This Dog for Hire

interruptions lightly—and twice he failed. He sat instead, a major no-no in the ring, his back to where his handler was down and surrounded by noisy strangers.
    I heard the walkie-talkie crackle.
    Magritte was frantic. He wasn’t looking anxiously from side to side the way a German shepherd or a Dobie would. He was in an almost Zenlike trance, staring straight ahead. Except for one pretty white paw raised and doing the dog paddle in a heart-wrenching gesture of supplication, he was still. But I could see that his sides moved in and out too rapidly, and he was opening and closing his mouth as if biting the air.
    Two men in white came running into the ring with a stretcher. Between the judge’s legs and the steward’s, I saw one of the technicians bend and take Gil’s pulse at the neck. They closed ranks even more after that, moving quickly and efficiently while we all stood and waited to hear what had happened, having somehow forgotten the basics of breathing.
    An elegant man, tall, thin, in his sixties, a flush across his cheeks as if he’d been running, appeared center ring. He lifted his hands and rode them down once, then twice, through the air, signaling us to sit, which we did, as tractable as the dogs in the ring, still frozen in show pose as they had been before Gil fell. Poised, calm, and eloquent, he began to speak.
    “There’s no reason at all to be alarmed. Mr.—”
    He paused, and the steward whispered in his ear.
    “Mr. Gilmore has fainted.”
    He smiled and looked down at his expensive, polished shoes. “As many of you know, and others can guess, this is tense, hard work.”
    He smiled again.
    “Everyone wants to win, you see.”
    There was the laughter of recognition from a dozen or so in the audience.
    With one long-fingered hand, the gentleman in center ring smoothed his trim, white mustache, his starched white collar, his red silk tie.
    “There’s absolutely nothing to be concerned about.”
    Again, his hands rode down the air in front of him.
    I turned to look at Dennis, who was whispering with the steward, right at the place where the handlers enter the ring.
    “Please,” the man with white hair said. “Keep your seats, ladies and gentlemen, so that we may continue with the judging.”
    I looked up in the stands in time to see Doc’s back as he tore up the steps to the third tier.
    When the speaker’s hands returned to his sides, I could see they were trembling. Yet he soothed us with his voice, jollied us with gentle dog show humor, and when he had finished speaking and had nodded to the judge, we saw that Gil was no longer lying there. He had been circled, bidden, and spirited away.
    I saw the judge nod and gesture for the handlers to take the dogs around. And there was Aggie, in her aqua sweater and thick-soled dog show shoes, standing in third place, Magritte at the end of the lead, high-collared and nearly choking. The ten handlers popped the ten leads and, along with ten basenjis, just as before, began to run around the ring.
    I turned to my left, then my right. People had opened their catalogs to the hound group, to the basenjis. They sat quietly, [tens poised to mark the win, as if Morgan Gilmore had never been there, had never teased and baited his client’s dog into posing for the judge, had never gaited him across the garish green indoor-outdoor carpet, praying for a win, had never fallen, face pale, struggling for air, and then been carried away, as if he were an injured player at a football game.
    Morgan Gilmore, in his cowboy boots and string tie.
    Was I the only one wondering if he was alive or dead?
    I practically knocked over my chair getting out of it, pushing my way to get into the aisle where I could move. I was going to go get Dennis, but decided against it. Instead, I ran for the medical office, which was tucked away deep under the stands across from the basenji ring.
    I moved as quickly as I could, sideswiping several people and spilling at least one woman’s bathtub-size soda, but never stopping to apologize. This was New York. I didn’t have to.
    The security guard standing in the exit tunnel tried to stop me, but when I told him the man who had just been carried past him on a stretcher was my handler, reluctantly he let me go by.
    I know. I know. I just wish to hell I knew what a handbasket was.
    Cheering and screaming echoed down the tunnel after me from one of the larger rings. Perhaps one of the harriers or an Ibizan had just taken the breed,