Dog House (8 page)

My Millard, who hadn't wanted another dog, hadn't thought I should buy one sight unseen and absolutely not through the mail, who'd seldom even stopped to pet a strange dog unless it nosed him ... hard ... adored her from the moment she bloodied his hand with her pointy milk teeth.

But that figured.

The shiny pages of magazines like
Country Life
are filled with grizzled oldsters tramping along English lanes trailed by tough little, scarred little, off-leash Jacks. Because Jack Russells are a Real Man's dog. Feisty, willful, only incidentally cuddly and plenty mean.

 

 

Yet Cosi became our joint hearts' dog. We welcomed her beneath the covers of our bed (which was when I gave up nightgowns for pajamas), and bribed her with treats to hop on one or another of our laps—nose on our knees, head on her paws—while we read the paper, talked on the phone, watched the news, sat on the back porch, ate. Our sex life became a little dodgy since we had to put her forcibly out of the bedroom and learn to ignore the insistent scratch of her nails on the historic woodwork while having also to listen to the simultaneous high-pitched barks, pitiable whines, extended howls and doggy Greek chorus with which she announced to the neighborhood that Carol and Millard were doing it again.

Still, when Cosi sprawled in her accustomed puppy-lay posture on the floor (both back legs extended flat out behind), she almost made it up to me that she was merely our substitute child: that our son was gone from my life. Especially in the dusk of a mild summer evening, when Millard and I would take her for a ride to the local Dairy Queen to buy her her own (small) cup of vanilla. (“Sprinkles?” the owner would ask. “No sprinkles. It's for the dog. She's driving.”) After which, head lolling on my knees, belly taut with soft serve, wide brown eyes blinking in glazed stupefaction, she'd sigh and wriggle down in my lap to be even more comfortable for the short drive home.

 

 

Cosi adored the car. Her single serious reservation about the car was that it seemed to attract her nemesis, the deadly gas station attendant. The merest glimpse of her enemy, relentlessly intent on forcing his uniformed way into her pack's traveling den, would make her strip her teeth and hurl her body at the window, frantic to kill. Far more often than either of us cared for, the service station guys would find her hugely funny, and as they'd stand and wait for the tank to fill, they'd snigger at Cosi's futile malevolence or, worse yet, tap on the glass. Ultimately, the rear windows of our car just above the gas cap were permanently etched with furious flights of nose juice.

 

 

Our quirky antique house was right on the village street—Main Street, believe it or not—and by the time of Cosi's arrival, it had acquired a Millard-built white picket fence and a Millard-repaired gray wooden stoop. Our mail arrived through a Millard-installed brass slot in the door, and as it slithered through, it made tiny rustly sounds that caused Cosi, sleeping a mere three floors away, to start, race to the hall and gleefully tear to death whatever she couldn't eat. Daily, the residue of glossy catalogues, costly magazines and soon-to-be-overdue bills bestrewed our narrow hall floor, giving graphic meaning to the dog-ate-my-homework trope.

We discovered, too, that she loathed other dogs almost as much as she loathed Gulf uniforms and
House Beautiful.
Sometimes, deliberately courting trouble, Millard would lounge on our wooden stoop with Cosi sprawled watchfully across his lap. As an enemy dog and its owner strolled unconcernedly by, faster than a speeding bullet, she'd be out the gate and down the street, murder in her happy heart. And my mild Millard—chuckling indulgently—would just amble on over and peel her off the unsuspecting and forever-traumatized Scottie or Akita and apologize to its terrified walker before hurrying back to brag to me about the latest derring-do. Cosi's bitchiness went straight to something I never suspected in Millard's gentle heart.

I wish I could tell you he loved my own as much.

Millard loved our old house, though, almost as much as he loved that dog. It was a house that was genuinely At One with Nature. It welcomed mouse births in the bathtub, literal bats in the attic, and every spring, all over the garden—among the tulips, on the lawn, in the shrubs—wild ducks holding orgies.

Mallards mated everywhere we looked.

There was one three way, in particular, that were regulars; a group comprising two fat iridescent males and a scrawny, exhausted brown female. Why those pompous, sleek drakes thought she was hot, I never knew, but they pursued her relentlessly around our house and yard, and if one wasn't ravishing her, the two of them were noisily fighting for her favors as she stood mildly, unconcernedly by, preening what was left of her tail. We called them May, Nage, and Trois, and they were our daily laugh, except that the beauteous May-May seemed to be kept so busy satisfying her admirers that she seldom found time to eat and was pitiably thin. So when we could get her off by herself, which wasn't often, we fed her seven-grain bread and birdseed. To help her conserve her strength.

It was a real coincidence that we'd attracted mallards particularly. There were other types of ducks around the village pond and in the park, mainly Muscovys and domestic white ducks, plus, which won't surprise you, a hodgepodge of “blends” of the three. Multicultural ducks wandered in and out of our gate freely, but only the mallards stayed to play. This was coincidental because at fourteen, when Millard had been sent North to boarding school, the boys there had named him “Duck”; short for “Mallard Duck, the Georgia Quacker.”

All right, it's funny.

But it always hurt me for the boy he was. I knew it hadn't been meant kindly.

“Duck” had mallards now.

 

 

One spring weekend, I came back from a plant nursery with water lilies for the pond. About two feet below its near edge, there was a neat, narrow shelf, and Millard and I lovingly lowered onto it three heavy pots with their hopeful shoots, tamping down the soil, fluffing up the stems. Every evening for a week or so when he came home from work, we'd walk down to see a new leaf unfurled and floating on the water. And one day, we finally saw a bud, then another, till there were five, promising and green and long, like buoyant spindles. We could smell those star-white blooms.

I was cutting scallions in the kitchen and happened to glance out the window at the pond when I saw—on the ledge by the lawn, May-May, Nage and Trois doing their thing in our prized aquatic plants. In fact, standing in the water, right in the lily pots, was Nage, holding May-May down by her now nearly featherless neck while Trois had his way with her. At the borders of their duckish frenzy, shreds of crisp pale leaves seemed to be ... loose and floating toward the center of the pond, and oh no ... was that a bud? I slammed out the screen door and charged down two flights of stairs, shooing furiously. Though I wasn't in time. Our lilies were destroyed.

Gasping and breathless, I raced back to the house, grabbed the phone and called Millard at work. (One of the unheralded joys of being married is always having someone to bitch to, for among a woman's most basic needs is having a complaint department that's always open.)

“The ducks are in the water lilies,” I sobbed into the phone.

Millard got it right away. “Are the buds gone? The leaves? What's left?”

“Nothing,” I whimpered. “Just a leaf or two.”

He was silent.

“Well, you know,” he said in his soothing, contemplative drawl, “I hope that the worst thing that ever happens to us in life is having ducks in our water lilies.”

 

 

For the remainder of ouryears together, “ducks in the water lilies” became a family shorthand for anything we overreacted to.

It got used a lot.

And come July, there wasn't a single water lily in our pond. Only seven fluffy peeps.

 

 

While Millard alone doted on Cosi's evil soul, we both agreed that she was nothing less than a paragon of Jackitude, and we began to show her off at the Jack Russell Terrier trials in New York's horsey suburbs, where all the dogs seemed to be wholesome, muddy “outdoor dogs” that certainly had never had a Dairy Queen, and all their very fit owners clomped around in ancient wellies (ditto). Unquestionably, too, none of these dogs had ever slept in a bed. Plus, most had names like Jock and Tom. Mozart wasn't in it.

We discovered there were whole towns upstate, actually, where you couldn't find a horse without its attendant working Jacks, all doing what tiny terriers have traditionally been bred to do: kill rats in stables by breaking their necks.

Oh, this was one intriguing world. We'd known about Westminster, of course, the annual AKC beauty pageant at Madison Square Garden. Jack Russells were blackballed from show business back then, since basically, they were mutts. And Jack people were pretty proud of that. So they—we—held our own shows, where scores of incredibly noisy dogs competed to see who was shortest, podgiest, jauntiest, and most true to type. Not one, by the way, was ever voted Miss Congeniality.

Showbiz tyros that we were, Millard and I were convinced that Cosi was a jewel of Jackish beauty, and with Millard on the sidelines admiring us both, I trotted her around the show ring a few times. Once, she actually took a second-place ribbon. We hung it in the kitchen.

 

 

We entered her in the races, too, these hysterically funny runnings of several little dogs in mad pursuit of a lure that looked like a tail but “smelled like rabbit.” Or rat.

At the end of the shortish track—these are mini-dogs, after all—great bales of hay are piled up with one Jack-size hole in the middle. The lure is dragged along the track back through the hole, and the first crazed dog to squeeze in after it, wins. Then there's some scary action on the far side of the hay bales, where fearless human volunteers in elbow-length leather gauntlets try to separate overexcited barking, snarling little spotty dogs with razor teeth, before they rip one another apart. It wasn't all just toughing it out in that pit, however. There was the occasional mild complaint when one or the other pup came away missing part of an ear.

Cosi never won that either. Usually, when the chutes opened and all the other dogs ran like hell, she'd sort of wander off the course, snuffling. She was red-ribbon pretty, our girl, but a little, and lovably, dim.

 

 

The third and most rigorous of the trials was the go-to-ground. Here, in a mown, scrubby field, the show managers had simulated a vermin hunt (so Brit) by slipping the canine contestants nose-first down a hole in the ground into a very black, very tight tunnel. To make things interesting, the organizers placed inside it a live mouse in a small cage. (How I bled for that mouse, its tiny heart pitterpattering in the dark). Each dog entered alone; the judge had a stopwatch; and the contestant that got to the mouse fastest and barked, won. (In real life, Jacks in hot pursuit of rodents sometimes get stuck in those holes. When this happens—if they can be reached—they're pulled out by the short, docked tails that have been left just long enough for an owner to get a hand around.)

While they never said anything to us overtly, never actually snickered, Millard and I decided that, after several Saturdays at these events, the regulars, those waxed-coat men and women who docked their own dog's tails and casually employed terrified scapemice, were conveying to us, by example, how wimpy we were. So we never entered Cosi in the go-to-ground. She had merely the stub of a tail, anyway, and given the fact that we three slept in the same bed, Millard and I weren't about to teach her how to scurry down grubby holes in our garden. I wasn't much on teaching her to bring me gifts of dead vermin, either, unless they were minks. Millard, though, loved the whole manly hunt thing and so was enormously pleased when I eventually found an antique English watercolor depicting a trio of what, to our recently educated eyes, were clearly Jack Russell ratters. The frame bore a legend only mad Anglophiles could love:
Three of the Right Sort.