T. S. McAdams

 

 

Before our time, Stagecoach Drive had been a curving line of oak trees and two-million dollar homes, and abutting Briones Park was a selling point, until it became Briones Reservation, also known as the Dog Park, and suddenly it wasn’t. The trees were still handsome that fall, even without leaves. And students looking for cheap rent fifteen miles from Berkeley were decent neighbors, more often than not, but they weren’t there to do home maintenance.

3501 was just another jumble of hip and valley roofing, bay windows, redundant garage doors and unnecessary brick columns, but the tang of recent paint was like fresh urine on a post no one marked anymore. The bluegrass lawn was perfect, nurtured with just enough fertilizer and very little herbicide. I wanted to strip off my suit for a roll. Instead, Dobhar and I ascended three levels of terraced walkway into the shadow of the house, which stood between us and the late-morning sun. We were surprised when a particolored spaniel answered the door, and she seemed alarmed to find two large dogs on the porch. We were used to that. Her employer may or may not have told her to expect dog cops, but we weren’t typical specimens.

Dobhar was mostly Newfoundland with some Rottweiler, taller and heavier than most humans, the scariest dog you’d ever meet. That’s why we got the assignment. Dog cops have no authority two steps off the reservation, and Darwin forbid we threaten citizens, but they tended to answer questions in the hope Dob would go away. I’m a shepherd-mastiff mix, nearly as large as Dobhar, but not so angry. Dob was the only dog in the East Bay with an illegal pet monkey, because he wanted to demean a primate. Naturally, living alone with the creature, he came to love it. That does not mean Dob loved humans or sapient dogs who answer their doors wearing maid uniforms. His hackles rose like a dorsal fin. The Spaniel, half our height already, dipped her head to avoid eye contact. I nudged Dob aside and displayed my meaningless badge.

“Sorry to disturb you, Miss. Officer Sampson and Officer Dobhar. Mr. Lane is expecting us.”

“Yes, yes.” The man appeared behind her in the hallway. “Thank you, Millie. And thank you so much for coming, officers.” He was lean, serious and jowly, like a hairless Weimaraner, maybe sixty years old. His famous father died before my parents were born. He herded us past a dining room and half-landing staircase, into a living room where a large, patterned rug concealed most of a blond wood floor. Sofa and armchairs were leather, dyed unnatural colors for a contemporary ambience, and a vase on the coffee table held an arty spray of bare branches. I could picture a whippet I knew sitting on that sofa, holding a chardonnay glass by the stem, lecturing progressive humans on the growing market for indigenous canine arts and crafts. Dobhar and I stood, dysplasia be damned. Outside French doors, oak trees formed a natural grotto; humans had added a koi pond and waterfall. Lane posed in front of the view. “I’m very grateful that you’re here. Of course, the sheriff’s office would ordinarily handle something like this, but my family has always felt close to the canine community.”

Dobhar growled, “And maybe there are things you don’t want the sheriff to know?” We always growled at humans. Humans only recognize four sounds from a dog: there are barking, howling, growling, and all other vocalizations, including most of those that became speech in sapient dogs, are classified as whining. To get respect from a human, you have to put a growl in your voice, but I didn’t want Dobhar overdoing it. The Briones Reservation PD didn’t send us to Gerald Lane because Lane Recombinant Technologies engineered sapient canines; more profitable work with vegetables and grains allows the family to make an annual donation, or “reparations,” as Dobhar called it, that still provides thirty percent of the Reservation budget.

“If that’s the case,” I said, “you can count on our discretion.”

“It’s nothing illegal,” Lane said. “At least I — My sister is missing.” There it was. I’d been hoping this wouldn’t involve Vera Lane. It’s not as well known as you’d expect, but she used to run an obedience parlor. There are sapients, the kind who don’t fit in on the reservation, who will pay humans to put collars on them, teach them to heel, give them water in bowls on the ground. Most political types say they’re betraying their essential dogness, but some say no, they’re embracing it, and some say it depends on whether sex is involved. Turns out, the parlors get mostly human clients anyway.

I didn’t look at Dob. “How long, sir?”

“It’s been a week. Eight days. We were quarreling at the time. You see, I’ve been working on a cure for cancers in sapient canines.” I glanced at Dob then, to see if this changed his opinion of Lane. I think Lane did too. Dob wasn’t readable. Lane lowered his voice and said, “Until the latest results, a few days ago, it seemed very promising.” Millie the Spaniel did something quiet in the dining room, maybe put flowers on the table. Lane said his sister’s boyfriend had cancer, and she wanted him to focus on a cure for humans. Save her boyfriend first, she told him, then work on adapting the treatment for dogs.

“Even the dogs eat of the crumbs,” Dob said. His mother had belonged to the Congregation of Man’s Best Friend. He didn’t believe, far from it, but he was full of quotes from scripture. I looked over a bookcase to keep from shushing my partner and spotted The Call of the Wild in hardcover. I read it during the second of my three years in school. The short course, for giant breeds. Our teacher, a beautiful setter, thought it was wonderful how well Jack London understood primitive dogs, so I thought so too. And maybe he did, but how could either one of us know that?

“There’s no legal issue,” Lane said. “There’s no law that says I have to research human applications first. The biology isn’t much different, anyway. But if Vera went public, there are groups that — It would have complicated my position at the university.”

Dobhar said, “So you switched to humans?”

“No,” said Lane. “I feel bad for Neil, I do. But there are sapient canines just as — family just as worried — ”

I said, “How sick is Millie, Mr. Lane? How long does she have?”

Wrinkles contracted, squeezing his features into the center of his face. “A year. Less. The same as Neil.”

“How old will she be in a year?” Dob asked.

“Twenty-three,” Lane said, looking Dobhar in the eyes. That’s not always aggressive with humans. We observed a moment of silence, because Dob and I would never live to twenty-three, and maybe because Millie wouldn’t live past thirty, with or without cancer. This was hardly the Lane family’s fault. The eighteen to twenty years Dobhar and I could expect was better than the ten-year lifespan of a natural mastiff. The worst I can say about Lane’s father is that he made me realize how short twenty years is.

“She has a son,” Lane said. “Gus. I don’t know how he’ll manage without her.”

“I have a squirrel monkey who may live another fifteen years,” said Dobhar, who wouldn’t. At least he wasn’t trying to provoke our patron anymore. I asked Lane a few more questions, starting with his sister’s address. Descending the walkway outside, I resisted the lawn again, and watched a wild turkey hen scratching the last grass seed of the year from a clump of oat grass on the reservation side of the street. I heard a robin, but didn’t see it. A robin lives about two years, a wild turkey maybe four, so they’re gone by now.

 

 

A human tried to explain to me, once, what it’s like to see “in color.” He showed me a pie chart called a “color wheel,” and said he saw slices of twelve different shades. I could see ten different slices myself, but it turned out some that were just lighter or darker to me looked warmer to him. That’s the only way I can explain what some humans see in each other: there must be something warm about them that’s invisible to me. Ms. Lane’s boyfriend was waiting for us in the driveway, in a t-shirt, jeans and sandals, with a dog, a real dog, a big Rottweiler, on a braided rope leash. The dog started barking as Dob and I climbed down from my old Jeep Cherokee; you know how familiaris are around sapients. The boyfriend said, “Lane is crazy if he thinks he can send dogs to search my house.”

I said, “Good morning Mr. Petersen.” I squinted at the sky, checked my watch, corrected myself: “Excuse me, good afternoon. I take it Mr. Lane told you we were coming.” Vera Lane had a gravel yard, but it was across the street from the soccer field at Diablo Valley College, where Petersen taught Environmental Science, so there was that lawn smell again, like a faded whiff of sunrise. Even now, some nights, the smell of grass makes me think the sun will always come back up. I could smell Petersen’s sickness, too; not that I could have diagnosed it. There was one large conifer in the center of the yard, and a bed of scraggly plants bordering the gravel. There was a hitching post on the front porch, though Pleasant Hills is not a horse neighborhood. Image is important in that business, and there’s no traditional costume for dog trainers, so a lot of obediatrixes dress like horse trainers, in breeches and riding boots; the iconography took off from there.

Petersen saw me examining the yard. “The tree is bristlecone fir,” he said. “Along here, I’ve got sheep burr, Indian mallow and verbena. All native plants. I don’t like invasive species.” I wondered how that worked, her being an obediatrix and him a sapient-hater. I was fantasizing about Petersen as a suspect, to be honest, and thinking I should find out how he and Ms. Lane met. Like I said, they always have human clients. And humans have been around 200,000 years. No one should be surprised if we’re a little tentative.

Dobhar said, “I learned in school that humans are an invasive species on this continent. I’ve never been more than a hundred miles from the lab where my species was designed.”

“That’s a hundred miles too far,” said Petersen, then all I could smell was his sweat. He’d frightened himself with his boldness. The leashed Rottweiler redoubled its barking, but no one came to the neighboring windows. There was no one else on the street. The wedge of soccer field I could see between two houses was empty. I saw Petersen notice these things, too, but Dob and I kept our paws at our sides. The Briones Reservation PD has strict rules governing canine-human interactions. Dobhar merely stepped as close as he could to the man without engaging his dog. You might not think it’s possible to loom menacingly over someone from eight feet away, but Dob had a gift.

I said, “I understand Ms. Lane is the property owner, Mr. Petersen, but we aren’t necessarily here to invade your residence. We’re just looking for indications of where Ms. Lane might have gone. I’m sure you want to know that as well. Officer Dobhar, what does your cousin on the leash have to say?”

“He says something’s wrong,” Dob improvised. “Something isn’t right here, and he’s very upset.”

Petersen pulled the Rottweiler closer, which improved Dobhar’s looming prospects. “Something’s wrong? No shit, something’s wrong! My fiancé is missing, and you’re harassing me instead of Lane’s bitch sidekick or her lowlife son in the Kennel and the pack of thugs he brings when he tries to threaten Vera!”

I had told Lane we weren’t detectives, that the Reservation PD doesn’t even have that rank. Humans always thought we were detectives because they expected beat cops to be in uniform. Humans don’t vary much, so uniforms make them identical and intimidating, like ants. But this didn’t need detectives. The fiancé part may not have been true: Petersen never could prove that in court. It was a kindness when Lane settled the lawsuit and let Petersen die a homeowner. But the rest checked out. There are no surprises, just things you don’t want to know.

 

 

The drive to Dogtown gave us five minutes to argue about the damned Rottweiler. I didn’t even mention that he allowed a human to leash him and name him Spartacus. That would have been unfair and beside the point, which was the dog’s ferocity, his appetites, his indifference to a ten-year life expectancy. If Spartacus loved a monkey, he wouldn’t lie awake wondering who would care for it when he was gone. (It’s me, by the way: I got stuck with Fido, who is not really housebroken, and will outlive me as well.) What I said was that Dobhar might want to be a real dog — he hadn’t said so, but I could tell, and it irritated me — but Spartacus didn’t; he wasn’t capable of an opinion. If that was life enough for Dob, he might as well be satisfied as a blade of grass, or as what he would be: carbon and nitrogen and whatever else — we both took the short course — that would dissolve back into the food chain and become a beetle or a mushroom or just living soil. “Congratulations,” I told him. “You’re immortal!”

I’d mostly been arguing with myself, but Dobhar finally said, “You see what they’ve done to you? You could have been an animal, and they turned you into a philosopher.”

 

 

Dogtown — residents almost never call it “the Kennel” — is the northern section of a mobile home park next to the airport. The south half is as tidy as a library, so I guess it only went to hell when the dogs moved in. I’m told humans don’t even smell the wastewater treatment plant unless there’s a southerly breeze, but even human noses register that dogs with indoor plumbing are somehow less sanitary than dogs on the reservation. And whatever drives a dog to live there, it’s not love of the Reservation Council, or of dogs with the shaky authority of a reservation cop.

Parking my jeep on Avenida Flores brought dogs to every porch. Stepping to the pavement sent everyone back inside, though someone yelled “Rovers” from a window. We found our canines of interest behind the house. Two unkempt Australian shepherds and an unconscious bloodhound sprawled amid drifts of empty beer cans in the shade of an embankment; two folding chairs held a sheepdog in pajama pants, with a shaved torso but a hairy head and face, and a terrier mix in dirty overalls, staring west into the sun at a muddy stream, a field of dirt, and the interchange of the Delta Highway and Interstate 680. If you were looking for it, you could see the terrier mix was part spaniel. He tilted his chair against the house. A missing patch in the brick veneer at his back, the height and shape of a car’s bumper, showed dented composite panels. He said, “You want something, Rover?”

The sheepdog said, “Hey, Lassie, Timmy’s fallen down a well! He needs you, he needs you to — ” He forgot what Timmy needed as Dobhar stepped silently into his personal space. I wouldn’t have done that job without Dobhar. Cancer took him too, in the end, so many tumors in his stomach he couldn’t swallow food, and I retired the day he went on medical leave. Would have been nice if Lane’s research had come to something, but I guess it was his time.

“Gus?” I said.

“Gustav,” the terrier said, “if it’s any of your business.”

I showed him my badge. “BRPD. I’d like to talk to you about Vera Lane.”

“Piece of work. Daughter of you-know-who, and runs a pet parlor. Keeps a big familiaris, Rottweiler, so clients can roll over and submit to it. But listen, Rover, if this is police business, you’d better send the police. Off the reservation, you’re not a cop.”

“That’s a gray area,” I said. “When was the last time you saw Vera Lane?”

The Terrier said, “I don’t think I have time for you today, Officer Rover.”

I said, “Officer Sampson, actually. Maybe we’ll talk after I have a look inside.”

The front legs of his chair hit the ground. The terrier moved to block the back door. The sheepdog brushed hair from his eyes like a human and said, “We do have rights, you know.”

“Off the reservation?” Dob said. “That’s another gray area.” He made sure the shaven dog was completely in his shadow. I had a good idea, at this point, how it would turn out, and I didn’t like it. I picked up the terrier by the bib of his overalls and threw him toward the neighboring house, intending to bounce him off the wall but falling short, past my prime even then.

Inside, there was a sofa, a television, and more beer cans. Someone liked the same brand of corned beef hash I do, and you can probably smell it there today, the way it was ground into the carpet. The wall that was smashed and dented outside hardly bulged inside at all. I’ve heard modular homes are twenty percent more durable than homes built on-site. The entryway and kitchen were ahead, with smells I didn’t want to explore, so I turned left into the hall, where spider webs hung as low as a medium-sized dog could reach without effort. Combing webs and the husks of old flies from my face, I chose the bedroom to my right, toward the front of the house, a room with two twin beds and a child’s dresser, with big knobs and pictures of Robin Hood on the drawers. Robin Hood from the old Disney cartoon, where Robin is a fox. We’re not that closely related to foxes, by the way. Their genus is Vulpes, not Canis. There must have been clothes and such in the closet, but all I remember is a very large ice chest with a hinged lid.

Outside the bedroom window, there was a California laurel, a young one because the bark wasn’t dark yet. We have plenty of those on the reservation. It’s a hardwood evergreen with thick leaves, shiny on top. Smells like wax and pepper, and has nuts like olives, make you jumpy if you eat them. Nice trees. Native, too. Petersen should have had one. Gustav was behind me, saying something about standing up for family, how humans understand that and we don’t. I opened the ice chest.

She was packed in melting ice, knees pressed to her chest to make her fit, with stab wounds in her side and neck. The knife was there, too, just a sharp steak knife with a thick wooden handle. She was in her fifties, more than twice as old as I’ll ever get, but there was a little cup on a laurel branch outside, woven of leaves and hair, coated with spider silk: a hummingbird nest as neat as an acorn. She was missing it, and maybe she had never seen one. This was about a week before they found her Volvo wagon north of Mallard Reservoir. BRPD had no part in that, but I understand there was a “World’s Greatest Mistress” coffee mug. Gustav said, “We have to stand up for our own,” and I hit him, open-paw, knocking him to the floor, which didn’t fix anything.

 

 

There’s another service some obediatrixes offer, a confusing issue for progressives who want to support both Canine Equality and Right to Die. They call it dog hospice, because euphemism is one thing humans and dogs have in common. What they do is, they pick up old or sick dogs who think they don’t have much time left, and take them to the vet — not all veterinarians will do this, but some will, and they always say it’s not about the money. The vet gives the dog a lethal injection, and the obediatrix stays to pet the dog and say good boy or good girl, everything will be okay, all dogs go to heaven. The state and the feds have no laws about this yet. Several cities have passed nonbinding resolutions of support or condemnation; Concord has passed both. I don’t know whether Vera Lane offered this service, or whether she herself wished for something like that at the end.

 

 

Late in the afternoon, Lane’s clean glass windows blazed like your windshield when you drive into the sunset, and the blinded drivers following wouldn’t see you if you stopped, so you just slow down a little, maybe even close your eyes, wondering what will happen. Petersen was there with his dog, and Lane, and Petersen was yelling at him. Petersen’s car was a four-door sedan with a towel on the back seat, so Spartacus wouldn’t get it dirty. The turkey hen was still scratching across the street, but the season for grass seed was over.

Spartacus started up when Dob and I got out of the Jeep. Gustav, crowded in the backseat with the ice chest, waited for me to pull him out, because I had engaged the child safety locks. He hung back when Dob and I crossed to Lane, and I hoped he wouldn’t run. I could catch him, I thought, but I’d be sore the next day. Finally, Dobhar said, “She’s dead.”

I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Lane. It seems Gustav thought she would keep you from saving his mother.”

Petersen dropped the leash, and Spartacus went straight for the terrier, either because Gus was afraid, or because he was the smallest. Spartacus may not have had a rich inner life, but he did enjoy tearing into a smaller dog. Lane stepped forward as though he might try to do something, but Dobhar put a paw on his shoulder. “He that meddleth with strife,” he said, “is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.” Because of the glare, I don’t know whether Millie watched all of this from a window. Spartacus may have been destroyed later, or Petersen may have paid a fine, or maybe nothing. It wasn’t our jurisdiction.

Lane couldn’t keep it all as quiet as he would have liked, mostly because of Petersen. There were vigilante incidents in Dogtown. That wasn’t our job, either. Vera Lane’s funeral was news, which is how I know six or eight sapients attended wearing collars and howled as they lowered the casket. A few humans howled as well, probably outing themselves as clients. Five months later, I went to a ceremony for Millie. It was off the reservation, at Oakmont Memorial Park where Lane plans to be buried himself. She was combed and powdered and blow-dried, and I wondered who did that. You never see open-casket funerals on the reservation. No one except maybe a taxidermist specializes in grooming dog cadavers. Human theologians are divided on sapient dogs in the afterlife, so the minister just commended her to “eternal rest.”

Lane replaced Millie with a human majordomo, and his lawn is still free of bald patches and dandelions, but it smells like salt and bleach. I don’t know what he researches these days, if he researches anything. He has promised he’ll take this monkey when I die. He promised me, as I promised Dob, that Fido will never be euthanized, even if he suffers. I don’t know whether he’ll keep that promise, and I don’t know whether he should, but I suppose he’ll give Fido the little Spanish peanuts he likes and plug in his Curious George nightlight every night.

 

 

 

 

T. S. McADAMS lives unobtrusively with his wife, son and bullmastiffs in the San Fernando Valley, where he is not working on a screenplay. His fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Madcap Review, Santa Monica Review and Pembroke.