If Chief bit one more person, they were going to make Ruthann kill him. So when he went for her face, she was flooded with fear not for herself but for him.
No one ever said kill, except her nephew, who had offered to do it for five dollars, the cost of one bullet. But killing’s what it was. Not a putting down or a putting to sleep, which made it sound like you were laying a drowsy baby in its crib with a warm bottle. Not the stopping of being heroic, like they’d said about Mom when everyone except Ruthann had voted to pull the plug, despite the chance that the next week or the next day even, there might be a cure. All of them had ripped that chance away from their mother, who had always tenderly bandaged every scraped knee they ever had, and had left her own bed to sleep in theirs with them when they were sick and throwing up or frightened from bad dreams. All of them telling Ruthann she was the one being unreasonable.
No one ever listened to her. Everyone always acted like her ideas were foolish or ignorant or selfish, yes even selfish, like when Lucy said Ruthann only wanted to keep their mother alive — alive and suffering, she’d said — because she didn’t want to have to feel the sadness of her dying. Ruthann should have been used to it by now, but it always surprised her when other people couldn’t see things her way. It wasn’t just that they didn’t agree. They couldn’t see it at all. She might as well have been talking Chinese. But just because people didn’t understand her didn’t mean she didn’t know what she was talking about.
Not that any of this passed through her mind as Chief, lips curled back over ferocious yellow teeth, leapt open-mouthed at her face. Her only thought was to keep him away from Lucy, who was not backing down. Lucy never backed down, whether against highway patrolmen or red-neck bikers or bucking horses. Lucy was standing in the middle of the kitchen shouting at the dog, like his snarling didn’t mean anything or, more likely, because she was too drunk to take in the danger, to see how Chief was on the tipping edge of attack, only holding himself back for Ruthann’s sake. Which was why Ruthann had to put herself between her sister and the dog. Chief must not be killed simply because Lucy’s temper was short when she was drinking. It helped that Ruthann herself had been sipping white wine since ten that morning, it being Saturday and her day off. Benson Dermatology was open Saturday mornings, but they didn’t need Ruthann to come in — she pulled the patient records for Saturday appointments before she left on Friday, and the nurses left them for her to re-file on Monday afternoon. She sometimes thought this wasn’t fair, as she could have used the pay of extra hours, especially since they wouldn’t let her go full-time. Not that she’d welcome having to get up Saturday mornings.
Ruthann had knelt down to appeal to Chief’s better nature, and at that very same moment, he had lunged. Her face was right in his path. She knew, even as his teeth sank into her cheek and blood and dog spit splashed into her eyes, that he hadn’t meant to hurt her. It was Lucy he was after, and he didn’t want to hurt her, either, but only to make her shut up. Ruthann knew how that could be. She’d never gone after Lucy herself. But she could understand the urge. Or maybe Chief had meant to snap the air near Ruthann’s face to get her to move aside, and it was her own clumsiness that caused the accident. Maybe she’d stumbled into his open jaws. She’d gone into a squat quickly and wasn’t that steady.
That’s what Ruthann kept calling it — an accident — interrupting Lucy in all her repeated tellings of the the story, to her son with the five-dollar bullets, and to her ex-husband, who was also their landlord, and to their brothers and to Rhonda, her drinking buddy, who was a dog-lover but had never shown any special fondness for Chief. Some people just couldn’t warm to an animal that didn’t make a fuss over them. Chief was a one-person dog, and that person was Ruthann.
She was the one who had found him wandering on a lonely back road, skinny and shivering, too far from any house to belong anywhere nearby. Not that Ruthann would have looked for Chief’s owner even if she’d found him in the middle of a neighborhood of close-set houses. Anyone who’d let a dog get into the condition Chief was in didn’t deserve to have him. It took Ruthann an hour to talk him into getting into her car. He was that suspicious and scared. It was a way of being that he never lost, even after he’d been living with Ruthann and Lucy for many months and had grown fat and handsome, looking like he had some Chow in him, though Lucy always frowned and rolled her eyes when Ruthann claimed that, like Ruthann had said something impossible. Just look at that curled tail, Ruthann would argue, and those dreaming eyes. Other people said Chief’s eyes were more wolfish than doggy, the eyes of a vicious hunter, maybe a wounded hunter. It made visitors nervous to see how he’d slink under the dining room table when they came in, and how he’d watch them without stopping, even if they stayed for hours, not lying down but keeping on his feet like he wanted to be ready, turning his body if they moved their position so he was always facing straight towards wherever they stood or sat. Like Lucy’s friend, Bart, who, after he’d come back from Iraq, would only sit where he could face a door, even in a restaurant.
Sometimes, if Ruthann cooed at Chief and the visitor wasn’t too loud, Chief would come out from under the table and sit at Ruthann’s feet, still watchful but not so tight. Ruthann considered that any visitor who Chief was willing to share the living room with like that must be a good person. She trusted Chief’s instincts. She knew suspicion was often the smart move, and not just for a dog.
Everything stopped as soon as Ruthann got bitten. Lucy stopped shouting and rushed to help Ruthann stand up, saying, omigod, omigod, omigod over and over. Chief stopped barking and retreated out of the room, like he knew he might’ve just cooked his own goose. For the moment, Ruthann stopped worrying about him, the hot pain in her face demanding all her attention. Lucy wanted to take her to Emergency, but Ruthann hated waiting, and Emergency at midnight on Saturday was sure to be full of moaning old men and vomiting kids and blood. Besides, she had no insurance, and she didn’t want to spend money on a bandaging job that Lucy could take care of just as good. And she didn’t want some nosy doctor reporting Chief to Animal Control. The neighbors had called Animal Control out once already when Chief jumped the fence and was running loose. Everyone around here kept their dogs on leash. Plus there was that incident last month when a little girl a few blocks over had been attacked by a Doberman who was off-leash. Ruthann heard that she needed thirty stitches in her leg. That had got everybody even more against dogs running free, even though the development was out in the country, having been chopped out of old farm land.
Everyone so strict about dogs was just one thing Ruthann didn’t like about this new neighborhood where she and Lucy had moved three months ago. Lucy kept reminding her how they could never afford such a big house if not for her ex’s giving them a break on the rent, but it didn’t seem such a break to Ruthann if you considered he hadn’t finished re-paneling the living room like he’d said he would and other things, too, like no toilet paper holders in the bathrooms and the yard full of dead leaves and in the far corner two brown Christmas trees with sad scraps of tinsel on some branches that glittered when her headlights hit them from the driveway and kept making her think a cougar was in the yard. And what if the big cat had got Chief and now was waiting to make her his dessert?
Ruthann had never put a leash or collar on any dog she’d owned. She knew they didn’t like it. She’d always had fenced-in yards for them because she couldn’t walk them. Shep, who died last year, had never learned to take stairs either, so in their old place, Ruthann had had to carry him up and down the steps from the house to the yard whenever he had to do his business, no matter if it was raining or icy cold or dark. Lucy said it was Ruthann at fault, not the dogs, that Ruthann was too lazy to train them. Lucy said it was Ruthann’s fault, too, that she had to stand between Shep and Jocko every night while they ate to keep them from fighting if one finished first and wanted the other’s food. Over the years, she’d needed stitches in her legs a few times from standing between the dogs like that and one of them biting her by mistake. Now, with Chief her only dog, Ruthann didn’t have to do that any more. But she’d never needed thirty stitches, like that little girl. Her dogs would never do her that bad.
When Ruthann’s husband, Dave, was in the hospice for his lung cancer, they had let her bring Shep and Jocko in to visit him. They hadn’t wanted to at first because it would be a big bending of the rules, but Ruthann kept asking every day, sometimes more than once in a day when different staff came and went. She kept promising that the dogs would be quiet in the room and would slip in and out the back door where no one could notice. You won’t even know they’re here, she’d said. They miss Dave, they need to see him. The dogs couldn’t understand where he’d disappeared to and why Ruthann was away so much, too. The hospice people finally said yes when Ruthann told them it would cheer up Dave to see the dogs. Because the hospice people all thought Dave was dying.
Ruthann had been sure Dave would pull through. He’s healthy as a horse, she kept telling everyone, healthy as a horse. He worked construction and was never sick. Only smoker’s cough. But Ruthann and Lucy had that, too. Dave was strong and healthy as a horse, Ruthann had insisted to the doctor when they tried to get him on that experimental drug. He went into the hospice the next week.
The dogs ended up going three or four times to the hospice. Probably Chief wouldn’t have been welcome back after one visit. So it was a good thing Ruthann didn’t have Chief then.
Shep was hit especially hard when Dave passed. He carried Dave’s terrycloth bathrobe belt around in his mouth for weeks afterwards. Ruthann was sure the animal had died of a broken heart. Lucy said it didn’t hurt that the collie was old and arthritic and half-blind. Couldn’t control his bladder any more either, though he usually managed to drag himself to a far corner of the kitchen linoleum first. Much as Ruthann loved Shep, she couldn’t stand it when he peed on the floor. Shame, shame, she’d yell at him. Then she’d wash down the whole floor with bleach, no matter what the hour, nor how much her back might be acting up, sometimes the countertops, too, for good measure. Jocko would keep her company while she cleaned, following close at her heels, wearing a worried look like maybe he was going to get bawled out next. And, truth to tell, after tripping over him two or three times, she would end up snapping at him go to bed, go to your bed, using her sternest voice and making that hissing sound he hated to chase him off.
Lucy was much more patient about Shep’s peeing problem, telling Ruthann not to yell at him, he couldn’t help it. Lucy could be so mean sometimes, sniping at Ruthann over nothing, sometimes hollering shut up or worse, but she had a kind heart, even if she didn’t always let it show. Their brothers said Ruthann should be glad Lucy put up with her and her fussy habits and constant complaining and crazy-ass way of thinking. But they did admit that Ruthann had some putting up to do with Lucy, too. Lucy liked to go out to bars and dance halls and was was a lively, noisy drinker even at home, while Ruthann preferred staying quiet on the Barca-lounger. They argued a lot, about small things mostly, but they had each other’s backs, come hell or high water. I’ll never abandon Ruthann, Lucy had said to more than one person. Ruthann knew it was true. And she knew Lucy wouldn’t like to be without her anyway, but neither of them ever said so.
When Ruthann went in to work on the Monday after the Saturday she got bitten, of course everyone asked why she had the big bandage on her face. But better they see the bandage, she’d thought, than the ugly, swollen, discolored wound beneath it. She told them it was a dog bite but not how bad it was, brushing away their horrified seeking after more information with it’s not anything, it was just a silly accident. And really, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. It didn’t even hurt any more, just itched some, plus the top edge of the bandage blocked out part of her vision, which was a nuisance when she was reading names on file folders or punching in a phone number to give someone an appointment reminder. One of the nurses told Dr. Benson, though, and he insisted on looking at Ruthann’s cheek. He shook his head when he saw it, and put in a couple shots of lidocaine and stitched it up, and he scolded her that she should have gone to Emergency right away when it happened. He gave her a tetanus shot, too, and some antibiotics that he had free samples of. She thought he might send her home to rest, and he did say she could go if she wanted, but his wife, who was the office manager, reminded Ruthann she wouldn’t get paid for any hours she wasn’t there. She would’ve gone anyway except she still owed Lucy for last month’s utilities, and the groomer wasn’t going to let her bring Chief in again until she paid that back bill. But if only she had gone home that day. Then she could have stopped what happened to Chief. Though Lucy would only have done it on another day. She was that set on it.
Ruthann screamed when Lucy told her. Screamed and screamed no, no and then sat down on the couch and cried and cried, and Lucy had sat beside her and put her arms around her, and Ruthann had leaned against her. Honey, honey, Lucy kept saying, you know it had to be done, and you know you couldn’t do it, hon. When Ruthann calmed down, Lucy told her all about it. How her ex had paid for a special mobile unit to come to the house. How Lucy had held Chief on her lap as he died. How it had been quiet and smooth and he hadn’t even whimpered, only lifting up his head once to look into Lucy’s eyes. Ruthann was sure that when he did that, he must have been looking for her and wondering why she wasn’t there in his hour of need, but she didn’t say that to Lucy because Lucy already felt bad enough about it.
Lucy said Ruthann could get a new dog, that it should be a rescue dog, so she’d know it was one that really needed a home and someone devoted like Ruthann to love it. Ruthann was thinking she’d like a chihuahua so it could sit on her lap and sleep in her bed without getting in the way when she rolled over. She’d heard, though, that chihuahuas were hard to housebreak, not because they were stupid but because they were stubborn. Ruthann didn’t like the idea of another dog that peed on the floor, but she kind of liked the idea of a dog that would stand up for itself and do things in its own time, a dog with some self-respect. That was what Chief had, though nobody but her could see it. To everyone else, Chief was too nervous and a little bit crazy. You couldn’t trust him. You couldn’t relax around him. Except that Ruthann never felt more relaxed than when she was watching an old movie on t-v with Chief’s head resting on her knee and a glass of white wine and ice cubes on the table beside her chair.
Not even Lucy, who lived with Chief, had understood that he wasn’t crazy, but just sensitive. But Lucy did understand Ruthann. She was right that Ruthann couldn’t have been there while Chief died, no matter how peacefully. So Ruthann could forgive her for doing it in secret. And hadn’t Ruthann herself put Chief’s life in danger on that night last year she was so drunk and downhearted that she put him in the car and set out to drive into traffic on Route 32 and end it all? Wouldn’t that have been a much worse death for him than a quick injection and a slow fading away on Lucy’s lap? Ruthann took Chief with her that night because she hadn’t wanted to leave him behind to miss her like Shep had missed Dave.
Of course, Chief ended up having to miss her anyway when she was in the county jail for six months for driving into that traffic. It was only for DUI. They thought she’d missed the STOP sign. They didn’t know she had sat there for 20 minutes watching for headlights coming over the hill, waiting until there were three cars and not just one coming her way. It was very late at night and not many people out.
Ruthann regretted it the minute the cars collided. The noise of it was horrible — crumpling metal and shattering glass and screeching brakes and a loud yelp from Chief. Everyone walked away from the accident, thank God. But what if, she wondered later, what if she’d killed someone’s mother? What if she’d killed Chief? She still had nightmares about it. Which was enough punishment, she thought. Why, after getting out of jail, did she have to do community service, too, folding old clothes at the smelly Salvation Army, and why’d she have to sit every other week in alcohol classes with a bunch of losers, and go to see that nasty, frowning probation officer who made her pee in a paper cup and who looked at her like she was a bad person? None of it was any good to her and not necessary anyway because she wasn’t ever going to do anything like that again. Besides, they took her license away. Couldn’t they just leave her alone otherwise? As far as she could see, it was all just a way for the county to make some easy money. After paying for the classes and the cab to the Salvation Army and the installments on the fine, she only had pocket change left from her paychecks, not much more than a pile of coins. Lucy didn’t even ask her for gas money when she drove her to Probation, though it was 45 minutes each way.
Next week, after her appointment, she and Lucy were going to the animal shelter again, to see if they’d got in a chihuahua yet. Or maybe some other kind of dog would just look at Ruthann in a way that would let her know he was meant to be hers. Lucy encouraged her to keep her mind open for that. Ruthann knew she had to decide soon. Lucy could be patient only so long, and she was already making noises about not taking Ruthann to the shelter again if she didn’t pick a dog soon. But as strong as Lucy’s opinions could be, she wouldn’t stick to her threat. After a few weeks of saying no, she’d start taking Ruthann to the shelter again. She had a good heart, after all. And she loved dogs, too. Not as much as Ruthann did, though. 