Rose wrapped gauze around his hand, so gently he hardly felt it. She tucked the end under and reached for a roll of adhesive tape. Then she said, “Maybe we could send him to obedience school.”
“Obedience school is for minor things — walking to heel and things,” Porter told her. “What we have here is major.”
“It is not!” Macon said. “It’s really nothing at all. Why, the woman at the Meow-Bow got on wonderfully with him.”
“Meow-Bow?”
“Where I boarded him when I went to England. She was just crazy about him. She wanted me to let her train him.”
“So call her, why don’t you.”
“Maybe I will,” Macon said.
He wouldn’t, of course. The woman had struck him as bizarre. But there was no sense going into that now.
On Sunday morning Edward tore the screen door, trying to get at an elderly neighbor who’d stopped by to borrow a wrench. On Sunday afternoon he sprang at Porter to keep him from leaving on an errand. Porter had to creep out the rear when Edward wasn’t watching. “This is undignified,” Porter told Macon. “When are you going to call the Kit-Kat or whatever it is?”
Macon explained that on Sundays the Meow-Bow would surely be closed.
Monday morning, when Edward went for a walk with Rose, he lunged at a passing jogger and yanked Rose off her feet. She came home with a scraped knee. She said, “Have you called the Meow-Bow yet?”
“Not quite,” Macon said.
“Macon,” Rose said. Her voice was very quiet. “Tell me something.”
“What’s that, Rose?”
“Can you explain why you’re letting things go on this way?”
No, he couldn’t, and that was the truth. It was getting so he was baffling even to himself. He felt infuriated by Edward’s misdeeds, but somehow he viewed them as visitations of fate. There was nothing he could do about them. When Edward approached him later with a mangled belt of Porter’s trailing from his mouth, all Macon said was, “Oh, Edward…”
He was sitting on the couch at the time, having been snagged by an especially outrageous moment in Rose’s soap opera. Rose looked over at him. Her expression was odd. It wasn’t disapproving; it was more like… He cast about for the word. Resigned. That was it. She looked at him the way she would look at, say, some hopeless wreck of a man wandering drugged on a downtown street. After all, she seemed to be thinking, there was probably not much that you could do for such a person.
“Meow-Bow Animal Hospital.”
“Is, ah, Muriel there, please?”
“Hold on a minute.”
He waited, braced against a cabinet. (He was using the pantry telephone.) He heard two women discussing Fluffball Cohen’s rabies shot. Then Muriel picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Yes, this is Macon Leary. I don’t know if you remember me or—”
“Oh, Macon! Hi there! How’s Edward doing?”
“Well, he’s getting worse.”
She tsk-tsked.
“He’s been attacking right and left. Snarling, biting, chewing things—”
“Did your neighbor tell you I came looking for you?”
“What? Yes, he did.”
“I was right on your street, running an errand. I make a little extra money running errands. George, it’s called. Don’t you think that’s cute?”
“Excuse me?”
“George. It’s the name of my company. I stuck a flyer under your door.
“No, I broke my leg,” Macon said.
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
“And I couldn’t manage alone of course, so—”
“You should have called George.”
“George who?”
“George my company! The one I was just telling you about.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you wouldn’t have had to leave that nice house. I liked your house. Is that where you lived when you were married, too?”
“Well, yes.”
“I’m surprised she agreed to give it up.”
“The point is,” Macon said, “I’m really at the end of my rope with Edward here, and I was wondering if you might be able to help me.”
“Sure I can help!”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Macon said.
“I can do anything,” Muriel told him. “Search and alert, search and rescue, bombs, narcotics—”
“Narcotics?”
“Guard training, attack training, poison-proofing, kennelosis—”
“Wait, I don’t even know what some of those things are,” Macon said.
“I can even teach split personality.”
“What’s split personality?”
“Where your dog is, like, nice to you but kills all others.”
“You know, I think I may be over my head here,” Macon said.
“No, no! Don’t say that!”
“But this is just the simplest problem. His only fault is, he wants to protect me.”
“You can take protection too far,” Muriel told him.
Macon tried a little joke. “ ‘It’s a jungle out there,’ he’s saying. That’s what he’s trying to say. ‘I know better than you do, Macon.’ ”
“Oh?” Muriel said. “You let him call you by your first name?”
“Well—”
“He needs to learn respect,” she said. “Five or six times a week I’ll come out, for however long it takes. I’ll start with the basics; you always do that: sitting, heeling. My charge is five dollars a lesson. You’re getting a bargain. Most I charge ten.”
Macon tightened his hold on the receiver. “Then why not ten for me?” he asked.
“Oh, no! You’re a friend.”
He felt confused. He gave her his address and arranged a time with the nagging sense that something was slipping out of his control. “But look,” he said, “about the fee, now—”
“See you tomorrow!” she said. She hung up.
At supper that night when he told the others, he thought they did a kind of double take. Porter said, “You actually called?” Macon said, “Yes, why not?”—acting very offhand — and so the others took their cue and dropped the subject at once.
seven
