“It’s alright, honey,” Penny said and stroked Hope’s head. He didn’t wake but he stopped twitching. “I don’t know how you can stand it, day after day in the same clothes.”
“I got my trial shirt. Don’t wear that for longer than twenty minutes a day and I hang it up soon as I come off. How many times twenty minutes go into twenty-four hours?”
“It’s a good thing it ain’t winter.”
They rode down the road for twenty miles before Ransome asked, “Why’s that?”
“We’d have to travel with the windows shut.”
WABASH VALLEY SHEEPDOG TRIAL
May 13, Jonestown, Ohio
Judge: Tom Wilson, Gordonsville, Virginia
21 Open dogs went to the post
1. Ransome Barlow
Bute
94
2. Kent Kuykendall
Bill
90
3. Bruce Fogt
Molly
84
4. Florence Wilson
Kate
83
5. Penny Burkeholder
Hope
82
THEY WERE COMING OUT of Columbus on 1-95 when they hit the dog. The median strip is narrow there and the dog had dodged onto it under the snout of a Kenilworth and maybe he was hysterical or maybe he thought he had nothing to lose because he kept coming. Ransome jerked the wheel and stuff broke loose inside the camper but there was this solemn thud on the side of the truck and that was that.
“Ransome, he’s trying to get up.” Penny had her eyes glued to the rearview mirror. “Ransome, stop!”
“How the hell I’m going to do that!” They were around the bend and the Freightliner on their butt pulled out to pass and blatted his airhorn, in sympathy or derision.
“We’ve got to go back.” They passed a sign: DEGRAFF 14.
Ransome hit the hazard blinkers and slowed and took AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY. When he pulled back into traffic stuff shifted around in the camper again.
“Ransome, I think he was a Border Collie.”
“How the hell you know that?”
“Look, there he is. He’s got back to the median.”
He was a black and tan smooth-coated bitch with a broad head. She hadn’t been eating well before she wandered onto the interstate: her ribs quivered under her skin like steel guitar strings. Half the hair was off her tail, like she’d been flayed. She was just lying there.
The median was ten feet of dead grass and soda pop bottles. A Kentucky Fried Chicken “Bucket of Chicken” lay behind the dog, a Mello Yello bottle a few feet ahead. It was hot, and every time a sixteen wheeler came by the air billowed and sucked.
“Ransome, what are you doing?” The bitch was panting hard, licking her lips, her eyes followed Penny’s every move.
“I got me a tire iron behind the seat. Christ, Penny, this is a mess. I like to keep things tidy.” He held the tire iron in his hand like the familiar tool had turned strange. “You scoot back in the truck. This won’t take but a moment.”
“Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m putting this poor bitch down, is what I’m doing. What do you think I’m doing. You want to drive away and leave her? Go on. You don’t have to watch.”
“Ransome, she isn’t hurt that bad. Look, her eyes are open.”
“She’s no account and she’s hurt bad. I’ll be doing her a favor.”
A double trailer rig roared by. The air was thick with its passage. “She must have been terrified. Ransome, I’m asking you.”
And Penny looked at him and the hurt bitch looked at him and Ransome said, “Won’t be the first dumb thing I’ve done in my life,” and went back to the truck and got a dog crate. He knelt beside her and said, “Alright, girl, this won’t hurt a bit,” and tied his checked neckerchief around her muzzle.
“She doesn’t need that?”
“She’s hurt, scared. She don’t know us from Adam. Lift her careful, don’t twist her now.”
The dog was panting like there wasn’t enough air in the world as they slid the crate in beside Bute, who pawed his crate door to be let out. “You cut that out,” Ransome said.
When they were rolling again, Ransome said, “I don’t know if DeGraff has got a dog pound.”
“Dog pound’ll just kill her.”
“What in the hell do you want to do? She’s not your dog. You wouldn’t want her if she was healthy. She’s probably not even a Border Collie, some kind of shepherd mix.”
“She’s the spitting image of Tom Lacy’s Rip, same muzzle.”
“What if she is? She’s not trained. You don’t know anything about her. The world is full of useless dogs nobody wants.”
“Are you always so hard? What made you so hard?”
Ransome shut up. He knew to a dollar how much money Penny had, every prize she’d won. She’d barely scraped up enough to send her entry check to the Blue Ridge Trial and she was dead broke. Ransome had a couple hundred dollars in the bank and as much in his wallet, and he’d been paying their joint expenses. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d paid for a tank of gas.
Ransome wished he was traveling alone. “You ever hear the story of the dog handler who goes to help the rancher load his calves? Well, his dogs don’t know anything and the handler knows less and all morning there’s cows running this way and that and everybody hollerin’ and everything gets done shouldn’t have. Finally the rancher looks at the dog man and says, “I’d like to thank you for comin’ out here to help me. Having you and your dogs is like having two good men stay home.”
“I wish she’d stop howling,” Penny said.
The Mint Springs Veterinary Clinic had loading dock and chutes around back for large animals, and that’s where Ransome backed in. “You go tell ’em what we got,” Ransome said. “I’ll wait with the truck.”
The bitch stopped howling when he opened the camper. There was blood coming out of her mouth and she was swallowing it down.
Maybe that was the secret. Keep it all inside, give nothing away.
The bitch’s eyes were desperate.
Ransome said, “I didn’t cause your trouble. Wasn’t me turned you loose to forage on your own,” but the words didn’t make him feel better. “I ain’t got the extra for this,” he said. “There’s plenty of men who got extra, but I don’t.” The bitch swallowed more blood.
The boom of a steel door and footfalls over a concrete floor and the vet was wearing a white smock and his assistant was wearing a green one. The assistant pushed a stainless steel trolley.
“Just leave her in the crate. We’ll take her that way.” The vet looked at Ransome.
“She ain’t my dog,” Ransome said. “I hit her on the interstate.”
Penny came around from the front, hurrying.
“But you’ll be responsible,” the vet said. The vet was a young man with blond hair and a darker reddish moustache. He was about Ransome’s age. Ransome wondered how much he made in a year.
As the vet tech wheeled her away, the bitch started howling again. Things, Ransome thought, were out of hand.
“I’ll be responsible,” Penny said.
“We’ll do what we can,” the vet said, nodded briskly, and disappeared.
Ransome moved the truck over to the end of the lot where Bute and Hope could stretch their legs. Penny had one foot on the bumper and a distant look on her face. “What are you going to do with her if she pulls through?” Ransome asked.
She shook her head. “I can’t stand any more senseless dying.”
Ransome took a dip of snuff. “Your husband—was he a dog man?”
“Mark wasn’t much of a hand with animals. Oh, he could work a chute or corral, and after Nop brought the sheep, Mark knew what to do, but he never was real interested. He knew grasses—we’d take walks through the meadows and he’d point out the different bluegrasses, the clovers, the ironweed, pigweed, purpletop, blue stems …”
“You and him, you …”
/> “What got you so curious, all of a sudden.”
“I was just asking …”
“Yeah. Well, Mark took my daughter for a drive in the rain when it was pouring down so hard he could hardly see and then he got in an accident and couldn’t get Lisa out of the truck and she drowned. Any other questions?”
“What makes you so hard?”
She looked at him sharply and then the tears came to her eyes, so he walked over to the grass and called Bute to him. Just like that hurt bitch in the vet clinic, Bute was busy dying. He was just going about it more gradually. Bute was five now. Roy was still winning trials for John Templeton when he was eleven, but that was real unusual. Maybe Ransome should look for a new young dog to start. “I never had no family to speak of,” he said. “My dad ran out on us. You know that Bruce Springsteen song about everybody’s got a hungry heart? I’m sorry you lost your family. I never figured I was much account, so I always figured to put all I had into doing one thing and I’d get that right. I never thought anybody else was more account than me and they never had the one thing to do right.”
“You’re a hell of a dog man. What do you want more than that?”
Ransome shrugged. He thought to say something about a wife, a family, a home, but, the truth was he wasn’t sure he wanted those things though he knew he was supposed to want them. “It’d be nice if that bitch lived. I never ran over her with the tires; it was a glancing blow.”
“It’s what I admire about you. Sometimes when you’re out on the trial field, you can take my breath away.”
“Yeah. Well sometimes I get lucky. What are you going to do after the National Handlers’ Finals?”
“Polish my trophy.”
“No really?”
Penny watched Hope, who was rolling in the grass. “It’s kind of like praying,” she said softly. “You don’t know what you’re going to do until after you know if God is going to answer.”
“I come second last year. It’s just a trial. Bigger. Outrun’s nearly a mile.”
“Isn’t anything you can’t make small. The World Series is just a bunch of overgrown boys playing ball and the same jerks want to be President of the United States wanted to be president of the senior class. My Lisa … there’s millions of kids died in worse pain, plenty kids didn’t have the life she did. How about you and me? Two misfits who’ll put sixty thousand miles on this pickup this year to run in pennyante dog trials. You can look at it that way.”
“Come over here, Bute. That’s enough foolishness.” The vet tech had crossed the tarmac to say that the doctor would see them now.
The corridors of the cavernous building were damp and cold. Big drains in the concrete floors. The operating room was brightly lit, like everything important was concentrated right here. The bitch lay on the steel table on her side with some kind of tube that looked like a vacuum cleaner part way down her throat. Penny never knew a dog’s tongue could come out so far. They’d shaved a wide strip of hair and pulled back a flap of belly skin and her innards were inside like aliens in a cave.
“Excuse me,” Ransome said and retreated into the hall, and the door hissed shut behind him.
The vet was wearing his mask and his disposable gloves, and the front of his uniform was bloody from table top height to his ribcage. “It doesn’t look good.”
“Poor bitch. The poor little bitch …”
“I’m afraid her spleen is ruptured and there’s substantial damage to the liver too.”
“You want me to say we should kill her.”
“If I patch her back together she’ll live a couple days, in pain, getting weaker and weaker.”
Penny shook her head. “I’m not up to this. Poor bitch is so alone. Wait a minute. Let me ask my partner.”
Ransome was at the back door drawing big drafts of air. “Sorry,” he said, “I see blood and I get squeamish. I might pass out.”
“Well, you got to go back in there and tell that vet what to do.”
He looked at her for a moment. “If I start to go gray faced, you steer me out of there.”
And so the lost bitch died, issued out of life with more human gentleness than she had known during her life, with the gentle hand on her neck of a hard man who couldn’t look at her and a woman’s voice in her ears, “Poor baby. Good-bye, poor baby, good-bye.”
Yes the clinic would dispose of the dog. They had an incinerator. The vet said, “I wish it could have turned out better.”
A gray-faced Ransome Barlow said, “Dog wasn’t any account anyway,” and swallowed.
The vet said, “I’ll work for free, but I’m going to have to charge you the medications and incineration.”
Penny wrote him a check for sixty dollars, which meant her check to the Bluegrass Trial would bounce when they cashed it.
Outside, Ransome took a deep breath of air and set his hat straight across his forehead. “Would have been cheaper with the tire iron,” he said.
“Ransome,” she said, “I won’t say it’s been fun traveling with you, but it sure has been interesting. Know what I mean?”
PENNY CAERAU STOCKDOG TRIAL
May 21, 1st day, Lady Lake Florida
Judge: Lewis Pulfer, Quincy, Ohio
60 Open dogs went to the post
1. Ralph Pulfer
Ken
87
2. Ransome Barlow
Bute
87 (Decided on outwork)
3. Ethel Conrad
Jan
86
4. Bobby Ford
Yogi
80
5. Quinn Tindall
Shep
79
EVERY MORNING, as soon as Penny stirred, Hope stretched and yawned and went to her sleeping bag and put his nose within a millimeter of her cheek and smelled whether she was awake. If she slept, he grunted and laid back down again. If she was awake, he licked her cheek, just once, and laid down and thumped his tail against her sleeping bag.
While she struggled into her clothes, he sniffed around the area, tail held high, reading all the messages posted since last night. SICK, OLDER DOG, WATCH OUT—one said. YOUNG NERVOUS DOG—BEWARE, said another. YOUNG LADY IN HER PRIME … and so forth. He overlapped a few messages of his own. DEVIL-MAY-CARE YOUNG DOG SEEKS LOVE AND ADVENTURE. That was Hope’s customary signature.
Some mornings fog coiled among the gypsy encampment, blurring the outlines of the motor homes, the rows of pickup campers. A door would bang open and two or three dogs would hurtle out into the morning, and several would charge straight at Hope in a brusk and determined manner. Hope’s hackles would rise and he’d stand fast until the other dogs were quite close before circling them, which is part threat (hindquarters being relatively undefended) and part politeness. The dog who stands straight and doesn’t circle is itching for a fight.
Hope knew these dogs. Knew Ethel Conrad’s crotchety old Tess and Bill Berhow’s joking dog, Nick. Knew Barbara Ligon’s quick Mirk and Roy Johnson’s devoted Roscoe.
Once the introductions were made, (“And how art thou, this morning?”) dogs would provoke a chase and bound away full tilt, under the RV’s, around the outskirts of the course, running because they were made for it, created by God for that purpose, and they had the joy of it in their legs, their dogginess in their dodge, their sheer pleasure at a new day.
Suddenly, Hope would be overtaken by a reminder from his own innards that he was full, full to bursting and he’d find a bush or some tall grass where he could squat safe with no one watching him, man or dog.
Though he and Bute traveled together, saw more of each other than any other dog, they weren’t pals. When Bute came out of the crate in the pickup, he checked the other dogs’ calling cards but was indifferent to all but bitches in heat. Bute’s calling card read: BAD TO THE BONE. Once, out in Oklahoma, a young dog, startled by Bute’s sudden appearance, lunged at him. Bute couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d been hit by a meteor. He ran away and made fifteen yards, encouraging the young
dog to a foolish pursuit. Then, he turned and threw the young dog over and held him by the throat and the young dog sobered instantly, the fight light going out of his eyes. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry.” Bute considered killing him, but killing other dogs was not his work, so with a final growl, he stalked off and returned to the pickup, where Ransome had filled his bowl for breakfast.
From time to time, Hope offered to play with Bute, dropped down into the inviting puppy crouch that means: “After you, Gaston,” or “After me, Alphonse,” but Bute sneered and went about his business.
Like some humans, Bute came alive at his work, had displaced his soul into work. Once Hope asked Bute what he thought about Ransome: “He is the best there is,” Bute said.
Before eight o’clock, the sun would burn off the fog, handlers would gather near the judge to hear his instructions and the faint sound of whistles on the course announced that men were putting out sheep. The dogs were tied beside the vehicles, and all day they’d doze, listening to whistles and commands on the course until their turn came.
PENNY CAERAU STOCKDOG TRIAL
May 22, 2nd day, Lady Lake Florida
Judge: Lewis Pulfer, Quincy, Ohio
58 Open dogs went to the post
1. Ransome Barlow
Bute
90
2. Ralph Pulfer
Ken
88
3. Quinn Tindall
Shep
87
4. Tom Wilson
Cap
85
5. Ethel Conrad
Jan
84
THE BAND WAS PLAYING Bob Will’s old tunes and not too bad either. Fiddle, couple guitars, woman singer—big woman, spangled western shirt hanging loose and a blue cowboy hat. Jo-Jo’s, the restaurant where they held the Handlers’ Dinner and Dance, had a sign on the front door, SORRY: PRIVATE PARTY TONIGHT, and the narrow dining room was full of dog handlers, dressed up in their best western garb. Ransome Barlow wore a red and black striped body shirt with extremely wide droopy lapels. Ransome’s run had been one of those efforts most handlers only dream of. Ransome was no dancer, but tonight he had plenty of willing partners.