Little Boy Blue Read online

  I felt the muscles in my hand relax as I unclenched my knuckles from around the leash I’d been gripping at the ready. Stacy looked on with unabashed approval, saying, simply, “What a cute little dog.”

  Andrew next moved toward Blue with the lanky lope of just about every adolescent boy I know. Blue wasn’t as comfortable with Andrew’s approach as he had been with Erika’s, and he darted backward, scampering with his tiny puppy toes until he was well out of Andrew’s reach. Blue tucked his tail between his legs and let his ears droop in what looked to us all like an unquestionable sign of fear. It wasn’t like with so many puppies who get nervous or uncomfortable if you approach them from overhead instead of reaching toward their bellies. It also wasn’t something that happened quickly, as with most puppies who then bounce right back to cheerful play. Blue’s cowering and retreating lingered like an unwelcome stench in the air, in a way that made it obvious he had learned the hard way to be leery. He wasn’t looking at us with the curious eyes of a puppy who was momentarily startled. He was looking at us with the eyes of a survivor who knew far more about the harsher side of human nature than any dog ever should.

  Andrew felt so bad that he stopped moving entirely, even skipping a breath or two. Then he sat down in the grass and waited until Blue was ready to come to him. Again, Blue bellycrawled across the lawn. His posture showed friendliness, but also wariness until he felt sure that he was safe.

  Mental note, I thought. Blue is a sweetheart, but he seems unusually timid for a puppy. Somebody has taught this dog not to trust some people until they prove themselves friendly.

  With Erika and Andrew now proudly counting themselves among Blue’s best friends in the entire world, I walked him home just in time to greet another friend who’d dropped by to meet him. I kept Blue on his leash in the driveway as Brandi unloaded the car seat that held her infant daughter, Avery. We let Blue sniff the car seat itself, and then Avery’s itty-bitty baby feet. While Brandi and I were both at the Defcon One stage of alert, Blue and Avery alike seemed remarkably nonplussed. Blue was more interested in saying hello to Brandi, who happily swapped newborns with me and took Blue into my backyard to play.

  Blue was shy with Brandi, just as he’d initially been with Erika and Andrew, but she lured him with a welcome-home chew toy wrapped inside soft animal hide that is apparently as delicious to dogs as black truffles are to connoisseurs of French cuisine. Blue went crazy for the thing, and of course then crazy for Brandi, this mysterious new human being who was the bearer of exciting things to gnaw. Once he felt comfortable with her, he let her hold him and pet him and hug him, and she fell in love with him just as quickly as everybody else who’d met him. Blue seemed to have more than the usual allotment of natural puppy charm. Something about the way he tested people before trusting them made everybody want to cuddle him that much more.

  I was expecting a similar reaction when I brought Blue to my veterinarian a few days later for his first checkup. Dr. Allison Milne and her staff at Mendham Animal Hospital had been outstanding with Floyd and Stella alike, and I knew I could trust them implicitly with Blue’s care, no matter what he ended up needing. When Floyd, around age ten, had developed benign tumors that grew so large that they impeded his ability to walk, Dr. Milne had put his quality of life before his age and done surgery that some other vets would have refused the old man, but that ended up giving him five additional years of comfortable walks at the park. Stella was known as a frequent flyer in the office thanks to her Velociraptor-like tendencies to puzzle her way into all kinds of bones fractured and items swallowed, and Dr. Milne and her staff always welcomed her with hugs and treats, as well as with bandages and stitches. Maybe the staff really liked my dogs, or maybe they really liked the way my countless visits were providing serious funding for the office mortgage. Either way, I couldn’t wait to introduce the squad to Blue.

  He had arrived on the RV without a shred of paperwork, so the folks at Lulu’s Rescue had spent a few days tracking down what they could while I was settling Blue into his new life. They’d e-mailed me a few files that morning, and I’d printed them out to bring to Dr. Milne without actually having time to read them myself. Only after I was in the exam room with Blue sitting on the table, with a veterinary technician holding him in place and Dr. Milne listening to his lungs with her stethoscope, did I finally have a chance to look over the four sheets of paper. They weren’t much, but they contained all the information that had been recorded about Blue during his first five months of life.

  One sheet of paper was just that, a plain piece of standard white with only three lines of handwritten notations. They indicated the dates that Blue had received his second and third doses of puppy booster shots for parvovirus, distemper, and parainfluenza, as well as a dose of Heartgard, which many dogs take once a month to prevent heartworm. It was standard stuff in terms of veterinary care, albeit recorded in a thoroughly homespun way.

  The second sheet was an official-looking certificate from Roxboro Animal Hospital in Roxboro, North Carolina, a city that I would later learn has fewer than ten thousand residents and that is the seat of Person County. This sheet described Blue as a Boxer/Hound mix and noted the date of his first rabies vaccine. His owner was listed as an alphabet soup of letters that I guessed was a generic acronym for some kind of animal-rescue group.

  Third was a sheet that bore the same date as Blue’s rabies vaccine, from the same animal hospital in Roxboro. The computer-generated form stated that he’d received a physical exam, a round of puppy booster shots, a supply of Heartgard to prevent heartworm, and a supply of Frontline for fleas and ticks. It looked very much like the receipts that I get from Dr. Milne’s office after my visits, itemized with standard information that I recognized from my own dogs’ care. At the bottom, someone had handwritten reminder dates for when Blue needed his next doses of everything. All on the up-and-up, I thought.

  The fourth and final sheet was also computer generated, but from a different source. The top read “POP-NC” beneath the line “Pet Overpopulation Patrol—Mobile Spay/Neuter.” There, Blue had received a physical exam that showed almost everything about him to be normal. He’d been neutered and given pain medication for any post-operation discomfort, and his surgery was listed as “uncomplicated.”

  There was, however, one line on that fourth sheet that gave me pause. Under “skin/hair/nails,” the POP veterinarian had listed Blue as abnormal. She had handwritten “circular dermatitis on chest—recommend culture for ringworm.” Beneath that note was another one, left by someone with different handwriting. It was an asterisk followed by three words: “treated for ringworm.”

  I was about to hand the information to Dr. Milne when she asked me about the little scabs running from Blue’s face all along his neck and onto his upper back. She was going to do a scraping for mange to be sure that’s not what had caused them.

  “It says here that he was treated for ringworm,” I told her as I handed over the paperwork. “None of my dogs have ever had ringworm. Is that some kind of rash? He was advertised as healthy, so maybe they’re just scabs that are still healing from the treatment.”

  Dr. Milne immediately stepped away from Blue and began to read the papers, scouring them the way a divorce attorney reviews bank records for signs of hidden money. The veterinary technician who had been holding Blue on the exam table threw her arms into the air and stepped back, as if my precious pooch were a ticking nuclear bomb. Blue himself sat freakishly still, no doubt sensing the sudden change in mood. I walked over and put my arm around him to comfort him, just as I had countless times during the past few days.

  Ringworm, I would learn, is not actually a worm, but instead a fungus. It creates a highly contagious, hard-to-kill skin infection that can be passed from dogs to dogs, and from dogs to humans. Most of the vet techs in the office had suffered with it before— itchy, red, scaly patches that can blister and ooze—and the one who had just been holding Blue didn’t want any part of having it again. Dr. Milne
asked me to wait while the vet tech went and found one of her colleagues, who seemed to be immune to ringworm and was not concerned about becoming infected.

  Dr. Milne herself, having now read all four sheets of paper, shook her head in disgust. She let out a sigh, and then for the first time in the five years I’d known her, she raised her voice.

  “You know,” she hollered, “I get that they’re trying to rescue dogs out of shelters, but there is a difference between saving dogs on a shoestring and giving proper medical care! What do these notes even mean? Was this dog ever actually tested for ringworm? Did they verify that it’s cured? How can these people adopt out a dog who might be infecting every other dog and person who touches him?”

  My mind immediately flashed to Erika. And then to Andrew. And then to baby Avery, who was just a few months old. The hair on her head hadn’t even grown in all the way yet. Her mom and I had been so excited about the new puppy that we’d passed Blue and Avery back and forth without even thinking to wash our hands.

  “Can babies get this?” I asked with an overwhelming sense of dread.

  “Not only can they get it, but it can be very difficult to clear up,” Dr. Milne answered. “It’s not common, but it is possible. Anybody who touched this dog and then held a baby could have transferred it.”

  I sat down on the chair in the exam room and took a deep breath. It felt like a hamster was running loose inside my intestines.

  Dr. Milne walked stoically out of the exam room. She returned a moment later with a piece of scrap paper and a pen. She said that Blue would need a ringworm test and two full weeks of quarantine at my house until the test results were confirmed, and that she would prefer not to release him from her office at all until we could get at least a few basic questions answered.

  “We don’t want to spread this problem any further than it has already gone,” she said. “We’re now in a situation where we’re dealing with public health, not just a puppy’s rash.”

  Some people may think she was overreacting, but the truth is that she was right to be concerned. I would later learn that some states have gone so far as to pass quarantine laws to prevent dogs from being transported with diseases like ringworm. Dr. Milne wasn’t upset so much because of the rash itself, but instead because I may have gotten Blue from what appeared in that moment to be an irresponsible rescue.

  On the scrap paper, Dr. Milne wrote the four questions that she said needed immediate answers. Number One: How was it determined that Blue had ringworm—were actual ringworm cultures taken, or were they just recommended? Number Two: What kind of treatment had Blue received, specifically? Number Three: How long was he treated? Number Four: Was he retested for ringworm after the treatment was completed?

  “They’re all important,” she told me, “but that last one is really important. The standard of care for ringworm includes doing a test to confirm that the fungus is present, and then doing the same test a second time, after the treatment, to make sure it’s actually gone. Sometimes it requires multiple rounds of treatment before the fungus is killed all the way.”

  I looked over at Blue, who was now lying instead of sitting on the exam table. His big, brown puppy eyes drooped with exhaustion. It had been a long day for him on the heels of a long week. I asked Dr. Milne to leave us the room and the records. As Blue faded into a nap, I took out my cell phone and began calling every number on those four sheets of paper.

  Mostly, I got hold of office workers who could only confirm what the papers already stated. Then one telephone number led me to a feed store in North Carolina, a place where a van apparently shows up every week or so to offer inexpensive spaying and neutering services. I asked the feed store guy for any help he could give me, and he asked me to hold on while he grabbed his phone book to get the number for the people he knows from the van. The woman who answered my call to that number didn’t know anything about Blue, but she did recognize the alphabet soup that I read off the paper identifying Blue’s owner at the time of his surgery.

  “That’s the Canine Volunteer Rescue of Person County here in North Carolina,” the woman said, so quickly that she might as well have been recalling her own home address. She was kind enough to look up the group’s phone number for me before adding, “You want to talk to a woman there named Annie Turner.”

  It surprised me that this woman knew the rescue worker by name. A week earlier, I’d clicked on a photograph of a puppy listed within an hour of my home and offered to adopt him. I’d been told that he was homeless, saved from a shelter, and had no known origins. Now I was on the phone to a place hundreds of miles away where the people involved in Blue’s earliest days seemed to all know one another by name. It felt weird to me, perhaps because I live in a New Jersey county that is home to nearly a half million people, most of them strangers to one another in the suburbs of the even-bigger New York City. I had the immediate sense that I was calling a part of America that was much smaller and much different, a place where I was somehow inserting myself into a group of people who knew each other really, oddly well.

  I thanked the woman for Annie Turner’s phone number and asked her if she could tell me anything more about the type of treatment the spay/neuter veterinarian would have given Blue for ringworm.

  “Oh, we don’t treat things like that,” she said. “We would have only recommended that he get a ringworm culture done, that some kind of follow-up be done at the local veterinarian.”

  I next called the number for Canine Volunteer Rescue of Person County, and I left a voice mail requesting that Annie Turner return my call. That’s when Dr. Milne came back inside the exam room.

  “So this puppy was never actually diagnosed with ringworm through an actual culture at a veterinarian’s office?” Dr. Milne asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “but all of the veterinarians listed in this paperwork told me they never did any ringworm tests.”

  Dr. Milne sighed and made a face that I hadn’t seen since about 1978, when my father had caught me hurling Star Wars action figures from the bathtub into the toilet.

  “All right, then, here’s what we’re going to do,” Dr. Milne said. “We don’t actually know that this dog had ringworm. Since you and your other dog have already been exposed, as long as Blue stays in your house and yard, he can’t infect anybody else. Notify everybody who’s touched him, and have them watch for any signs of abnormalities, especially on that baby. We’ll do the ringworm culture today and keep him in quarantine with you for the next two weeks, just to be safe. When you hear back from this woman Annie Turner, call my office and give me all the details you can get. In the meantime, we’ll give you a bottle of medicinal shampoo that should kill any fungus that Blue might still have, plus a tube of cream that will help to heal his scabs.”

  I scooped up Blue and paid my bill, which listed the cost of the shampoo and cream at a combined total of $38.75.

  All of this drama over something that costs less than forty bucks to correct? I thought. I paid $400 for this dog. Why on earth would people charging that kind of money not have just given Blue these things before putting him up for adoption?

  Back at home, I got in touch with the folks from Lulu’s Rescue. They were horrified to learn of my experience. They said it was the first time they had ever had a problem with a dog from this particular rescue group in North Carolina, and they’d been given no indication that Blue was anything other than a happy, healthy puppy. The photograph of him hadn’t shown any signs of a skin problem, and nobody had ever said the word ringworm in their discussions about him. They promised to do further research and let me know if they could find any additional information about Blue’s past, and they thanked me for all I was doing to make sure he was healthy. Some people, they told me, would have skipped the shampoo and instead just sent him back, rejected as defective.

  It took me a good while to get that repugnant idea out of my mind. I shook my head at the very thought of it, and I spent the rest of the afternoon following Dr. Milne�
��s instructions. Blue seemed oblivious to all the concern and drama, what with his nap at the vet’s office having recharged his puppy batteries. He scampered and played with Stella until I picked him up in one hand with the bottle of shampoo in the other.

  Not long after I’d finished Blue’s first medicinal bath in the kitchen sink, my telephone rang. The woman on the line said she was Annie Turner, returning my call.

  At least I thought “Annie Turner” was the name the woman had said. She sounded about as different from me as a platypus from a mountain lion. I was born and raised in New Jersey. Unless I make a serious mental effort, I talk as fast as a freight train and sound just as silly as Snooki or Tony Soprano thanks to my “Joisey Gurl” accent. This woman Annie Turner had a Southern drawl and talked slower than a push mower on a hot summer’s day. At first, we couldn’t understand a thing that the other was saying. I asked her to repeat a couple of things a couple of times, until I could discern her pattern of speech. I slowed my own sentences and tried to enunciate the way I do when I’m on assignment as a travel writer in foreign countries.

  Turner said she had fostered Blue at the farm where she lived after he was found at the local animal-control center in Person County. “They gas puppies like him to death,” she said. “They kill 92 percent of all the dogs that go in there.”

  I paused for a moment, trying to digest what she’d just told me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shocked into responding even more slowly. “Would … you … please … say that again?”

  “Ninety-two percent,” she said. “They kill almost all of them. We pulled him out at the last minute. He was headed for the gas chamber.”

  Blue, at that moment, was on my backyard deck. He’d gone outside to dry off, and I’d given him a bone for being such a good boy about the bath. I could see him through the kitchen window. He had fallen asleep while chewing the bone, which lay next to him, half eaten. His little puppy potbelly rose and fell with every breath as his wet fur dried in the afternoon sun.