Little Boy Blue Page 4

  Gas chamber? I thought. The words echoed in my brain with a muffled dullness, like the way ears ring in the immediate aftermath of an explosion. Who on earth would throw a puppy like Blue into a gas chamber? Is that even legal?

  I had Dr. Milne’s scrap paper in hand, and I needed her four specific questions answered. Turner was at first open and forthcoming with lots of information, which it turns out included all of the first-known details about Blue’s life.

  Blue, after her group rescued him from the animal-control center, had gone to live on what she described as a farm where she was fostering about twenty dogs. Most of them are Chihuahuas, which she said hold a special place in her heart, but some- thing about Blue’s face made her feel that he was exceptional, too. She said that Blue had loved playing with all of her other foster dogs, and that he practically sang with delight when she rocked him in her arms. He had been learning to sleep and eat in a crate at her urging and without any complaint, and he’d grown especially fond of a big Labrador mix who lived on the farm as well. The two of them had become inseparable, Turner said.

  I thanked her for having saved him, and for all of the work her group had done to bring him to my attention. I assured her that he was loved and well cared for, and that he had, in fact, just returned from a checkup at the veterinarian’s office.

  Then I slowly but determinedly turned the conversation back to its original purpose. I needed to know the cause of Blue’s scabs, and why and how he was treated for ringworm.

  “Oh, he never had a test for ringworm,” she said, about as casually as a mother of five whose youngest child is screaming bloody murder over nothing but a little ol’ scraped knee. “The vet who neutered him said his rash looked like it could have been ringworm, so that’s why the paper says that.”

  “Great,” I said, checking off one of Dr. Milne’s questions from the list. “So where it says ‘treated for ringworm,’ what does that mean?”

  “Well,” she replied, measuring her words, “it means that I treated him for ringworm.”

  I couldn’t tell whether she thought I was some variation of an obnoxious soccer mom, or if she was just uncomfortable about me asking questions in general, but her tone was definitely changing. She was becoming defensive.

  “I’m sorry if I sound pushy,” I pressed, “but my veterinarian asked me to find out exactly how Blue was treated for ringworm. We are trying to make sure he has the best possible care now. Any information you can give me about how he was treated would be really helpful.”

  A few seconds went by, and Turner said nothing. It seemed to me that she was hesitant to answer the question at all.

  I let the silence hang in the air, and after a few more seconds, she filled it.

  “I treated him the way I was told to treat him,” she said. “With bleach and Monistat.”

  Again, I found myself pausing, trying to digest what she’d just told me.

  “Did you say … bleach?” I asked.

  “That’s what I was told to do,” she said. “The veterinarian from spay/neuter said I could treat with bleach and Monistat.”

  Monistat, I thought. Mon-i-stat. I racked my brain until I remembered where I’d seen it: on the drugstore shelf, in the section for vaginal anti-yeast cream.

  “It definitely worked,” Turner continued as I tried to calm my own racing thoughts. “None of my other dogs got the same rash, and some of them are as little as three pounds apiece. He was playing with all of them. They would’ve had it by now if it was contagious.”

  Still, I remained silent. I looked at the thirty-eight dollars’ worth of shampoo and skin cream on my kitchen counter. On a puppy’s skin? On anybody’s skin? Bleach? I couldn’t get the word out of my mind.

  “You know, he also had toxidia when I found him,” she said.

  “Toxidia?” I replied, snapping my attention back to our conversation. “What the heck is toxidia?”

  “Not toxidia,” she corrected me, sounding less like a crazy person and more like someone with lots of animal-care experience. “Coccidia. It’s serious diarrhea. Puppies can get dehydrated from it and die. He lost three pounds in a single week. I got him healthy and put the weight back on him.”

  Turner was now talking with great pride, but I was reeling like an elephant stunned by a dart filled with brain tranquilizers. I again looked out the window at Blue, who was as content as could be sleeping under the sun. Aside from his tiny scabs, he seemed as happy and healthy as any puppy I’d ever known. It was challenging, if not impossible, to imagine that just a couple of weeks earlier he had been in line to be tossed into a gas chamber, was so sick with diarrhea that he couldn’t keep weight on, and was covered in some kind of a rash that left people coating his skin with bleach and vaginal anti-yeast cream.

  Turner was kind enough to say that I could call her back at any time if I needed additional information. From her end, I surmised, everything she’d said was routine. A job well done.

  I thanked her, hung up the telephone, and walked outside to the deck. Blue’s ears perked up and then his eyes opened, and he lifted his head out of what looked like a deep slumber. I sat down and crossed my legs, and he crawled into my lap. He curled himself into a ball, rested his head on my thigh, and went peacefully back to sleep.

  So began our two-week quarantine for what, mercifully, ended up not being ringworm. I’ll never know for sure what actually caused Blue’s rash because all of his tests came back negative and his scabs continued to heal. Baby Avery never had any problems, and I—despite a few paranoid moments of feeling phantom itches all over my body for absolutely no reason whatsoever—got to enjoy two whole weeks of paying extra-special attention to Blue. Since I work from home as a writer and have the benefit of making my own hours, there was lots of time spent with just the two of us practicing basic commands, learning how to walk on a leash, and playing on the backyard grass. And it was in the backyard that I started to realize Blue not only had an exceptional emotional effect on a good number of people, but also on other dogs.

  At just twenty pounds during those first weeks at home, Blue was literally a third of Stella’s size. She’s as solid as dogs come, with a strong proud chest, a big square forehead, and muscles so carved and pronounced that you’d think she was hitting the weight room for a few deltoid reps in between her walks at the park. Between her looks and her personality, I used to joke that Stella was an all-star linebacker living in a world filled with powder-puff cheerleaders. She didn’t approach other dogs and ask them politely if they wanted to play. She ran up to other dogs and gave them the canine version of a smack across the head as if to insist, “Let’s wrestle!”

  Blue, on the other hand, was a typical awkward puppy, so eager to run that he sometimes forgot which feet he was supposed to move next. He had all the requisite loose skin on his back and baby fat around his waistline, and his natural instinct was to be cautious and protect himself around other dogs, just as he did with people. He also had what I came to appreciate as a pretty sharp brain inside his little noggin, using it at first to outsmart Stella and then to win her respect.

  My backyard is surrounded by a four-foot-tall, split-rail fence. Inside is about fifteen hundred square feet of nothing but freshly mowed grass. Around the fence is the rest of my property, a few wooded acres with tall, old-growth trees. Deer tend to wander by, and though the yard is plenty big for Stella to run at a full sprint, she decided early on that she wanted to follow the deer into the woods instead. She quickly figured out how to leap clear over the fence, pretty much in a single bound. Soon after, I installed an invisible, electrical fence around the regular one, as well as a shock collar around Stella’s neck to keep her safely inside the yard.

  Blue had no need for a shock collar; it took him a few days to even bark at the deer, let alone try to chase them. But once he took a liking to getting his nose right up into the fence to bark at the deer, he began to realize that Stella always stayed a few feet behind. He would actually look back over his shou
lder at her, like an army cadet puzzled by his sergeant’s reluctance to engage in the heart of the action. Stella’s safety border, Blue was figuring out, was about three feet from the fence edge. Any closer, and she got a warning buzz from her collar.

  Blue took about two days to turn Stella’s safety zone into his own. He couldn’t run as fast as she could, but he was quick enough that he could get about halfway across the yard before she caught up to him in a game of chase. He’d prod her and coax her into playing, and then he would run and run his little heart out, and she’d chase after him like a cheetah. When he heard her steps beating down upon him, he’d dart into the three-foot safety zone and run as close as he could to the fence line. Stella continued to chase him back and forth, but always from a distance where she couldn’t actually reach him. They would do this for hours a day, always with the same pattern and result. Blue had figured out how to outsmart the bigger, stronger playmate simply by using the rules of the field to his advantage.

  I watched this scene unfold for a few days, thought about making T-shirts that read “Mommy’s Little Genius,” and in general forgot that we were in fact quarantined instead of just plain having a good time. Then, after five or six days, I noticed the strategies of their game beginning to change. Instead of Blue nipping at Stella until she chased him, and then him dashing as fast as he could to beat her to the safety zone, I watched in awe as Stella intentionally—dare I say gracefully—let Blue walk right past her to get to the fence and start the game from there.

  Now, grace has never been part of Stella’s personality. Assertive? Yes. Aggressive? Never with people, but sometimes with other dogs. Polite? About as often as an Ultimate Fighter going for the title at a pay-per-view main event. And yet she had not only decided to accept this puppy, but also to accommodate him. He appeared to have earned her respect. He had softened her edges just the same way he’d eased the worst of my grief about Floyd’s death. Blue was somehow Zen-like, a calming presence in and of himself.

  The more and more I got to know Blue, the more and more I began to obsess about the things that Annie Turner had told me on the telephone. Such disconcerting information didn’t match up against the winning personality that this dog was showing me. Not even a little bit. I didn’t think about the things she’d said once in a while. I became preoccupied, and even a little bit haunted, by what seemed to be a few more bread crumbs on a trail that begged to be followed into Blue’s past.

  I did some research and learned that bleach and Monistat are a common, inexpensive home remedy for ringworm. The medicine my veterinarian had prescribed cost just less than forty dollars. I didn’t think much of that expense in the context of bringing a new puppy home, but a drugstore website told me that a three-day supply of Monistat plus bleach cost about half as much. Multiply that extra twenty bucks by, say, two hundred dogs with rashes, and the remedy would save four thousand dollars. By my math, from the day I met Blue at the RV, the money saved was enough to transport at least another forty puppies just like him to safety.

  That Turner had felt so desperate to save that money, that she had felt the need to use bleach that can burn instead of shampoo that soothes, that she is the head of a countywide rescue group and she made that decision—all of it seemed beyond strange. I talked about it with my husband in the context of our new puppy, and it gave us both pause.

  A great deal of pause, actually, and an insatiable desire to learn more.

  A Journey Awaits

  Michele Armstrong looks nothing like the image that I had of her in my mind. On the day that Blue and I met her in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for breakfast at a dog-friendly restaurant with outdoor tables, I was expecting a cherub-faced, later-in-life woman who had maybe raised a few kids and was now applying the full bore of her maternal instincts to saving dogs. I’m not sure how I conjured this mental picture, given that Armstrong’s cofounder at Lulu’s Rescue, Jane Zeolla, had looked youthful and polished when she’d come to inspect my home. I guess it was something about the name Lulu’s Rescue, plus the fact that the group is based in a town called Point Pleasant. The names just sound so gosh darn quaint that I’d formed a mental impression of Armstrong as being, shall we say, a hair shy of cosmopolitan.

  Instead, Blue and I were greeted by a woman who is about my age (forty is the new twenty, right?) and who looked nearly as fit and focused as any member of the U.S. Olympic swimming team. Armstrong wore no makeup, had her blonde locks effortlessly pulled back from her face, and was clad in faded jeans and a T-shirt that appeared custom-made to fit her like a runway model. To see her walking down the street in farm country along the Delaware River, I’d never have guessed that she’d lived a previous, professional life in New York City. And unless I’d talked with her, I’d have missed out on her absolute aura of intelligence. I’ve only experienced it before with journalists working to expose truths from war zones, and in volunteers working to save lives in the aftermath of natural disasters. Armstrong is the kind of person who needs precious little primping or adornment. Her honesty and beauty seem to emanate directly from her soul, brightened even more by the obvious smarts and sincerity that accompany her every word about the dogs whose lives she is trying to save.

  She and Zeolla, who together have more than thirty years of experience saving dogs, started Lulu’s Rescue in January 2010. That was just a few months before I applied to the group through Petfinder to adopt Blue, making him one of their first successful adoptions during their initial year of operation. The mission at Lulu’s Rescue is to get great dogs like Blue out of high-kill shelters and into permanent homes. Like many rescues, Lulu’s doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar facility, but instead uses a network of foster homes to keep each dog safe until a permanent home can be found.

  Armstrong and I casually grabbed an outdoor table at a restaurant whose owner is a Lulu’s Rescue supporter. We each ordered an omelet as Blue rested at our feet, happily chewing on a bone and enjoying a morning out of the house. It was the first day that Armstrong was meeting Blue, even though she’d been instrumental in saving his life. At Lulu’s, Armstrong focuses on tasks like vetting potential adopters, organizing major fundraisers, and helping shelters win grants that ultimately bring down their kill rates. Zeolla, meanwhile, has the unenviable job of sifting through the countless descriptions of dogs in need. It’s Zeolla who first spots the dogs who will be lucky enough to get a spot in the Lulu’s Rescue program. She is the one who saw Blue’s face in the photograph that Annie Turner’s group had put online, and she is the one who chose to promote him through the Lulu’s page that I saw on Petfinder.com.

  “He’s just so beautiful here in person,” Armstrong told me as the waitress brought our orders to the table. Armstrong sounded happy and hopeful, but her exuberance lasted only for a moment. “You know, I’ve tried to look at all of the photos of dogs like him on the computer, and I just can’t do it. I get physically sick. To see all those dogs and know that so many of them aren’t going to make it …”

  Her voice trailed off. She pushed her omelet around the plate with her fork. With her other hand, she reached down and gently rubbed Blue behind his ears.

  Our breakfast was supposed to be a casual conversation that I thought might help me learn more about Blue’s past, but I was brimming with so many questions that I feared they were going to blast out of my mouth like machine-gun ammo. I didn’t want to seem like a CIA interrogator, but I also wanted desperately to know how Blue had ended up in his predicament down South.

  “I’m having a hard time understanding how a dog like Blue finds himself headed for a gas chamber,” I told Armstrong, with my own omelet now getting cold, too. “I mean, look at him just sitting there politely, not even begging for a bite of food. If somebody had told me where he’d come from, I would have thought something was wrong with him. But this is a great puppy. This is not a problem dog. It’s keeping me awake at night. I’ve never even heard of anything like this, and I’ve loved dogs all my life.”

 
Armstrong reacted like a Gold Glove catcher, anticipating my pitch before I’d even finished my windup.

  “It’s because it’s not legal up here,” she said, the words from my last sentence still dangling between us in the air. She’d obviously answered questions like mine a thousand times. “We don’t have dogs being thrown in gas chambers in the Northeast, so people don’t know it’s happening. People can’t even imagine that it could even possibly be happening, it sounds so crazy. But down in the South, those gas chambers are still used in a lot of places. The dogs are killed on a regular schedule, at 8:00 A.M. and 4:30 P.M. We get a list every morning of the dogs who are scheduled to die that day, we get lots and lots of pictures, and we get as many of them out as we can.”

  She paused a moment and sighed, thinking about the puppies and dogs she’s had to leave behind.

  “It destroys us knowing that the ones we can’t get out are just as great as Blue,” she said. “They almost always aren’t going to make it.”

  I nodded my head as if I understood, but she could see in my eyes that I didn’t. It’s kind of like being told there’s a mass murder taking place in Africa as a single, dominant tribe gains control of the freshwater supply. Cognitively, I could comprehend the words that I was hearing. Intellectually, I could understand it was a situation worthy of the world’s rapt attention. But emotionally, it was tough to relate. The last time I’d heard about gas chambers was a couple of decades ago in a high-school history textbook, in the chapter about Adolf Hitler. Gas chambers seemed about as contemporary to what I knew of modern American society as, well, bobby socks and zoot suits.