Dog Have Mercy Read online

  “We have a small emergency,” I said to her. “Can Dr. Horz squeeze in a quick look at Rochester’s toenail? I’m afraid it’s infected.”

  “Dr. Horz is running behind,” she said. “We’ve had some trouble this morning. But things should start moving again soon and I can squeeze you in.”

  The tag on her blouse read “Sahima.” I signed in with my name, Rochester’s, and my phone number, and took Rochester to a chair by her window. He slumped by my feet and watched with interest the parade of pets. He tried to make friends with an elegant Lhasa Apso beside us, but she kept her queenly distance from the hoi polloi.

  A big sign beside the receptionist’s desk announced that the clinic would be closed for two weeks over Christmas, and that all pets who had been left for boarding had to be picked up by 6 PM Monday, December 22. At the bottom was the name and address of another office that would be open during the holidays.

  A twenty-something guy with bristly short hair and arms covered in tattoos stepped out of the door to the examining area. He called the Yorkie and his dad, a huge bald guy in a Harley Davidson T-shirt and as they went in, Rick came out, alone, to another cascade of barking from the Peke.

  Rick walked toward me, but stopped at the receptionist’s desk. While he waited for Sahima to get off the phone, I asked, “Nothing wrong with Rascal, is there?”

  He shook his head. “Business visit,” he said.

  “Really? What happened? Someone got bit?”

  Sahima ended her call as Rick pulled on his sheepskin-lined leather jacket. “Tell Dr. Horz I’ll call her later today,” he said.

  “Rick--” I began.

  He held up his hand. “Lousy day. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He didn’t stop to pet Rochester on his way out the door, which was unusual for him. Even when he’d been mad at me in the past, he’d always made time for my dog.

  I figured he wasn’t mad, just busy. The Peke went in next and calm fell over the room. I turned to the receptionist. “What happened?” I asked.

  She leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “There are drugs missing from Dr. Horz’s cabinet.” I could tell from her eagerness this was the most exciting thing that had happened in her life for a while.

  “What kind of drugs? Like a junkie would steal?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not pain meds. We keep those double-locked. And not the Euthasol, either, for putting dogs to sleep. That’s locked up, too.”

  I was intrigued. “Then what?”

  She almost whispered, “Potassium.”

  “Really? What do you use that for?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just the receptionist. But I figure it must be something important because Dr. Horz got into a real state. This morning, after she discovered that there were five of these little vials missing, she pulled each of us into an examining room. It was crazy. We had dogs and cats all over the place, and she was freaking out over this stuff.”

  Her phone rang and I sat back down with Rochester. I sent a couple of texts and checked my email, and the waiting room began to clear. After an hour, Rochester was getting restless, and I was glad when the tattooed guy appeared and called, “Here with Rochester?”

  My big golden boy bounded up at the sound of his name, and I had to hold tight to his leash to keep him from tackling the guy.

  “I’m Felix,” he said. “Follow me, please.” He had the mumbling and flat vowels of a real Philly accent—my favorite example was the way the city’s football team had become the Fluffyah Iggles.

  As we walked down the antiseptic corridor, I asked, “Where’s Elysia?” Rochester liked our regular vet tech.

  “She went to take care of her sick mom. I usually take care of the dogs and cats we got staying with us, but the doc asked me to fill in out front until Elysia gets back.”

  We stopped at the digital scale in the hallway, and Rochester, usually so reluctant to step onto it, followed Felix’s instructions easily. “Eighty-five point two,” he said, then led us into an exam room. Rochester circled twice and then flopped down on the floor. Felix picked up a clipboard with a series of questions printed on it and asked, murdering the r’s in the statement, “What’s the reason faw yaw visit today?”

  I told him about the toenail, and he sat down on the floor with Rochester and very gently examined his paw. “He probably tore this when he was playing,” he said to me. “Goldens are such big happy dogs.”

  “We had a dog come over Saturday night and they played a lot,” I said. “Could it have been then?”

  “Nah, maw like a few days before that,” Felix said. “These infections, they don’t come up overnight. But yeah, he probably screwed with it Saturday night.”

  As I heard him speak, I wondered why I didn’t say things like “Satiday,” when I’d grown up so close to Philadelphia. Was it a socio-economic thing? Because I’d had excellent teachers? Because my parents were first-generation Americans who had impressed on me the importance of speaking clearly? I remembered Lili’s comment about how fortunate she and I had been to have the backgrounds we did.

  Felix labored over the clipboard, gripping his pen like it was a spear ready to stab at the paper. When I was a grad student at Columbia I had done some student teaching in city schools, and I remembered seeing kids hold their pens that way, as if they were determined to beat the words into submission.

  Dr. Horz’s office was gradually becoming computerized, but she and her vet techs still wrote out case notes by hand, and Felix looked relieved when he put down the pen and took Rochester’s temperature and a fecal sample. I was pleased to see that my dog had taken a liking to him and let him do whatever he needed without complaint. Not that he was a fussy puppy, but who wants to let a stranger mess around with your butt?

  Felix went back to the clipboard and his face darkened. He chewed on the end of his pen. “Can I give you a hand with anything?” I asked. “I’ve taught writing in the past.”

  “My writing sucks,” Felix said. “I can never make the words say what I want.”

  He shifted the clipboard so I could see it. Under “History” he had written “owner founded redness and swelling on golden retriever’s right hind paw yesterday PM,” and I pointed out that it should be “found” rather than “founded.” I corrected a couple of other mistakes I recognized as second-language ones, including a lot of missing articles.

  Then we talked through the notes he wanted to make. He knew all the right terms, but his writing was very rough. “Let me guess, your first language isn’t English, is it?”

  He shook his head. “Spanish. I was born in Puerto Rico. Didn’t move to Philly until I was ten, and they dumped me right into regular English classes.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that in my students,” I said.

  He was relieved when we finished everything. “Thanks faw yaw help,” he said. “Dr. Horz will come see you.”

  He left us in the examining room with all the diagrams of canine intestinal disorders. “Ingestion of foreign substances is the number one reason for emergency veterinary visits,” the first poster read.

  Yeah, I’d been through that routine a few times.

  I sat on the floor with Rochester and stroked the smooth hair on the back of his head. “You’ll be all better soon, puppy.” I leaned down to kiss his head. “I promise.”

  I had plenty of time to read about inflammatory bowel disease, coronavirus, and canine minute virus, which involved diarrhea, difficulty breathing and anorexia. At least Rochester didn’t have any of those.

  We had to wait quite a while for Dr. Horz. She was a small, slim woman with a great bedside manner. “Sorry, I’ve been run off my feet this morning.” She had a smear I hoped wasn’t dog poop on her white coat, and several strands of her graying hair had come loose.

  “I heard,” I said. “Some potassium was stolen?”

  She looked at me. “I guess Rick Stemper was right. When he was here earlier he said you and Rochester are often nosing aro
und in his cases.” She smiled. “I’m impressed that you already know what happened.”

  “I wouldn’t call it nosing around in his cases,” I said. “Rochester has… some skills. I just follow along.”

  She picked up the clipboard, then sat on the floor beside the dog. “How’s my handsome friend?” she asked, as she looked at the notes Felix had written.

  “He’s been great, except for this little problem,” I said.

  She looked up at me. “Felix’s writing has improved dramatically here. These notes are pretty good. Did you help him, by chance?”

  I shrugged. “Was that wrong?”

  “Not at all. He’s a smart guy, but he’s had some bad luck in life. I’m hoping he can turn things around. One area he’s got to improve is his writing skills. When he’s working back in the kennel for me, all he has to do is check on the animals and record data. But if he wants to be a vet tech, he has to be able to write notes.”

  “They have remedial courses at the community college he could take,” I said. “I have a friend who teaches over there, and she says that almost three-quarters of the incoming students need help with writing.”

  “I’ve been trying to convince him,” she said. “He wants to go into a vet tech program at a college in Jenkintown, but they won’t accept him until he improves his skills. I can’t blame him for not wanting to spend three semesters and a thousand dollars to get where high school should have gotten him.”

  She wrote a couple of notes at the bottom of the form, then looked up at me. “Standard treatment for a bacterial nail bed infection is an oral antibiotic, with antimicrobial foot soaks and a topical ointment. I’ll have Felix bring in the prescriptions for you.”

  She reached down and chucked Rochester under his chin. “You ought to be less rambunctious, mister. You must be at almost three by now.” She looked up at me. “I know you don’t have his exact birthdate, but he first came to us almost two years ago, and my records say that based on his teeth, we estimated that he was about a year old.”

  “Was there anything I could have done to prevent this?” I asked.

  Dr. Horz shook her head. “You take great care of this dog. I can see that you trim his nails regularly. He just got one caught. Sorry to be so abrupt, but I have a whole raft of animals waiting for care. And I need to reevaluate my security procedures, and talk to my staff. It’s going to be a long day.” She shook her head. “And I thought Friday was bad.”

  Though I knew she needed to go, I couldn’t resist asking. “What happened Friday?”

  “A teenaged girl came in after I’d sent the staff home, as I was about to close. She insisted her dog was deathly ill and I had to look at him right away.” She smiled. “You know how teenagers are. So I took him back into the examining room, and she texted furiously on her phone all the time I was examining him. Then she had to go the bathroom. There was nothing wrong with that dog and I had to wait in the room with him until she got back.”

  “Teenagers,” I said. “I see the same kind of thing in the classes I teach.” I hesitated. “Do you think she could have been the one who took the potassium?”

  She cocked her head and for a second I recognized Rochester in her. “What would a teenager want with potassium?”

  I shrugged. “For a chemistry class?”

  “The science labs at Pennsbury High are well-funded,” she said. “I know, because I’ve been over there to visit. And as far as I know they don’t experiment with potassium.”

  “Just a thought,” I said.

  “It’s more likely that one of my staff either misplaced the missing vials, or that our record-keeping needs to improve and we used the last supply without noticing it. But I still thought I ought to notify the police, in case we find anything else is gone.”

  I thanked her for looking at Rochester, and a few minutes later Felix came back with a bottle of pills, a tube of ointment, and a bottle with a dropper built into the cap. “This stuff here is organic iodine. You don’t gotta worry about it -- it's safe, non-toxic, antifungal, antibacterial, and anti-yeast.”

  “Do I put it on his nail?”

  He shook his head. “Here’s what you do. You got some kind a pot, right? You fill it with water, add a couple a drops then swish it around until looks like iced tea.” He laughed. “You don’t drink it. You dunk Rochester’s paw in faw like two to five minutes.”

  He sat down on the floor beside Rochester and opened the dog’s jaws. He dropped one of the pills into his mouth and then shut it and tilted the dog’s head back. He massaged Rochester’s throat as he spoke. “If he don’t like having his foot in the water, you can give him a rawhide to chew.”

  I expected Rochester to spit the pill out on the tile floor as soon as Felix let go of him, but instead the dog smiled and licked Felix’s hand.

  “You’re good with him,” I said, as Felix stood and then put everything into a bag for me. “He can be finicky sometimes.”

  “He’s a pussycat,” Felix said. “I’ve worked with way worse dogs than him. I was with this program when I was in prison--”

  He stopped, and I could tell he’d said more than he wanted to.

  “I was inside for a year in California,” I said. “Finished my two-year probation a couple of months ago.”

  He relaxed visibly.

  “What program?” I asked.

  “Called Paws Up. They bring in these shelter dogs that nobody wants because they got problems. This one Staffordshire Terrier mix came to stay with me. He’d been a bait dog and he went between scared and vicious, and you never knew which was gonna come out.”

  He pushed up the sleeve of his shirt and pointed to a scar in the middle of a tattoo of the island of Puerto Rico with the word “Boricua” in script beneath it. “See this? He bit me real bad. But I got him calmed down and trained so good he got a family in the Northeast to take him in.”

  He was about to leave when I said, “Listen, I hope you don’t think I’m meddling in your private business. But Dr. Horz said you need some help with your writing. I’d be happy to give you some tutoring.”

  He looked suspicious. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Because I’ve been where you are. When I went to prison, I lost my job, my wife divorced me, and all my friends but one melted away. I got lucky when I moved back here, and a couple of people took chances on me, helped me get my life going again. Just want to pay it forward.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I got one friend who stuck by me, Zeno.”

  I must have misheard him, because I asked, “Zero?”

  “Zeno,” he said more clearly. “Yunior Zeno. My home boy from Mayaguez. But he speaks as bad as me. At the program, they gave us a lot of help, but they weren’t there to teach us to write good. And nobody I know can help me with that.”

  “You know where Friar Lake is?” I asked. “Up River Road by Leighville?”

  He shook his head. “But I can find it. That where you live?”

  “It’s where I work. It’s owned by Eastern College. If you come by I could get you started with some stuff to read, some practice exercises.”

  “I’m off tomorrow,” he said. “That good?”

  “Sure. Come by any time in the afternoon.” I pulled out a business card and handed it to him, then wrote directions from Stewart’s Crossing on the back of a flyer for a new kind of doggie halter. “You have access to a computer somehow?” I asked.

  “My buddy Dan has one he lets me use for email and stuff,” Felix said. “He’s one of my roommates.” He took the directions and shook my hand. “I really appreciate this.”

  I led Rochester to the check-out desk. We stood beside a tall potted plant waiting for a petite black woman to check out ahead of us. Her brindle cat crouched at the rear of a carrier, but Rochester was more interested in nosing behind the plant.

  “Rochester, please,” I said, tugging on his leash. When I looked at him, he had a torn piece of paper in his mouth. I reached down and pulled it away.

  It wa
s sticky with his saliva, and I had to use a wipe from the dispenser on the counter to clean it off. It was the left-hand side of a permission slip from Pennsbury High, where Rick and I had gone. The student’s last name was Brezza, but the paper had been torn vertically after that. It didn’t seem to be important, so I crumpled it up and tossed it into the trash.

  I paid for the visit and we walked outside, where Felix leaned against the building in a sheepskin coat, puffing a cigarette. “Thanks again faw helping me,” he said.

  “My best friend’s always complaining about me being an English teacher,” I said. “I guess it’s a habit I can’t break.” At least it was one habit that wasn’t likely to get me in trouble, I thought.

  4 – Little White Angel

  Flurries had begun to float down from the overcast sky. With Rochester beside me, resting his big golden head on his paws, I left the vet’s and drove down Ferry Street, busy with last-minute shoppers in big SUVs.

  As I turned onto the River Road to head toward my job at Friar Lake, I thought about potassium. Why would someone steal it? Wasn’t it one of those vitamins you could buy at the drugstore?

  I remembered that when Mary was pregnant for the first time, she’d had malaise and muscle weakness, and been diagnosed with a potassium deficiency. She was a picky eater, and wouldn’t eat many of the foods that were high in the vitamin, like tomatoes, potatoes and bananas. Her doctor had given her an injection and prescribed some additional vitamins.

  After her miscarriage, that was one of the reasons she had seized on. Had the baby been deprived of some essential nutrient? As soon as she discovered she was pregnant the second time, she had gone on a strict diet and nutritional regimen, but that hadn’t helped, and she miscarried in the fourth month of that pregnancy.

  I tried to push those memories away and focus on the upcoming Christmas holiday, and the time I’d be able to spend with Rochester and Lili. As I drove up the River Road, I passed white split-rail fences hung with pine boughs and a stately Norway spruce decorated in vertical strings of lights, which glowed even in the gray morning light.