Katz - Dancing Dogs: Stories

Dancing Dogs is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2012 by Jon Katz

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Katz, Jon.
Dancing dogs: stories / Jon Katz.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53616-7
1. DogsFiction. 2. Human-animal relationshipsFiction. 3. Short stories, American. I. Title.
PS3561.A7558D36 2011 813.54dc23 2012021478

Jacket design: Victoria Allen
Front-jacket photograph: Media Bakery
Flap, spine, and back-jacket photographs: Shutterstock

www.ballantinebooks.com

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C AROLYN PULLED THE BATTERED OLD BLACK S AMSONITE SUITCASE her father had given her down the stairs at the Eastern Parkway subway entrance, the wheels bumping loudly as she went. The suitcase weighed as much as she did. The contents shifted suddenly, threatening to send her tumbling down the long concrete stairway. Safely at the bottom, she was immersed in a great dinthe roar of trains, footsteps echoing on concrete, garbled voices on loudspeakers. She wrestled the suitcase past the crowd and through the special gate for people with strollers or large packages that wouldnt fit through the turnstile, and then down the long ramp and onto the platform for the Number 2, headed farther downtown in Brooklyn and then under the East River to Manhattan. When a train pulled in a few moments later, the car was packed with commuters on their way home from work, but several passengers stepped back from the door to make room for Carolyn and her luggage.

As the doors started to close, Carolyn was startled when she turned to see two police officers with a formidable-looking German shepherd come into the car. Her palms began to sweat despite the cold, causing her hands to slip momentarily from the suitcases handle. It wasnt unusual for the police to make a quick scan of a subway car before stepping back off, but this time they stayed on.

The train rumbled out of the station. The officers began looking around, talking to each other. The train made one stop, then headed out again.

The officers walked to the far end of the car, then turned and headed back toward Carolyn. The shepherd was staring at her suitcase, one of the officers holding the dog as it strained against its leash, its nose down, its tail straight out. The dog began to whine.

Oh, my God, Carolyn said to no one in particular.

Miss, said one of the officers, a beefy young man in a standard-issue dark blue NYPD jacket, one thick hand on the dogs collar. The train pulled into the next station and the doors opened. Would you please step out of the car?

C AROLYN HAD KNOWN Gracie was dead as soon as she had opened the gray metal apartment door. If Gracie were still alive, she would have been at the door, tail going like a rotor blade, barking and squirming with joy. Every now and then, she would greet Carolyn with the leash in her mouth, her eyes closed in that familiar golden retriever grin that said, Lets walk! Carolyn would drop her shoulder bag and briefcase, and head back out the door with her.

The afternoon light had been streaming through the soot-stained window, the subway grumbling far below the cramped two-room apartment. Carolyn could see her beloved dogthe graying snout, the honey blond bodycurled up, as if sleeping, on her blue Orvis bed, a Christmas gift from her devoted owner two years earlier.

Though she had been expecting it, Carolyn was still paralyzed by the wrenching tableau. She had never loved anything, or anyone, the way she had loved that dog. Nor had anything ever loved her that much.

She looked around the small apartment, already a different space, like some kind of still life. The sounds outside seemed more distinct nowsirens, horns, truck engines, clanging pipes, coughing, a TV show seeping through the thin walls. Gracies water dish was full, kibble still in her food bowl, the days ration of rawhide chews and peanut butterstuffed bones untouched.

So she had died in the morning.

Gracies balls and toys were in a circle near her bed. One was near her mouth; the yellow one, her favorite.

Gracie had always been obsessive about chasing and retrieving, her eyes wide and tail wagging as she brought each of her toys over to Carolyn and deposited them at her feet. Whether Carolyn was on her cell, online, or reading, she would pick up the toys and simply hand them back. There was no room to throw them, and, in any case, the neighbors would have complained about the noise they would have made. But it didnt matter to the dog. Gracie never tired of this ritual. When Carolyn got sick of it, shed pick up all the toys and balls and stuff them in the closet, or else the poor dog would have run back and forth until she collapsed.

Carolyn had first encountered Gracie running loose in a vacant lot near Prospect Park. When the limping, emaciated dog trotted over with a rolled-up newspaper in her mouth, Carolyn knew all she needed to know. She and the dog had walked straight to a nearby vet, Gracie carrying the two-day-old New York Times all the way. The vet said she had been starved and neglected. Six-hundred-dollars-that-Carolyn-didnt-have later, Gracie was shiny, happy, and healthy. Carolyn put up Lost Dog posters in the neighborhood, but weeks went by, and nobody came to claim her.

From that first day on, they became constant companions. They rode out blizzards together, went to the beach, visited the dog run every day. When Carolyn worked at her computer, Gracie offered herself as a warm footrest. And like a proud mother, Carolyn put Gracies photo up on her Facebook page.

Whenever Carolyn went to the corner caf for coffee, Gracie sat outside and waited, never taking her eyes off the door. She had many more friends in the neighborhood than Carolyn did, and their walks were punctuated by greetings from neighbors, doormen, cops on patrol, delivery people. Gracie was just one of those dogs that made people smile. She connected Carolyn to the world in a way she had never really been able to do herself.

But Gracie had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure more than a year earlier. It could have been something much worse, Dr. Meyer had told her, pointing to a gray shadow over the dogs ribs on the X-ray. Shes had nine years, a good life for a golden, he said. Five of those years had been with Carolyn. Shell probably die in her sleep. Theres not much we can do. The last-alternative surgery was invasive, painful, expensive, and doubtful. Carolyn had said no.

Now here she was, down on the floor, her face buried in Gracies gray cold muzzle.

Outside, the sun had already moved past the enormous buildings across the street, and the apartment was now cloaked in the late-afternoon November gloom.

I T WAS A LONG TIME before she got up. Carolyn remembered how Gracie got her through her mothers death, and later, Keiths walking out on their five-year relationship. Gracie was there when Carolyn got laid off, when her sister got sick, when a date went sour, when the nights got lonely. It was Gracie who kept love alive for her whenever it was like a flickering candle, always threatening to go out.