Even there, you heard the dogs through the wall—they never stopped barking, an endless echoing disharmony. At the shelter, dogs were the important thing. Moving out to their kennel, you passed into a world of sound and heat and motion. The sticky summer air smacked at you, the sudden volume frantic. But in summer the kennels had their sides up, so the breeze blew right through. With the flick of a latch, each dog could slip out to the chicken wire runs that spanned the length of the building. The dogs were kept two or three to a cage: many runaway or abandoned animals got picked up or dropped off because their owners couldn’t manage them any longer. The little old dogs came in because their little old owners had died, or got sick, or gone to live in apartments that wouldn’t accept pets. It was hard to find homes for them—Stinky was one; and Elsie, a ten-year-old shih tzu with an incontinence problem; or Fritzl, the swaybacked deaf dachshund that barked almost constantly. These little dogs lived closest to the metal door; then the middle range of large, loping youngsters, mixed breeds with beautiful dog faces, dogs that wanted to roam; and finally, farthest from the entrance, the pits and their kin, with their powerful jaws and sleek, close fur, one or two so snarly that they were kept muzzled.
Cassie and I went to the shelter two mornings a week, from nine till one. Our job was to feed the animals and clean out their cages. We wore rubber boots and rubber gloves and we got used to the smells; and it felt like a triumph when a scared, shy dog got used to you, and instead of cowering, inched toward you and dipped her head or rolled onto her back for a rub. The dogs were mostly sweet at heart. They wanted to be loved, and when you loved them, they loved you back.
We had our favorites—mine, a trim, glossy chocolate Lab mix called Delsey, with a chiseled, square face and dark, sad eyes, was only just past puppyhood, and moved his body as if its size was still a surprise to him. Although his eyes were mournful, his temperament was happy; he loved nothing more than playing fetch in the dog run with an old tennis ball or a stick. He’d bring the slobbery catch, and you could see him debating whether to let it go or not, weighing the choice between keeping his prize or getting to run after it again. Sometimes he’d lope off still carrying it, head up, tail up, like an athlete running a victory lap around the dog run.
Cassie’s favorite, Sheba, was a pit cross. We were allowed to feed her but we weren’t supposed to go into her cage unless Marj was there too; not because of Sheba herself, whose brindle face was almost smiley and who wagged her stumpy tail at the sight of us, but because her stall mate was a grumpy black bull named Leo, who didn’t chase sticks but chewed them into splinters given the chance.
Cassie liked Sheba because she was beautiful but tough, a survivor. The story was she’d been found scrawny and starving in an outdoor pen next to an abandoned double-wide about ten miles inland in the backwoods. Her owners had skipped out—Cassie and I made up different stories about what had happened to them—and a couple of hunters heard the howling. They called Animal Control to come and rescue her. Cassie had asked her mother if they could adopt Sheba, but Bev had said categorically no, that any dog was too much for the two of them to manage, but that especially a dog like Sheba would be wrong, because after all she’d been through, Sheba needed a family that could spend a lot of time with her, spoil her, and make her feel loved.
Cassie liked to pretend that Sheba was her dog. There didn’t seem to be any harm in it. Early on, when Leo was out of their cage one morning, Cassie slipped the latch and walked right in. Sheba, ecstatic, twitched and whimpered, and when Cassie sat down cross-legged on the concrete floor, Sheba ran over to be petted. She widened her eyes and flipped over, baring her spotted belly with its tiny unused teats, and Cassie rubbed her furiously, both of them emitting jumbled, excited little moans of pleasure.
I lurked in the hallway with my eye on the metal door: if she got caught, wouldn’t we get sent home in disgrace?
But when I called to her, quietly—“Hurry up, Cassie . . . come out . . . I think I hear someone!”—she first paid no attention and then got annoyed.
“What’s your problem, Juju? Aren’t we here to make their lives better? She loves it—don’t you, my Sheba? Don’t you, my darling?”
She didn’t get caught—we didn’t get caught—and by the time Nancy and Jo from the front office came in with some prospective adopters, we were back down the other end, Cassie sluicing out Stinky’s cage with water while I held his raspy little pug body in my arms. But Cassie had staked her claim. After that, she was always looking for a chance to get into Sheba’s cage, as if Sheba were her bad-boy boyfriend.
On a Thursday in early August when we’d been working at the shelter for almost two months, and we felt, and they felt, that we were as familiar as the furniture, Leo was in the run outside, getting some air, if the muggy swamp of that day could be called “air.” He was alone—no other dogs, no human keeping an eye—and Marj had gone to take a phone call from the pet-food supplier about a delivery mix-up the previous day.
“You girls keep at it,” she’d said, “I’ll be right back.”
Once the door clanged behind Marj, Cassie hustled up to sneak a visit with Sheba. She had in her pocket a rawhide chew brought from home—bought with her own money, in fact. Rawhide chews weren’t allowed at the kennel, not least because they could get stuck in a dog’s throat and choke him; but Cassie didn’t much care. She’d already slipped Sheba a couple, and knew she liked them so much she could gnaw one down in under three minutes flat. Just like the other times, Cassie slipped the latch and ducked into the cage, holding the treat high in her hand, to play a game with it. Even this she’d done before. While Sheba was playful, she wasn’t aggressive by nature; so we didn’t even think.
I didn’t see all that happened next. My eyes were on the metal door, anticipating Marj. I wasn’t thinking about Cassie and Sheba.
I certainly wasn’t thinking about Leo. Because the gate from their enclosure to the outdoors looked closed, it didn’t occur to either of us to check the latch. What were the odds that Leo would tire, just then, of his solo ramble in the dog run, that he would nose his way back home and push the gate open with his snout? But he did, somehow in the brief moment when Cassie held the rawhide in her hand.
He leaped for the chew, jaws gaping, paws uplifted. He clamped down on Cassie’s left hand, gored her inner forearm. Thank God she had the chew to give over. Thank God. She barely squealed—Leo’s snarling and Sheba’s high, desperate barks made me whip around and look, not any noise from Cassie herself—and if I hadn’t dragged her out of the cage ass-backward and kicked the door shut behind us, I don’t know what might have happened.
It looked like she’d stuck her forearm in a wood-chipper, her skin shredded in strips up from the wrist, the blood coming so fast it dripped onto the floor.
“Can you wiggle your fingers?” I asked. That was what my mother asked me when I hurt myself. “Can you move your wrist? How bad is it? Does it hurt?”
“I don’t fucking know.” She slumped against the wire of the opposite cage, behind which an arthritic, white-muzzled pit named Opie stared with intent curiosity. “I don’t even know how it hurts.”