“Now, when the music comes on, put Mickey’s paws on the keys, say ‘Tinkle,’ and then give him a cookie,” the trainer instructed.
“‘Tinkle’?” Maye asked.
“Unless you use that command at home for Mickey’s personal business, this word is new to him,” Gwen explained. “It could mean anything.”
Maye figured she was right, and waited for Gwen’s cue.
The trainer nodded as she pushed the “play” button on her boom box, which was as big as something out of a Run-D.M.C. video, and they heard a roll of electronic drums, then the notes of what sounded like a Moog synthesizer. For some reason, Maye suddenly got the image of a dance-hall girl shimmying in a skirt of rags. “Tinkle!” Gwen shouted. “Tinkle!”
Maye placed Mickey’s paws on the keyboard, said, “Tinkle!” and then gave him a cookie, although now, for some unknown reason, she had in her mind the picture of a white-vested grinning pimp with a gold tooth.
“‘We are young!’” she heard an echoing voice sing. “‘Heartache to heartache we stand!’”
“Um, Gwen? Gwen?” Maye called loud enough to be heard over the blasting music, giving her the time-out sign. “Gwen, could we possibly teach Mickey to play piano to something other than ‘Love Is a Battlefield’?”
The trainer looked utterly defeated. “You don’t like that song?”
“Well, um,” Maye stuttered, “it’s, um, not that I don’t like it, but when I hear it, I’m transported back to 1983 and a redheaded mongrel of an adolescent with a whitehead the size of a nickel on the tip of his nose is attempting to shove his slug of a tongue down my throat as I am sitting in a swiveling bucket seat in the front of his dad’s Chevy van on the bad losing end of a double date while my best friend has basically completed a conjugal visit with her companion, who just got out of juvenile detention the week before for setting fire to an apartment building. Not the makings of a yearbook memory.”
“Oh,” Gwen said sadly. “Well, this is the only record I have.”
“Okay,” Maye said, trying to smile. “Maybe we can try another one next week.”
“No,” Gwen said, emphatically shaking her head. “I mean I only have this one. This is my only CD. I don’t have another one.”
Maye stopped for a moment. “You mean, ever?” she asked. “You don’t own another CD?”
“Well, I like this one,” Gwen said defensively. “There was no reason to get another one. I know all the words.”
Maye didn’t know what to say to a middle-aged woman whose entire musical universe revolved around Pat Benatar, but it was clear that Gwen probably hadn’t done too much dating in the eighties, otherwise her scars would have run as deep as Maye’s. Deep as a river, thick as an eager tongue.
“This is Pat Benatar’s Greatest Hits,” Gwen offered hopefully. “What about ‘Hell Is for Children’?”
Maye cringed inwardly and waved her hand. “‘Love Is a Battlefield’ will be fine,” she said, stretching her lips across her teeth in what was supposed to be a smile but looked more like she was getting a rabies shot. It couldn’t be helped—she remembered Pat Benatar having a dance-off with a pimp as she’s backed by a clan of fellow whores and hussies as they snap their fingers and shimmy their way out of a sex dungeon and arrive underneath a bridge near the docks, where they find freedom.
“We are strong!” Benatar insisted as Maye placed Mickey’s paws on the keyboard, told him to tinkle, and gave him a cookie. They did this for the remainder of the hour, while Gwen mouthed the words and shuffled her anvil-like weight from one leg to the other in what Maye presumed was an unnatural attempt at dance.
Mickey caught on quickly, as he always did when liver-flavored cookies were involved, and when Maye cued him with a howl, he would sing back as he “tinkled” on the keyboard, making him a four-legged and slightly hairier version of Barry Manilow getting down with a song about sex workers.
When the class was over, Maye waited as the rest of the dogs cleared out.
“Gwen, I was wondering if you might be able to help me with something,” she said as the trainer packed up her mammoth, circus-sized boom box.
“Sure,” the trainer said as she carefully removed the CD like it was evidence at a crime scene, laid it to rest in its little case, then snapped the case closed. “What do you need?”
“I was hoping that you might be familiar with dog breeders in the area. Do you happen to know anyone who breeds boxers?”
Gwen sucked in a torrent of air, clasped both hands to her mouth, and clearly squealed.
“Oh my goodness!” she gushed, appearing to be fighting back tears. “Really? Oh, that’s wonderful! A puppy! A baby puppy for Mickey! How wonderful! What great news! Look at you, you’re glowing already! Can I throw you a shower? We can have it right here in the store and get a puppy-shaped cake!”
“No, no,” Maye replied, waving her hand slightly. “It’s not for us, it’s…for a friend of Charlie’s at work. He was thinking about getting a boxer, and I thought you might know of someone in the area.”
“Oh,” the trainer replied as disappointment deflated her spine and she resumed her Charlie Brown posture. “Well, I do know of a fellow out by New River who has boxers.”
“Mmmm.” Maye squinted and shook her head. “Anyone else? I heard there might be a breeder out by Crawford Lake.”
“Oh, yes.” Gwen nodded, thinking. “Yes, I do remember a boxer lady out that way. From what I heard, she was a bit of a pistol. The fellow by New River is a much nicer man. And he has beautiful dogs.”
Maye had struck gold.
“Do you know how Charlie’s friend could get in touch with the Crawford Lake lady?” Maye asked. “A phone number, an address?”
“Oh, sure,” Gwen said as she wrapped her boom box cord in a precise pattern of tight, bundled eights. “We keep a list of certified breeders up at the Pet Station info desk. Let’s go and take a look.”
Maye and Mickey followed Gwen to the front of the store. Gwen flipped open the binder holding the list of breeders, and her eyes followed her finger as she scanned the names. “Ah! Here we go,” she said with a snap of her fingers. “This must be her: ‘Royal Loyal Boxers, the only friend you’ll ever need.’ Seventeen Crawford Lake Road, and here’s a phone number.”
Maye copied the information down feverishly, almost as if she was afraid it would evaporate suddenly.
I know where Ruby Spicer is! I have found her! Maye’s mind shot back and forth like a Ping Pong ball. I’m pretty sure I’ve found her. I think I’ve found her. I might have found her.
“Thank you so much Gwen,” Maye said as she stuffed the piece of paper into her purse. “You’ve been a tremendous help. Charlie’s friend will be so happy.”
“Well, I’m glad.” Gwen shrugged. “I’ll see you both next week!”
“No promises, no demands,” Maye said, and she winked.
Pat was right. Crawford Lake Road was not paved, and not only was it a bumpy dirt road, it was full of potholes that looked more like spots where meteors had bounced off the face of the earth the way a basketball inevitably rebounds off the head of the fat girl in freshman gym class. Maye’s forehead still stung with the slap of orange rubber every time she thought about it.
As Maye drove along, topping speeds of seven to ten miles an hour, the car rocked, dipped, and fell every couple of feet. She was grateful to have eaten more than an hour earlier, otherwise, she was sure, she would have succumbed to seasickness. Vomiting was not on her schedule today. Hopefully, unless she drove straight into a sinkhole—a real possibility—she was going to be face-to-face with Ruby Spicer in about ten gut-churning minutes.
If she could find her.
Once Maye had the phone number in her hand, she had grown gradually and strangely anxious. She’d surprised herself by letting the scribbled-on piece of paper soak in her purse for the rest of the day.
When Charlie came home that night, she had finally dug it out and handed it to him without a word. He??
?d looked at it, rolled his eyes, and shaken his head.
“No,” he’d commanded. “Absolutely not. We don’t need another dog, Maye. I agree that a dog band would be funny and they could perform at weddings and bar mitzvahs and we could retire, but no. Especially if this one played the drums, because I’m calling dibs on the drummer spot in Dog Band. I am the stick man.”
“Charlie, sometimes even the mere fact that you found your way home at night seems like a miracle to me,” Maye had said, shaking her head back. “You are an idiot. I don’t want another dog. This is the phone number of Ruby Spicer. She raises boxers.”
“The Queen of all Sewer Pipe Queens?” Charlie had asked. “The one you read about in the library? Wow. How did you get that?”
“I got the plumber high on donuts and exposed Mickey to repeated, three-minute shock treatments of Pat Benatar,” she had explained. “All skills taught in Journalism 101. Worked like magic. Imagine what I could have done had I let three women with bad perms give me a bath in a backyard. I could have ruled the world.”
“Wow,” Charlie had said. “I can’t believe you found her. That’s some detective work you did there, Columbo.”
“Well,” Maye had said, then paused. “I’m not exactly sure it is her—I mean, all of the pieces fit, but I don’t have one hundred percent confirmation that it’s Ruby Spicer. And after the fifth donut, the plumber was pretty wasted. He could have been making the whole thing up for all I know, or having sugar-related hallucinations.”
“So, did you call her?” Charlie had asked.
Maye had shaken her head. “I want it to be her. I wanted you to be here in case I was disappointed and it wasn’t her and I’d have to hand the pageant over to Rowena and Melissabeth after all on one of my tablecloth-eating fat rolls.”
Charlie had walked over to the phone, picked it up, and handed it to her. “I’ll stay right here,” he had promised.
So Maye had dialed the number with shaky, hesitant fingers, and on the fourth ring, the sleepy voice of a woman answered. Maye hadn’t asked for Ruby—since there was no name listed in the breeder’s directory, she hadn’t wanted to tip her off to anything other than being interested in a dog—and had simply inquired if Royal Loyal had any available boxers.
“Sure,” the woman had replied, yawning. “I have some available from the last litter.” She’d given Maye directions to “the farm,” told her to come out the following afternoon, and promptly hung up the phone.
Now, twenty miles out of town, with the directions in hand, Maye was closer to meeting the vanished Sewer Pipe Queen of Spaulding. Deep in the rain forest of the Cascade foothills, the western hemlock, cedar, and fir trees loomed high above the floor carpeted with ferns and huckleberry bushes and spotted with patches of sunlight that had pushed its way through the dense branches of the canopy. Moss clung to trunks and tree branches, and the farther Maye drove, the darker it seemed to get. She followed the curvy road that had begun to resemble more of a path as it wound deeper still into the woods until it finally opened onto a meadow, bright and clear and flooded with sun, fronted by an old gray farmhouse. As she got closer, Maye realized the house wasn’t actually gray but was weathered by the elements after most of the paint had flaked off of it and fluttered away, pulled by the wind.
She turned in to the driveway in front of the house and stopped the car. Ramshackle (and that was being kind), it was the sort of place you’d typically only see in documentaries about the Unabomber or people who refuse to pay taxes but then decide that shooting at government agents with rifles from their kitchen window is an appropriate avenue of recourse. It was definitely not a place you’d expect to find a former Sewer Pipe Queen holed up unless she had stopped paying taxes and was planning a hoe-down with the ATF through a scope.
Maye left the safety of her car and headed for the front door, which featured a giant carved relief of the face of a boxer. Wow, she thought, you really have to make sure your devotion to a breed isn’t a flight of fancy to chip away at your front door until the head of one pops out. Maye couldn’t find a doorbell, so she rapped her knuckles on the boxer’s forehead. For quite a while she heard only the barking of what sounded like numerous dogs, but as she was getting ready to rap on the door again, she detected a fair amount of shuffling from behind the door and finally heard a thin, nasally, crackly voice call out, a little slowly, “Hold your horses, would ya? I’m coming, I’m coming.”
Maye immediately thought she had gotten the time of their appointment wrong; the person behind the door sounded like she’d just awoken. She felt foolish, ashamed of herself for disturbing an old woman napping, even if it was in the middle of the afternoon.
But as the door with the head of the boxer swung back, an old woman was not standing behind it.
A wrinkled old crone was.
Maye was so stunned, surprised, shocked, that she was speechless and couldn’t find a thing to say or, for that matter, a tongue to say it with.
Now, to be fair, Maye hadn’t known what to expect when Ruby Spicer answered the door—she’d thought perhaps she would resemble Cynthia in her impeccable appearance, her perfect posture, and unmistakable grace, but this wasn’t exactly the case behind the boxer door number one. In the pictures Maye had seen, Ruby looked to be in her late teens to early twenties, vibrant, beautiful, and with a sparkle in her eye that suggested she was the kind of girl who wasn’t afraid to make a little bit of mischief if it meant a good story and a laugh later on. True, five decades had passed, but Maye couldn’t find any trace of that young woman in the old woman who stood before her.
That beauty queen plus fifty years had equaled a tiny, skinny, wilted, wrinkly, red-lipstick-encrusted old woman with fiery red hair and only one eyebrow—the remnant of a previous eyebrow had been singed as if in a brush fire, and she was sucking on a Viceroy cigarette, looking a lot like Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings but apparently way more drunk and not nearly as well kept.
“You called about the puppy?” the woman asked in a raspy voice, and after a moment, Maye nodded in the only form of communication available to her in that moment.
“Come on in,” the old bag said, stepping back so Maye could enter.
Maye tried to smile as she passed the biddy, but the combination of decades’ worth of cigarette smoke and the eau de doggie from the numerous boxers that were standing guard—even several who had come into the room since Maye’s arrival to evaluate the visitor—made smiling a challenging task indeed.
The crone, dressed in a yellow terrycloth sweat suit with several burn holes directly below the neckline, closed the door and motioned for Maye to sit on the couch. As she did, Maye looked up at the grungy yellow-stained walls, the stinky brown barkcloth curtains, and the mud-colored bald carpeting, all shellacked with a grimy, dull film of exhaled nicotine and exuding its coordinating smell. Christ, she thought, it’s like this woman is living inside of a diseased, shabby lung.
“So,” the woman said, lowering herself nearly to the ground and taking a seat on the floppy, disintegrating sofa that even Maye could feel the springs through despite her well-endowed derrière. “Have you ever had a boxer before?”
Maye shook her head.
“Well,” the woman said, taking a deep drag on her cigarette before continuing, “they’re very loyal, very strong, very smart, very tolerant around children. You can count on them. Excellent companions. Would you like to see the puppy now?”
Maye suddenly realized that she didn’t really know if this was Ruby—this woman could have been anyone, really—she hadn’t introduced herself, making it possible that there really was a beautiful, elegant Ruby Spicer somewhere locked in an upstairs bedroom who spoke in a flawless Brahmin accent and was on the verge of being fed her pet canary by her jealous, decrepit evil sister.
“I’m Maye,” she said suddenly, and stuck out her hand.
The old woman seemed to be taken off guard and looked at Maye out of the corner of her eye.
She paused for a mo
ment, switched her cigarette from her right hand to her left, then begrudgingly held out her nicotine hand in a gesture that made her seem even smaller than she really was. “I’m,” she said quietly, “Ruby.”
“Nice to meet you,” Maye said as she shook the tiny skeleton hand with fingers that resembled twigs freshly snapped off a branch.
“Do you wanna see that puppy or not?” the old woman snapped suddenly, pulling back her hand.
Maye thought this would be a good time to come clean, but before she could muster up the courage, Ruby, with a rattle and a wheeze from her lungs, called out as loud as she could manage, “PUPPY! PUPPY, COME!”
Within seconds, a gangly, large, and quite robust dog emmerged from the dog crowd, took a bounding leap, and flew onto the couch beside Maye, where it proceeded to dance and bounce on the beaten, weary cushions.
“This is the…puppy?” Maye asked as she tried to pet the clearly very adult dog, so adult that the fringes of his snout were turning gray.
“He’s the last of the litter,” Ruby replied with her raspy voice. “Is he what you were looking for?”
“He looks a little big to me,” Maye said as Puppy took a swipe at the side of her head with his welcome mat of a tongue. “I’d put him at sixty or sixty-five pounds already.”
“Achh, he’s fifty if he’s ten,” Ruby hedged. “He’s big for his age.”
“Actually, I was looking for something a little different,” Maye started, the courage bubbling up from her stomach and finally reaching her throat as Puppy’s tongue climbed up her face again in a full-throttle slurp. “I’m looking for Ruby Spicer, the Sewer Pipe Queen.”
Within the moment that it took Maye to finish that sentence Ruby had sprung to her feet and immediately brandished her cigarette at Maye as if it were a shiv.
“Get out!” the old shrew roared as loud as her craggy voice would permit, her breath soaked in alcohol. “GET OUT or I’ll torch you!”
Maye hadn’t expected that—in fact, she realized then that she’d never really anticipated any specific sort of response, let alone a violent, angry one by a loaded woman waving a lit cigarette at her. She was entirely shocked, as was Puppy, who had stopped in midlick to stand at attention before his wailing master.