Picture This, page 18
Melissa had begun to look at everyone in a different way, but the person she wanted to really see was Natalie. In the jewelry store, she’d glimpsed a Natalie that no one on Peaks had seen, the real Natalie. And there was that guy in the van. Why didn’t Natalie just tell Rocky she had a boyfriend? Melissa wanted to find out more, and she could begin by waiting in the bookstore after cross-country practice, hoping to see Natalie meet the guy again. All Melissa had to do was stand in the bookstore and shoot.
“Believe what you see.” Mr. Clarke had said this a hundred times, maybe more. He drilled it into them like the multiplication tables. He told them to see like the camera instead of the human brain, which has perceptual problems, like not noticing the power lines in the background of a shot, or a garbage can, or the rear fender of a car.
“With digital cameras, you can clean out a distracting background, which is good in a pinch, but train your eye to be the viewfinder and the lens. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll see. Then you’re ready to move to digital cameras after you’ve trained your eyes and your brain.”
One day while she was camped out in the bookstore, hoping to see Natalie meet up with the guy in the car, she saw a man in camouflage gear walk by with a dog. The man had all the trappings of someone who was homeless. He had a backpack covered in a black plastic bag to keep it dry, and he wore tough, military-looking boots in the summer, a time when there was no need for boots at all. She let him come into focus just as Mr. Clarke had taught her. Gradually, he didn’t look scary at all, not like homeless men had looked to her before. His dog was short-haired, tight, and serious, not at all like the dogs in her first study. How did he feed his dog? Where did the dog stay when the man went into a store? Melissa got an idea for a fine-tuned version of “The Dogs of Portland”; she could photograph homeless people and their dogs. She couldn’t wait to tell Mr. Clarke, which she did as soon as she saw him the next day at photography lab.
“Interesting riff on your first study,” he commented. “Are your parents okay with you photographing homeless people? They are not like a species to be observed. Many of them are ordinary people who have slipped through the cracks, and your job would be to tell their story,” he said.
Melissa had instinctively not asked her parents. “Sure, my parents are fine with the idea. My father is a lawyer, and he volunteers one day a month at one of the homeless centers,” she said, hoping that she’d never run into her father, who would in fact be furious with her for hanging around a district of Portland known for crack, alcohol, and homeless people. “I get what you’re saying about the story,” she added, even if she really didn’t get how she would tell their story.
She wanted desperately to dive into the grittiness of her new study, to abandon the dogs who frequented the expensive shops and restaurants of Portland’s tourist center—the pugs, the short-haired terriers, the Chihuahuas, the retrievers. She had clicked away at the dogs in their owners’ arms; some were even pushed in strollers. It was not until she drew closer to the Chester Hill district, where runaway kids and people without permanent housing congregated, that Melissa met the dogs with a different kind of character. Her parents wouldn’t find out because no one from Peaks ever went to the Chester Hill district.
After Rocky readily agreed to let Cooper go with her to Portland, Melissa and Cooper took the ferry on Saturday. Dogs couldn’t ride the ferry without a ticket, especially a big dog like Cooper, who weighed in at more than ninety pounds. He took up as much space as two six-year-old kids. Dog tickets were the same price as tickets for kids, and Melissa was glad the ticket price wasn’t based on weight.
In the summer heat, Cooper was one large solar collector. The sun amplified BTUs through his black fur, slowing him down to a large, panting canine. The ferry ride offered him relief, however temporary. As soon as they stepped onto the ferry, Melissa could immediately feel the temperature drop by ten degrees. The ferry was nothing more than a large metal object bobbing around in the icy Atlantic. Midway through the crossing, the ferry entered the deepest part of the channel and the temperature dropped another ten degrees. Cooper spread his body on the cool metal of the ferry and closed his eyes as the one cool breeze of the day lifted the tips of his ears away from his face.
As they approached Portland, the heat pulsing off the land reached out to meet them.
“We are back on the continent, big guy,” said Melissa. This would be his first day as Melissa’s backup as she shot photos in the predominantly homeless section of Portland.
Melissa and the dog walked up the hill from Commercial Street and over to Chester Hill. Cooper had to have a leash in the city, and it took about six blocks before they got the system right. Melissa was not used to responding to every stop and start from the dog. And clearly, Cooper did not appreciate the micromanagement of the leash.
“You hate this, don’t you?” asked the girl as they crested the hill. Cooper’s tail hung several notches lower than usual.
“It’s just a formality. This is a city, and this is city gear. If you’re a dog, you’ve got to wear a leash. You’re still the king of the island, but here in Portland you’ve got to be stealth. I mean, you’ve got to act like other dogs.”
They had reached the outer edge of Chester Hill. A woman wearing two sweaters and a knit hat—far too much clothing for a July day—stopped along the sidewalk. Her face, toughened by sun and wind, had a leathery look.
“I used to talk to my dog all the time, just like you. Talk, talk, and talk. If I didn’t have that dog to talk to, I would have killed myself thirty times over. She was a spaniel kind of dog with big brown eyes and a sad face. Every time I felt something sad, she’d give me that look, and I’d end up telling her it wasn’t that bad. And then I wouldn’t feel so bad either.”
Cooper walked in between the woman and Melissa and sniffed her hand. He sat down and gave the woman his best openmouthed smile.
“I had to give my dogs up, not the spaniel, but the one after that. When I was evicted, I couldn’t take the dog. Her name was Dropsy. Homeless shelters wouldn’t let her in. The worst day of my life was taking her to an animal rescue place.”
The woman knelt down by Cooper and leaned her head against him.
“Here’s the dividing line, right here. If you’re homeless, and you want to sleep in a shelter, you can’t have a dog, period. There’s a lot we can’t have, but the worst part for me is that I can’t have my dog.”
She put her face in Cooper’s neck and breathed deeply.
“This here is a good-smelling dog. Are you taking good care of him and making sure he’s got water to drink? ”
“Yes, m’am, I take good care of him.”
The woman pushed up and dusted off her knees. She continued on her way. If Melissa had been thinking, she would have taken a photo of Cooper with the woman as she sniffed his fur. Was this what Mr. Clarke had meant, about the camera feeling like an intrusion on something private? How did you get past that sense of invading someone? But as she and Cooper continued their walk, she knew she should have taken the shot. She’d remember the next time.
The next day, Melissa and Cooper walked for several hours in Portland, and the black dog was a magnet for every person who had grown up with a dog but more recently had been stripped of their dog. She heard the same story from people: they had had a dog once, but now they couldn’t. Only the people who found alternatives to the shelters had dogs. These were the people who slept outside, tucked in the crevices of highway underpasses, rolled in sleeping bags under kind bushes, boldly in the parks on the benches, or on boats if they were able to do so without getting caught. Their dogs looked like they were bred for the hard life; short-haired, tight muscles, forty-five pounds or so of loyal canine trotting smartly beside their human. Street-smart, they were expert in crossing busy streets and not flinching around strangers, but they were not overly friendly either. They lived on the edge of possibilities with their person, and they knew it.
Melissa asked permission before she shot, and without exception, the owners were proud of their dogs. They had the devotion of a good dog, a smart and agile creature who didn’t judge them by their material acquisitions or their lack of housing. If Melissa squinted, the men looked to her like nomadic warriors, carrying their sacks of essentials with their warrior dog at their side. Believe what you see.
At home she downloaded her shots from the day. In one shot, a dog stood watch while a man collected food from a restaurant Dumpster. In another, a dog’s eyes had darted to the side, one ear erect, as he listened to some scratch of a sound while a man sat on the sidewalk, his back against the brick wall, with a good breeze from the ocean reaching Chester Hill. Melissa had spent all day with Cooper, and that was just how she wanted it.
On Sunday her friend Chris had suggested that they take Cooper to the assisted living center in Portland where her grandmother lived. Chris thought the dog might cheer everyone up. Her grandmother lived in the special Alzheimer’s unit, and both girls agreed that if anyone needed cheering up, it was this group.
Cooper had charmed the pants off the staff, and he walked right into Chris’s grandmother’s room, sat next to her chair, and pushed his big black head into her alabaster hand.
“Smoky,” she said, her eyes clearing. “Where have you been? You haven’t been chasing the neighbor’s chickens again, have you? Oh, you rascal.”
Melissa pulled out her camera, knelt down, and began to shoot. Click. Chris’s grandmother didn’t notice the camera. Cooper gave his soft, dark gaze to the old woman and pressed his body close to her polyester-clad legs. Then he sank to the floor and lay at her feet. Chris slid her grandmother’s shoes off and gently placed her feet on Cooper’s broad back.
“Smoky, you’re as warm as a furnace.” She leaned her head against the plastic upholstered padded chair and smiled.
Later, Melissa related the story to Rocky and Tess. “It was like he knew how sick she was and he had something to give her. We were there forever, close to an hour.”
“I think Cooper would be a natural as a therapy dog,” said Tess. “There’s a woman in Portland who has classes for dogs. She teaches them to be therapy dogs for hospitals, rehab centers, even at libraries for kids who have reading difficulties.”
The three of them were at Rocky’s cottage, and for the first time in weeks Natalie was gone and it was just them again. Melissa stretched out on the weathered deck, and the tiny muscles around her ribs softened. Cooper thumped her with his paw.
“He’s either ready for another photo shoot or he wants me to throw his stick,” said Melissa. She rolled her head to one side and looked at Rocky. “I could take him to dog therapy school. But, I mean, he is your dog. You’d have to get him enrolled. What do you think?”
Rocky looked up from her building supply catalog. “Does anyone here see the irony in this? I’ve just quit my job as a therapist, and you two think my dog should become a therapist! But I’ll look into it.”
Chapter 33
Cooper
As each day ended, the new girl returned to their home and Rocky welcomed her. As he did with all of his people, he studied her behaviors, their predictable sequencing: which hand reached for the white food door, the time of day her bathing took place, what signaled her leaving the house. Nothing alarmed him about the girl’s actions. It was her scent that troubled him. A mist hovered over the girl, a cancerous glow draped in a man’s scent.
The scent flooded Cooper, lighting up his brain like a sky jammed with stars. The girl had mated; the scent was only thinly covered. It was possible to sort out the intentions of humans, but they were a changeable lot, often confused by their own longings. He sorted out the intentions of the man from his actual deeds. This was what made living with humans so fragile and so rich.
With other mammals, it was simple to sort out the prey from the predators, even when one mammal played both roles, as they mostly did—prey to some, predators to others. Some creatures, like deer, were purely prey with almost no predator in their nature. They had a clear destiny. Rabbits were the same unless one counted the bloody mating battles between males.
The scent of a predator was unmistakable. Foxes, coyotes, fisher cats, the elusive wild cat—their destiny demanded that, in order to live, they had to kill and kill fast, strike hard, snap a neck, slit an abdomen open. They were built for battle with fangs and claws to rip flesh. The girl’s scent, mingled with the man’s, pumped out the sureness of a predator.
The layers of scent within a predator were complex. Cooper smelled fear on Natalie. Her pure expression of fear was carried by the sweat and hormones that she left everywhere in the house. Mixed in with her fear was another, the man’s fear, but his came from the drive of the predator. What predators fear is that they will miss their kill and go hungry. What the girl feared was unclear, but a fearful creature was a dangerous one, no matter what the source.
Cooper understood predators. His body was built to bring down food if he had to, with his speed and fangs, the bulk and power of his muscles, the rip of his claws. His own power lay coiled, ready beneath his soft mouth, tamed for the most part by the thousands of years his kind had slept near humans. Joining with humans so long ago carried with it the comfort of safe havens when dogs were fortunate enough to find them. But every dog carried the thread of genetic material that could be instantly tapped if the home was in danger. There was a responsibility for everything, and he willingly paid the price to protect his pack. The scent hovering around Natalie made Cooper stand up. He would have to listen more intently, sniff more carefully. Something was coming closer.
Chapter 34
Rocky had reluctantly agreed to call the woman who trained therapy dogs to visit hospital patients, those under hospice care, and even little kids in library reading programs. Tess had urged her to include Melissa.
“This would be something that Melissa could do that would help others and keep her connected to you and Cooper. I know you wouldn’t notice right now, but she is feeling tossed aside by you, just when the two of you had become friends. She looks up to you. Cooper is perfect for the job. Once they meet him, they’ll say that he’s already 90 percent on his way to being a therapy dog. They’ll let him skip five levels. He’ll be like the genius kids who go to Yale when they’re thirteen. You could be his best case study. Tell them that he almost has you up and running as a fully functioning human.”
Rocky had considered a pithy comeback, but everything that Tess had said about Cooper was true. She wasn’t at all sure what she would have done if she hadn’t found him. Rocky had called on Monday morning and agreed to meet Caroline, the dog therapy trainer, at the parking lot of the Casco Bay ferry in Portland.
“I have two main questions before we go any further,” said Caroline. She was tall, in her fifties, and wore a T-shirt with ducks on it.
Rocky was prepared for Cooper to wow Caroline, and he did not disappoint. He sat peacefully by Rocky’s side and sniffed Caroline’s hand with a level of decorum befitting British royalty.
“First question. Is your dog predictable?”
Rocky swallowed. Jesus. Predictable? “Yes, most of the time he’s predictable. He’s very good at predicting me. Psychic almost. Although unusual circumstances can prompt unusual responses. Or new circumstances require an equal response, just like in physics. It’s a law of physics.” Rocky was stalling, waiting for the purpose of the question to be clarified.
Caroline’s mouth straightened. “What would you call unusual, on either side of your physics formula?”
“There was a stalker on the island a few months back. So, for example, when Cooper was in my car and he recognized the stalker before any of us could, he, well, he showed agitation,” said Rocky, hoping that she had aptly described Cooper exploding like a bomb in her car, sputtering and barking.
“I see.”
Rocky sensed a change in Caroline’s personal tides.
“What’s the other question?”
“Has he ever shown aggression?” asked Caroline, looking at Rocky without giving her an inch of room to manufacture a coded answer.
“What exactly do you mean by aggression?” said Rocky.
“This isn’t a hard question, and you must admit, it’s an important one. We have to screen out dogs that have suddenly shown an aggressive side to their character. Has Cooper ever gone for someone? Has he ever lunged at someone? Bitten anyone?”
Rocky ran the episode of the stalker’s apprehension quickly through her head. Had Cooper bitten anyone? No. But he gave chase to the stalker with a ferocity that had shocked her, and she had no doubt that Cooper would have gladly sunk his fangs into the man’s leg. He might have done just that if the guy hadn’t knocked Cooper to the ground with a tranquilizer dart.
“No, I’m sure of it. He’s never bitten anyone,” said Rocky. Why did this feel like such a fat lie? “I’m his second owner. The first owner died, but I can give you the name of the vet who has taken care of him since he was a puppy. She’s over in Orono.”
“Let me put the question to you in another way. If Cooper thought anyone was threatening you, what would he do? Would you have voice control of him? This is important.”
The day Rocky found Cooper, she had changed. Not all at once, one doesn’t in matters of love, and both of them had approached the new relationship with differing levels of caution. The day she found him, feverish and filled with infection from his wound, she knew he would not have lasted much longer. But how much longer would she have lasted if he had not come into her life in his full-throttle style?
