Dancing Dogs (26 page)

Karen forced herself to remind the customer that while the predictions were free, the water wasn’t. Two bottles, $2.25.

The woman took out her purse and bought three bottles. Ernie barked at her again.

“So what did he say?” she asked Karen again as her two kids drew in closer.

“Ernie says absolutely. Your husband will definitely get a job.”

The woman smiled and one of the kids squealed, “Awesome! Wait until we get home and tell Daddy!”

A truck driver stepped to the front of the line and bought two bottles.

Ernie barked and the driver looked at him dubiously. “I had a mutt who drove with me for ten years,” he said. “Looked a little like him.”

Karen saw that the man’s eyes had filled with tears. “Hey,” she asked, “what’s your question?”

“Will it cost me more than five hundred dollars to get the transmission on my truck fixed?”

Karen listened to Ernie bark.

“No” said Karen. “Ernie says less than that.”

Next, a middle-aged woman came up to the dog, looked him in the eye, and bought a whole case of bottled water. She looked worn. Karen waited while the woman summoned the strength to speak up.

“Will my mother recover from her cancer?” she asked.

This was too much for Jim. Before Karen could say a word, he stepped forward and whispered, “Karen, we can’t have this. These people will be furious if the predictions don’t come true. They’ll come back and sue us.”

He tried to give the women her money back, but she put up her hand and looked right into Ernie’s eyes. “No,” she said, “I want an answer.”

Karen listened to Ernie’s barks, and then, with a strange look in her eye, threw her arms around the woman and said, “Your mother will recover, at least for a while.” The woman burst into tears.

Jim ordered Karen to put Ernie in the car and go home.

She picked up the dog and moved him to the rear seat, muttering under her breath. It wasn’t until she was a mile or so from Pharma-Rite that she became terrified she would lose her job.

In fact, she wasn’t sure if she’d already been fired or not. Jim hadn’t said either way.

Once home, Dan was furious. “How could you do that?” he thundered. “This dog doesn’t know squat. He isn’t a psychic. He was just shooting his mouth off, like he always does. You’re giving these people false hope.”

Karen said nothing, but burst into tears. Had she lost her job? Misled people? Lost her mind? It started as a bottled-water contest, and there, out in the parking lot with Ernie, she had kind of lost perspective. But she wasn’t lying. She believed Ernie knew more than most dogs. She was sure of it.

She went into her room and put her head on the pillow and cried. She would never get promoted, and couldn’t even imagine getting to keep her job. At least Jim hadn’t called to fire her yet. He was probably waiting for the morning. Ernie, puzzled, lay on the bed next to her. He was quiet for once. Napoleon looked on disdainfully.

The next morning, Karen got up early, drove to the Pharma-Rite, and left Ernie and Napoleon in the car across the road from the store. She went through the aisles, putting bottles of lotion back in their proper places, picking up the bags of chocolate and cough drops that had been knocked to the floor. Then she took her place at the drive-thru window, and when she was done, reported to her cashier station. Her hands were trembling but there was still no sign of Jim.

Karen looked out the window to see if Ernie was all right and noticed a small commotion in the parking lot. There were about a dozen people there—a big crowd at that hour—and Jim was standing out there in his Pharma-Rite manager’s vest trying to placate them. Karen asked her friend Janine to cover her station and stepped outside.

The first person she saw was the mother with her two children. She clapped her hands when she spotted Karen. “My husband got a job yesterday,” she said. “Your dog is miraculous. I want to buy some more water.”

The truck driver was right behind her. “Me too,” he said. “The transmission work cost two hundred fifty. How did the dog do it? I want to ask him about a new car I want to buy.” Karen looked around for the woman whose mother had cancer, but she didn’t see her.

There was a line now, halfway across the lot. She looked at Jim, who gave her a nod. “I wasn’t out here,” he said. “In case anybody asks, I was never here. I never saw this.” He looked down, shook his head, and retreated inside the store.

Karen crossed the road to her car, got the sign and Ernie, and set up against the rear wall, just like the day before.

She sold out of bottled water by noon. Jim stacked a few more cases. Ernie barked continuously, making a string of predictions: the local high school would win a football championship; a young wife would get pregnant; three women would get married; a boy would move out of his mother’s house and live near the ocean; a divorce-court judge would rule in favor of a father’s custody plea; a hunter would get some deer. The words just came streaming out of Karen’s mouth, and she was sure they were from Ernie. Bottles of water kept selling.

Every now and then Jim would come out with another stack of bottled-water cases, then flee. In the mid-afternoon, he appeared again, practically glowing. “We won. We beat Saratoga and Glens Falls. I get to go to the awards dinner Corporate is giving at the end of the month.”

Karen had never seen Jim smile like that.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out an “Employee of the Month” pin, plastic painted to look like brass. He told her she would get the “Employee of the Month” parking spot by the side of the store as well. And, he whispered, she was free to keep Ernie there. He winked, and then said, sotto voce, “Get used to the Cosmetics Department.”

By late afternoon, the crowd had dispersed and Karen put Ernie back in the Corolla with Napoleon. She headed into the locker room to change out of her blue vest. When she left the store, the woman who had asked about her mother’s cancer was standing alone in the parking lot.

Karen came up to her. “I hope I didn’t give you any false hope,” she said. “I’m not a doctor. I was up thinking about you all night. It just came out that way—”

The woman smiled. “Last night, I went home and told my mom what the dog had said. She clapped her hands, got up out of bed, and said she wanted to go for a walk. We walked through the park and along the river, and she laughed and had some popcorn and smiled for me, and I will remember that smile for the rest of my life. I wanted to come and thank Ernie for making my mother smile.”

Thanks to Elizabeth Stein, Rosemary Ahern, Jen Smith, Maria Wulf.

Thanks to the families, farmers, and box-store women who let me into their lives, and allowed me to see what animals mean to them in contemporary America.

Dancing Dogs

Lenore Finds a Friend

Going Home

Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm

Rose in a Storm

Soul of a Dog

Izzy & Lenore

Dog Days

A Good Dog

Katz on Dogs

The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

The New Work of Dogs

A Dog Year

Geeks

Running to the Mountain

Virtuous Reality

Media Rants

Sign Off

Death by Station Wagon

The Family Stalker

The Last Housewife

The Fathers’ Club

Death Row

J
ON
K
ATZ
has written twenty-one books—eight novels, one collection of short stories, and twelve works of nonfiction—including
Soul of a Dog, Izzy & Lenore, Dog Days, A Good Dog
, and
The Dogs of Bedlam Farm
. He has written for
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal
, Slate,
Rolling Stone
, and the
AKC Gazette
. He has worked for CBS News,
The Boston Globe, The Washington Post
, and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Katz is also a photographer and the author of two children’s books,
Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm
and
Lenore Finds a Friend
. He lives on Bedlam Farm in upstate New York with his wife, the artist Maria Wulf; his dogs, Lenore, Frieda, and Red; his donkeys, Simon, Lulu, and Fanny; and his barn cats, Mother and Minnie.