Dogfight Read Online Free Page A

ball on the public courts across the street.
    â€œYeah, well.” He shrugs and looks in the direction of the tennis sounds.
    â€œBesides, I’m on emergency call tonight. I thought an afternoon off would do me some good.” This is the truth. I have become part of an arrangement of the three local vets, where one of us stays on call twenty-four hours on alternating nights. The other offices transfer their emergency patients after business hours. “So, what do you say? Should we go down to the mall and look at that CD player you want?”
    He brightens visibly.
    â€œCool,” he says. “Let me change clothes and we’re gone.”
    He pivots on a heel and goes stomping back upstairs.
    After my wife died, I moved my son from our farm in Loudon County to this place, a brick town house in Alexandria, anonymous among the rows of similar buildings. Ours wasn’t a working farm, just some land, the old farmhouse and the sagging barns behind it,and a grain silo that Sarah called the Leaning Tower of Loudon. My practice has boomed since our move to the city. My clientele, though, has changed from horses and hearty dogs to mostly cats and those dogs that need constant grooming. Poodles and such, city dogs. I never would have thought that grooming would become a vital part of my practice, but I’ve recently hired an assistant, Sissy, for just that purpose. Sissy is young and attractive and people like her, and the owners of my new patients seem to find something charming, something quaint, in having a country doctor for their pets. I make my manner brusque and forceful and have lately found myself speaking in colloquialisms to fit the part that has been given me. They often ask why a veterinarian, a natural lover of animals, does not have a pet of his own. I mention lack of space and the inclemency of keeping animals confined to the city. A happy dog is a running dog, I say. I made that up. And they nod and look at the floor, guilty in their minds of animal cruelty. They like my subtle scolding.
    What I don’t tell them is that I once saw a Siberian husky called Bear run over by a lumber truck, flatbed strapped with skinned trees. This was before X was born, and Sarah and I loved that dog as if he were our child. She would put a plate for him under the dinner table so he could have his meals with us. On cold nights, he slept in the bed between us, his head on a polyester pillow that Sarah bought because it turned out he was allergic to down. All of us slept on polyester pillows. I still do. To console her on the evening of the accident, I had to promise that we would never have another pet. I’m not certain how serious she was about the promise, whether it was just one of those things people did at a time of tragedy, self-denial as punishment for some implicit fault in the affair, but our farm was without animals until her death.
    X found a cat curled up in the grain silo the month after Sarah’s funeral and I gave in to his pleading and let us keep it. The cat was never fond of me, ignored my attempts at affection, hissing at my touch and rushing to X for protection. The cat wouldn’t eat until the kitchen lights were off and I had gone up to bed. Late one night, Iwent down to the kitchen for a snack and flipped the light switch and surprised him at his bowl. He skittered across the linoleum, out of the little pet door and our lives. We never saw him again. I tried fish, after the cat, for X’s sake, but could never remember to feed them or change their water and when I did remember, I thought of Sarah and the promise that I made.
    Grace Poole and her shar-pei, Candle, are new patients of mine. I have never found any truth in the idea that people and their pets come to look alike over time. Candle is all wrinkles and short, wiry hair and full of high-strung motion. They have only been in once, for a flea dip and groom, but Sissy noticed something about Grace immediately. Sissy is