A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

We took the Ninety-Sixth Street exit and passed the many discount stores with merchandise displayed on the sidewalk even in the cold, and the cut-rate grocery, the White Castle, the projects, and gas stations packed with cabs. A frosted-over community garden interrupted a row of tenements just before we turned onto 119th Street.

“Have you got her leash?” Billie asked.

We had just pulled into a parking space (no meter) just short of the iron gates in front of the nearly windowless, concrete structure. My dog had been imprisoned since September, and we were about to break her out.

“Leash and collar,” I said. The nylon web collar had peace signs in a rainbow of colors printed on it. Her name tag, her license, her rabies tag. Billie must have sensed my going soft because she said, “Act as if you come here all the time.”

She steered me past the intake desk after waving to a kennel worker she knew. The woman at intake had recognized Billie and buzzed us in. The noise assaulted us immediately, combined with an overpowering smell of urine and feces. I followed Billie on slippery linoleum — she moved with the purpose of a soldier. It should have inspired strength in me, but I felt disequilibrium.

The occasional wall-mounted sanitary dispensers would have held antibacterial gel had they ever been filled. We passed door after door leading into the wards. Each ward contained about two dozen dogs, the large ones housed in a row of cages, the smaller dogs inhabiting smaller cages stacked three high. Overflow made it necessary to place a wall of these stacked cages in the main hallway. I saw that frightened cats in carriers were mixed in with the dogs. Fluorescent lights in the hallway pulsed and crackled, an instant headache. The ward doors were on one side of the hallway; on the other was a door marked MEDICAL.

“Don’t go in there,” Billie said.

I glanced in when a vet tech opened it as we passed. I saw blood on the linoleum floor.

“Told you,” Billie said.

Food storage was on the same side of the hallway down a ways from Medical. There, a deep sink was filled with aluminum water bowls and opened cans of dog food under a leaking faucet.

“Eyes right,” Billie said, noting my wandering gaze. But I looked anyway. Each ward door had a narrow panel of glass at about eye level, and I looked in at the dogs. Some were clearly depressed — they sat in the back of their cage facing the wall. Others, as soon as they made even passing eye contact with a potential rescuer, began to perform tricks that someone had once taught them — a lifted paw to shake, though no one was there to shake it. I felt as though I would disintegrate. I must have gasped because Billie turned to me and said, “This is why I come here.”

Adoption hours were still in effect, and we had passed clusters of people looking at dogs behind bars. Dogs cleared for adoption were in the first two wards, with small dogs in a separate room. The small dogs always had more visitors looking for a pet. I saw children holding trembling Chihuahuas and miniature poodles, as well as big-eared mutts. I saw families walk from cage to cage in the big-dog adoption wards, debating the merits of one over the other, which dog was cuter, which would require less exercise. I paused while Billie walked ahead for a moment. I’d overheard a grungy-looking guy around twenty or so gauging the likelihood of a young male pit bull’s chances in the ring. I caught up to Billie to tell her about him, and she said, “We know all about that guy. Intake knows not to release a dog to him.”

But the public was not allowed in the ward we were headed for.

I would not last an hour in this place. I had known this all along, but I could only now acknowledge it fully, since I was getting my own dog out. The only thing that went in the face of this horror was the generosity shown the animals by the kennel staff and volunteers, other women like Billie, for she had told me the volunteers were nearly all women. She had also told me that most of the kennel workers, there to do a difficult and distressing job, were kind to them, called the dogs by their names, even though those names were usually assigned to them at intake.

“At the end of the hall, that door goes into a backyard,” Billie said. “It’s the one place where dogs can be off leash. Though yard isn’t really accurate — it’s not as if there’s any grass.”

We were nearly to the ward where Cloud was confined when Billie said, “If the elevator were working, you’d see all of this replicated on the second floor.”

When that fact washed over me, I was stricken with guilt at not being able to take more than just Cloud out of here. But where did that lead, and where would it stop?

“I can see what you’re thinking,” Billie said. “You can’t save them all. For me, it’s a matter of translation, always translating what I spend money on into what it would pay for in this place. That pair of shoes would inoculate twenty-five dogs against bordetella. Those sunglasses would spay ten dogs.”

Billie took out a key ring and unlocked the door to Ward 4A, where the Dangerous Dogs were kept. In this ward, on each kennel card affixed to the top of a cage were the red-inked words CAUTION — SEVERE. This was their temperament rating. On the concrete wall facing the row of cages were thick steel rings hanging from exposed screws — tie-outs that these strong dogs had pulled clean out of the wall. Propped against the wall in one corner was a catchpole, next to the industrial, coiled black hose.

Cloud was not where I had last seen her, the first cage near the door. Instead of Cloud, that cage held a large white dog with cropped ears and pink eyes; it sat coolly facing the front bars.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She’s been moved to the end of the row.”

I felt a moment’s guilt at not tending to the dogs in the cages I raced past to find my own. When I saw my girl, her white coat defiled, I cried out her name and then just cried. She moved to the front bars as Billie opened the door just enough to attach her collar and leash. Billie told me to let her walk Cloud out of the ward, Cloud to the left of her, Billie’s body between Cloud and the caged dogs. When we reached the entrance to the ward, I saw the white dog with cropped ears, but it was not in the first cage by the door. It was in the second cage from the door, where George had once been next to Cloud but unable to see her. I realized that there were two white dogs with cropped ears and pink eyes, mirroring each other’s stance in their respective cages. The dogs had short hair and broad, muscular chests. They were not pitties, but seemed to be Molossers, the predecessors of the bully breeds. The dogs looked to be about 130 pounds, larger even than Cloud.

“Are they Presas?” I asked Billie. Years before, when Steven had lived in San Francisco, a pair of untrained Presa Canarios had gotten out of their owner’s apartment into the hallway of a tony apartment building in Pacific Heights and mauled a young woman who could not get the key to her apartment out fast enough. The woman had died from her injuries, which included nearly eighty wounds, with only her scalp and feet unharmed. The resulting trial sent the dogs’ reckless owners — one of them a lawyer — to jail for fifteen years for second-degree murder.

“They’re Dogos Argentinos,” Billie said. “But really they’re scapegoats, brought in last night.”

“What’s their story?”

“Same old story.”

Either she was giving me credit for knowing or she was blowing me off.

As we passed their cages, the Dogos rose and circled their quarters; their movements were identical, like synchronized swimmers. Yet they could not see each other to know what the other was doing. Each dog looked at me, growling and curling its lip.