Saving Fish From Drowning (9 page)

During the bus ride into Lijiang, Wyatt dozed, and Wendy gave everyone who was awake the benefit of her stream-of-consciousness observations. “Omigod, look at those people on the side of the road.

They’re smashing rocks, turning them into gravel to pave the road. . . .

Those faces! They look so beaten down. Does the government think people are machines? . . .” Though Wendy had only arrived in China, she was already sharpening her sensibilities about despotic rule.

LIKE ANY EXUBERANT PUP, Wendy needed to learn “shush.” That’s what Harry Bailley thought. He was sitting across the aisle from her 4 8

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and Wyatt. He had forgotten that he had once possessed the dedication of an activist. In his youth, now some twenty-plus years past, he, too, had wanted desperately to sink his teeth into important causes.

He had vowed to resist complacency, abhor apathy, “to make positive, incremental change and leave an imprint after this tenure on earth.”

Years before, a much younger Harry had led the movement to

abolish aversive dog-training methods, those that relied on leash-jerking, shock collars, and rubbing the dog’s face in its feces. When he finished veterinary training, he did doctoral studies in the behavioral sciences department at UC Berkeley, investigating pack behavior, how dogs instinctively learned from higher-ups and taught protocols to lower-downs. Dog temperament was not ingrained from birth, he noted. It could be shaped by interaction with other dogs and people and by tasty bribes. Anyone who understood basic Skinnerian principles could tell you that when given positive reinforcement, dogs respond more quickly and consistently to what humans want, and they learn new behaviors more quickly through luring, shaping, and capturing.

“If your doggie has your very expensive alligator purse in his mouth,” Harry would say in his seminars, “offer to trade him a piece of hot dog. Oh goodie, pant-pant, and he’ll drop the purse at your feet. What’s the lesson here? Put your overpriced purses and pumps where Pluto can’t get to them! Then go and get him a smelly old tennis ball. The game is simple: Ball in your hand, treat in his mouth.

Even if he’s a basset hound, he’ll turn into an impressive retriever if you do enough trades.”

And through such commonsense advice, Dr. Harry Bailley became the Dog Trainer of Dog Trainers, the founder of the well-regarded International Society of Canine Behaviorists, the inventor of humane training devices (patents pending), the star of
The Fido Files
, and now the well-qualified owner of my dear, dear Poochini. I’m 4 9

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afraid I never did much training with him, and naughty Poochini had already chewed off the spines of some of Harry’s collection of first-edition books.

“You must inform your clients, gently but firmly,” he often told his disciples at lectures. “Dogs are not people in fur coats. No, indeed.

They don’t speak in the future tense. They live in the moment. And unlike you and me, they’ll drink from a toilet. Lucky for us, they are perfect specimens of how operant conditioning and positive reinforcement work, and beautifully so if only we learn how to apply the principles properly. Their human handlers have got to be absolutely objective about what motivates their poochies—so quash their tendency to ascribe Muggum-wuggum’s barking, growling, and counter-surfing to anthropomorphic motives such as pride, revenge, sneakiness, or betrayal. That’s how we speak of our ex-wives, former lovers, and politicians. Remember that
Canis lupus familiaris
is driven by his own jollies, which are usually harmless to others but can be detrimental to white carpets and Italian shoes. The fact is, dogs mark territory and they masticate. And if dogs resemble
Homo
erectus
in any respect, it is in those traits of the poorly socialized male. Both do what pleases them: they scratch their balls, sleep on the sofa, and sniff any crotch that comes their way. And you, the brilliant dog trainer, must
train the owners
—that’s right, those barely evolved humans holding those rolled-up newspapers in hand like cavemen’s cudgels—you must train the humans to show the dogs what lucky canines
prefer
to do other than nip and yowl, or use the leather sofa as a chew toy. Ah! ‘Prefer’ is the operative word, isn’t it? . . .”

Harry Bailley believed in training people early, before they could inflict any lasting damage upon the wee and impressionable pooches.

“Puppy classes!” he would exhort on his television show. “A great equalizer, the perfect socializer, far better than those bore-and-snore book clubs that are all the rage on the other channel. Doggie classes, 5 0

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what a
fantastic
way for singles to meet. Strong, sensitive men. Woof!

Loyal, long-limbed ladies. Woof-woof! And all those sweet, slurpy puppies. Picture their tails wagging—the
doggies
, you scalawags.”

And as his TV clients and their dogs tangoed to “Sit,” “Down,”

“Stay,” and “Come,” Harry would ham it up to make everyone feel successful, proud, and continually motivated. “Lure your dog. That’s right, dangle that cheese bit above his nose, now back until he sits.

Steady, steady . . .
Yessss!
Bingo! Give him the jackpot right away.

He’s got it.
You’ve
got it. Only five point two seconds that time.

Good Lord, you two are
fast!
What a fantastic team!” The dogs panted. The humans, too.

Harry revolutionized dog training. Everyone said so. In the early days, he went so far as to believe his notions of dog behavior could be applied to anything, from toilet training to international politics.

He said so in seminars: “Which works faster: beating and humiliating a dictatorship, or luring it to follow a better and more rewarding model? If we call upon the country only to pummel it for being bad, how likely is it to come seeking our humanitarian advice? Isn’t it utterly obvious?” And then Harry would dangle a hundred-dollar bill and bob it up and down so that people in the front row would nod dutifully in agreement. He was rather cocky in those days.

In more recent years, Harry had become less focused on the bad behavior of dog owners and governments and more on his own virility, which he feared might share the fate of endangered species—

going, going, gone. He still had his hairline, though it had grayed on the sides—excellent credentials for authority. His physique was still trim; expensive tailored suits helped give him that effect. The damn trouble was, he had an enlarged prostate, the typical benign prostatic hyperplasia that afflicts many men, more annoying than harmful. But by God, Harry would moan, it shouldn’t strangle a man’s best friend before he’s even turned fifty! He was troubled that he had to urinate frequently, and the more he strained, the more he issued 5 1

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forth only driblets, much to his shame at public urinals. He was educated enough to know that the force of urinary flow—or lack thereof—was not a correlation of sexual prowess. Yet he feared that his personal plumbing, which had once spurted those two essential fluids as forcefully as the nozzle on his garden hose, might soon become choked off like a water-saving shower head, and unsatisfying not just to him but to the woman of the moment as well.

He searched the Internet for information that might indicate the prognosis of his sex life should his condition worsen. Ejaculatory backfiring was one worry. Could women really tell? He found a website on prostate problems, with messages from men who shared the same annoying condition. Several posters suggested that daily ejaculations might slow down the hyperplastic activity and keep the pelvic muscles better toned. The message board was also littered with invitations to join porn sites where sufferers could find instant relief for one flat rate. Great, Harry thought, the answer is to masturbate like a kid with a magazine as your one-night stand. No, thank you. He grew more determined to find a lovemate—one would do nicely in this day and age of protected sex and privacy angst—one incredibly wonderful woman he could have and hold, who would understand when parts of him sputtered and gave out, for now or forever. Harry was desperate for love and sex, and for the first time, in that order.

Lovely, sleek Marlena Chu had boarded the bus to Lijiang ahead of him and had taken a window seat, while her daughter, Esmé, raced to the aft of the bus and flopped lengthwise on the long bench.

Ye gods, an opportunity. Harry pretended to pass Marlena before reversing to inquire quietly whether she might have any aspirin.

Women adore helping creatures in pain; Harry knew that, as well as the fact that ladies always carry remedies for menstrual cramps and headaches. As Marlena began to dig through her purse, he sat down next to her and waited puppylike for his treat.

Although Harry had seen Marlena at many social gatherings in 5 2

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San Francisco, here in this mountain valley in China, she looked positively exotic. Why was that? Why had he not sought her out before?

Could it really be that he had overlooked her because she was past a certain dewy-skinned age? But look at her now. Everything about her was smooth and elegant: her hair, her face, her clothes, and especially her movements and gestures. When applying insect repellent, she looked like a goddess. Such grace, such style. She wore a simple black sleeveless sheath and a large colorful pleated scarf, wound and wrapped, so that it resembled a sarong, an origami shawl, a sari, the multiple effects waiting to be undone by a breeze, a whisper of consent in the night.

Naturally, he worried that his friend Moff might have similar thoughts. The two men often did when it came to women. He

glanced over at Moff, who was staring right this moment at Heidi as she reached into the overhead rack to pull out a neck pillow from her rucksack. Moff’s son, Rupert, who had been playing with a deck of cards, also stared openly at the young woman’s breasts. Harry had noticed that Moff had given Marlena a number of second glances, his eyes drifting down the length of her figure, lingering on her buttocks. By sitting next to her, Harry hoped this territorial hint would find its way into his friend’s brain, stir some cognition where impulsive behavior and primitive reflexes now resided. Moff could be thickheaded exactly when you didn’t want him to be.

There was that time, Harry recalled, when they were both at a café in Stinson Beach, and Harry had clearly indicated his interest in the café’s owner by saying to Moff: “What gorgeous peepers. Huge hazel irises, fourteen millimeters in diameter, I reckon.” Harry had a fixation about eyes. And Moff had answered, “Really? Hadn’t noticed.”

The next day Harry was back at the café and ordered eggs sunny-side up. The woman was friendly, but it was hard to move in more closely; she was like those hand-shy dogs in shelters that had been beaten by previous owners. But he loved the challenge of transform5 3

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ing untrusting creatures into licking maniacs. Take it slowly, he cautioned himself. No sudden moves.

The next day, she wasn’t there. He learned later that Moff had wooed the pants off her by asking if he could drop her somewhere on his refurbished Harley. She rode with him down the coast to Monterey, shedding almost every stitch of clothing and flinging it into the Pacific. After two rapturous months, Moff had to break things off because of “serious differences in expectations.” She responded by spray-painting his motorcycle pink. Harry was more upset than Moff about this report. Blast it! Moff had turned her into a Cerberus hellhound who wanted only to lunge and kill anyone with a penis.

He had utterly ruined her as far as future dating was concerned.

Adding insult to injury, Moff had also said to him, “Those hazel irises you admired so much? Colored contact lenses, my friend.”

What the devil did women see in Moff? Harry tried to imagine him from a female’s perspective. . . . He was taller than average (meaning, taller than Harry, who was five-feet-ten), had a passable build, lanky and no flab. But he was a complete washout when it came to proper clothes. His boyhood pal wore the same jungle-safari shirts and baggy short pants no matter what the season or event.

And the shoes, well, they were more working-class boots, greased with dirt and flecked with paint. His hands were callused, like an ordinary laborer’s. He wasn’t the sort to buy a woman flowers or speak to her in endearments, not like Harry. And Moff’s hair was a mess, long bushy locks gathered into a ponytail, and a receding hairline accentuating a massive forehead. The latter made him appear super-brainy, which he was, Harry acknowledged, though he also knew that Moff had been kicked out of school for truancy and smoking pot by the time he was sixteen, and thus was forced to become an autodidact.

What knowledge Moff possessed had come from reading, roaming the streets, and taking odd jobs in his youth, many of them in 5 4

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dockyards where he did inventory for import-export companies, the rest in backyards in Miami and Los Angeles, where he pruned hedges and cleaned pools. His interest in bamboo began in the 1970s, when he grew walls of it to camouflage his marijuana plants. Keen to make his cannabis as powerful per puff as possible, he devoured books on horticulture, particularly those related to genetic enhancement.

Later, bamboo cultivation itself superseded his nefarious grass-growing interests—and why wouldn’t it, when bamboo regenerated so quickly, just like marijuana, but without the legal hassles? And thus he made the 1980s transition to capitalist farmer, shipping containers of “live product,” as he called it, to the lobbies of new office buildings, remodeled airports, and luxury hotels around the world.

(Harry didn’t know at the time that Moff and Marlena had quite a few clients in common. Then again, neither did Moff.)

All right, so Moff had an unconventional business, Harry granted him that. And by calling himself a “plantation owner,” Moff made himself highly attractive to women with romantic illusions. They probably thought the plantation was idyllic, like the set for a dinosaur movie, and indeed, it had been used for that purpose on several occasions. But Moff himself had not a whit of romance in his brain.