2
CHIPPER'S BACKGROUND we know. Alice arrived at Maxton's from a big house on Gale Street, the old part of Gale Street, where she outlived two husbands, raised five sons, and taught piano to four generations of French Landing children, none of whom ever became professional pianists but who all remember her fondly and think of her with affection. Alice came to this place as most people do, in a car driven by one of her children and with a mixture of reluctance and surrender. She had become too old to live alone in the big house in the old section of Gale Street; she had two grown, married sons who were kind enough, but she could not tolerate adding to their cares. Alice Weathers had spent her entire life in French Landing, and she had no desire to live anywhere else; in a way, she had always known that she would end her days in Maxton's, which though not at all luxurious was agreeable enough. On the day her son Martin had driven her over to inspect the place, she had realized that she knew at least half the people there.
Unlike Alice, Charles Burnside, the tall, skinny old man lying covered by a sheet before us in his metal bed, is not in full possession of his wits, nor is he dreaming of Fred Astaire. The veiny expanse of his bald, narrow head curves down to eyebrows like tangles of gray wire, beneath which, on either side of the fleshy hook of his nose, two narrow eyes shine at his north-facing window and the expanse of woods beyond Maxton's. Alone of all the residents of Daisy wing, Burny is not asleep. His eyes gleam, and his lips are wormed into a bizarre smile ¡ª but these details mean nothing, for Charles Burnside's mind may be as empty as his room. Burny has suffered from Alzheimer's disease for many years, and what looks like an aggressive form of pleasure could be no more than physical satisfaction of a very basic kind. If we had failed to guess that he was the origin of the stench in this room, the stains rising into the sheet that covers him make it clear. He has just evacuated, massively, into his bed, and the very least we can say about his response to the situation is that he does not mind a bit; no sir, shame is not a part of this picture.
But if ¡ª unlike delightful Alice ¡ª Burny no longer has a firm grasp on all of his marbles, neither is he a typical Alzheimer's patient. He might spend a day or two mumbling into his oatmeal like the rest of Chipper's zombies, then revitalize himself and join the living again. When not un-dead, he usually manages to get down the hall to the bathroom as necessary, and he spends hours either sneaking off on his own or patrolling the grounds, being unpleasant ¡ª in fact, offensive ¡ª to all and sundry. Restored from zombiehood, he is sly, secretive, rude, caustic, stubborn, foul-tongued, mean-spirited, and resentful, in other words ¡ª in the world according to Chipper ¡ª a blood brother to the other old men who reside at Maxton's. Some of the nurses, aides, and attendants doubt that Burny really does have Alzheimer's. They think he is faking it, opting out, lying low, deliberately making them work harder while he rests up and gathers his strength for yet another episode of unpleasantness. We can hardly blame them for their suspicion. If Burny has not been misdiagnosed, he is probably the only advanced Alzheimer's patient in the world to experience prolonged spells of remission.
In 1996, his seventy-eighth year, the man known as Charles Burnside arrived at Maxton's in an ambulance from La Riviere General Hospital, not in a vehicle driven by a helpful relative. He had appeared in the emergency room one morning, carrying two heavy suitcases filled with dirty clothing and loudly demanding medical attention. His demands were not coherent, but they were clear. He claimed to have walked a considerable distance to reach the hospital, and he wanted the hospital to take care of him. The distance varied from telling to telling ¡ª ten miles, fifteen miles, twenty-five. He either had or had not spent some nights sleeping in fields or by the side of the road. His general condition and the way he smelled suggested that he had been wandering the countryside and sleeping rough for perhaps a week. If he had once had a wallet, he had lost it on his journey. La Riviere General cleaned him up, fed him, gave him a bed, and tried to extract a history. Most of his statements trailed off into disjointed babble, but in the absence of any documents, at least these facts seemed reliable: Burnside had been a carpenter, framer, and plasterer in the area for many years, working for himself and general contractors. An aunt who lived in the town of Blair had given him a room.
He had walked the eighteen miles from Blair to La Riviere, then? No, he had started his walk somewhere else, he could not remember where, but it was ten miles away, no, twenty-five miles away, some town, and the people in that town were no-good jackass asswipes. What was the name of his aunt? Althea Burnside. What were her address and telephone number? No idea, couldn't remember. Did his aunt have a job of any kind? Yes, she was a full-time jackass asswipe. But she had permitted him to live in her house? Who? Permitted what? Charles Burnside needed no one's permission, he did what he damn well wanted. Had his aunt ordered him out of her house? Who are you talking about, you jackass asshole?
The admitting M. D. entered an initial diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, pending the results of various tests, and the social worker got on the telephone and requested the address and telephone number of an Althea Burnside currently residing in Blair. The telephone company reported no listing for a person of that name in Blair, nor was she listed in Ettrick, Cochrane, Fountain, Sparta, Onalaska, Arden, La Riviere, or any other of the towns and cities within a fifty-mile radius. Widening her net, the social worker consulted the Records Office and the departments of Social Security, Motor Vehicle License, and Taxation for information about Althea and Charles Burnside. Of the two Altheas that popped up out of the system, one owned a diner in Butternut, far to the north of the state, and the other was a black woman who worked in a Milwaukee day-care center. Neither had any connection to the man in La Riviere General. The Charles Burnsides located by the records search were not the social worker's Charles Burnside. Althea seemed not to exist. Charles, it seemed, was one of those elusive people who go through life without ever paying taxes, registering to vote, applying for a Social Security card, opening a bank account, joining the armed forces, getting a driver's license, or spending a couple of seasons at the state farm.
Another round of telephone calls resulted in the elusive Charles Burnside's classification as a ward of the county and his admission to the Maxton Elder Care Facility until accommodation could be found at the state hospital in Whitehall. The ambulance conveyed Burnside to Max-ton's at the expense of the generous public, and grumpy Chipper slammed him into Daisy wing. Six weeks later, a bed opened up in a ward at the state hospital. Chipper received the telephone call a few minutes after the day's mail brought him a check, drawn by an Althea Burnside on a bank in De Pere, for Charles Burnside's maintenance at his facility. Althea Burnside's address was a De Pere post office box. When the state hospital called, Chipper announced that in the spirit of civic duty he would be happy to continue Mr. Burnside's status at Max-ton Elder Care. The old fellow had just become his favorite patient. Without putting Chipper through any of the usual shenanigans, Burny had doubled his contribution to the income stream.
For the next six years, the old man slid relentlessly into the darkness of Alzheimer's. If he was faking, he gave a brilliant performance. Down he went, through the descending way stations of incontinence, incoherence, frequent outbursts of anger, loss of memory, loss of the ability to feed himself, loss of personality. He dwindled into infancy, then into vacuity, and spent his days strapped into a wheelchair. Chipper mourned the inevitable loss of a uniquely cooperative patient. Then, in the summer of the year before these events, the amazing resuscitation occurred. Animation returned to Burny's slack face, and he began to utter vehement nonsense syllables. Abbalah! Gorg! Munshun! Gorg! He wanted to feed himself, he wanted to exercise his legs, to stagger around and re-acquaint himself with his surroundings. Within a week, he was using English words to insist on wearing his own clothes and going to the bathroom by himself. He put on weight, gained strength, once again became a nuisance. Now, often in the same d
ay, he passes back and forth between late-stage Alzheimer's lifelessness and a guarded, gleaming surliness so healthy in a man of eighty-five it might be called robust. Burny is like a man who went to Lourdes and experienced a cure but left before it was complete. For Chipper, a miracle is a miracle. As long as the old creep stays alive, who cares if he is wandering the grounds or drooping against the restraining strap in his wheelchair?
We move closer. We try to ignore the stench. We want to see what we can glean from the face of this curious fellow. It was never a pretty face, and now the skin is gray and the cheeks are sunken potholes. Prominent blue veins wind over the gray scalp, spotted as a plover's egg. The rubbery-looking nose hooks slightly to the right, which adds to the impression of slyness and concealment. The wormy lips curl in a disquieting smile ¡ª the smile of an arsonist contemplating a burning building ¡ª that may after all be merely a grimace.
Here is a true American loner, an internal vagrant, a creature of shabby rooms and cheap diners, of aimless journeys resentfully taken, a collector of wounds and injuries lovingly fingered and refingered. Here is a spy with no cause higher than himself. Burny's real name is Carl Bierstone, and under this name he conducted, in Chicago, from his mid-twenties until the age of forty-six, a secret rampage, an unofficial war, during which he committed wretched deeds for the sake of the pleasures they afforded him. Carl Bierstone is Burny's great secret, for he cannot allow anyone to know that this former incarnation, this earlier self, still lives inside his skin. Carl Bierstone's awful pleasures, his foul toys, are also Burny's, and he must keep them hidden in the darkness, where only he can find them.
So is that the answer to Chipper's miracle? That Carl Bierstone found a way to creep out through a seam in Burny's zombiedom and assume control of the foundering ship? The human soul contains an infinity of rooms, after all, some of them vast, some no bigger than a broom closet, some locked, some few imbued with a radiant light. We bow closer to the veiny scalp, the wandering nose, the wire-brush eyebrows; we lean deeper into the stink to examine those interesting eyes. They are like black neon; they glitter like moonlight on a sodden riverbank. All in all, they look un-settlingly gleeful, but not particularly human. Not much help here.
Burny's lips move: he is still smiling, if you can call that rictus a smile, but he has begun to whisper. What is he saying?
. . . dey are gowering in their bloody holes and govering their eyes, dey are whimbering in derror, my boor loss babbies No, no, dat won't help, will it? Ah, zee de engynes, yezz, oh dose beeyoodiful beeyoodiful engynes, whad a zight, the beeyoodiful engynes againzt de vire, how they churrn, how dey churrn and burrn I zee a hole, yez yez dere id iz oho zo brighd around de etches zo folded back . . .
Carl Bierstone may be reporting in, but his babble is not of much help. Let us follow the direction of Burny's mud-glitter gaze in hopes that it might give us a hint as to what has so excited the old boy. Aroused, too, as we observe from the shape beneath the sheet. He and Chipper seem to be in sync here, since both are standing at the ready, except that instead of the benefit of Rebecca Vilas's expert attentions, Burny's only stimulation is the view through his window.
The view hardly measures up to Ms. Vilas. Head slightly elevated upon a pillow, Charles Burnside looks raptly out over a brief expanse of lawn to a row of maple trees at the beginning of an extensive woods. Farther back tower the great, leafy heads of oaks. A few birch trunks shine candlelike in the inner darkness. From the height of the oaks and the variety of the trees, we know that we are regarding a remnant of the great climax forest that once blanketed this entire part of the country. Like all of the ancient forest's traces, the woods extending north and east from Maxton's speak of profound mysteries in a voice nearly too deep to be heard. Beneath its green canopy, time and serenity embrace bloodshed and death; violence roils on unseen, constantly, absorbed into every aspect of a hushed landscape that never pauses but moves with glacial lack of haste. The spangled, yielding floor covers millions of scattered bones in layer upon layer;all that grows and thrives here thrives on rot. Worlds within worlds churn, and great, systematic universes hum side by side, each ignorantly bringing abundance and catastrophe upon its unguessed-at neighbors.
Does Burny contemplate these woods, is he enlivened by what he sees in them? Or, for that matter, is he in fact still asleep, and does Carl Bierstone caper behind Charles Burnside's peculiar eyes?
Burny whispers, Fogzes down fogzhulls, radz in radhulls, hyenaz over embdy stomachs wail, oho aha dis iz mozt-mozt gladzome my frenz, more an more de liddle wunz drudge drudge drudge oho on bledding foodzies . . .
Let's blow this pop stand, okay?
Let's sail away from old Burny's ugly mouth ¡ª enough is enough. Let us seek the fresh air and fly north, over the woods. Foxes down foxholes and rats in ratholes may be wailing, true, that's how it works, but we are not about to find any starving hyenas in western Wisconsin. Hyenas are always hungry anyhow. No one feels sorry for them, either. You'd have to be a real bleeding heart to pity a creature that does nothing but skulk around the periphery of other species until the moment when, grinning and chuckling, it can plunder their leftovers. Out we go, right through the roof.
East of Maxton's, the woods carpet the ground for something like a mile or two before a narrow dirt road curves in from Highway 35 like a careless parting in a thick head of hair. The woods continue for another hundred yards or so, then yield to a thirty-year-old housing development consisting of two streets. Basketball hoops, backyard swing sets, tricycles, bicycles, and vehicles by Fisher-Price clutter the driveways of the modest houses on Schubert and Gale. The children who will make use of them lie abed, dreaming of cotton candy, puppy dogs, home runs, excursions to distant territories, and other delightful infinitudes; also asleep are their anxious parents, doomed to become even more so after reading Wendell Green's contribution to the front page of the day's Herald.
Something catches our eye ¡ª that narrow dirt road curving into the woods from Highway 35's straightaway. More a lane than an actual road, its air of privacy seems at odds with its apparent uselessness. The lane loops off into the woods and, three-fourths of a mile later, comes to an end. What is its point, what is it for? From our height above the earth, the track resembles a faint line sketched by a No. 4 pencil ¡ª you practically need an eagle's eye to see it at all ¡ª but someone went to considerable effort to draw this line through the woods. Trees had to be cut and cleared, stumps to be pried from the ground. If one man did it, the work would have taken months of sweaty, muscle-straining labor. The result of all that inhuman effort has the remarkable property of concealing itself, of evading the eye, so that it fades away if attention wanders, and must be located again. We might think of dwarfs and secret dwarf mines, the path to a dragon's hidden cache of gold ¡ª a treasure so safeguarded that access to it has been camouflaged by a magic spell. No, dwarf mines, dragon treasures, and magic spells are too childish, but when we drop down for a closer examination, we see that a weathered NO TRESPASSING sign stands at the beginning of the lane, proof that something is being guarded, even if it is merely privacy.
Having noticed the sign, we look again at the end of the lane. In the darkness under the trees down there, one area seems murkier than the rest. Even as it shrinks back into the gloom, this area possesses an unnatural solidity that distinguishes it from the surrounding trees. Aha oho, we say to ourselves in an echo of Burny's gibberish, what have we here, a wall of some kind? It seems that featureless. When we reach the midpoint in the curve of the lane, a triangular section of darkness all but obscured by the treetops abruptly defines itself as a peaked roof. Not until we are nearly upon it does the entire structure move into definition as a three-story wooden house, oddly shambling in structure, with a sagging front porch. This house has clearly stood empty for a long time, and after taking in its eccentricity, the first thing we notice is its inhospitability to new tenants. A second NO TRESPASSING sign, leaning sideways at an improb
able angle against a newel post, merely underlines the impression given by the building itself.
The peaked roof covers only the central section. To the left, a two-story extension retreats back into the woods. On the right, the building sprouts additions like outsized sheds, more like growths than afterthoughts. In both senses of the word, the building looks unbalanced: an off-kilter mind conceived it, then relentlessly brought it into off-center being. The intractable result deflects inquiry and resists interpretation. An odd, monolithic invulnerability emanates from the bricks and boards, despite the damage done by time and weather. Obviously built in search of seclusion, if not isolation, the house seems still to demand them.
Oddest of all, from our vantage point the house appears to have been painted a uniform black ¡ª not only the boards, but every inch of the exterior, the porch, the trim, the rain gutters, even the windows. Black, from top to bottom. And that cannot be possible; in this guileless, good-hearted corner of the world, not even the most crazily misanthropic builder would turn his house into its own shadow. We float down to just above ground level and move nearer along the narrow lane . . .
When we come close enough for reliable judgment, which is uncomfortably close, we find that misanthropy can go further than we had supposed. The house is not black now, but it used to be. What it has faded into makes us feel that we might have been too critical about the original color. The house has become the leaden gray-black of thunderheads and dismal seas and the hulls of wrecked ships. Black would be preferable to this utter lifelessness.
We may be certain that very few of the adults who live in the nearby development, or any adults in French Landing or the surrounding towns, have defied the admonition on 35 and ventured up the narrow lane. Almost none so much as notice the sign anymore; none of them know of the existence of the black house. We can be just as certain, however, that a number of their children have explored the lane, and that some of those children wandered far enough to come upon the house. They would have seen it in a way their parents could not, and what they saw would have sent them racing back toward the highway.
The black house seems as out of place in western Wisconsin as a skyscraper or a moated palace. In fact, the black house would be an anomaly anywhere in our world, except perhaps as a "Haunted Mansion," a "Castle of Terrors," in an amusement park, where its capacity to repel ticket buyers would put it out of business within a week. Yet in one specific way it might remind us of the dim buildings along the ascent of Chase Street into respectability from the riverbank and Nailhouse Row. The shabby Nelson Hotel, the obscure tavern, the shoe store, and the others, marked with the horizontal stripe drawn by the river's grease pencil, share the same eerie, dreamlike, half-unreal flavor that saturates the black house.
At this moment in our progress ¡ª and through everything that follows ¡ª we would do well to remember that this strange flavor of the dreamlike and slightly unnatural is characteristic of borderlands. It can be detected in every seam between one specific territory and another, however significant or insignificant the border in question. Borderlands places are different from other places; they are borderish.
Say you happen to be driving for the first time through a semirural section of Oostler County in your home state, on your way to visit a recently divorced friend of the opposite sex who has abruptly and, you think, unwisely decamped to a small town in adjacent Orelost County. On the passenger seat beside you, atop a picnic basket containing two bottles of a superior white Bordeaux held tightly in place by various gourmet goodies in exquisite little containers, lies a map carefully folded to expose the relevant area. You may not know your exact location, but you are on the right road and making good time.
Gradually, the landscape alters. The road veers around a nonexistent berm, then begins winding through inexplicable curves; on either side, the trees slouch; beneath their twisted boughs, the intermittent houses grow smaller and seedier. Ahead, a three-legged dog squirms through a hedge and barrels snarling toward your right front tire. A crone wearing a teensy straw hat and what appears to be a shroud glances up red-eyed from a listing porch swing. Two front yards along, a little girl costumed in dirty pink gauze and a foil crown flaps a glittery, star-headed wand over a heap of burning tires. Then a rectangular placard bearing the legend WELCOME TO ORELOST COUNTY glides into view. Soon the trees improve their posture and the road straightens out. Released from anxieties barely noticed until they were gone, you nudge the accelerator and hasten toward your needy friend.
Borderlands taste of unruliness and distortion. The grotesque, the unpredictable, and the lawless take root in them and luxuriate. The central borderlands flavor is of slippage. And while we are in a setting of wondrous natural beauty, we have also been traveling over a natural borderland, delineated by a great river and defined by other, lesser rivers, wide glacial moraines, limestone cliffs, and valleys that remain invisible, like the black house, until you turn the right corner and meet them face to face.
Have you ever seen a furious old wreck in worn-out clothes who pushes an empty shopping cart down deserted streets and rants about a "fushing feef "? Sometimes he wears a baseball cap, sometimes a pair of sunglasses with one cracked lens.
Have you ever moved frightened into a doorway and watched a soldierly man with a zigzag lightning-bolt scar on one side of his face storm into a drunken mob and discover, lying spread-eagled in death on the ground, a boy, his head smashed and his pockets turned out? Have you seen the anger and the pity blaze in that man's mutilated face?
These are signs of slippage.
Another lies concealed below us on the outskirts of French Landing, and despite the terror and heartbreak that surround this sign, we have no choice but to stand in witness before it. By our witness, we shall do it honor, to the measure of our individual capabilities; by being witnessed, by offering its testimony to our mute gaze, it will repay us in measure far greater.
We are back in midair, and spread out ¡ª we could say, spread-eagled out ¡ª beneath us French County sprawls like a topographical map. The morning sunlight, stronger now, glows on green rectangular fields and dazzles off the lightning rods rising from the tops of barns. The roads look clean. Molten pools of light shine from the tops of the few cars drifting toward town along the edges of the fields. Holsteins nudge pasture gates, ready for the confinement of their stanchions and the morning's date with the milking machine.
At a safe distance from the black house, which has already given us an excellent example of slippage, we are gliding eastward, crossing the long straight ribbon of Eleventh Street and beginning a journey into a transitional area of scattered houses and small businesses before Highway 35 cuts through actual farmland. The 7-Eleven slips by, and the VFW hall, where the flagpole will not display Old Glory for another forty-five minutes. In one of the houses set back from the road, a woman named Wanda Kinderling, the wife of Thornberg Kinderling, a wicked and foolish man serving a life sentence in a California prison, awakens, eyes the level of the vodka in the bottle on her bedside table, and decides to postpone breakfast for another hour. Fifty yards along, gleaming tractors in military rows face the giant steel-and-glass bubble of Ted Goltz's farm-implement dealership, French County Farm Equipment, where a decent, troubled husband and father named Fred Marshall, whom we shall be meeting before long, will soon report for work.
Beyond the showy glass bubble and the asphalt sea of Goltz's parking lot, a half mile of stony, long-neglected field eventually degenerates into bare earth and spindly weeds. At the end of a long, overgrown turn-in, what seems to be a pile of rotting lumber stands between an old shed and an antique gas pump. This is our destination. We glide toward the earth. The heap of lumber resolves into a leaning, dilapidated structure on the verge of collapse. An old tin Coca-Cola sign pocked with bullet holes tilts against the front of the building. Beer cans and the milkweed of old cigarette filters litter the scrubby ground. From within comes the steady, somnolent buzz of a great m
any flies. We wish to retreat into the cleansing air and depart. The black house was pretty bad; in fact, it was terrible, but this . . . this is going to be worse.
One secondary definition of slippage is: the feeling that things in general have just gotten, or very shortly will get, worse.
The ruined boxcar-shaped shack before us used to house a comically ill-run and unsanitary establishment called Ed's Eats & Dawgs. From behind an eternally messy counter, a chortling 350-pound mass of blubber named Ed Gilbertson once served up greasy, overdone hamburgers, baloney-and-mayonnaise sandwiches ornamented with black thumb-prints, and oozing ice-cream cones to a small, undiscriminating clientele, mostly local children who arrived on bicycles. Now long deceased, Ed was one of the numerous uncles of French Landing's chief of police, Dale Gilbertson, and a good-hearted slob and dimwit of great local renown. His cook's apron was of an indescribable filthiness; the state of his hands and fingernails would have brought any visiting health inspector to the verge of nausea; his utensils might as well have been cleaned by cats. Immediately behind the counter, tubs of melting ice cream cooked in the heat from the crusted griddle. Overhead, limp flypaper ribbons hung invisible within the fur of a thousand fly corpses. The unlovely truth is that for decades Ed's Eats permitted generation upon generation of microbes and germs to multiply unchecked, swarming from floor, counter, and griddle ¡ª not hesitating to colonize Ed himself! ¡ª to spatula, fork, and the unwashed ice-cream scoop, thence into the horrible food, finally into the mouths and guts of the kids who ate that stuff, plus those of the occasional mother.
Remarkably, no one ever died from eating at Ed's, and after a long-overdue heart attack felled its proprietor one day when he mounted a stool for the purpose of finally tacking up a dozen new strips of flypaper, nobody had the heart to raze his little shack and clear away the rubble. For twenty-five years, under the shelter of darkness its rotting shell has welcomed romantic teenage couples, as well as gatherings of boys and girls in need of a secluded place to investigate for the first time in recorded history, or so it seemed to them, the liberation of drunkenness.
The rapt buzzing of the flies tells us that whatever we might be about to witness within this ruin will be neither a pair of spent young lovers nor a few silly, passed-out kids. That soft, greedy uproar, inaudible from the road, declares the presence of ultimate things. We could say that it represents a kind of portal.
We enter. Mild sunlight filtering in through gaps in the eastern wall and the battered roof paints luminous streaks across the gritty floor. Feathers, dust, eddy and stir over animal tracks and the dim impressions left by many long-gone shoes. Threadbare army-surplus blankets speckled with mold lie crumpled against the wall to our left; a few feet away, discarded beer cans and flattened cigarette ends surround a kerosene-burning hurricane lamp with a cracked glass housing. The sunlight lays warm stripes over crisp footprints advancing in a wide curve around the remains of Ed's appalling counter and into the vacancy formerly occupied by the stove, a sink, and a rank of storage shelves. There, in what once was Ed's sacred domain, the footprints vanish. Some ferocious activity has scattered the dust and grit, and something that is not an old army blanket, though we wish it were, lies disarrayed against the rear wall, half in, half out of a dark, irregular pool of tacky liquid. Delirious flies hover and settle upon the dark pool. In the far corner, a rust-colored mongrel with quill-like hair gets its teeth into the knuckle of meat and bone protruding from the white object held between its front paws. The white object is a running shoe, a sneaker. A New Balance sneaker, to be exact. To be more exact, a child's New Balance sneaker, size 5.
We want to invoke our capacity for flight and get the hell out of here. We want to float through the unresisting roof, to regain the harmless air, but we cannot, we must bear witness. An ugly dog is chewing on a child's severed foot while making every effort to extract the foot from the white New Balance sneaker. The mongrel's scrawny back arches down and extends, the quilled shoulders and narrow head drop, the bony front legs rigidly clamp the prize, tug tug tug, but the sneaker's laces are tied ¡ª too bad for the mutt.