Saving Gracie by Carol Bradley

For a small dog—she weighed just sixteen pounds—Dog 132 had more than her share of ailments. A skin infection riddled her patchy coat. Her ears were infected and filled with mucus. She had a case of dry eye so advanced it had left her half blind, and her teeth were almost completely decayed. Veltri prescribed antibiotics for her skin infection and daily drops for her raw, red eyes. For now, that would have to do.
    Bair fed the dogs again in the late afternoon before she left for the day. By the time she arrived for work the next morning, a fresh new odor of excrement permeated the boarding wing. The dogs’ coats were filthy and full of mats, and they smelled like sewer rats. Bath time could not come soon enough. Gwen Engler, the shelter’s groomer, was as eager as anyone to lather them up. Most of the dogs’ physical problems could be chalked up to plain and simple dirt, Engler believed. They were covered in it. They smelled unlike anything she had ever encountered: a combination of urine and feces, certainly, and something else besides. A uniquely awful funk .
    For months afterward, Engler savored the memories of how bedraggled the dogs looked the morning before their shampoos and how noticeably improved they looked after. She arrived early for the big job. It was doubtful any of the dogs had ever had a bath, and Engler wondered how they would respond to the billowing suds. Almost all of the dogs had skin infections. In addition, the Cavaliers all had piaderma, tiny red bumps that covered their legs like a heat rash. Instead of a simple lather and rinse, Engler needed to treat them with medicated shampoo and let it work it into their coats for a full ten minutes to flush the hair follicles.
    The groomer lined up the special shampoo on a counter next to the claw-foot tub where she had bathed hundreds of dogs over the past five years. She brought Wolf’s dogs back in twos, one under each arm. Dog 132 and her kennelmate were the second pair to go. When it came her turn, Dog 132 stood quietly while Engler worked the tingling suds into her itchy skin. Ten minutes of wet lather must have seemed an eternity, but Dog 132 didn’t budge. She seemed distant, detached, as if she were trying to block out the experience. As jets of warm water engulfed her, she stood immobile, frozen with apprehension the way Engler had seen other puppy mill dogs react. Some dogs would have thrashed about in the water. Not this dog. She didn’t even twitch. She was resigned to letting Engler do with her whatever needed doing. The groomer was struck by how little trouble the Cavalier gave her, and also how removed she seemed. For the duration of the bath, Engler spoke tenderly to the little dog, but not once did the Cavalier gaze up at her or swish her tail in response.
    Afterward, Engler toweled off Dog 132, placed her and her kennelmate in the same crate, and aimed an industrial-strength hair dryer at their damp coats. Neither Cavalier reacted one way or the other to their small confines or to the dryer’s roar.

    Groomer Gwen Engler gives Dog 132 a soothing bath at the Berks County Animal Rescue League. ( Susan Angstadt/Reading Eagle )
    It would be months before the ammonia-laced odor would disappear from her body for good, but for Dog 132, bath day marked a turning point. For the first time in years, the Cavalier had obtained some relief from the eye-stinging fumes. Tears welled in Bair’s eyes when Engler brought the silky-feeling dog back to her kennel. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t feel good,” Bair thought as the rest of the newly bathed dogs returned to their kennels.
    Their cleanliness was short-lived. Within a couple of days of their baths, the dogs reeked of excrement again. They thought nothing of eliminating where they lived, stepping in their own waste and, in the process, daubing fecal matter all over the floor, the walls, and themselves. “They don’t know any better,” Bair and her cohorts told themselves each