Burning Violin #12 - Katorga

The dog was going to die and knew it. He had that distant and sad look in his eyes that let everyone know that the fighting part was done, now was the part for finding a cave away from the eyes of the pack and laying his head down on his paws for one last long sleep. Doug knew it, and although he was the sort of veterinarian to be a little too sunny sometimes with his prognosis - optimism not delusion, he insisted to himself - he had made it more than clear to the owner.

The owner was the problem.

"Petey's going to be fine, you'll see doc, you'll see." The owner was saying, not for the first time.

Doug shook his head and tried to pull Mr. Anderson's hands away from Petey's fur where they dug painful furrows that Petey was too kind to protest. "Mr. Anderson, we've been through this. Petey's organs are shutting down. There's nothing we can do to fix this. He is old, he's had a good life, but there's not any more we can do."

Mr. Anderson shook his head some more and Doug sighed silently. Doug left the exam room through the sliding wooden door and disappeared into the small maze of equipment and stacked boxes to emerge through the back door of reception.

"Is Petey the last one we've got today?" Doug asked the receptionist.

Roberta was the kind of thin twenty-year old who would be a hundred pounds overweight once her teenage metabolism finally ground to a halt. She gulped at her ubiquitous Diet Coke and continued playing minesweeper. Doug grimaced as she lost the game, lifting his hand to stop her a moment too late. She immediately opened a new game and clicked randomly until she lost again. Doug wondered, not for the first time, if she even knew that the game had rules other than luck. An economy sized bag of Cheetos disgorged half its puffs across the desk and onto Petey's paperwork. One pink ear-bud headphone dangled over Roberta's shoulder, blaring some remixed club electronica in tinny tones.

Doug began to ask again, thinking she hadn't heard, but Roberta nodded impatiently and yanked out Petey's stack of paperwork from underneath the Cheetos, handing it to him without noticing either the crusty fingerprints she left or the glare that Doug leveled at her back.

"Next mutt's tomorrow at ten, Dr. B," Roberta called out as if he were in the next zip code. "Robbie, I think." She crammed half a dozen puffs past her teeth and bit down with a rumbling crunch while she started minesweeper and lost again.

"Bobbie," Doug corrected, but Roberta only shrugged.

Mr. Anderson entered reception with Petey in tow, who walked with an awkward gait that alternated between standing and bolting forward two or three steps while his legs held out. Deterioration of the brain stem due to complications from an old injury had given Petey the shakes and the steroids didn't do much to help. Petey looked up at Doug, grinning through his panting - it was chronic at this point - and waited for the treat Doug had been tossing to him on his way out for the last six years. Doug obliged and winced as Petey's legs collapsed under him as he lunged forward for the treat, his jaw bouncing hard off the tile and the treat skittering away to safety under a cabinet. Roberta finished another game of minesweeper and then handed Mr. Anderson a sheet of paper.

"That will be two hundred fifty-seven dollars, will you be paying with cash or credit?" Roberta asked in a squirt of words that left her mouth almost as one syllable.

Mr. Anderson stared at her for a moment, and then seemed to find some iron in his spine. "Two hundred fifty bucks? You didn't do anything. You just told me my dog is going to die. What the hell did you do for two hundred and fifty bucks?"

"Sir," Roberta started, but Doug brought a quick hand down on her shoulder.

"Mr. Anderson, it's the listed expense. It's not something I can do anything about, as you know." Doug said and frowned. "If it was up to me, there'd be no charge, but you know I can't do that."

"Should report you," Mr. Anderson ranted. "That's what I should do. Let them know that you're racketeering in here. Turning a profit on the people's backs, that's what you're doing. Be in the next black van, you would."

Doug held up his hands, not quite panicking but feeling it rumbling up anyway. "Mr. Anderson. I swear to you, I have never charged you anything but the legal requirements. I'm a good Hegemonist just like you. A party man for ten years next week." He said the last with pride and a smile. "Why don't you just swipe your card and take Petey home. Give him some hamburger if he'll eat. Take care of your dog."

Mr. Anderson nodded, paused, asked "are you sure you can't do anything?" one more time and then sighed and waved his right index finger over the scanner mounted on the desk. It beeped, churned away for a long minute like an old man trying to remember whether he had grandkids or not and finally beeped twice to confirm the transaction had gone through. He pulled Petey through the door and disappeared into the grey afternoon. Doug sighed.

"Roberta, can you make the arrangements so that Petey can be disposed of if Mr. Anderson calls back and needs the service?" Doug asked.

"Sure thing, Dr. B," Rebecca said and made no move to minimize minesweeper.

Doug sighed again and went out into the little lobby across from Roberta's desk. He examined the bulletin board, just looking for something to distract his eyes. Rattlesnake vaccines, puppy training classes at the park down the street, order forms for indestructible rubber toys and anti-coprophagia tablets (now in wintermint!) lined the wall, just the normal vet clinic bulletin board kit. A photograph of the First Citizen printed en masse on high gloss and distributed with all such kits stared down at Doug, beaming and proud and defiant, with that wrinkling around his eyes that a legion of designers had probably decided implied a fatherly affection. First among equals! Doug pushed a spare pushpin through Joseph Steel's right eye and felt a little thrill of misbehavior. He cleared his throat, pulled the pin out and stuck it back in the wall. He caught Roberta looking at him.

"Damned kids," Doug muttered. "Don't have anything better to do than vandalize public property."

"Hey Dr. B," Roberta said in her nice voice. It was different from her indifferent normal voice because it meant she wanted something. "Have you thought about hiring on my friend Susie part time like we talked about?"

"I don't have the money," Doug said. "I told you that."

Roberta shrugged. "Well, I enter all the billing, and we're doing really good lately, all this income, and," she added the dramatic sigh, "all this work to do, I think we need the help."

"Roberta, we're barely scraping by, you know that," Doug said. "I'm lucky I haven't had to cut back your hours." He regretted it as soon as he said it, and Roberta's face hardened.

"Well, I wouldn't want you to have to cut back your hours, of course." She snapped. "I have rights, you know."

"Yes, yes, I know, Roberta, believe me I know." Doug excused himself to his office in the back and collapsed into a chair to sigh. He could not find a glass, so he filled a beaker to the brim from a bottle of delightful merlot that was flown in from France each week. Doug had six stashed beneath his desk.

He toasted the black and white candid photo of a dog running on the beach, "Rough day here Sam, how's heaven treating you?" Doug asked his long dead dog and drained the two hundred milliliter beaker. "Because this world bites."

Doug frowned in honest wonder. "Now why would I say that?"