Stud Rites (24 page)

”No,” she grumbled. ”More’s the pity. The more I look at the thing, the more I hate the sight of it.”

”Betty? I hate to tell you, but he’s lost a big patch of fur. Down here by the base of his tail, he’s shed to bare, uh, skin.”

”Oh, that’s nothing. That happened while he was on his little adventure. I meant to touch him up last night. We’ll have to do it before the auction. They’ll have glue back there somewhere at the registration desk.” Replying to my raised eyebrows, she added, ”Fur is fur. Rowdy’s will do just fine.”

”Speaking of—”

”Before you dash off, Holly, I want to remind you to keep your eyes open for this Thacker woman. I am certainly looking forward to having a word or two—”

”We don’t know what she looks like!” I protested. Betty brushed off my objection. ”Oh, you’ll know her right away. The tone here isn’t always what we might wish,” she pronounced, glaring at the lamp.

”Witness that ridiculous episode last night! But no one here is outright
slovenly
.”

To get embroiled in a discussion of whether puppy-mill operators were necesarily slovenly seemed a perilous exercise. So I nodded compliantly and, reminding Betty that I’d brought her sandwich, took off for the grooming tent. Despite the schedule, the judging, I should note, was not about to start any second. Back from her lunch break, Mikki Muldoon was at the judge’s table, where she was conferring with her stewards while securing the shoulder strap of her purse to the judge’s chair, but a couple of show-committee members had just begun to embellish the arborlike gate to the ring with a long, thick garland woven from what must have been thousands of delicate pink and white flowers. The late Elsa Van Dine had sent Freida a special donation for flowers, I recalled Betty saying. The donation must have been very generous indeed.

There were, of course, no flowers in the grooming tent. It was a communal backstage dressing room forced to accommodate a big cast of stars and dressers. Portable tables and commodious malamute-size crates stacked on top of each other partitioned the space into a maze of open rooms, and everywhere were crate dollies, tack boxes, canvas bags of gear, heavy-duty extension cords, and those forced-air dryers that look like old-fashioned canister vacuum cleaners and sound like peaks in hell on the verge of volcanic eruption. The roar of the motors was so loud that I could all but see, taste, and smell the sound, but as handlers led their dogs out, the noise level diminished greatly, and what remained was the miasma of no-rinse shampoo, grooming spray, and clean, damp dog, the fervent odor of my own religion.

Faith Barlow was set up in a particularly jam-packed spot near a canvas wall about halfway down the tent. The table on which Rowdy stood was so close to the one that supported Z-Rocks that in going over Rowdy with smooth, soothing strokes of her finishing brush, Faith came close to grooming Timmy Oliver as well. I’d known Faith for years. She looked the same as ever: same dimples, perfect skin, wavy hair in apparently permanent transition from blond to silver, same neat, conservative, multipocketed suits or dresses in colors chosen to camouflage dog hair.

But it wasn’t a people show, was it? And I
am
a dog writer. Z-Rocks’s coat, after what must have been wrist-spraining brushing, still retained a vaguely dead look. At the risk of making myself obnoxious by bragging about Rowdy, let me just remark in passing on the shiny, stand-off perfection of his coat, the gleam of vigor and health in his ideally dark eyes, the visibly and palpably well-conditioned tone of his musculature, and the indefinable yet unmistakable air of top-dog self-confidence radiated by this miraculous incarnation of the official standard of the Alaskan malamute. In truth, the dog was so beautiful that I could hardly believe he belonged to me. And he was just standing there on the grooming table wagging his tail. You haven’t seen Rowdy until you’ve seen him move.

”Timmy Oliver!” Faith’s voice was sharp. ”Get that bottle off that table before I open it and pour the whole mess down your throat!”

Oblivious to Faith and Z-Rocks, Timmy Oliver was making his usual sales pitch for Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote to Finn Adams, who was ignoring Timmy to deliver his usual R.T.I. spiel to Duke Sylvia, who had Ironman up on the grooming table beyond Timmy’s. I’d seen show photos of Ironman before, but in the flesh and bone and steel-gray coat, the dog was bigger and more imposing than I’d pictured him. To my eye, backed by the official breed standard, Ironman was too big; and his small, rather light eyes made him look strangely cold and frightening. The standard, of course, calls for dark eyes, the darker the better—Rowdy’s eyes —and the correct facial expression is warm, sweet, and open, not icy or steely: nothing like Ironman’s and everything like you-know-who’s. Ironman was impressive, though. He had the kind of gorgeous coat that results from a combination of good genes, robust health, excellent diet, and regular grooming, and is never obtained just by dosing a dog with any of those magic-bullet powders, tablets, or liquids, including that stupid Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote, a large glass bottle of which now sat prominently on Z-Rocks’s grooming table.

To promote his product, Timmy had set the bottle next to a bitch with the kind of ready-to-shed coat that the glop was supposed to prevent. As a time to try to sell Duke on R.T.I.’s services, Finn had chosen a moment when Duke was eager to get Ironman off the grooming table, past Finn, out of the tent, and into the ring. In jest, I assume, Duke told Finn that what Ironman liked was insemination without artifice, thank you; and furthermore, in Duke’s experience, after people went to the trouble of freezing semen, they hardly ever used it anyway. Take Comet’s. Why, on three separate occasions, he himself had taken Comet to—

Catching sight of Leah, Duke broke off. In her flower-print dress, Leah could have passed for thirteen. Dog people speak with wholesome frankness about absolutely everything, but we occasionally remember to censor ourselves in front of other people’s children. After kneeling by Kimi’s crate to treat her to torn-up bits of steak sandwich, Leah had startled Duke by suddenly rising.

”Don’t let me stop you,” Leah told him.

But Duke took advantage of the interruption to get Ironman off the table. As Duke led the dog away, Timmy Oliver resumed his effort to convince Finn Adams that that damned food supplement would make an ideal addition to R.T.I.’s product line. Gentleman that he’d been reared to be, Finn was doing his best to get out of the way of the handlers and dogs heading out of the crowded tent—he obviously wanted to join them— but Timmy had scooped up the bottle of Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote and was shoving it in Finn’s face.

In the meantime, Faith had removed her grooming coat and was stocking the pockets of her gray wool blazer with bait, stashing a comb and a plastic spray bottle in her skirt pockets, and otherwise preparing to earn her fee by getting Rowdy into the ring on time. Attentive to the familiar cues, free of the grooming noose, Rowdy shook himself all over. The dog is a born performer. I stepped up to him, smacked my lips, and got a kiss. ”Hey, big boy,” I whispered in his ear. ”Go out there and wipe the floor with them.” Then I got out of Faith’s way.

Faith showed none of Rowdy’s extroverted energy. On the contrary, as she busied herself with last-minute details, her face wore an expression of cultivated composure. Tightening her grip on Rowdy’s lead, she smiled at me, then at him. Snapping her fingers and gesturing to Rowdy to get his ninety pounds off the low table and onto the blacktop, she told him, ”Okay! Let’s go, Buster!”

Just as the Disobedience Champion of the Western World was about to do exactly as he was told, Finn Adams made his escape, and Timmy Oliver finally put down the glass bottle and got a grip on Z-Rocks. As he lifted her, her tail swept the glass bottle off the edge of the grooming table, where that stupid Timmy had left it, and sent it crashing down. I have never blamed Z-Rocks. Or Faith, either. She’d warned Timmy about that bottle, and until a second earlier, it hadn’t been sitting on the table where it could tumble down and smash to pieces. And Rowdy? When his feet left his grooming table, he had no idea that in the second before he landed, the Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote would get knocked to the blacktop.

I suppose that if the bottle had shattered into hundreds of tiny fragments, Rowdy might have escaped unharmed. Maybe, just maybe, fine shards of glass would not have penetrated the thick leather of Rowdy’s pads. As it was, the power of Rowdy’s descent drove his left front foot into a thick chunk of jagged glass, and almost immediately, his blood flowed into the foul-smell-ing brown pools of Timmy Oliver’s damned greasy snake oil.

To anyone who believes that show people treat dogs as nothing but objects, let me point out that Faith Barlow, a ferocious competitor, knelt in broken glass beside Rowdy, and that in her determination to spare him further injury, she shoved me aside, wrapped her arms under and around him, and, murmuring gently, managed to lift him straight up and back onto the grooming table.

Shaking their heads and calling out in sympathy, the exhibitors heading out of the tent took a safe route along the opposite side, and people who weren’t handling dogs scurried around cleaning up and offering help. Timmy Oliver, who hadn’t removed poor Z-Rocks from the glass-strewn blacktop, made abortive efforts to speak, but the mere sound of his voice inflamed Faith, who briefly raised her head and snapped, ”I am telling you
once,
Timmy Oliver. You get yourself and your bitch out of here before you end up hurting her, too. There’s broken glass scattered all over. Now, you pick her up and carry her, and don’t put her down until you’re out of this tent, and the next time you lay eyes on me, you turn in the opposite direction and run, because I never intend to look at your ugly face again, and if I see it, I intend to do something about it!”

I did not see Timmy leave. My eyes, my hands, too, were on Rowdy. A dog of another breed, maybe even another malamute, might have been whimpering and would have had a right to cry. A deep pad cut must be incredibly painful. This was not Rowdy’s first. The last time Rowdy’d had one, I hadn’t even realized that he was injured until we returned from a walk and he tracked blood all over the kitchen floor. He’d resisted my efforts to examine the wound. Now, unexpectedly hoisted back up on the grooming table, he wagged his tail and put his weight on all four feet. Oily brown splotches stained his forelegs. Blood seeped from his foot. Faith finally convinced him to raise it. With blood on her hands, she said, ”It’s way beyond me. We need—”

As if in reply, the little group of bystanders parted, and a tall, lean guy with green-blue eyes made his way calmly and purposefully toward Rowdy, who doubled the tempo of his tail wagging and sang a resounding peal of
woo-woo-woos.
Ignoring everyone but Rowdy, Steve Delaney moved immediately to him and, before examining the injury, wrapped gentle hands around Rowdy’s head, brought his face so close to Rowdy’s that the two rubbed foreheads, and spoke so softly that no one but Rowdy could hear him. Then Steve held out his hand, and Rowdy offered the injured paw.

Steve never hurries. I expected him to spend twenty minutes examining the wound before he uttered a word. I was wrong. After a glance, he lowered Rowdy’s paw and, still addressing Rowdy, said, ”Sorry, my friend. We’ll patch you up, but for today, you’re out of the running.”

M.D.s AREN’T the only M. Deities; they’re not the only ones who think they’re God. As Steve injected lidocaine and waited for the anesthetic to numb Rowdy’s paw, he kept explaining why it was impossible instantly to undo the damage and rush Rowdy into the ring before it was too late. The jagged glass had sliced like the blade of a knife; the injury was far too deep for Nexaband, a sort of sterile Super Glue that’s a miracle cure for superficial abrasions, but has to be used with care: Nexaband bonds skin to skin. Yes, imagine! My dogs and I are already as one. We don’t really want to be Siamese triplets.

Watching Steve remove supplies from his emergency kit—it’s actually a fishing bag from Sears— Rowdy’s fan club had downcast eyes and sour mouths. Prominent among the sourpusses was Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy of the Cambridge police, my next-door neighbor, who’d arrived with Steve. Not being a malamute Person, Steve, who has a shepherd and a pointer, had planned to come to the national only for Best of Breed.

Bringing Kevin with him had been more my plan than Steve’s, in fact, entirely mine, not that there’s any enmity or ambiguity—Steve is my lover, Kevin’s my friend —but if you kennel two alpha males in adjoining pens, you’re bound to hear a few rumbles. Although you’d never guess it to look at Kevin, who has an Irish-cop face and the build of a mastiff, he feels intimidated in situations he can’t control by the familiar expedient of putting everyone under arrest. In other words, he’s more at home at a bank heist than at a social gathering where he doesn’t speak the language and no one is likely to pull a gun. A dog show isn’t exactly one of those Cambridge high-brow dinner parties where the host and hostess prepare dessert at the table by flambeing the peeled and diced remains of underpublished guests who didn’t go to Harvard, but despite his affection for dogs, Kevin just isn’t a real dog person, and if I hadn’t intervened, he’d have stayed home. So in gratitude for the time he’d spent helping me run the dogs around Fresh Pond while listening to me blather about the national, I’d arranged to have him ride with Steve, who agreed to the plan only after, in a stroke of desperate mendacity, I promised him that Kevin would fix the hundreds of dollars’ worth of Cambridge parking tickets that stood between Steve’s and the renewal of its registration. But only, I cautioned, if Steve didn’t mention anything whatsoever about the matter to Kevin, who, in his own way, was really very shy and would be deeply embarrassed by even a hint of thanks.