Stud Rites (6 page)

We’d saved Czar for last. Old and frail, he gamely tottered around the ring at the side of his owner, Lorraine. As Lorraine and Czar approached Freida to receive his sash and plaque, the announcer read my commentary. ”Anyone familiar with the history of the Alaskan malamute,” he announced, ”has heard stories of legendary lead dogs that unerringly followed the trail home through blinding blizzards. Ice-encrusted eyes frozen shut, those legendary dogs used what remained to them: their wonderful noses, their keen ears, their mental maps, the intelligence of this breed, the unmatched will to survive. In Czar, we see the living history of the Alaskan malamute. Because of bilateral detached retinas, Czar is completely blind; he spends all day, every day, as his own sightless lead dog.”

Too sappy? A lot of tissues. No airsickness bags. And no one, I thought, had guessed upon seeing him that Czar was blind. How did Czar end up with detached retinas? Another ordinary story: turned loose on a highway, hit by a car. Happens all the time.

AS THE SHOWCASE ENDED, at least four show people interrogated me about Frosty’s origins and remarked that he looked an awful lot like Sherri Ann Printz’s dogs. He looked like a lot of people’s dogs, I replied. No one wondered aloud about Cubby’s ancestry; no one saw Sherri Ann’s Pawprintz lines in his background.

Betty and I had been so busy that we’d forgotten to eat. We agreed to meet at the smaller of the hotel’s two restaurants, the Liliu Grill. She was involved in an intense discussion with the owners of one of the rescue dogs. She was going to walk the people to their car. My bladder was as full as my stomach was empty. On my way to the restaurant, I stopped in the public ladies’ room.

Serving as the principal toilet facility available to female patrons of the big restaurant in the Lagoon and to other women who weren’t staying at the hotel, the ladies’ room was only slightly smaller than the hotel lobby, with dozens of little chairs set at equal intervals along miles of countertop, so you could sit down to reapply your mascara; acres of mirror, so you could get your lipstick on straight and make sure your slip wasn’t showing; a dozen sinks, so you could have a choice of where to wash your hands; and a couch covered in beige vinyl, so you’d have somewhere to faint while waiting your turn at the stalls, of which there were four. And were all four occupied? Hah! Only a man would ask. I took my place at the end of the line of three young women, the first of whom, Crystal, was chatting to the other two, who must have been guests at the bride’s dinner. Crystal wore what looked like a gigantic baby dress, a smocked pink garment decorated with ruffles and lace. Her friends were thin and wore black. All three held drinks.

”And,” Crystal was telling her buddies, ”I go, ’Geez, Greg, a puppy! Whyn’t we think of that?’ and Mrs. Lofgren pipes up, ’Now, now, Crystal, dear’—she hates me; she just really hates me—’you’re forgetting that my baby boy Greggie’s allergic to
everything,
especially you!’ And—”

”Crystal, she did not!” shrieked one of the friends. ”She didn’t say ’especially you.’ ” After a pause, the friend added, ”Did she?”

”No,” admitted Crystal, ”but that’s what she meant. You should see how she looks at me! She gives me the evil eye. She must spend half her life watching
Rosemary’s Baby,
for God’s sake. Wait’ll she finds out it’s twins! She’s gonna go totally ballistic. The first thing that’s gonna come out of her mouth is, ’What! You mean, my Gregory did it
twice!’
”

Crystal and friends burst into screams that abated only when one of the stall doors opened. Handing her glass to one of the friends, Crystal said, ”Hold this for me?”

The friend took the glass, sniffed it, and said, ”Crystal, really! You know, you aren’t supposed to—” Crystal’s voice came from behind the closed door.

”Oh, yeah? Well, no doctor’s telling me I can’t celebrate my own wedding, okay? And don’t you dare tell—” The other two stalls freed up simultaneously. Crystal’s friends abandoned the three drinks on one of the counters and took their turns. I considered upending Crystal’s glass over one of the sinks and substituting tap water. Before I could act, however, she emerged from the stall. I entered. While I was inside, she told her friends about the husky in the lobby and all the other beautiful huskies, except that they weren’t really huskies, but malamutes, and what she really, really wanted for her most special wedding present was a beautiful little malamute puppy. Her friends told her that she was out of her mind. Besides, they said, she’d never talk Greg into it.

”Oh, yeah?” Crystal replied. ”How much you wanna bet?”

The smug note in her voice made me uneasy. Leaving the stall, I took a place at the sink next to the one where Crystal was, of all things, brushing her teeth. Unable to keep my own mouth shut, I said, ”You know, I couldn’t help overhearing. I thought you should know that there aren’t any puppies for sale here. You aren’t allowed to sell puppies at a show.”

Crystal’s self-satisfied expression made me wonder whether she’d already written someone a check. ”That’s show
grounds
”,
she informed me. ”Otherwise, it’s
nobody’s
business but your own.”

Show grounds?
Crystal, who couldn’t tell a malamute from a Siberian, seemed a strange source of the dog person’s phrase. Odder yet was her understanding of the American Kennel Club’s sharp distinction between secular terrain and the hallowed precincts of a show site. As I fluffed up my hair in front of a stretch of mirror, I pondered the matter. While I was touching up my lipstick, Crystal flounced out, drink in hand, and her friends followed. I’d just zipped my cosmetics bag when the door to the ladies’ room opened to admit Cubby’s adopter, Jeanine, who wasn’t just weeping, as she’d been when her dog was in the ring, but sobbing hard. With her was a woman who just had to be her sister. Both were tall and lean, with long, straight black hair, fine features, extraordinarily large hands, and long fingers tipped by nails tinted a shade of rose-brown that picked up the color of Jeanine’s rather drab suit and the flower print of her companion’s silk scarf. Catching sight of me, Jeanine covered her face with those immense, elegant hands. I immediately asked what on earth was wrong.

Her companion answered for her. ”We had an unfortunate little experience. I’m Jeanine’s sister. Arlette.”

We shook hands. ”Holly Winter. I placed Cubby with Jeanine. Jeanine, can you tell me what happened?”

”Jeanine,” Arlette said firmly, ”you know, this does not have to be a big huge deal. Get it through your head: This was
not
an attack. It was just some ignorant people who didn’t even know who we were, okay? So would you go and wash your face in cold water? And blow your nose and pull yourself together.”

As Jeanine moved obediently toward a washbasin, I again asked what had happened.

”It’s nothing,” Arlette answered. ”We were on our way back to the car. With Cubby. We’re parked at the opposite end of the hotel, because when we drove in this afternoon, we noticed there was a field there, and it seemed like a good place to let Cubby do his thing. So we left the car there. Anyway, just now, when we’d almost got to the car, there were some people talking and—”

Jeanine lifted her wet face from the sink to wail: ”Men.”

”Deep voices,” her sister explained. ”It was very dark. The lighting out there really isn’t adequate. Anyway, all that happened was that we overheard a couple of phrases that got Jeanine all upset. And for
no
good reason! Have you got that, Jeanine? For
no
good reason!”

Jeanine took a seat on one of the dainty little white chairs arrayed along the counter in front of the long mirror. The ladies’ room didn’t supply paper towels, just machines for drying your hands, so she was blotting her face with tissues from her purse. I caught her eye in the mirror. ”Jeanine,” I said gently, ”could you tell me what they said? Obviously, it was something painful. I want to know what it was.”

”It was about
B-B-Betty’s mongrels,”
she stammered.

”The killer phrase,” Arlette added, ”was ’trash dogs.’ But they were
not
referring—”

Jeanine abandoned repairs on her face to snarl: ”Oh, yes they were! And we did
not
just overhear them, Arlette! They saw us, they saw Cubby, and they said that
deliberately!
And they did it just to be mean.”

I said, ”I hate to tell you, Arlette, but it’s possible that Jeanine is right. Look, in any group of people, there are a few stinkers. And the ones we’ve got here tend to be supercompetitive show people who don’t actually know anything about dogs. To cover up their own ignorance, most of what they do is go around saying other people’s dogs are trash. They say it about show dogs all the time. Especially the ones that beat theirs. But the rescue dogs make easy targets.”

One of the toilets flushed loudly. As the stall door opened, Jeanine startled the poor woman who emerged by exclaiming,
”Cubby
is
not
trash!” Belatedly, she lowered her voice. ”I know he’s not a show dog. You told me that when you gave him to me, that he’s a pet, that he’s no show dog. But he is not
trash!”

”Of course he’s not.” To my mind, no dog is trash, but it seemed an inopportune moment to say so.

”What
trash
means,” Arlette added, ”is assholes like those guys out in the parking lot, okay?
That’s
trash for you, Jeanine. So just forget it. Hey, Cubby’s all alone in the car out there, and we’ve got a long drive ahead. Let’s just forget it and go home.”

Jeanine looked a lot better now. With her own spirits improved, she turned her thoughts to someone else.

Rising from her seat, she said, ”You know, Holly, when we were out there, Betty was out there, too. She was walking with some people to a car. I hope she didn’t hear what they said. I hope the other people didn’t hear either.”

”I hope not,” I agreed. ”But please don’t worry about Betty. She’s a lot tougher than she looks.” I paused. ”But if she didn’t hear, I think we won’t tell her, okay? I’ll tell her eventually, but if it’s all right with you, I think for now we just won’t mention it.”

Jeanine concurred. As it turned out, she and Arlette didn’t see Betty again that night, anyway. We took a shortcut through the Lagoon, which rang with the raucous laughter of young men gathered around the outrigger bar, where Greg’s bachelor party was in progress. I tried to get a description of the voices Jeanine and Arlette had heard in the darkness. Jeanine was positive that both speakers were men. Arlette said that at least one could have been a woman with a deep voice. Neither speaker had had a foreign accent or a regional drawl. One voice might have been hoarse. There had been nothing to see except shapes in the dark. When we reached the lobby, Betty wasn’t in sight. Jeanine, Arlette, and I shared a big hug.

”Thank you, Holly,” Jeanine said. ”You know, what really got to me wasn’t
what
they said. It was the pointless cruelty of saying it at all.”

”I know,” I told her. ”That’s what got to me, too.” Although the Liliu Grill was located just off the lobby, I stood perfectly still for a few seconds to try to steel myself for whatever Betty’s reaction might be if she’d overheard the voices or somehow learned of the incident. She’d be enraged, of course. But whether she’d be in a hot mood of hell-bent revenge or a cold state of murder-on-ice, I couldn’t predict. It was also possible that like me, she’d keep the matter to herself.

In fact, when I entered the grill and located Betty, I couldn’t tell whether she knew or not. She was perched °n the edge of a chair too high for her peering with

Kimi-like intensity at a menu too big for her small hands. ”Now what,” she demanded, ”would you say that Norwegian salmon Delmonico might be?”

I took a seat. ”Cream sauce, maybe?”

Outraged, Betty said, ”Well, I find it hard to believe that anyone would drown a nice piece of salmon in
cream
sauce!”

I couldn’t resist the impulse to try to mollify her. ”Maybe it’s smoked salmon on toast,” I suggested. ”That would be good.”