Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  ”You know, Holly, he’s just the kind of little shit who’d get off on making sure someone like Jeanine heard him say ’trash dogs.’ And then turn around and suck up to Betty.”

  ”Actually, I had the same thought myself. Rowdy, hurry up! This is a n-i-i-i-ce place to go! Hurry up!” Rowdy anointed the wall of a little white shed that was apparently used to store recreational equipment. I thought it was the same place he’d marked that morning. Whether because of the killing of Elsa Van Dine or my own anger about Jeanine’s pain, Rowdy’s harmless leg-lifting made me wonder about murderers who revisit the scenes of their crimes. Do they, too, get some kind of incomprehensible satisfaction from making sure that their scent is fresh?

  AS WE RETURNED to the hotel, Leah remarked that she was thirsty. ”There’s a Coke machine right near our room. And an ice machine. Room service would be a lot more fun,” I acknowledged, ”but even as it is—”

  ”This is costing you a fortune because you’re paying for me.”

  ”You’re handling Kimi for me. You’re working for expenses. I’m lucky you don’t charge me.”

  Unexpectedly, she asked, ”Have you ever thought about writing your memoirs? You could probably make a fortune.”

  ”My what!”

  ”Memoirs. Romantic memoirs. You could call it Women Who Run with Vets.”

  ”Leah, I do not ’run with’ vets!” I thought the matter over. ”As far as I can remember, Steve is the first one.”

  ”You could just make up the others. Or pretend that they were vets even though they weren’t.”

  ”Sure,” I said, ”just tack D.V.M. onto their names, and-”

  ”Not all of them,” said Leah, as if there had been thousands. ”And at least one ought to be an M.R.C.V.S., like Mr. Herriot.” Ascending the hotel stairs inspired Leah to literary heights. ”I know! Look, you have to change their real names anyway, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed or sue you or whatever. So as long as you’re doing that anyway, you call him James. So your readers would naturally assume—”

  I halted at the top of the stairs. Rowdy sat. ”That what? That I’d had an affair with James Herriot? Leah—”

  ”It’s important to let readers draw their own conclusions. Why should you do all the work? You wouldn’t say Herriot. You’d just say James,” Leah pronounced emphatically.

  As if in answer to a summons, an elderly man stuck a lizardlike head out of the open archway to the room that housed the vending machines. His head and, as I soon observed, his body as well weren’t lizardlike in some vague, generic sense. Rather, he bore an astonishing resemblance to a pet horny toad—a horned lizard— that a childhood friend of mine had bought in Arizona as a living souvenir and had brought home to Maine. There the little reptile entered a permanent state of dormancy and spent year after year in suspended animation on a bed of dry sand in a glass aquarium. Oddly devoted to the creature, my friend provided food and water that the animal never touched. Every day or so, she gently lifted the spiny body out of the artificial desert to make sure that the lizard was still alive. Well, yes, as Dorothy Parker asked when told that Calvin Coolidge had died, How could they tell? My friend blew lovingly in the horny toad’s face. Maybe Coolidge didn’t blink anymore.

  Without bothering with the preliminaries, our human lizard loudly announced that the ice machine, like half the other damned things in this world, was not working.

  ”It was working okay last night,” I informed him. ”Have you tried kicking it?”

  After unlocking the door to our room to admit Leah, Rowdy, and Kimi, I got the change purse from my shoulder bag and the ice bucket from the bathroom. When I returned to the corridor, the man stood in the open archway in a cloud of what proved to be tobacco smoke and not, as I first feared, the vapor emitted by a broken ice machine. A hand with thickened joints, splayed fingers, and scaly skin clutched an unfiltered cigarette.

  Dripping ash on the lapels of a navy blazer, the man lurched, stumbled forward, and bumped into the ice machine. He was short, wide, and flat, with turned-out feet, a mottled complexion, and no hair. I tried to remember whether the horny toad had had lips. The man’s were like thin purple strips of raw liver. He raised the hand that wasn’t depositing ash on the carpet. Pinched between two fingers was a quarter. In a wheezy voice, he said, ”Can’t for the life of me get this thing in! All it does is fall back on the floor.” With that, he made what was evidently a repeat attempt to force the coin into a narrow ventilation slot. The quarter, of course, dropped to the carpet.

  Bending to retrieve the coin, I failed to think of a tactful way to break the news that ice was free. As I straightened, the man gestured to the soft-drink machine. ”And that one,” he reported, ”doesn’t work a damned bit better.” To demonstrate, he snatched the quarter from my hand, inserted it in the correct slot, and pressed the big button for Coca-Cola. I wondered how many years it had been since a Coke cost twenty-five cents. He probably expected a green bottle.

  Dog people, I might point out, are unusually experienced in providing for the needs of elders, both human and canine. Many people stay active in dogs into their eighties and beyond. Even if they feel like vegetating, they can’t, because their dogs won’t let them, and neither will we. At advanced ages, dogless people suffer from luxury: There’s nothing they have to do; no one relies on them; and the future consists of one final certainty. At a minimum, however, a dog has to be walked, and if there’s one thing that a dog does even more reliably than go out, come back in, eat, sleep, and love, it’s need, need, need. As to the future, when your almost-champion needs only one major win to finish, now is not the time to quit. That now coincides with your ninetieth birthday is incidental. And when our senior human citizens are no longer able to participate in the sport, instead of leaving them in peace, we insist on driving them to shows and training classes, and dragging them out to club dinners. Elder abuse! And the entire dog fancy is guilty.

  In a tone too loud and bright, I said, ”I’m afraid you have to add a few more quarters.” After a fit of liquid coughing, the stranger fished through his pockets, produced another coin, and inserted that one, too. I stepped neatly in front of him, opened my change purse, poured quarters into the slot, and pressed the button. With a grinding, metallic shriek, the machine delivered itself of a pop-top can. ”There you go!” I announced. ”Do you have an ice bucket?”

  Like the horny toad, he blinked.

  ”That’s okay. I have one,” I said, as if I always toted a spare. Zipping around, I shoved our ice bucket into the compartment of the machine and pushed the button. When I turned around, the man was examining the side of the soft-drink machine.

  ”You wouldn’t happen to know”—he paused to produce another deep, wet cough—”whether there’s an opener here somewhere?”

  ”You pull on the top. It’s a, uh, new thing. I’ll show you.”

  As I opened the can of Coke, the man ground the remains of his cigarette on the ice machine and dropped the butt in a plastic-lined trash barrel. Then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and the kind of gold flip-top lighter I hadn’t seen for years. He offered the pack to me. I shook my head. He lit up. I looked around in search of a smoke detector and located one on the ceiling near what looked like the nozzle of a sprinkler system. By now, I thought, the alarm should have been sounding, and the man and I should have been sharing a cold shower. What I could smell was, of course, just smoke and more smoke, but I could almost see the discarded cigarette butt begin to smolder in the trash barrel. Deciding that the alarm and sprinkler system might actually be defective, I told the man that he was all set now. And I bolted.

  Unless I doused that barrel, I’d lie awake worrying. The plan was to return with a bottle of water I’d brought from home in case the change from Cambridge to Danville water bothered the dogs. I could sacrifice the water; neither dog had a sensitive gut. At the door to my room, however, I discovered that I’d left the key inside. It wasn’t one of those plastic slabs, but a metal key attach
ed to a big tab. I could almost see it lying next to my shoulder bag. As I was knocking and calling to Leah, Pam Ritchie came striding down the corridor waving a sheaf of papers at me. She wore what looked like an old-fashioned prom dress, a three-quarter-length rose-colored gown with shoulder straps as thin as the spiked heels of her dyed-to-match shoes. Crystal had not, of course, suddenly drafted Pam to fill in for an absent bridesmaid. Pam was on her way to or from the Parade of Veterans and Titleholders, which called for evening dress. If I’m ever forced to handle a malamute while wearing formal attire, I’ll choose a floor-length gown and running shoes. Also, good coverage. When a malamute pulls, your pecs flex hard enough to snap any spaghetti strap. Topless handling is a fad that has yet to entrance the fancy.

  ”Isn’t that your room?” Pam demanded. ”I was bringing this to you.” She thrust the papers at me.

  ”I’m locked out. My cousin must be in the bathroom or something. Oh, the stud book! Thank you.”

  ”I’m sorry it took me so long. November 1990 through June ’93. Is that it?”

  I nodded. Like Nixon’s White House tapes, my copy of the Alaskan malamute stud book had had a significant gap: Until now, I hadn’t been able to look up the sire, dam, breeder, and owner of any dog with a registration published in the missing months.

  ”This’ll do it,” I told her. As a sort of extra thanks, I added how much I admired the old sign from the Chinook Kennels that she’d donated to the breed club auction. Pam replied that she was glad that someone appreciated it because, these days, a lot of people in malamutes didn’t even seem to know that Eva B. (”Short”) Seeley was the matriarch of our breed or that the dogs from her Chinook Kennels had gone with Admiral Byrd. As Pam was speaking, the lizardlike man, smoking yet another cigarette, appeared from the vending-machine room and, to my astonishment, uttered a series of succinct and obscene remarks about Mrs. Seeley that I am too grateful to her to repeat. If it hadn’t been for Short Seeley, Rowdy and Kimi wouldn’t exist. I owe her a retrospective and unpayable debt. She had a wonderful eye for a dog.

  Before the man had finished vilifying her, the outraged Pam was aggressively defending her memory: ”If Short were alive today, you wouldn’t dare say any of that! But now the poor woman isn’t around...”

  In response to the altercation, Rowdy and Kimi were breathing loudly on the other side of the door. They didn’t intend to do anything; they just didn’t want to miss the fun. Claws scratched. I banged on the door. ”Leah! Leah, open the door!” Rowdy began wooing.

  ”... know-it-all bitch...” I couldn’t tell whether the man meant Short Seeley or Pam Ritchie. From Pam’s viewpoint, it didn’t matter.

  As Pam was sputtering about Short Seeley’s sacred memory and demanding to know just who the man thought he was, Freida Reilly arose from the stairwell like a deus ex machina. ”Holly, get in there and make those dogs shut up,” our show chair ordered crisply. ”And you,” she told Pam, ”disappear.” Swooping down on the lizard, Freida snatched his can of Coke and the ice bucket into which he was dribbling ash. ”Please accept our most profuse apologies for this misunderstanding,” she gushed. And away she swept him.

  Ten minutes later, when I’d carried out my plan of drenching the trash barrel, Leah and I were analyzing the episode. Actually, we were just talking about it, but Cambridge is finally starting to get to me. Before long, I’ll be deconstructing narratives. Anyway, Leah was sprawled on her bed drinking a diet version of what I used to call tonic, a New England term dating, no doubt, to the era when Coke really was and the pause really, really refreshed; and I was cross-legged on the floor scratching Rowdy’s white chest and administering to myself the tonic of my adulthood, cognac, which I’d poured into a bathroom glass from the flask in my first-aid kit, the only medicine therein meant exclusively for human emergencies.

  ”I’m not handling,” I said. ”He didn’t get all that good a look at you, and he didn’t really look at the dogs. The only one it really affects is Pam.”

  Leah replied by asking for some of my cognac. ”Only if you don’t mix it with anything,” I said. Anyone who wants to be young again has forgotten the concoctions that youth pours down the throats of its victims.

  ”Ice?” she requested.

  ”Oh, all right.” He probably had seen her. And her hair is very distinctive. ”Freida says he drank on the plane,” I said for the second time. ”He hates flying.”

  ”You told me,” Leah said. ”Why was he so pissed at Eva Seeley?”

  Pissed. Her language! For this she goes to Harvard. ”At a guess,” I answered, ”sometime or other, Mrs. Seeley told him his dogs weren’t malamutes. I gather that she did that—if malamutes weren’t from her lines, then she thought they weren’t malamutes, and she didn’t mind saying so. Naturally, people weren’t thrilled.”

  ”I’ll bet she would’ve loved Rowdy and Kimi!” Leah said.

  ”Mrs. Seeley isn’t judging,” I reminded Leah. ”James Hunnewell is. She’s dead. And he’s still half alive.”

  Oh, yes. James. James Hunnewell.

  BUT I WAS WRONG. James Hunnewell’s body was found early the next morning. Hunnewell had been smashed on the head with what, in a triumph of honesty over literary aspiration, I shall describe as a blunt instrument. I am, however, relieved to report that despite the proximity of hundreds of keennosed dogs, the corpse was discovered by—of all things—a human being, in fact, by an ex-lover of mine named Finn Adams, whom I’ll introduce only by falling back on the truism that we all make mistakes.

  But Judge James Hunnewell was dead! Murdered! Isn’t death, especially violent death, exactly what cliches are for? He lost his life, as if it were a folding umbrella he’d absentmindedly left on the seat of a cab, or a glove he’d accidentally dropped, or a forgotten jacket borrowed by a friend who, suddenly remembering, might yet bring it back. His time ran out? Death as meter maid! The indignity! As if a cemetery were a grassy parking lot with rows of stones depicting fluttering tickets and stylized Denver boots. ”SCOFF-LAW!” shouts each epitaph, which also lists the ticket number, the issue date, and the time of the violation, but not, of course, the amount due, the ultimate price having obviously been paid in full. He expired? It could be worse: Ignoring appeal procedures, he was towed away. Grotesque? That’s the point: that James Hunnewell’s time did not just run out.

  I shall postpone for the moment the matter of the blunt instrument and the mistakes we all make by noting that at six-thirty on Friday morning, some fool in one of the campers at the edge of the back lot decided not to let sleeping dogs lie and, indeed, to awaken everyone but the proverbial dead, in this case James Hunnewell. Leah rolled over, swore, and pulled the hotel’s plush blanket over her head. When I’d fallen asleep at ten or so the previous night, she’d just started watching Back to the Future. At a guess, she’d been up until midnight, maybe later. Neither of our dogs was in the ring until Saturday; Leah was free to keep on sleeping for the next twenty-four hours. To prevent the dogs from leaping on her bed and licking her awake, she’d crated them, but at six thirty-five that Friday morning, Kimi’s metal crate was clanking, and Rowdy was breathing in a meaningful way.

  So, ten minutes later I was standing bleary-eyed and messy-haired on the blacktop between my Bronco and Betty Burley’s van while the dogs gulped down their carefully measured portions of the defrosted Fresh Frozen Bil Jac I’d been keeping on ice in a cooler in the car. Great stuff. For what it costs me to feed these dogs, I could live on lobster. Since neither of the dogs exhibits the self-sacrificing attitude toward the other that I strive to model, Kimi was breakfasting inside the Bronco, and Rowdy was using the blacktop as a tablecloth. Kimi’s head was still in her dish. Rowdy was scouring his with his tongue.

  ”All done, big boy?” I bent over. When I lifted Rowdy’s empty dish, he kept licking it. As I held it for him, my eyes drifted and then froze. On the macadam just under the rear of Betty’s van lay, of all things, Comet’s reliquary, the Alaskan malamute lamp—pink granite base, b
rass rod, shedding dog, Iditarod shade and all—Sherri Ann Printz’s donation to Rescue’s auction. After the showcase, I realized, Betty and I had both neglected to gather up the valuable items reserved for Saturday night’s live auction. At some point, Betty must have remembered our lapse and returned to the booth to remove the Inuit carving, the jewelry, the antique wolf prints, and Sherri Ann’s lamp. The framed prints were bulky, heavy, and fragile. The lamp, of course, sat on granite. It would’ve required a six-armed Amazon to carry the entire load at once. Betty was in her seventies. At a guess, she weighed barely a hundred pounds. Instead of making repeated journeys through the exhibition hall, the corridors, the lobby, and the maze of hallways and staircases that led to her room, and instead of asking for help, she must have made a single trip with her van, returned it to its original spot next to my Bronco, and carried some or all of the items the short distance to her room.

  What I didn’t understand was why the damned lamp was underneath Betty’s van. Her aging memory? It was usually better than mine. Forty years her junior, I’d entirely forgotten the valuables until now. No, Betty loathed that lamp, and she resented Sherri Ann’s use of Rescue in her bid for a seat on the board of our national breed club, a campaign that was heavily focused on beating Freida Reilly. In all arenas, political ambition baffles me. If the United States were populated exclusively by people like me, the race for the White House would be a sprint in the opposite direction, and presidential debates would be fights about who’d have to get stuck with the job this time. But glory isn’t wasted on everyone. In vying for the honor of election to the board, Sherri Ann and Freida both wanted the support of the pro-Rescue faction of the club, and Betty took violent exception to what she saw as Sherri Ann’s hypocritical effort to seduce our vote with her lamp.