Bloodlines

by Susan Conant

  Back to the Shawsheen Valley show. Lois, Betty, and I had retreated to the area where they’d set up their crates, chairs, and grooming equipment. In muted bellows, Lois was explaining that she’d love to take Missy but didn’t have room, and Betty Burley, who had no extra kennel space, either, was making Lois feel really guilty about not helping with rescue. Rowdy was sniffing through the wire mesh door of the crate that held Lois’s bitch, and I was standing there with my knees and thighs locked together.

  Dog people learn to read body language. Before I’d even asked Lois or Betty to keep an eye on Rowdy for a few minutes, Lois glanced at me, assessed my posture, and said, “Holly, do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  “Yes,” I said instantly. “Could you take Rowdy?” I handed her his leash. “I didn’t bring a crate. I’ll be right back.”

  “Take your time,” Lois said. “It’ll take me a while to pack up. I’ll be here another ten or fifteen minutes.”

  Like a lot of other indoor show sites, the Northeast Trade Center had a No Dogs Allowed sign outside the rest rooms, but at the Shawsheen Valley show, there was also a guard whose task seemed to be the enforcement of that stupid rule. I might’ve been able to sneak a Yorkie or a chihuahua into the ladies’ room. But a malamute? Also, since Rowdy isn’t neutered, he was obviously no lady. Anyway, I hurried off and discovered the usual, namely, that there was no one outside the men’s room, but six or eight women ahead of me in line for the ladies’. This phenomenon does not, as commonly supposed, constitute proof that the world is designed by and for men. In fact, all public rest rooms are planned by radical feminist architects whose hidden purpose is to convince women that if we ever expect to compete with men, we’d better learn to hurry up. Unfortunately, the women ahead of me had failed to get the message, and it was at least ten minutes before I headed back to retrieve Rowdy.

  Lois was easy to find. The grooming table that had stood by her crates was now folded up and resting against the wall, and she was tucking a slicker brush into her tack box. Her dogs were resting quietly in their crates. Rowdy was nowhere in sight.

  I looked around and asked, “Where’s Rowdy?”

  “Your cousin came and got him,” Lois said, without looking up. “Didn’t she find you?”

  My cousin?

  “Janice?” I asked. My cousin Janice shows wire-haired fox terriers, but she’s an incredible moocher. If she’d been going to Shawsheen Valley, she’d have invited herself and five or ten dogs to stay with me. On arrival, she’d have announced that the dogs were overdue for their shots. I was still seeing that vet, wasn’t I? He wouldn’t mind writing her a prescription for Panacur, too, would he? All this gratis, of course. If Janice had taken Rowdy and gone off in search of me, I thought, it could only be because one of the fox terriers required major surgery that Janice wanted Steve to do for free. Then my heart leaped. “Leah?” I asked eagerly. “Long curly red hair? Where’d …?”

  But Lois was shaking her head. “Uh-uh. Dark hair. Long.” She paused, obviously fishing for a euphemism. “Damp looking.”

  Oily? Janice has light hair, and one good thing to be said about her is that she is clean. My heart began to pound, and I broke out in a sweat. Yes, a sweat. Sure, horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glisten, but a lady who’s lost her dog is an animal.

  “Where did they go?” I yelled at Lois and added, as though I’d been unclear the first time, “Which way did they go?” If Lois had been a dog, I’d have grabbed the scruff of her fat neck with both my hands and administered a hard shakedown. As it was, I glared at her and spat out: “Lois, God damn it, you have just given Rowdy to some stranger! Where are they?” Don’t ask me how I expected her to know. Then the obvious finally hit me: Lois had no idea. “For Christ’s sake,” I pleaded, “help me! Help me look for him!”

  My ears pounded with the words of advice I’d offered my readers again and again: Never leave your dog unattended at a show. Never. But I hadn’t left Rowdy unattended. I’d left him with Lois Metzler, a malamute breeder, a responsible person, someone who knew as well as I did that vicious, greedy people will steal show dogs. Dognappers will hold them for ransom. Puppy mill operators will match them with AKC papers and breed them. Wolf hybridizers won’t care about papers, but they’ll sure go for a malamute, especially an obvious stud like Rowdy, beautiful and wolflike, gentle and friendly. And the liberationists, the animal rights lunatics! I’d heard all the rumors and had passed along the warnings. Rowdy would be easy prey, swishing his tail, making eyes, playing up to everyone. An unknown crated dog could’ve turned protective, might’ve growled and bitten, but Rowdy would’ve been a no-risk steal. And, to someone who knew nothing about dogs, Rowdy would have looked so damned natural, as if he could fend for himself once he’d been freed from the bonds of human exploitation. Released. Turned loose. Manumitted. Liberated. Right next to I-95.

  In my sprint for the nearest exit, I shoved past a massive Kuvasz, barely missed crushing a brace of Maltese, crashed into a blessedly forgiving Newfie, and narrowly missed tripping over a darling Cairn and plunging down onto a German shorthaired pointer. In my terror, I fixed on a mad idea: Why hadn’t I just dashed off to Sally Brand? Rowdy belonged where’d he never be lost, on my skin, under it, permanently inked and linked to me. What did it matter where? On my back, on my arm, or inside my ear like the ID number on a French dog.

  As I neared the cafeteria, though, I spotted a crowd of people and dogs in an area away from the show rings, and I heard what I’m now convinced are the most beautiful words in the English language. They aren’t cellar door, of course, and they aren’t what my fellow writer, Dorothy Parker, said, either: Check enclosed. If your partner and soul mate has vanished at a show, the most beautiful words in the English language are loose dog. “Loose dog!” voices called out. “Loose dog!”

  One of the worst and best things about being a supposed expert on dogs is that your own dogs, the ones you presumably understand best, teach you over and over again that you know nothing at all. I pushed and squirmed through the crowd around the concession stand. From Rowdy’s point of view—evidently situated in his stomach—he’d done the obvious. Before I caught sight of him, I heard the trail mix crunch under my feet. The guy who held Rowdy’s leash was a jovial, ursine young Rottie-owner I’d noticed now and then in the obedience rings. I’d always liked his happy, easygoing manner with his dogs, and I liked it now with Rowdy. The two of them made me think of some corny children’s movie about a bear and wolf who become pals. They beamed at one another, the man obviously proud to be the hero who’d caught the loose dog. Dogs do get loose at shows by accident, of course. Exhibitors sometimes forget to latch the crates, and there are a few notorious canine Houdinis who’ve figured out how to escape from anything. Once loose, though, most of those dogs are terrified: disoriented, bewildered, scared silly, sometimes outright panicked. Not Rowdy, though. The opportunistic show-off had grabbed the chance for an unexpected feast and was now reveling in his role as the center of everyone’s attention. When he caught sight of me, the tempo of his tail quickened to allegro, and he burst into song. No exaggeration, either. Song. Woo-woo-woo-woo. In case I haven’t already bragged about Rowdy, let me tell you that he has a truly spectacular voice. Objectively speaking, the dog should attend the New England Conservatory of Music instead of the Cambridge Dog Training Club. You really should hear him. Anyway, I won’t swear to the following, but I will wager a small bet on it. I’m not positive, of course, but I think it’s possible, and his song definitely carried a note of triumph, at least to my ears. Grinning and wagging and wooing there in the center of the crowd, Rowdy sure acted and sounded like a dog who knows he’s just gone Best in Show.

  8

  Every exhibitor at Shawsheen Valley, myself included, had sat through plenty of hellfire-and-brimstone preaching about the evildoings of radical animal liberationists. If Rowdy had been killed, my brethren in dog worship would have joined me in praying for the salvation of his soul, and,
while we had God’s ear, we would’ve whispered a few words of advice about the appropriate final destination of blackguards who commit crimes against dogs. But with my domesticated wolf returned to the fold, we were as thrilled as a congregation of ardent revivalists who’ve just witnessed sin itself in flagrante delicto right there in the middle of their own camp meeting—witnessed it, yes, but been left unsullied.

  Twenty or thirty people asked me how it had happened, and, although no one said it, I was willing to bet that every single one of those people was thinking the same thing: Don’t you know better than to leave your dog unattended at a show? Despite everyone’s tactful silence on the matter of my apparent irresponsibility, I kept defending myself. “I left him with a friend, and she got conned, I guess,” I’d say. “He was with someone I know. I don’t know what happened.”

  When Rowdy and I finally reached Lois Metzler, who’d quit smoking a couple of years earlier, she was flopped in her folding chair taking big, wheezy drags on a cork-filtered cigarette, but she looked more in need of oxygen than of nicotine.

  “Holy Christ,” she greeted me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Really, Rowdy’s fine. He was at that damned concession stand with all the nuts and candy and stuff. The worst thing that’ll happen is that he’ll vomit up a mess of trail mix.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I repeated. “It’s over, okay? But could you, uh … Lois, I still don’t know what happened. Some woman came up and said …?”

  “Faith stopped by,” Lois began.

  Faith Barlow handles Rowdy in breed. He associates her with liver and glory. At the sight of Faith, he sparkles all over.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “And so we said hello, and Faith gave Rowdy a treat, and she asked where you were. And so I told her, and she said, ‘Yeah, well, there’s a big line, so don’t expect her back soon.’ So I said something like, ‘Well, that’s okay.’ ”

  “And?”

  “And Faith left, and this girl came up.”

  The story we pieced together was that the dark-haired stranger had probably overheard Faith and Lois, and thus picked up my name and Rowdy’s. She’d learned that I’d be gone for a while, and just as Faith was leaving, she’d stepped up to Lois, claimed to be my cousin, and strolled off with Rowdy, who, like most malamutes, is always so delighted to make the acquaintance of yet one more fascinating and possibly food-bearing member of our species that he’ll go with anyone. If the stranger had been a dog, Lois would, of course, have supplied a minutely-detailed description that would’ve enabled me or anyone else unhesitatingly to spot her in a crowd of thousands. As it was, I was able to establish that the stranger was a dark-haired female between the ages of fifteen and fifty who wore black or navy clothing and looked “damp.” Damp, for God’s sake. I’d driven to the show through a gray winter drizzle. Most of the dogs had been blown dry for the ring, but “damp” fit at least half the people there.

  At that point, Mary Kalinowski, Shawsheen’s show chairman, appeared. Trailing after her were a couple of morose security guards and four or five dressed-up people wearing show officials’ badges. Ever worked on a show? Well, worked hardly says it. It’s like giving a wedding with two or three thousand guests. The planning begins at least a year in advance, and, as the date draws near, the momentum builds, the tasks multiply, and the people in charge, especially the chairman and the chief steward, start waking up in the night and scrawling notes to remind themselves not to forget the final five or ten thousand details that will make the show run smoothly, which is to say, without incident. The officials’ faces were tight, bleak, and determined. What had just happened to Rowdy was, of course, an Incident. The officials intended to investigate it.

  If I’d had any hope that they’d succeed in wringing out of Lois a decent description of the dark-haired “liberator,” I’d have stuck around. As it was, I gave a succinct account of my part of the story and offered the only excuse to leave that anyone at the show would’ve understood or accepted, namely, that although Rowdy appeared to be in good spirits, he was more sensitive than he looked and needed to go home. In truth, of course, Rowdy has the unflappable self-confidence of the truly fearless. I’m the one who’s more sensitive than I look.

  Even so, Rowdy did a convincing, if unwitting, job of backing me up. He began by seating himself next to me and staring at my face the way I wish he’d always do in the obedience ring. Then he stood up, shuffled his feet around, and started a soft, high-pitched whine. When that didn’t work, he pranced around and burst forth in an uninterrupted series of sharp yelps and loud woos that drowned out human conversation. This apparent trauma-victim behavior drew the sympathy of the officials, none of them malamute people, and Lois Metzler had the grace not to translate. Shall I? Rowdy unconditionally refuses to use a so-called exercise pen. He was pleading to go outside.

  “I’m sorry,” I shouted over the din, “but I have to get him out of here!”

  Mary Kalinowski and the other officials clucked and nodded, and Rowdy and I beat it to the obedience rings, where I grabbed the gear I’d left there, and, with Rowdy acting as a sort of canine siren to clear our route, we sped out of the building and into the parking lot’s ash gray fog, thick with the musk of auto exhaust from the departing vans, RVs, and big-breed cars like mine, as well as the diesel semis roaring by on 128. About halfway across the lot, thus halfway to the distant parking space where I’d left the Bronco, I spotted Faith Barlow’s van. Did I say that my Bronco might as well have DOG PERSON lettered on the doors? Well, forget that. Faith’s silver van all but did. DOG PERSON actually appeared only on one bumper sticker on the back fender, but painstakingly hand-painted on both of the wide sides of the vehicle were identical teams of gray-and-white malamutes pulling artistically rendered sleds driven by identical parka-clad Eskimos. The rear doors stood ajar, and Faith herself was leaning in and rearranging her crates and equipment. At the sight of Faith, Rowdy gave himself a massive overall shake evidently meant to fluff up his coat. Then he trotted straight up to her, walked himself into a four-square show pose, and raised his beautiful big head and eyes to Faith’s pretty, dimpled face.

  Faith has looked about forty for the ten or twelve years I’ve known her. Her wavy, easy-care hair remains in perpetual transition from blond to white. The mist had given her a mass of ringlets that managed not to look juvenile or silly, probably because she has great skin. Fact: Dog saliva happens to contain a powerful cosmetic ingredient that prevents lines and wrinkles, cures acne, and promotes a healthy, glowing blush. The hitch is that it has to be scoured on three times a day. Anyway, when Faith turned and caught sight of Rowdy, she bent from the waist, and he gave her complexion the full treatment. Am I making this up? No. Honestly. You should see Faith. Ponce De Leon and all those people were wasting their time crossing the Atlantic to muck around in the swamps. The true location of the fountain of youth is a dog’s mouth.

  “You heard what happened?” I asked Faith.

  “Yeah,” she said. “They catch her?”

  “No, and I don’t think they’re going to. Among other things, Lois doesn’t even seem to remember what she looked like.”

  “Lois is so unobservant,” Faith said scornfully.

  Breed people are so competitive. When Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” he wasn’t talking about football. He meant dog shows. Anyway, Faith Barlow’s eagerness to beat Lois Metzler extended beyond the conformation ring. Lois was unobservant? Well, Faith wasn’t.

  “She’s about twenty, give or take a year,” Faith said definitively. “Long dark hair plastered with some kind of gel. She had on a long skirt, kind of a dark paisley pattern, and a navy pea jacket, sort of a throw-back-to-the-sixties look. Bad skin. No makeup. And she’s short, maybe five one or two. Oh, and she was wearing a, uh, backpack—what do you call it?—like a little backpack. Rucksack. It was green, sort of loden. Dark green. Didn’t Lois …?”
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br />   I gave a sigh of exasperation. “Lois didn’t tell me any of that, and she didn’t tell the officials, either. Or she won’t. They’re probably still talking to her. Could you?”

  “I have to go back anyway.” Faith waved toward the trade center. “I’m just getting something. I’ll tell them. But probably it’s too late. If she has any sense, she’s long gone.”

  “But it’s not too late for next time. There’ll be other shows. People like that—”

  Faith slammed the van door shut. Then she finished my sentence, but not quite as I’d intended. “People like that ought to be shot,” she said. “They ought to be shot on sight.”

  9

  In the foggy early darkness of that Sunday afternoon, Route 128 glowed red with the brake lights of the backed-up cars and trucks headed toward Boston. Instead of swinging onto the highway to await the inevitable multivehicle collision, I decided to take the back way, Route 38, all the way to Medford, where I could pick up Route 16 to Cambridge. I followed 38 over 128 and into the center of Woburn.

  Woburn. You ever hear of a parts match? It’s a conformation fun match with categories for best head, ears, tail, that kind of thing. The point of a parts match is that every dog has at least one good feature. Cow-hocked or not, he has a great muzzle. Roach-backed? Sure, but with a spectacular coat. As I pulled to a stop at a red light in the center of Woburn, I was wondering what category you’d need to create in a parts match for small cities that would let Woburn win best anything or, for that matter, worst anything. I’d just awarded Woburn first place in the Most Ordinary competition when my peripheral vision registered something moving to the right of the Bronco. The object in motion turned out to be a gloved thumb. Attached to it was a small, drenched person stationed on a traffic island near the stoplight.