Bloodlines

by Susan Conant

  “Mr. Coakley,” I said firmly over the din of the dogs, “I’m Holly Winter. I called about the malamute. Betty Burley did not pick her up, and neither did Enid Sievers, the owner. Now I want to know—”

  Coakley didn’t wait for me to finish. “Found that little lady a good home,” he said. Then he moved purposefully toward the pen in the far corner of the room. The light was dim. A brown haze hung in the air. Maybe once, a long time ago, this had been a living room. A battered couch remained. Like everything else in the house, including the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the air, Coakley, his clothing, the dogs, and a large, ugly cat asleep on top of a stack of crates, the couch was dirt tan. “Woman sees my usual ad in the paper, calls, stops in about a dog. One of my pups.” His tone was indefinably inventive. “And she says, ‘Ain’t that a pretty husky you got out there,’ and I says, ‘Sure is.’ ”

  “Meaning the malamute,” I said. “Missy.”

  Coakley bent over to retrieve a large plastic bowl from the cardboard pen. Inside the enclosure swarmed about two dozen tiny puppies, Yorkies, Poms, and what I think were Pom-a-poos. “Got my chores to do here,” he said. “Breeding dogs ain’t easy. It’s a lot of work.”

  Shall I spare you the food dish? Let’s make a deal. I’ll skip Coakley’s ears, but you have to hear about the dish, which was a big avocado green spill-proof plastic bowl thickly lined with a hardened brown substance that I hope—but won’t promise—was old dog food. Solidified dribbles clung to the outer sides. Coakley handled the thing with no evident revulsion or even reluctance and—this is the really disgusting part—plunged it unhesitatingly into an open bag of dog food unprepossessingly labeled Generic. The clunk and rattle of the kibble against the dish touched off a renewed frenzy of little-dog yapping and yelping. Four or five dirt brown food moths rose lazily from the bag of dog food and hovered in the dusty air. Their larvae probably had a higher protein content than the food did.

  The clamor eventually subsided enough for me to speak. “Where is the dog now?” I demanded. “That dog belongs—”

  I never heard Bill Coakley sound anything but cheerful. He did now. “Don’t have to do nothing but turn around, and there’s some woman’s hollering at me.” Happy sounding as ever, he launched into the details. “Lady from the IRS. They’re after me. The wife, she’s still after me, and that old battle-ax from the Humane. You ever get in tax trouble, let me tell you, there’s one thing you gotta—”

  When he lowered the dish into the puppy pen, the noise of the dogs cut him off. The little ones in the pen scrambled and fought for their foul dinner. There were so many of them that it was hard to distinguish one from the other. I wondered why anyone would buy a dog from a place like this. Kind, ignorant people must look around and think, “My God, I’ve got to get this puppy out of here.” Or did people imagine that filth promised a bargain? But the puppies were cute, of course. Damn, they were adorable. You wanted to scoop one up, take it home, clean it up, and give it the first decent meal of its life. You did? No, I did. Yes, even me. They were almost irresistible.

  “I’m in a hurry,” I said. “I’m here for that dog, and I want her—”

  “I’m telling you, ain’t I? The lady come and took a look at her, and I says that the lady that owns her can’t keep her no more and if you want her, she’s yours, and the lady says, sure. I didn’t even get nothing out of it. I done it for the dog.” He looked me directly in the eyes.

  Bill Coakley, canine benefactor?

  “Okay,” I said. “So just give me her name and—”

  The ugly cat, a blatantly unneutered tom, chose that moment to plummet from its perch on the crates, traipse across the floor, and head straight for me. Its sudden dive precipitated a renewed outburst of yipping, to which Coakley and the cat seemed equally deaf.

  “Handsome bugger, ain’t he?” Coakley remarked genially.

  I tried to feel sorry for the cat. As you probably know, cats require a higher protein diet than dogs do. That’s why dogs love cat food, of course, and why a cat fed on dog food is malnourished. My hunch was that the handsome bugger ate the same food-moth chow the puppies did. Its large belly hung from a swayback. Its ribs showed. The yellow-tinged farinaceous glop that dripped from its eyes looked a whole lot like the stuff on Bill Coakley’s teeth. The poor thing’s ears were ragged, and its head was scarred. Also, it undoubtedly had fleas. Cats are supposed to be standoffish, right? Sure, but there’s something about communicable diseases that makes them super friendly. This one sauntered up and rubbed against my legs. I bent down and stroked its bony spine.

  “Handsome bugger,” Coakley repeated proudly.

  It may have been the cat’s name. I didn’t ask. Instead, I again demanded the name of the woman who’d taken Missy. I don’t know why I bothered. I was far from sure that she existed.

  Coakley picked up the cat, gave me a plaque-ridden grin, shrugged, and said, with what felt like a hint of stubborn defiance, “Got it around here somewhere.”

  That’s when I’d had it. “That dog is the property of Alaskan Malamute Rescue,” I announced. Did I sound ridiculous? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m used to ordering around creatures a whole lot tougher than dirty Bill Coakley. “I want her back, and I want her back fast. You get that dog back, or I’ll have the MSPCA and every other animal welfare organization in Massachusetts in here so fast you won’t know what hit you. Do you understand what I’m telling you? You get that malamute back here, or I close you down.” Then I stomped out.

  I meant to do it anyway, or I meant to try my damnedest. I knew how to start. I knew the people to call. But first, of course, I had to have Missy back. Do you understand? I just had to.

  14

  A half hour after stomping out of Coakley’s, I had my feet planted on the concrete aisle that ran down the center of the raw-looking pale beige cinder-block kennel building at Your Local Breeder. I guess I’d expected a magnified version of the dump I’d just left. What I found was a semirural pet shop with large indoor-outdoor runs instead of fiberglass cage banks and, more importantly, with litters of puppies for sale as well as individual pups of different breeds.

  I was studying the four little black cocker spaniels asleep in the run in front of me. New to dogs? The smallest member of the AKC’s sporting group, the cocker spaniel is … But you know what a cocker is. Of course you do. Everyone does. It’s one of the most popular breeds in America, the quintessential show dog and the quintessential pet shop dog, too. The great publicist of the breed, Ch. My Own Brucie, was the only cocker ever to take two consecutive Best in Shows at Westminster—1940 and 1941—but his wins in the ring were the least of his triumphs: The U.S. population went Brucie-mad and cocker-mad. Trendiness is, of course, the doom of a breed. The indiscriminate mass production of cocker spaniels—a Brucie in every home—meant the proliferation of congenital problems: hip dysplasia, von Willebrand’s disease, blood clotting diseases, and, especially, inherited eye diseases like progressive retinal atrophy and so-called juvenile cataracts, which aren’t necessarily juvenile, but are definitely inherited. Dedicated cocker fanciers eventually rescued the breed. Cockers used in breeding are supposed to be tested for cataracts at least once a year, and some, like active stud dogs, twice a year. One of the silky little black cockers I was watching opened his eyes, yawned, and rested his head on his forepaws. His eyes looked fine to me, but that’s the damn thing about inherited cataracts: A veterinary ophthalmologist can diagnose the disease up to two years before it’s visible to the rest of us.

  When I’d marched into the pet supply shop at the front of Your Local Breeder, a bland-looking, sandy-haired young man in a plaid flannel shirt said, “Hi. May I help you?”

  “Yes,” I said as I scanned a display of leather leashes and a stack of overpriced Kennel Cabs. “I’m interested in dogs.” So, okay. Maybe it was a bit of an understatement, but it was no lie.

  By comparison with Diane Sweet, the sandy-haired guy had no talent for sales, or maybe he lacked training.
All he did was lead me past a couple of closed doors and into the kennel area. He didn’t put a puppy in my arms or assure me that I’d recoup the purchase price of a bitch the first time I bred her. He didn’t pretend that the puppies reacted to me in some astonishingly special way. He didn’t offer a puppy at cut rate, and he didn’t suggest a buy-on-credit plan. He didn’t do a thing except leave me alone with the best sales representatives God ever created.

  Which breeds, right? Was yours there? Okay. Mini dachshund, mini schnauzer, Doberman, Dalmatian, Lhasa Apso, Shih Tzu, poodle, collie, sheltie, and Norwegian elkhound. So far so good? Westie, Yorkie, English springer spaniel, Brittany, basset, chow, German shepherd, and Rottweiler. Look, wouldn’t you rather not know? Well, okay. The cockers, of course. A Boston terrier, who looked healthier than the one at Puppy Luv. One Kees and a lone Scottie, too, a half-grown male with a twisted rear leg. A litter of Siberian huskies not a day over five weeks old. A Siberian is pretty close to a malamute, huh? When I first caught sight of those little balls of gray fluff, my heart began to race. Then I took in the high-set ears, the fox tails, and the blue eyes, and I felt a surge of sick relief. Disgusting, right? Breed doesn’t matter. Puppies aren’t fully immunized until they’re four months old, and at five weeks, any puppy needs frequent, loving social contact with people as well as protection from the diseases of other dogs. But relief was what I felt. I know. I am ashamed.

  Anyway, having finished my meditation on My Own Brucie and the fall and rise of the cocker spaniel, I made my way past the open door of an office and back to the pet supply showroom, where the plaid-shirted young guy was perched on a stool behind the checkout counter talking into the receiver of a beige wall phone.

  “Yeah,” he said. He paused, listened, and said, “Yeah.” Then he repeated the gist of his previous remarks, listened for a good half minute, and again said, “Yeah,” but added, “We breed all our dogs here.” After he’d said “Yeah” a few more times, he hung up.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing,” I said. “You breed all these puppies here?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His face was empty of expression.

  I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t.

  “Do you have any, uh, Alaskan malamutes?” I asked. “There aren’t any.…” I gestured toward the kennels.

  His voice was as flat as his face. “Nope.”

  “Well, do you ever?”

  “Not now,” he said.

  The door to the office I’d passed closed with a sudden bang, and a sharp female voice rang out: “Ronald, go and sweep the grooming area! And then clean the water bowls, and I mean wash them and fill them. Don’t just add water.”

  Ronald started to speak. “Mrs. Coakley—”

  My face must have registered surprise, but Ronald and the woman were glaring at one another, not looking at me. The Mrs. Coakley? But maybe not. Her standards of personal hygiene seemed perfectly ordinary. Her short, straight black hair had a clean gleam, someone had ironed her soft-red chamois shirt and tan cords, and her black Reeboks looked new. Despite her pinched mouth and close-set eyes, she had a pretty face, with delicate features and high cheekbones. At a guess, she was in her late twenties.

  “Ronald, just do it!” she commanded. Then she turned to me and extended a small, tidy hand with neat pink-buffed oval nails. “We don’t happen to have malamutes at the moment,” she said in a gracious talking-to-customers tone, “but we have some darling little huskies.”

  Dog people, of course, say Siberians.

  “I just wondered,” I said. “Uh, Ronald—”

  “Ronald is on his way out. Good help is not that hard to find. The sign goes up today.” Mrs. Coakley’s head bobbed with assurance. The big brass button earrings on her ears danced like marks of emphatic punctuation. “I can get you a malamute,” she added. “I can get you any kind of AKC puppy you want. Or if it was a rare breed you wanted, I can get that, too.”

  The temptation was great. A Karelian bear dog? I wanted to ask. A Catahoula leopard dog, a Leonberger, a Löwchen? How about a Chinook? Can you get me a Chinook? My heart sank. A Chinook? I love the breed. Her answer could well be yes.

  “Actually,” I said, “I was out this way because of a malamute. I heard there was one for adoption. But by the time I got there, the dog had already been given away.”

  If Mrs. Coakley had been a horse, she’d have reared up. “I know all about that. That was my ex-husband that had that dog—”

  “Bill Coakley.”

  “Let me tell you something. Bill sold that dog. You don’t give away a dog with AKC papers.”

  True enough. Sometimes, no one will take the dog as a gift. Ask anyone who does purebred rescue.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Besides,” Mrs. Coakley added, “that wasn’t a puppy. You want a dog that will bond with you, don’t you? You want to be special to your own dog. And puppies are so cute. It’s a shame to miss that.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You know, scientists have proved that if you don’t start out with a puppy, dogs’ll never recognize you as their owner,” Mrs. Coakley informed me.

  Rowdy wasn’t really mine? Neither was Kimi? The news would come as a big surprise to them.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, zipping up my parka.

  Mrs. Coakley smiled. “You do that, and you call me anytime and let me know just what you want. Here, let me give you a card.”

  She stepped behind the checkout counter, fished around by the cash register, and handed me a business card. I glanced at it. Her first name was Janice. Janice and Bill Coakley. I tried to imagine them as a couple. I tried to hear people saying things like, “Hm, how about having Janice and Bill to dinner on Saturday?” Their Christmas cards? “Best wishes for the holiday season. Janice and Bill Coakley.” It seemed to me that instead of inviting them to dinner, everyone would’ve said, “Ick! What did she ever see in him?” And if Bill Coakley had so much as brushed his fingers against the Christmas cards, people would’ve opened the envelopes, taken one whiff, and said, “Boy, you don’t even need to look inside to tell who sent this one.” Had Janice and Bill both started out clean? Grubby? And the divorce? Maybe they hadn’t fought about soap and water at all. Maybe they’d fought about money. Maybe they’d fought about dogs.

  15

  Kevin Dennehy has spent most of his life in Cambridge. So far as I know, he’s never been west of the Mississippi. It’s possible that he’s never been west of Worcester, Massachusetts. Lately, though, he’s taken to wearing boot-cut jeans and yoked shirts with pearl snaps, not because he actually wants to cultivate a cowboy look but because Walker’s Western Wear is one of the few stores in Greater Boston that sell clothes big enough to accommodate Kevin’s increasing bulk. At six o’clock on Monday evening, he was dressed for a remake of Red River, but all he was doing was burning onions at my kitchen stove.

  Rita, who’s my second-floor tenant and a friend of Kevin’s as well as mine, had taken him to task a week earlier. She’d insisted that if he didn’t start living differently, he’d end up just like his father, dead of a heart attack at the age of forty. What she’d had in mind hadn’t been a radical change in diet. Rita’s a psychotherapist, not a nutritionist. Besides, the meatiest food his mother ever cooks is gluten-flour mock spare ribs. Also, Kevin’s a runner who averages forty or fifty miles a week. No, what Rita had been pushing was some kind of stress reduction seminar at a local holistic-spiritual-East-West-mind-body outfit called Interface. Rita had even unearthed a course catalog and tried to press it on Kevin. Unfortunately, though, he’d flipped it open to a page that listed a weekend workshop in which participants would travel to a forest in western Massachusetts where they’d track animals in the wild and learn to identify them by their spoor, in other words, their tracks and droppings.

  “Spoor!” Kevin had hollered. “You know what spoor means?” He’d turned to me. “You get this? You really get this? If I don’t want to die of a heart attack, I’m suppose
d to go out in the woods and stick my nose in raccoon shit? Jesus Christ. I don’t believe it.” Then he’d pulled himself together, taken a big swig of Budweiser, and said, “Pardon my French.”

  That’s presumably what led to Rita’s next piece of advice, namely, that if Kevin would substitute a glass or two of red wine for the beer or milk he usually drank with his meals, he’d be doing his coronary arteries a big favor and, at the same time, reducing his emotional stress.

  “Hey, hey!” he’d said. “Hold that Bud! Bring forth the Chateau le Classy!”

  But, to my amazement, he had apparently taken her suggestion seriously. At any rate, that Monday evening, instead of showing up with his usual ground beef and Bud, he’d brought a package of chicken thighs and a half-gallon jug of Gallo red burgundy.

  “Distressed grapes,” Kevin said, quoting Rita. He picked up a glass tumbler that Rowdy had won at a match, took a gulp, and swallowed the wine. Then he upended the package of chicken on the blackened onions. Steam hissed and smoke rose. Rowdy and Kimi, stationed on either side of Kevin, lifted their noses as if to heaven. “Distressed grapes,” Kevin repeated. “Make ‘em suffer, and then when they hit your gut, they’re mad as hell. Start out with all this fat clogging everything up, and you pour these little guys in, and they blast it out.” His beefy hand brought the glass to his lips. He drank, gave a satisfied smile, and added, “Just like Drano.”