by Susan Conant
By now I could see Walter Simms clearly. He was a big, lazy, stupid man with a beer belly that hung out over the unbelted waistband of his drooping pants. His unbuttoned shirt revealed a white-haired chest with small female breasts. He stood, feet apart, in the barnyard of a sprawling farm in the Midwest. Behind him, the huge burning sun of Iowa or Missouri was sinking below a flat horizon.
“Me, neither,” Kevin said.
“What?”
“CIA.”
I started to explain OFA and CERF and stuff—Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, Canine Eye Research Foundation—but Kevin spread the fingers of his left hand, pointed to the names of two dogs, and said, “These two.” He tapped on the pedigree.
“Yeah, you already … yes. They’re half sisters. Bred to the same stud.” I moved Kevin’s fingers to the left. “And these two, Sir Snowy the Fourth and Stupid Little Sally—God, I hate that name. Anyway … well, it’s very close.”
“Close!” he said in disgust. He lowered his voice. “What this is, is incest.”
“It’s really not the same, Kevin. These aren’t people. Dogs don’t know, and, besides, they get bred. They don’t commit incest.”
“Yeah, well,” Kevin answered, “maybe they don’t know, but if they did, you can bet they wouldn’t like it.” He moved his fingers back to the names of Queenie and Lady. “Especially these two.”
“Malamute bitches don’t usually get along too well with each other anyway,” I informed him.
Kevin’s fingers resumed the tapping. “Jesus,” he said. “No wonder.”
16
My Boston Globe arrives by seven A.M. On Tuesday morning, I read it over my second cup of coffee. The front page carried the usual Boston stories. Construction on the new central artery and the new airport tunnel would be slower than expected. (By whom? I, for one, expected it to take forever.) Mayor Ray Flynn’s arrival at a banquet had already been delayed. On route to the dinner, the mayor spotted a homeless man asleep in a gutter and stopped to pick him up and treat him to a Big Mac with a large order of fries. Ray Flynn is a man of the people. One of those people is, of course, his boyhood friend, Police Commissioner Mickey Roache. Boston, Boston.
Lest you suppose that the Globe practices provincial journalism, though, let me add that the front page articles were not exclusively concerned with events that had transpired within the city limits or even within the boundaries of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A tractor-trailer had overturned all the way out on 1-95 in far-off Woburn, and in Rhode Island—practically a foreign country, right?—jailed racketeer Enzio Guarini (the Globe’s words, not mine) was again appealing two or three of his convictions on twenty or thirty counts of fraud, conspiracy, and like crimes. Well, okay, get picky if you want. Sure, Guarini grew up in Boston, and Guarini’s whole family—and Family, presumably—still lived in Massachusetts, but just exactly how did you think he made the Globe’s front page, anyway?
Probably because Puppy Luv did business way out in the distant reaches of Cambridge, the two scanty paragraphs about Diane Sweet’s murder appeared in the Metro/Region section. According to the paper, police were “investigating several possible leads.” And ignoring the impossible ones. This is news? Diane Sweet’s obituary, though, reported a fact that was genuinely new, at least to me. This editorial slipup was undoubtedly attributable to the Globe’s odd but rather frequent practice of printing obituaries at the end of the Sports section, thus treating demise as the great final score.
What appeared wasn’t one of those laudatory accounts of Diane Sweet’s fine character and multitudinous contributions to society. Instead of a eulogy, all she got was the shortest paragraph in the cramped list of death notices. Even the usual information about funeral arrangements and memorial donations was missing. The gap seemed to confirm Kevin’s view of John Sweet as a good-for-nothing, the kind of husband who couldn’t even bury his wife without her help. He hadn’t so much as bothered to call her his “beloved” wife. In its entirety, the notice read:
SWEET—Suddenly, of Cambridge, February 9, Diane L. (Richards). Wife of John B. Sweet. Also survived by a sister, Janice Coakley, of Westbrook.
Yes, indeed. Sister. Something clicked. I turned to the classifieds. In spite of Diane Sweet’s murder, Puppy Luv’s ad was running under “Dogs, Cats, and Other Pets,” and so was Your Local Breeder’s. The two ads were in boldface at the tops of adjacent columns. As I remembered, Puppy Luv’s offered “Adorable AKC Puppies! More than twenty breeds to choose from.” Your Local Breeder, though, could supply “any AKC breed on request.” According to Puppy Luv’s copy, “our beautiful, healthy puppies come from local breeders, not from puppy mills.” But Janice Coakley’s ad, it now seemed to me, warned buyers about her sister: “Never buy a dog from a pet shop! Come to us first! Your Local Breeder.”
More or less the same two ads appeared regularly in the Globe, and I’d glanced at them before, but I’d missed what now felt like the exchange of personal accusations, sibling rivalry rather than business competition. On the basis of the ads alone, Janice Coakley seemed to be winning. The key phrase in the Puppy Luv copy, local breeder, Diane Sweet’s big selling point, was almost a pitch for the competition; and Puppy Luv’s “more than twenty breeds” (however adorable) couldn’t beat Janice Coakley’s offer of “any AKC breed.” Also, of course, Janice Coakley was still alive.
I made my routine check of the classifieds to see whether anyone was selling a malamute—no one was—and then I walked Rowdy and Kimi around the block, came home, looked up Bill Coakley’s phone number, and once again scanned the dog ads. Three separate ads gave his number, one for Yorkies (“tiny bundles of love”), one for Poms (“home raised with TLC”), and one for Shih Tzus, poodles, and “Shis-a-poos.” Why puppy buyers will pay purebred prices for crossbred dogs is beyond me. In God’s eyes, every dog is beyond price, of course, but here on earth, these Pom-a-poos, Yorkie-tzus, and all the other accidental-breeding-poos are simply mix-a-Yorks, so do yourself a favor, huh? If you want an all-American, go to your local shelter. Save your money. And a life, too.
I put down the paper, picked up the phone, and called Bill Coakley, who sounded as hearty as he had yesterday and who once again assured me that he had found Missy a good home and that I “shouldn’t worry none” about her. I concluded that in the sixteen or so hours since I’d seen Coakley, he’d worked exactly as hard on recovering Missy as he had on improving his English grammar. Janice, his ex-wife, had claimed that Bill had sold Missy. If so, it seemed to me, he probably knew where she was.
“This is a serious matter,” I said firmly. “That dog is the property of Malamute Rescue.” Yes, property. A dog who’s safe at home with you may share your life, but a lost or stolen dog damn well better be your property, or he’s apt to become someone else’s. “And,” I added, “it might interest you to know that there is a reward for her return.”
Ransom? Let’s call it motivation. Oh, and if you don’t do rescue, perhaps you imagine that the source of this proffered reward was the whopping endowment of the Alaskan Malamute Protection League—it has none—or the riches of the Alaskan Malamute Emergency Fund, that is, a bank balance that seldom exceeds a few hundred dollars. Yes, indeed, my empty pockets. By the way, while we’re on this topic, you don’t happen to know Robin Williams, do you? I’m serious. Robin Williams. Popeye? Good Morning, Vietnam? He used to own a malamute. Maybe he still does. Anyway, if Robin Williams happens to have been your first husband’s college roommate or something, and if you run into him, could you mention AMPL? The Alaskan Malamute Protection League. Just sort of work it into the conversation, huh? Box 170, Cedar Crest, New Mexico, 87008. Oh, and tell him that his donation won’t go to reclaim a rescue dog like Missy, lost by someone who found her inconvenient, someone who had better things to do.… In fact, if you think he can handle it, tell him the brutal truth: Rescue shouldn’t have to mean the painless dignity of a needle instead of the mass horror of a decompression chamber, but sometimes that’s
what it comes down to.
So Missy’s ransom, Coakley’s motivation, was my responsibility. I’d lost Missy. I’d pay to get her back. Also, I kept remembering Kevin’s repeated insistence that Puppy Luv used local suppliers. I’d been assuming that Missy had come from the Midwest or Pennsylvania and that the hog-faced, fat-bellied Walter Simms had represented himself as legitimate and persuaded Lois Metzler to ship him a puppy. In fact, I’d been especially ready to believe that that’s what had happened because of a story I’d recently heard from another local malamute breeder, Ginny Pawson. Seven or eight years ago, a pleasant-sounding woman in Iowa had talked Ginny into shipping her a bitch. A month later, though, Ginny spotted a malamute puppy in a pet shop and managed to get a look at the papers. The breeder shown on those papers was the same woman who’d just bought Ginny’s bitch. Ginny paid twice the purchase price to buy back that puppy, but she considered herself fortunate. I’d been assuming that Lois Metzler’s story was what Ginny’s would have been without the intervention of coincidence. Also, of course, I’d been eager to keep the horror of puppy mills as geographically remote as possible.
Local dogs, Kevin had insisted. Not from Kansas, not from the airport. Local. Puppy Luv’s ad: local breeders. By Diane Sweet’s standards, Bill Coakley was a local breeder; by mine, he was a puppy mill operator who’d eliminated the broker and the pet shop by doing direct sales. Your Local Breeder. Janice Coakley and Diane Sweet were sisters. Bill Coakley had been Diane Sweet’s brother-in-law. Eight years ago, Ginny Pawson had been talked into shipping a bitch to Iowa. Eight years ago, almost all breeders were more innocent and trusting than they are now. I didn’t know the birth date of Missy’s dam, Icekist Sissy, but I was willing to bet that Lois Metzler hadn’t sold her any eight years ago. I could find Icekist Sissy’s age by consulting the malamute studbook, but it didn’t really matter. The point was that Lois had sold Icekist Sissy recently enough to have been wary about shipping a puppy to an unknown buyer in a distant part of the country. Yes, it could have happened. But the chances were good that the buyer had been local. The word kept running through my head: local, local.
Almost on impulse, I called Gloria Loss, whose voice was thick with sleep. When she heard my name, the grogginess turned to guilt. “Did it snow? Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“No, it didn’t … Gloria, I’ve, uh, sort of been rethinking things.”
“I’m really, really—”
“I’ve got another plan,” I said. “There’s something I want you to do, instead of the shoveling. It’s more … it’s sort of more connected to your original purpose. Only this could actually do some good. All it is, is … all I want you to do is to collect some information. It’s just a matter of keeping your eyes and ears open. What I want you to do is apply for a job. If you don’t get hired, that’s it. We’ll … I’ll take it from there. But if you do, we have to agree right now that all you do is look and listen. You don’t actually do anything. Okay? And you don’t, uh, express your own opinions. You just give me the information, and then I worry about what to do about it. If anything.”
Gloria startled me. “Is this a job at a pet shop?”
“Yes,” I said. Then a little chagrined at having been second-guessed, I added, “More or less.”
“I thought from the way you … the way you talked about them.” Her voice took on that ghastly tone of adolescent admiration. “I could tell that you had strong feelings about them. You sounded really committed.”
I felt myself cringe. I’m so committed that I’d never even entered Puppy Luv until I’d practically been ordered there by someone who didn’t even have malamutes; so deeply concerned that whenever I’d read Janice Coakley’s offer of “any AKC breed,” I’d never even bothered to call and inquire. When I’d seen Missy’s papers, I’d conjured an image of the breeder, Walter Simms, against a convenient horizon of Iowa corn or Kansas wheat. The golden fields were so clear in my mind that, even now, I found it impossible to force Maine pines or Vermont maples to take root in the rich topsoil and raise the skyline. “What we can do is probably very limited,” I said sternly, “but it’s not going to work at all unless you do exactly what I tell you to do. And nothing else. Okay?”
The plan I outlined to Gloria was that she apply for the unenterprising Ronald’s job at Your Local Breeder. She was to call Janice Coakley and explain that one of her neighbors, someone looking for a dog, had heard she was job-hunting, knew she liked animals, and mentioned the possible opening at Your Local Breeder. The scheme had several potential hitches, of course. One was that Ronald might have kept his job after all. Another was that I had no spare car to offer Gloria and was completely unwilling to encourage her to thumb her way back and forth to Westbrook. A final problem was that Gloria’s appearance wasn’t exactly what any employer looks for in a salesperson; even if Janice Coakley had made good on her threat to fire Ronald, and even if Gloria got an interview, Janice Coakley might still take one look and decide not to hire her. In fact, the repellent thought came to me, unbidden and unwelcome, that dog … well, never mind. I was raised in the cult of dog worship. Some names I won’t speak in vain.
The transportation problem was easy to solve. When I presented it to Gloria, she said, “My mom’s away for two weeks. She left yesterday. I can use the car.” Gloria went on to explain: “She’s in New Mexico on a personal journey.”
A personal journey. A pilgrimage to meet her birth mother, right? Or reverse the roles: her first reunion with the child she’d given up at age sixteen. Or maybe a trip to the only clinic in the U.S. that even tried to treat her rare, painful, embarrassing, degenerative, and ultimately fatal disease. But the truth, it turned out, was a whole lot worse than I imagined. In fact, Gloria’s mother had signed up and actually paid an incredible amount of money to spend two weeks alone in the desert with nothing but an ample supply of drinking water and one large plastic trash bag. Cambridge.
“I hope it’s at least puncture proof,” I said frivolously.
“What?”
“All those cacti? Never mind. Anyway, speaking of—Gloria, if you get an interview, it’d probably be a good idea not to look too, uh, Cambridge. The image they’re after is probably more sort of …” I fished for words. “Not, uh, academic? Not ethnic. Sort of more all-American.”
“Pigtails?”
“Yes! Great idea. Exactly. Unsophisticated. Anyway, we might not even get that far, so let’s not worry about it yet, okay? But if it works out, all I want you to do is collect information. I want to know where their puppies come from, okay? And Janice Coakley, the woman who runs the place, told me she could get malamutes. If you can, I want you to find out where. And who the breeders are. The names of the breeders will be on the puppies’ papers. There’s a name I want you to look out for: Walter Simms. And who her suppliers are. But for now, just call her. Maybe that’s as far as we’ll get.”
When I hung up, I felt guilty about that puncture-proof crack. I’m in no position to make fun of personal journeys that seem ridiculous to other people.
17
My research for the Sally Brand article had revealed the startling fact that between sixty and seventy percent of the members of the Yakuza, Japan’s Cosa Nostra, are irezumi. Stunned, aren’t you? Or maybe your Japanese is a little rusty. Ire-zumi means “insertion of ink.” The irezumi are those who bear what the Japanese consider to be an externalization of inner reality. Well, I guess Americans think the same thing. Just look how many guys wear their hearts on their sleeves. I wondered whether Enzio Guarini had a tattoo and, if so, what it depicted, but the inner reality of a jailed racketeer fell outside my experience. Clasped hands? A Mini-Uzi? For all I knew, though, Guarini had popped into Sally Brand’s on his way to jail—after all, they were both in Rhode Island—and now bore on his back, chest, or upper arm the perfect likeness of his pet chihuahua, the devoted companion that at this very moment, right here in Massachusetts … Bonnie, my editor at Dog’s Life, just can’t resist a story ab
out any dog who’s pining away for anyone or anything. Just on the off chance, I made a note to ask Sally Brand.
So I was working, right? I mean, this is what writers do, you know. Being a writer is really wonderful. Most of your so-called work consists of kicking around a lot of sticky ideas until they glop onto one another, by which time you’re low on dog food and people food. So you scribble something on paper, hit the keyboard, sprint to the post office, and eventually get paid to keep staying home with your dogs. Well, it’s a great life.
To return to the gummy ideas, consider the possible adhesions: local dogs, personal journeys, inner realities, families, organizations, my happy profession, and my futile effort to transplant New England pines and maples to the rich, flat agricultural acreage of porcine Walter Simms, who was, for a start, an inner reality of mine, not someone I’d actually used my resources to pursue.
If I want to find out who’s who in reputable dogdom, I know quite a few people to ask, and I can also consult the membership lists of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America and lots of other clubs I’ve simply had to join. AMCA and the other national breed clubs are highly selective in admitting members. The dog magazines, though, don’t screen the breeders and kennels that advertise puppies, so their listings are no guarantee of reputability, but there are a lot of ads placed by the famous, the infamous, and the unknown.
Then there’s the matter of disreputable dogdom, which you may be surprised to learn actually has what is in effect its own organization, namely, the United States Department of Agriculture, the branch of our government that licenses puppy mills and puppy brokers. Whoops, pardon the slip, Class A and Class B dealers. Class A dealers breed animals; Class A dealers breed and sell them. Or if you’re a sci-fi fan, maybe you aren’t surprised. Parallel universes? You don’t believe me? Write or call the USDA and ask for a copy of the booklet Animal Welfare: List of Licensed Dealers. Yes, welfare. Ha-ha. In fairness, though, I must point out that not every USDA-licensed dealer is a puppy mill operator or broker. A few dealers maintain rabbit and ferret farms. Some breed kittens. A few have names that sound above reproach. Johns Hopkins University, for instance, is a USDA-licensed Class A dealer. So there’s no stigma, really, is there? After all, Johns Hopkins doesn’t mass-produce puppies for pet shops. Well, then, why the USDA license? Research, of course, including research on laboratory animals. Rats and mice? Probably. Also, I’ve heard, Alaskan malamutes. No stigma, huh?