Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  ”It takes a three-way bulb,” said Sherri Ann.

  I WAS SPEECHLESS. Sherri Ann said, ”Look, I was going to give this to Freida, and if you people for some reason don’t appreciate—”

  ”Oh, we do!” I exclaimed hastily. ”We’re really very grateful.”

  At the risk of revealing myself as thankless, I’ll add that the purity of Sherri Ann’s motivation in donating the relic to Alaskan Malamute Rescue instead of our breed club was, I thought, heavily contaminated by revenge. As every one of the hundred or so people in the exhibition area knew, Sherri Ann Printz, the chair of the previous year’s national, had arrived at the show to discover that this year’s chair, Freida Reilly, had chosen a previously unannounced theme: Putting the special Back in SPECIALTY! In and around the show ring, a lot of things get dropped: gum wrappers, paper coffee cups, scraps of sandwiches, bits of the liver used to bait the dogs. Insults? Let fall, yes. Seldom by accident. And if you happen to be a stranger to the dog fancy, let me explain right now that unless you’re a lifelong hermit, you’ll understand the competition and politics as well as any insider does. Little League competition? Church politics? The PTA! Stranger, you’re right at home here.

  Sherri Ann cleared her throat. ”When,” she demanded, ”is Betty getting back here?”

  ”Any minute,” I said. Then I introduced myself. ”I’m Holly Winter.”

  There was no reason why Sherri Ann Printz should have known who I was. I write a column for Dog’s Life magazine, but even if Sherri Ann subscribed, she didn’t necessarily read it. Furthermore, I wasn’t a breeder, and I had only two malamutes. Rowdy, my male, finished his championship easily, and I was still showing him now and then, but only in the Northeast. My cousin Leah was just starting to show my bitch, Kimi, in breed. Leah and I concentrate on obedience, but in Sherri Ann’s view, conformation—competition for championship points and beyond—was all that mattered; obedience trials barely existed.

  But I knew who Sherri Ann Printz was. Everyone did. She’d had malamutes for decades. Only a few years earlier, the Malamute Quarterly had published a two-part interview with her. She lived in Minnesota. Her kennel name wasn’t her fault; she’d been brainwashed by the cult. Failing deprogramming, she’d had no real choice: last name Printz, therefore Pawprintz Kennels. Sherri Ann had bred a lot of top show dogs, including the favorite to go Best of Breed on Saturday afternoon under Judge James Hunnewell, a dog called Bear—officially, Pawprintz Honor Guard—a big, heavy-boned dog named by Sherri Ann’s husband, Victor Printz, U.S.M.C., retired, who, according to rumor, had never been heard to utter an intelligible word to a human being, but was reputed to murmur and grunt to his wife’s dogs and to christen all of them: Tripoli, Montezuma, Few Good Men.

  So, if Sherri Ann thought that I was no one—no one in malamutes—she was right. Rejecting my suggestion that she wait for someone who counted—and Betty

  Burley did count—Sherri Ann departed to watch the judging and missed by only a minute or two the return of Betty, who was carrying two cups of that substance without which a dog show isn’t a dog show, namely, horrible coffee. Somewhere in South America, I’m convinced, dwells an anti-dog cousin of Juan Valdez who meticulously selects the most shriveled little beans from the most sickly, runty bushes, mixes his harvest with fistfuls of manure, and ships it to the U.S., where it’s tested for staleness, and then sold exclusively for brewing and consumption at dog shows.

  After handing me a cup and sipping from her own, Betty also passed along a bit of something that’s as universal at dog shows as bad coffee: gossip. In this case, though, the news was anything but the usual light hearsay. ”Elsa Van Dine was murdered last night!” I had the impression that the late Elsa Van Dine had once been a Personage in malamutes. ”In Providence!” Betty added. She made the city sound as shocking as the crime itself.

  The combination of murder and Providence reminded me of something ugly I’d heard from my next-door neighbor, Kevin Dennehy, who’s a Cambridge police lieutenant. Looking up from a newspaper article about murder-for-hire, my cousin Leah had asked Kevin how much you had to pay to get someone killed. ”It all depends,” Kevin had replied matter-of-factly. ”In Providence, you can get a bat job for sixty dollars.” In reply to Leah’s baffled look, Kevin had expanded: ”Baseball bat.”

  ”The poor thing,” Betty went on, ”flew in to New York and rented a car, and on her way here, she stopped off with relatives in Providence. And last night, when she went out to her car for something, she was robbed and murdered! Right there on the street! Her wedding ring and her diamond engagement ring were Pulled right off her finger. Poor thing! She died of massive head injuries.”

  Before I could ask exactly who Elsa Van Dine was —had been—Betty aimed a finger at the lamp. ”Don’t tell me! Sherri Ann Printz. And she made it herself.”

  I first met Betty Burley when we’d been seated next to each other at a dog club banquet. Even before we exchanged introductions, a flash of recognition informed me that I was encountering a rare case of duplicate reincarnation: Staring into Betty’s weirdly familiar almond-shaped brown eyes, I saw the soul of an Alaskan malamute, and not just any malamute, but my own Kimi. The physical resemblance, however, ended with those duplicate eyes; Kimi is young, big, well-muscled, and dark, with the facial markings that make up a full mask: a black cap, a bar down her muzzle, and goggles around her eyes. A tiny, frail-looking woman in her midseventies, Betty Burley never even wore a hat, never mind a cap or a mask, and she used glasses only for reading. Nonetheless, whenever Betty entered my kitchen, I felt compelled to check the counters for food she might steal. In Betty’s presence, I’d find myself fishing through my pockets for liver treats, and I’d discover on the tip of my tongue such unspeakable commands as ”Off!”

  ”Leave it!” and an emphatic ”Watch me!”

  ”Dear God,” sighed Betty, eyes on the lamp, ”since when did Sherri Ann start supporting Rescue?” She spoke loudly enough to be easily overheard by the people looking over the collection of silent-auction items arranged on our table. Saturday night’s live auction would bring in big money. The objects in our comparatively humble silent auction included a pair of metal dog bowls, a set of malamute refrigerator magnets, a copper aspic mold in the shape of a fish, two pounds of Vienna roast coffee beans, a case of beer that it was probably illegal for us to auction in Massachusetts, and —my favorite—a framed mirror with malamutes painted all over the glass, designed, I guess, to let you see yourself as your own dogs.

  ”She was going to give the lamp to Freida,” I said quietly, ”but she changed her mind. I assume it was that ’Putting the SPECIAL Back...’ ”

  Betty eyed the lamp. ”What it was—is—is trouble-making.”

  ”That’s Comet’s fur,” I said defensively.

  ”She hasn’t glued it on right,” Betty pointed out. ”It’s falling off.”

  In fact, stray clumps of fur were loose, as if the stress of finding himself stacked on pink granite and transformed into a light fixture had induced the poor dog to blow coat.

  ”Did Sherri Ann ever own Comet?” I asked.

  ”No. Comet had three or four different owners. Actually, poor Elsa Van Dine was one of them. But Sherri Ann certainly wasn’t. Some of her dogs do go back to Comet, though.” With an un-Kimi-like expression of resignation, Betty said, ”Well, if that really is Comet’s fur, I suppose we’ll have to save it for Saturday night. You don’t care for the ugly thing, and I wouldn’t give it house room, but someone will just love it.” From her overstuffed tote bag, Betty removed a manila folder and added a note about Sherri Ann’s lamp to her list of donations. At Betty’s request, I started to move the lamp from its temporary place among the silent-auction items to the long, narrow table that ran along the wall at the back of our booth, where we were displaying the ten special donations reserved for the Saturday post-banquet live auction.

  ”Don’t drop it!” Betty warned me. ”If it lands on your foot, it’ll crush it, and then
where will I be?” Betty had started checking animal shelters for abandoned malamutes thirty or forty years ago. She was one of the pioneers of the breed rescue movement, which is an effort to tackle the otherwise overwhelming problem °f needy and abandoned dogs by dividing the responsibility. It’s hard to understand why dog people would have devalued kindness to animals and rejected the simple, practical idea that we should take care of our own, but Betty spent decades being ridiculed for wasting her rime and money on what people called ”trash dogs.” She sometimes found it hard to believe that support was growing. If the lamp had smashed my foot, Yvonne, Nancy, Isabelle, Gary, or one of the other rescue people would have filled in for me. But Betty remained sensitive.

  A woman who’d been examining the album of rescue dogs moved along the table. Picking up a book— Frozen Future, a book about Antarctica—she asked, ”How much is this?”

  ”It’s a silent auction,” I explained for the thousandth time. ”You look at the piece of paper, the one there, and you see how much the last person bid for it. And if you’re willing to pay more, you write your name and the amount on the next line. And then on Saturday afternoon after Best of Breed, you come back and see if you’re the highest bidder.”

  Ever the proselytizer, Betty Burley pounced on the woman and offered her a pamphlet about Alaskan Malamute Rescue. Then Yvonne Johnson appeared and took over for me so that I could make the rounds of the vendors. The booth that especially interested me was run by R.T.I., Reproductive Technologies, Inc., a company that specialized in ovulation timing and semen preservation.

  Yes, indeed. I had to see a man about some frozen sperm.

  ”THE BITCH that Lois calls Angel is actually quite decent.” Pam Ritchie eyed the young—and by implication, far from decent—male that another New England breeder, Lois Metzler, was at that moment gaiting across the ring.

  With apparent astonishment, Tiny DaSilva gasped, ”Do you think so?”

  ”Yes, I do,” Pam snapped. ”For those lines.” Finding the R.T.I. booth staffed only by a sign that read back soon, I’d spotted Pam and Tiny and decided to catch some of the judging. Fond of my jugular, I’d avoided even the appearance of partiality by moving °ne of the hotel-supplied chairs to a position behind and directly between Pam and Tiny, whose knees almost brushed the baby gate.

  Tiny gave a loud snort. Lowering the volume, she mumbled, ”Ball of fluff on toothpicks!”

  Everything about Pam, from her big-boned build to the distinctive shape of her head to a familiar and characteristic expression in her eyes, suggested an origin in the lines that had produced Tiny’s dogs; and if Tiny had been a malamute, she’d have been one of Pam Ritchie’s own breeding, a pure Kotzebue, a descendant of the malamutes bred by Milton and Eva B. Seeley at the old Chinook Kennels, which supplied the dogs for the Byrd expeditions. But the colors were wrong, the coats incorrect: Pam had a mane of unacceptably fluffy curls in non-malamute chestnut. If Tiny had shampooed out the blue tint and let her blunt cut grow, she could have entered herself, I guess, but as it was, the evidence of cosmetic tinkering was unmistakable, and she was obviously out of coat.

  Appearances mislead. Despite the incessant exchanges of growls, Pam and Tiny often traveled to and from shows together. At meetings, they invariably sat next to each other. A few months earlier, Pam had had a miscarriage while her husband was away on business, and Tiny had nursed her and taken care of her dogs. Observing what often seemed like an imminent and bloody scrap, a stranger wouldn’t have known that Pam and Tiny were self-chosen kennelmates linked by the sturdy chains of dogs.

  ”Well, I’ll tell you something.” Pam gestured toward Lois’s dog. ”Doris likes him. He’s just her type.”

  Tiny narrowed her eyes. ”With that tail?”

  ”You watch and see,” Pam told her. ”Some of Lois’s dogs go back to Doris’s, you know. Or maybe you’ve forgotten.”

  Tiny, twenty or thirty years older than Pam, exclaimed, ”Forgotten? What makes you think that I’m getting forgetful all of a sudden? And in case you’re forgetting something you don’t know to begin with, let me tell you that James Hunnewell’s not going to like that dog any better than Doris does. Among other things, Hunnewell never put up a black-and-white dog in his life, and he’s not going to start now.”

  My hopes rose. Rowdy and Kimi are not black and white, but dark wolf gray.

  After a pause, Pam added, ”Although I, for one, have yet to see any real proof that the man is still alive.”

  ”Don’t be ridiculous!” Tiny said. ”Hunnewell’s name was on the eligible list, wasn’t it?”

  Each of the various competitions, including the independent area specialty scheduled for Sunday (another all-malamute show entirely separate from the national), had a judge. The judge of the national specialty itself, however, was James Hunnewell, whose victory in the poll of our entire national breed club membership had come as a gigantic surprise for the simple reason that he’d been out of dogs for so long that everyone had assumed he was dead. No one I’d talked to had admitted to voting for Hunnewell in the judging poll. Everyone in New England blamed the result on people in other areas of the country, where, I suspect, everyone was blaming us. In strict confidence, the woman who’d tallied the vote had told me that she’d been so amazed at the result that she’d recounted the ballots three separate times before reaching the conclusion that we had elected a deceased judge. Imagine: In the next U.S. presidential race, the surprise victor turns out to be Calvin Coolidge. Astounded, are you? None too delighted? Thought he was dead? Well, there you have the election of James Hunnewell.

  ”I still can’t understand it,” Pam said.

  ”Splintered vote,” I volunteered. ”Or name recognition. That’s what Janet Switzer thinks. Hunnewell’s name is in all the breed books.”

  Janet is Rowdy’s breeder and one of my mentors. ”And if they’d known Hunnewell,” she’d continued, ’they’d have scooped up the little piece of fecal matter and deposited him in the Doggie Dooley where he belongs.”

  James Hunnewell had drawn a surprisingly large entry: Since no one had even seen him for a long time, few exhibitors harbored resentments about losses under him or had any memories at all about how he’d conducted himself in his ring. Janet had advised me to enter. ”The old coot’s got to be on his last legs,” remarked Janet, who isn’t on her own first. ”Who knows? He might kick the bucket any day, and you could luck out with a substitute judge.”

  Faith Barlow, Rowdy’s handler, had taken Hunnewell’s election as a personal challenge. ”There’s not a judge on earth that can intimidate me,” she’d bragged. ”There are a few I won’t show under on principle, but otherwise, if it stands in the ring and hands out ribbons, I’ll show under it; and if it growls at me, I’ll growl back.”

  Betty Burley, though, had angrily refused to enter under James Hunnewell and had urged me to do the same. Betty’s attitude, I thought, must date to some ancient injury or insult, a nasty remark that Hunnewell had made twenty or thirty years ago, an unkind word about her dogs, perhaps, or a mean-spirited comment about Betty’s early rescue efforts.

  I ignored Betty’s advice and entered both dogs. Kimi was just beginning her career in conformation. I entered her in Open bitches. She’d be handled by my cousin Leah. I entered Rowdy, my champion, in Best of Breed. He’d be handled by Faith Barlow. Neither of my dogs would be in the ring until Saturday. Consequently, I had all day tomorrow to observe how Judge James Hunnewell treated those who’d complimented him by paying entry fees for his opinion of their dogs. If I didn’t want my teenage cousin in his ring, I could pull Kimi or, over Leah’s protests, no doubt, find another handler. Faith could take care of herself. I took her at more than her word: If Hunnewell bit her, she’d bite back.

  ACCORDING TO MYTH, the New England colonists fled the British Isles in search of religious freedom. In truth, they were extradited—summarily booted out of the homeland of dog worship following a little-known incident, an act of heresy, if you will,
that took place at the famous Canterbury Cathedral. There a rebellious clique of Brewsters, Bradfords, Carvers, and Winslows refused to join their fellow worshipers in what would otherwise have been the unequivocally fervent rendering of ”All Creatures Great and Small.” As everyone knows, the involuntary expatriates first sought refuge in Holland. In the course of a barge tour of Amsterdam, however, one of their number—a Stan-dish, I believe—uttered a very loud and extremely rude remark about a Keeshond, thus causing the previously hospitable Dutch to toss the future colonists over the dikes and into the cold seas of the Atlantic, where they drifted for many months before finally washing up on shore in the vicinity of a large rock on which many of them deservedly cracked their heads. Fable? Fact: The

  New England colonists attached dire theological significance to the backward spelling of d-o-g. The black mass: the litany backward. The dog: the creature of Satan.

  What leads me to the topic of the New England colonies is not the hotel’s decor, which was Hawaiian, but my conviction that somewhere on Maui, the Milestone chain has erected a hotel and conference facility structurally identical to the one in Danville, Massachusetts, but adorned with Ye Olde New England materials and motifs. The building itself is, I believe, the same as this one: the two-story motel-hotel at one end, the exhibition hall at the other, with the space between devoted to a large lobby, a bar, two restaurants, a variety of meeting, assembly, and banquet rooms, and the center consisting of a cavernous mock atrium that does not open to the sky and contains some droopy-looking trees that obviously wish it did and many others that, being plastic, don’t care. Through the center of the atrium at the Maui Milestone flows a miniature artificial trout stream spanned by a tiny replica of a genuine New England covered bridge. Unwary guests trip on the legs of spinning wheels, regain their balance, set down drinks on cobbler’s bench tables, and order refills from service personnel garbed for a grammar-school reenactment of the First Thanksgiving.