Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  I bought the tape and have repeatedly watched that display of naughtiness while fast-forwarding, stopping, and zipping on in search of the section that shows Leah and Kimi. But I have leaped ahead of myself. The tape has been heavily edited; long minutes have become seconds. And because the camera rested on a very low tripod, the viewpoint is odd and unfamiliar, as if the judging had been filmed by a very small child with a precocious interest in canine gait. Or perhaps an obsession with the lower halves of female human beings. In this foreshadowing of a radical-feminist future, the judge is female, and women handlers outnumber the men... five to one? Ten to one? So maybe what truly enthralls the child is ladies’ legs. They vary so greatly in size and shape, bone and muscle mass, as to constitute a sort of all-breed show within this otherwise uniformly malamute ring.

  Judge Mikki Muldoon’s legs are fine-boned, and she toes out; judged by the official standard of the Alaskan malamute, she doesn’t make it in her own ring. Kimi does. She moves with the power of a thundercloud and the grace of a big cat. At the time, I was silent. Each time I watch the tape, however, I coach Leah aloud: Don’t yank her in! Don’t make her sidewind! Leah’s lesson-ridden childhood pays off: Eurythmics, Suzuki, and the Orff-Kodaly method have taught her tempo and discipline. And if Kimi’s ear set is not the utter perfection of Rowdy’s? Well, malamutes don’t pull with their ears; and to some extent—fourth place, to be exact—Judge Mikki Muldoon agrees. First goes to a bitch bred, owned, and handled by Sherri Ann Printz. Two others are also ahead of Kimi. But fourth? Out of the highly competitive Open class? At a national specialty? With a young, if gifted, handler? I think that’s damn good.

  The hoots and wild applause were for Sherri Ann. My own cries of utter surprise were for Kimi and Leah. For obvious reasons, I did my best to hide the full extent of my astonishment from Leah and Faith. If Kimi knew, she didn’t care. Dogs judge souls, not bodies. Kimi knows her own worth.

  Leah thanked the judge, congratulated those who’d placed ahead of her, and accepted congratulations in return. Sherri Ann Printz smiled, chatted, and gesticulated with great animation. Sherri Ann could, of course, afford magnanimity. Her object, however, was obvious: to present herself to Leah as grandly rising above the false accusations and infantile food-fighting of madwomen. Every vote counts, I thought cynically: Leah belonged to our national breed club.

  Even after leaving the ring, Kimi was still flashing her eyes, wagging her tail at everyone, and angling for liver. To spare Leah the need to keep an eye on Kimi, as well as to reclaim my own dog, I took Kimi’s lead and was scratching her head and otherwise fooling around with her when Sherri Ann Printz turned from Leah to me and, just before leading her bitch back into the ring, exclaimed loudly, ”These youngsters are the future, you know! And if this young lady is any example, it’s my opinion that it’s a very rosy one!”

  I wasn’t sure whether Sherri Ann meant Leah or Kimi, and not long thereafter, when Judge Mikki Muldoon again gave the nod to Sherri Ann—Winners Bitch —I couldn’t help wondering whether the rosy future paramount in Sherri Ann’s mind was hours rather than decades away: In picking a Pawprintz bitch, Mrs. Muldoon hadn’t exactly dashed Sherri Ann’s hopes for Bear’s victory in Best of Breed, a triumph that would also serve as dandy revenge on the cake-smearing Freida Reilly. On the other hand (the frosting-free hand? sorry, no pun intended), if Mikki Muldoon was playing politics, this win and the championship points that went with it could be a sop, an advance consolation prize to Sherri Ann, who, as a VIP in the breed, would be a bad enemy for a judge interested in obtaining future assignments. How political Mikki Muldoon was, I didn’t know. Her pleasure in judging was obvious: She radiated dignified elation. Her efficiency, too, was apparent: When she left the ring for a hard-earned one-hour lunch break, I checked my watch: ten past twelve. In a world in which schedules are usually optimistic approximations, she had completed her morning’s work almost precisely on time, and she’d done it without creating any sense of rushed or careless judging. Striding confidently out of her ring, Judge Mikki Muldoon seemed an altogether different person from the woman who’d occupied the ladies’ room stall next to mine yesterday morning, the nerve-wracked Mikki Muldoon who’d noisily lost her breakfast.

  AS I STOOD at the take-out counter at the Liliu Grill handing over what felt like an awful lot of money for three sandwiches, Duke Sylvia showed up looking as confident as if Ironman had just gone Best of Breed. Duke nodded agreeably to me and asked for a pastrami on a bulky roll with extra mustard and a side of fries, not exactly what I think of as a remedy for a jittery stomach. For a few paranoid moments, I wondered whether Duke assumed that I was handling Rowdy myself. Was he trying to rattle the competition by ordering a lunch that wouldn’t have made it past my uvula? Of course, I could have ordered pastrami myself. I just couldn’t have forced it down.

  ”How’d you make out this morning?” I asked.

  Duke momentarily looked as if he’d already forgotten the Kotzebue bitch. ”She took her class,” he said, as if it almost went without saying. ”Sherri Ann took Winners,” he added in the parlance of the fancy, which glosses over distinctions between dogs and their breeder-handlers, beings assumed to share a merged identity.

  Almost as soon as Duke had finished paying, a white-coated waiter emerged through a swinging door with Duke’s food and mine. To get to the exhibition hall and the grooming tent, we cut through the lobby together and circled around outdoors. Although the rain had stopped, the sky was still gray, and pools of water remained on the blacktop. How Faith intended to keep Rowdy’s feet clean, I didn’t know, but I hoped she’d take advantage of the lull in the rain to get him from the tent to the exhibition hall. I checked my watch: twelve-fifty.

  ”Ten to one,” I told Duke. Rowdy’s chances? Were they that good? I mentally reviewed the competition, top-winning dogs so famous that I knew their call names: Ironman, Bear, Casey, and lots of others, especially Casey, who was supposed to be utterly gorgeous.

  Clustered near the entrance to the hall were at least a dozen people, a few standing alone, the others in twos and threes. A man I didn’t know detached himself from one of the little clusters to approach Duke and mutter something I didn’t catch.

  ”Thanks. I’ll take care of it,” Duke replied. Giving me his usual low-key smile, he said, ”Sometimes it doesn’t pay to do favors.”

  ”Is this about Ironman?” I asked.

  Duke shook his head. ”That bitch of Timmy Oliver’s. Z-Rocks. The thing is, Mikki’s not going to look at her twice.”

  ”Timmy’s telling everyone that under Hunnewell—”

  Uncharacteristically, Duke cut me off. As close to exasperated as I’d ever seen him, he said, ”In Timmy’s dreams. Besides, James’d never’ve lasted to now. He was sicker than anyone knew. He was supposed to be on oxygen. He told Karl so on the way from the airport. No way James’d’ve held out. Even if he had—like I said, in Timmy’s dreams.”

  ”Z-Rocks goes back to Comet,” I said. ”Besides, she’s pretty.”

  With scorn, Duke said, ”Comet was bone and muscle. He was all grit. Comet was not pretty.”

  Short on time, driven by nerves, I asked an abrupt question that Leah had asked me last night when she’d read the centerfold piece in the old Malamute Quarterly. ”Duke, what did Comet die of?”

  Duke spoke quickly and quietly. ”Hit by a car.” Duke’s face and his whole body were stolid. ”Most of the time, Comet was with me, but he was out of coat, and I was on the circuit, so James had him for a month.” His voice was bitter. ”James lived right by a major highway. And James loved to watch the dog run.”

  Someone told me later that Duke never discussed Comet’s death and that I shouldn’t have asked. I disagree. Duke, I think, told me about it because he knew I’d understand that Comet had been Duke’s and that James Hunnewell had murdered Duke’s great dog.

  Before I could say anything, however, Duke excused himself and headed toward the grooming tent, where I intended to
go myself to check on Rowdy and to give Kimi her unofficial prize as soon as I’d delivered lunch to Leah and Betty. Clutching the sandwiches, I dashed into the exhibition hall, where Leah was supposed to be helping Betty at the rescue booth, but was mainly devoting herself to fooling around with what I would immediately have recognized as a Poker Flat dog even if Robin Haggard hadn’t been right nearby. This one turned out to be Joe—properly, Ch. Poker Flat’s Rainman, C.D.X., T.D., W.W.P.D., W.T.D., C.G.C.— who, to judge from the way he was jabbing at Leah’s pocket, was actually more Battering Ram than Poker.

  ”Leah,” Betty said sternly, ”get that dog out from behind this table before one of you smashes something! All we need is for one of those wolf prints to get knocked over, and there’ll be broken glass all over the place. And if he swipes that lamp with his tail and does it some damage, I’ll never hear the end of it!”

  Almost before Betty had finished issuing the warning, the big, gentle dog rose up to give Leah a giant teddy-bear hug and, paws resting on her shoulders, fulfilled Betty’s prediction by wagging his tail, tipping over what I was convinced was the murder weapon, and sending it crashing to the floor.

  Leah was suitably ashamed of herself. ”I’m sorry! I really am sorry. The bulb didn’t break. Is the lamp...?”

  Retrieving the fallen relic, Betty rose like a diminutive Statue of Liberty struggling to hold forth a disproportionately large and radically redesigned torch. Our kind of help, she announced in a crabby voice, was exactly what she didn’t need. ”Out of here!” ordered Betty. ”Every one of you!”

  Catching the scent of food, Joe transferred his attention to me and had to be lured away midpoke. I thrust the steak sandwiches at Leah and said, ”Here. One for you, one for Kimi, Go!” Then I bent over the lamp, which Betty had finally lowered to the table, and asked whether there’d been any damage.

  ”No,” she grumbled. ”More’s the pity. The more I look at the thing, the more I hate the sight of it.”

  ”Betty? I hate to tell you, but he’s lost a big patch of fur. Down here by the base of his tail, he’s shed to bare, uh, skin.”

  ”Oh, that’s nothing. That happened while he was on his little adventure. I meant to touch him up last night. We’ll have to do it before the auction. They’ll have glue back there somewhere at the registration desk.” Replying to my raised eyebrows, she added, ”Fur is fur. Rowdy’s will do just fine.”

  ”Speaking of—”

  ”Before you dash off, Holly, I want to remind you to keep your eyes open for this Thacker woman. I am certainly looking forward to having a word or two—”

  ”We don’t know what she looks like!” I protested. Betty brushed off my objection. ”Oh, you’ll know her right away. The tone here isn’t always what we might wish,” she pronounced, glaring at the lamp.

  ”Witness that ridiculous episode last night! But no one here is outright slovenly.”

  To get embroiled in a discussion of whether puppy-mill operators were necesarily slovenly seemed a perilous exercise. So I nodded compliantly and, reminding Betty that I’d brought her sandwich, took off for the grooming tent. Despite the schedule, the judging, I should note, was not about to start any second. Back from her lunch break, Mikki Muldoon was at the judge’s table, where she was conferring with her stewards while securing the shoulder strap of her purse to the judge’s chair, but a couple of show-committee members had just begun to embellish the arborlike gate to the ring with a long, thick garland woven from what must have been thousands of delicate pink and white flowers. The late Elsa Van Dine had sent Freida a special donation for flowers, I recalled Betty saying. The donation must have been very generous indeed.

  There were, of course, no flowers in the grooming tent. It was a communal backstage dressing room forced to accommodate a big cast of stars and dressers. Portable tables and commodious malamute-size crates stacked on top of each other partitioned the space into a maze of open rooms, and everywhere were crate dollies, tack boxes, canvas bags of gear, heavy-duty extension cords, and those forced-air dryers that look like old-fashioned canister vacuum cleaners and sound like peaks in hell on the verge of volcanic eruption. The roar of the motors was so loud that I could all but see, taste, and smell the sound, but as handlers led their dogs out, the noise level diminished greatly, and what remained was the miasma of no-rinse shampoo, grooming spray, and clean, damp dog, the fervent odor of my own religion.

  Faith Barlow was set up in a particularly jam-packed spot near a canvas wall about halfway down the tent. The table on which Rowdy stood was so close to the one that supported Z-Rocks that in going over Rowdy with smooth, soothing strokes of her finishing brush, Faith came close to grooming Timmy Oliver as well. I’d known Faith for years. She looked the same as ever: same dimples, perfect skin, wavy hair in apparently permanent transition from blond to silver, same neat, conservative, multipocketed suits or dresses in colors chosen to camouflage dog hair.

  But it wasn’t a people show, was it? And I am a dog writer. Z-Rocks’s coat, after what must have been wrist-spraining brushing, still retained a vaguely dead look. At the risk of making myself obnoxious by bragging about Rowdy, let me just remark in passing on the shiny, stand-off perfection of his coat, the gleam of vigor and health in his ideally dark eyes, the visibly and palpably well-conditioned tone of his musculature, and the indefinable yet unmistakable air of top-dog self-confidence radiated by this miraculous incarnation of the official standard of the Alaskan malamute. In truth, the dog was so beautiful that I could hardly believe he belonged to me. And he was just standing there on the grooming table wagging his tail. You haven’t seen Rowdy until you’ve seen him move.

  ”Timmy Oliver!” Faith’s voice was sharp. ”Get that bottle off that table before I open it and pour the whole mess down your throat!”

  Oblivious to Faith and Z-Rocks, Timmy Oliver was making his usual sales pitch for Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote to Finn Adams, who was ignoring Timmy to deliver his usual R.T.I. spiel to Duke Sylvia, who had Ironman up on the grooming table beyond Timmy’s. I’d seen show photos of Ironman before, but in the flesh and bone and steel-gray coat, the dog was bigger and more imposing than I’d pictured him. To my eye, backed by the official breed standard, Ironman was too big; and his small, rather light eyes made him look strangely cold and frightening. The standard, of course, calls for dark eyes, the darker the better—Rowdy’s eyes —and the correct facial expression is warm, sweet, and open, not icy or steely: nothing like Ironman’s and everything like you-know-who’s. Ironman was impressive, though. He had the kind of gorgeous coat that results from a combination of good genes, robust health, excellent diet, and regular grooming, and is never obtained just by dosing a dog with any of those magic-bullet powders, tablets, or liquids, including that stupid Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote, a large glass bottle of which now sat prominently on Z-Rocks’s grooming table.

  To promote his product, Timmy had set the bottle next to a bitch with the kind of ready-to-shed coat that the glop was supposed to prevent. As a time to try to sell Duke on R.T.I.’s services, Finn had chosen a moment when Duke was eager to get Ironman off the grooming table, past Finn, out of the tent, and into the ring. In jest, I assume, Duke told Finn that what Ironman liked was insemination without artifice, thank you; and furthermore, in Duke’s experience, after people went to the trouble of freezing semen, they hardly ever used it anyway. Take Comet’s. Why, on three separate occasions, he himself had taken Comet to—

  Catching sight of Leah, Duke broke off. In her flower-print dress, Leah could have passed for thirteen. Dog people speak with wholesome frankness about absolutely everything, but we occasionally remember to censor ourselves in front of other people’s children. After kneeling by Kimi’s crate to treat her to torn-up bits of steak sandwich, Leah had startled Duke by suddenly rising.

  ”Don’t let me stop you,” Leah told him.

  But Duke took advantage of the interruption to get Ironman off the table. As Duke led the dog away, Timmy Oliver resumed his effo
rt to convince Finn Adams that that damned food supplement would make an ideal addition to R.T.I.’s product line. Gentleman that he’d been reared to be, Finn was doing his best to get out of the way of the handlers and dogs heading out of the crowded tent—he obviously wanted to join them— but Timmy had scooped up the bottle of Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote and was shoving it in Finn’s face.

  In the meantime, Faith had removed her grooming coat and was stocking the pockets of her gray wool blazer with bait, stashing a comb and a plastic spray bottle in her skirt pockets, and otherwise preparing to earn her fee by getting Rowdy into the ring on time. Attentive to the familiar cues, free of the grooming noose, Rowdy shook himself all over. The dog is a born performer. I stepped up to him, smacked my lips, and got a kiss. ”Hey, big boy,” I whispered in his ear. ”Go out there and wipe the floor with them.” Then I got out of Faith’s way.

  Faith showed none of Rowdy’s extroverted energy. On the contrary, as she busied herself with last-minute details, her face wore an expression of cultivated composure. Tightening her grip on Rowdy’s lead, she smiled at me, then at him. Snapping her fingers and gesturing to Rowdy to get his ninety pounds off the low table and onto the blacktop, she told him, ”Okay! Let’s go, Buster!”

  Just as the Disobedience Champion of the Western World was about to do exactly as he was told, Finn Adams made his escape, and Timmy Oliver finally put down the glass bottle and got a grip on Z-Rocks. As he lifted her, her tail swept the glass bottle off the edge of the grooming table, where that stupid Timmy had left it, and sent it crashing down. I have never blamed Z-Rocks. Or Faith, either. She’d warned Timmy about that bottle, and until a second earlier, it hadn’t been sitting on the table where it could tumble down and smash to pieces. And Rowdy? When his feet left his grooming table, he had no idea that in the second before he landed, the Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote would get knocked to the blacktop.