Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  I suppose that if the bottle had shattered into hundreds of tiny fragments, Rowdy might have escaped unharmed. Maybe, just maybe, fine shards of glass would not have penetrated the thick leather of Rowdy’s pads. As it was, the power of Rowdy’s descent drove his left front foot into a thick chunk of jagged glass, and almost immediately, his blood flowed into the foul-smell-ing brown pools of Timmy Oliver’s damned greasy snake oil.

  To anyone who believes that show people treat dogs as nothing but objects, let me point out that Faith Barlow, a ferocious competitor, knelt in broken glass beside Rowdy, and that in her determination to spare him further injury, she shoved me aside, wrapped her arms under and around him, and, murmuring gently, managed to lift him straight up and back onto the grooming table.

  Shaking their heads and calling out in sympathy, the exhibitors heading out of the tent took a safe route along the opposite side, and people who weren’t handling dogs scurried around cleaning up and offering help. Timmy Oliver, who hadn’t removed poor Z-Rocks from the glass-strewn blacktop, made abortive efforts to speak, but the mere sound of his voice inflamed Faith, who briefly raised her head and snapped, ”I am telling you once, Timmy Oliver. You get yourself and your bitch out of here before you end up hurting her, too. There’s broken glass scattered all over. Now, you pick her up and carry her, and don’t put her down until you’re out of this tent, and the next time you lay eyes on me, you turn in the opposite direction and run, because I never intend to look at your ugly face again, and if I see it, I intend to do something about it!”

  I did not see Timmy leave. My eyes, my hands, too, were on Rowdy. A dog of another breed, maybe even another malamute, might have been whimpering and would have had a right to cry. A deep pad cut must be incredibly painful. This was not Rowdy’s first. The last time Rowdy’d had one, I hadn’t even realized that he was injured until we returned from a walk and he tracked blood all over the kitchen floor. He’d resisted my efforts to examine the wound. Now, unexpectedly hoisted back up on the grooming table, he wagged his tail and put his weight on all four feet. Oily brown splotches stained his forelegs. Blood seeped from his foot. Faith finally convinced him to raise it. With blood on her hands, she said, ”It’s way beyond me. We need—”

  As if in reply, the little group of bystanders parted, and a tall, lean guy with green-blue eyes made his way calmly and purposefully toward Rowdy, who doubled the tempo of his tail wagging and sang a resounding peal of woo-woo-woos. Ignoring everyone but Rowdy, Steve Delaney moved immediately to him and, before examining the injury, wrapped gentle hands around Rowdy’s head, brought his face so close to Rowdy’s that the two rubbed foreheads, and spoke so softly that no one but Rowdy could hear him. Then Steve held out his hand, and Rowdy offered the injured paw.

  Steve never hurries. I expected him to spend twenty minutes examining the wound before he uttered a word. I was wrong. After a glance, he lowered Rowdy’s paw and, still addressing Rowdy, said, ”Sorry, my friend. We’ll patch you up, but for today, you’re out of the running.”

  M.D.s AREN’T the only M. Deities; they’re not the only ones who think they’re God. As Steve injected lidocaine and waited for the anesthetic to numb Rowdy’s paw, he kept explaining why it was impossible instantly to undo the damage and rush Rowdy into the ring before it was too late. The jagged glass had sliced like the blade of a knife; the injury was far too deep for Nexaband, a sort of sterile Super Glue that’s a miracle cure for superficial abrasions, but has to be used with care: Nexaband bonds skin to skin. Yes, imagine! My dogs and I are already as one. We don’t really want to be Siamese triplets.

  Watching Steve remove supplies from his emergency kit—it’s actually a fishing bag from Sears— Rowdy’s fan club had downcast eyes and sour mouths. Prominent among the sourpusses was Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy of the Cambridge police, my next-door neighbor, who’d arrived with Steve. Not being a malamute Person, Steve, who has a shepherd and a pointer, had planned to come to the national only for Best of Breed.

  Bringing Kevin with him had been more my plan than Steve’s, in fact, entirely mine, not that there’s any enmity or ambiguity—Steve is my lover, Kevin’s my friend —but if you kennel two alpha males in adjoining pens, you’re bound to hear a few rumbles. Although you’d never guess it to look at Kevin, who has an Irish-cop face and the build of a mastiff, he feels intimidated in situations he can’t control by the familiar expedient of putting everyone under arrest. In other words, he’s more at home at a bank heist than at a social gathering where he doesn’t speak the language and no one is likely to pull a gun. A dog show isn’t exactly one of those Cambridge high-brow dinner parties where the host and hostess prepare dessert at the table by flambeing the peeled and diced remains of underpublished guests who didn’t go to Harvard, but despite his affection for dogs, Kevin just isn’t a real dog person, and if I hadn’t intervened, he’d have stayed home. So in gratitude for the time he’d spent helping me run the dogs around Fresh Pond while listening to me blather about the national, I’d arranged to have him ride with Steve, who agreed to the plan only after, in a stroke of desperate mendacity, I promised him that Kevin would fix the hundreds of dollars’ worth of Cambridge parking tickets that stood between Steve’s and the renewal of its registration. But only, I cautioned, if Steve didn’t mention anything whatsoever about the matter to Kevin, who, in his own way, was really very shy and would be deeply embarrassed by even a hint of thanks.

  Anyway, I’d arranged to meet Steve and Kevin somewhere near the gate to the ring at a little after one o’clock, but before they’d entered the hall, Leah had flown out of the grooming tent, intercepted them, demanded Steve’s keys, and dashed to his van for the kit that he always keeps there. And a good thing he does, too. The official show veterinarian for the national was on call, not at the site. Besides, I trust Steve. So, of course, does Rowdy.

  When Steve had finished suturing and bandaging him, I eyed the morose faces around me. ”Hey, would all of you please quit it? Rowdy thinks he’s done something wrong, okay? In a few weeks or a month or whenever, he’ll be fine. That’s all that matters. So I would appreciate it if you would stop dumping your disappointment on my dog.” Oddly enough, in speaking out for Rowdy, I experienced a feeling of liberation. It was as if the glass that sliced Rowdy’s pad had cut through my knotted ties to him and severed the show dog from the dog.

  Even the Buddha did not dwell in ceaseless epiphany. To my credit, everyone had to gang up to convince me to leave Rowdy in my hotel room, with Kimi crated next to him for company. He’d been stitched, bandaged, and started on antibiotics. Everyone would check on him. I’d been saving up for the national for the past year, hadn’t I? There was no need for me to miss Best of Breed.

  So only half an hour after my transcendent moment of spiritual reunion with Rowdy as just plain my dog, there I was in the aisle outside the ring with my mind’s eye still on Rowdy and the other two on one of the top contenders, Williwaw’s Kodiak Cub—Casey—and when I spotted Casey, I quit feeling guilty about leaving Rowdy back in my room. The solar system revolves around a single orb. Stuck outside the ring nursing his numb, gauze-wrapped paw, Rowdy would have hated playing distant planet to another dog’s sun. Casey had tremendous carriage and a stand-off coat of dark, rich, gilded mahogany trimmed with pure Arctic white. To call that dog flashy isn’t quite right. A flash is a swift burst. Casey was the sun at midday. In the aisle outside the ring, he worked a crowd that had stepped back in unconscious deference. Casey was a big dog, but not oversize, not like Ironman, and Casey’s laughing, show-off eyes were dark and warm, not light and cold. I know a winner when I see one. I hoped that Mikki Muldoon did, too. Was I unfaithful to Rowdy? Rowdy was out of the competition today. In his absence, I longed to see the best dog win.

  The crowd in the hall now included spectators like Steve and Kevin who’d come only for Best of Breed. In addition to the people sitting and standing around the ring, throngs were shopping at the vendors’ booths; placing final b
ids at Rescue’s silent auction; taking chances on raffles for stuffed animals, kitchen implements, malamute coffee mugs, dog-portrait photography sessions; and accumulating brochures, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and tote bags promoting next year’s national. Everyone who’d heard about Rowdy (and almost everyone had) asked how he was doing, offered sympathy, and condemned Timmy Oliver. ”Leaving a glass bottle on a grooming table!” someone said. ”Stupid, stupid! Just like him!” A few times I found myself in the peculiar position of defending Timmy: ”He was careless, but he didn’t do it on purpose,” I heard myself say.

  Kevin Dennehy interrupted my study of the catalog by issuing a series of those hey-hey grunts that he uses to greet male police officers, and women he either considers to be good cops, or has a yen for, or both. As I’ve never remarked to Kevin, Rowdy, too, displays a single stereotyped greeting pattern for equal-status male dogs, respected females, and interesting bitches. Rowdy doesn’t grunt and say How ya doing? of course. He lifts his leg on the nearest tree. Same difference.

  With my view blocked by Kevin’s bulk, I at first mistook the object of his hey-heying. I expected him to introduce me to a short, gray-haired woman who was shifting impatiently from foot to foot near the festooned gate to the ring and looking around with the vigilant expression I associate with presidential bodyguards. Nothing else about her suggested a career in law enforcement. She wore a black jersey dress that looked familiar and a print scarf that I definitely recognized from a recent visit to L.L. Bean, and over her shoulder was slung a black version of the handbag I’d ordered in tan from the same reliable source. The affinity I always feel for my sisters and brothers in Bean was quickly displaced by a sense of alarm. A cop at the gate had to mean danger. On a street in Providence at night, I’d have expected to be vigilant, especially if, like Elsa Van Dine, I’d been wearing a diamond ring. If, like James Hunnewell, I’d been elderly, ill, and unaccompanied by a big, strong dog, I’d have been wary about strolling across a dark parking lot. Last night, as I’d made my lone way through the deserted hotel, I’d been on my guard. I’d stepped briskly along, eager to return to the sleeping company of Leah and my big dogs. Morever, I never wanted to look like an easy target, frail prey. Like Harriet Lunt. But here? In the exhibition hall? With hundreds of people? Hundreds of powerful dogs?

  Within seconds, I felt foolish. I should have known better, I told myself. Unless the job stress of being a cop had prematurely aged the Bean woman by twenty or thirty years, she was far too old for active police work. But black jersey? At a hairy-beast specialty? That she was a dog person never crossed my mind.

  As it turned out, the one to complete Kevin’s ritual by grunting a return hey-hey was Detective Peter Kariotis, who appeared out of the crowd and ragged Kevin by asking whether he was one of the dog nuts. In reply, my friend Kevin gave a disloyal smirk.

  After Kariotis moved away, I immediately took Kevin to task. I was citing Steve, Leah, and myself as typically sane and normal representatives of the dog fancy when some anti-dog agent of Fate sent our way who but Lisa Tainter, bedecked, as usual, in pelts, bones, teeth, and claws. Kevin was bug-eyed. And Lisa had no sooner departed than, practically right in front of him, Sherri Ann Printz directed the mist from her little blue spray bottle at Bear and then into her own wide-open mouth. Having dampened her dog and sated her thirst, she pulled out a metal comb and ran it though the dog’s coat and then through her own hair.

  Just then, Leah noticed a couple of seats being vacated in an ideal location near the judge’s table and the gate. The long sides of the rectangular ring were lined with hotel-supplied chairs and spectators’ aluminum lawn chairs three and four rows deep, but at this short end, the aisle between the single row of seats and the booths along the wall teemed with handlers and dogs awaiting further judging and with people visiting the rescue booth, which was directly behind the seats that had just opened up. Leah and Steve left to check on Rowdy. Naturally, as soon as Kevin had settled himself next to me, the handler in our direct line of vision, only a few feet away, stacked her male by unceremoniously thrusting her hand under the dog’s tail (Good God! Not THERE!) and lifting and lowering him into position, thus leaving the dog and Kevin with identical expressions of consternation. The malamute, however, must’ve been used to the procedure. Kevin was not. In involuntary self-protection, his beefy hands flew to his lap, and when Mikki Muldoon came along and checked the same dog for the presence of both testicles, Kevin’s face turned purple. He stood up and excused himself, thereby missing the opportunity to observe the same handler repeatedly transfer a single piece of liver back and forth between her own mouth and the dog’s.

  I took advantage of Kevin’s hasty disappearance to find my place in the list of Best of Breed entries in the catalog—forty-five dogs, thirty-five bitches. The entire entry, of course, wasn’t crammed in the ring all at once. With a big entry, you sometimes see the males judged first, then the females, but Mikki Muldoon was judging in catalog order, in other words, according to the arbitrarily assigned numbers printed in the catalog and on the handlers’ arm bands that enable the spectators to tell who’s who while supposedly keeping the dogs’ identities secret from the judge.

  Not to have recognized Ironman, Bear, Daphne, Casey, and the other top contenders, as well as their handlers, Mikki Muldoon would’ve had to stay away from shows and never open a dog magazine for a great many years, but she had a reputation for impartiality. Near the gate to her ring stood Duke Sylvia and Ironman. Standing up and turning around, I saw Al Holabach and Casey near the exit to the parking lot. Al’s idea, I suppose, was to let Casey cool off in the fresh air. Far from availing himself of an offstage moment, the sable show-off was devoting himself to polishing his already gleaming act. In looking around for Casey, I’d intended to compare him with Ironman. Compare I did: Ironman had impelled me to look elsewhere; Casey, however, refused to let me look at another dog.

  Thus Casey’s charisma made me miss the start of the fracas. It broke out right near me when the Border collie of a hotel manager herded Freida Reilly up to Duke Sylvia and then backed off as Freida unsheepishly charged Duke with violating the absolute and universal show-site ban on bathing a dog in a hotel bathroom. By the time I looked, Freida was shaking a rolled-up show catalog at Duke so fiercely that the badge, the purple flowers, and the little gold team of sled dogs pinned to the bodice of her lavender dress jiggled wildly. ”No bathing or grooming of dogs in hotel rooms!” she bellowed. ”This is the first time you’ve encountered this rule? No, no, no! This is the ten thousandth time you have encountered this rule! Five other clubs are booked here this year, and you have taken it upon yourself to threaten their ability to use this site, and at my show!”

  Karl Reilly forced his way to his mother’s side, grabbed her elbow, and, in tones too soft for me to hear, somehow mediated the dispute. Within seconds, Duke Sylvia had pulled out his wallet and was offering the manager a fistful of cash. Everything about Duke’s gesture, from the upraised hand to the angle of his head, was so familiar, so unmistakable, that I had to wonder whether the effect was deliberate: Except for the money in place of the usual liver, Duke looked ex-actly as if he were baiting a dog. Throughout the little episode, too, even when Freida was hollering, Duke made no observable effort to control Ironman, and no one—not Duke, not Freida, not Karl, not the hotel manager, certainly not Ironman himself—seemed to see the dog as any kind of threat. I believe that he was none.

  I felt sorry for the hotel manager. Although human beings lack the Alaskan malamute’s exquisite sensitivity to even the most subtle shifts in hierarchical position, the man must have known that in taking Duke’s cash, he’d acknowledged Duke as master, himself as cur. Later, panicked in retrospect by his own apparent loss of sanity, he’d have waking dreams of Ironman, visions of the jaws and teeth of the huge dog with the cold eyes. Poor man! He couldn’t have known that Duke Sylvia never, ever lost control—of a dog or of himself.

  But that’s just what Timmy Oliver had tr
ied to provoke Duke to do. Timmy’s object, as I see it now, was to cast a halo of guilt around Duke. At the time, I was mystified. As perhaps I haven’t made plain, neither Freida’s accusation nor Duke’s immediate proffering of cash nor the admirable condition of Ironman’s coat led me to suppose that Duke had precipitously decided to give Ironman a last-minute bath and foolishly left a hairy, stopped-up tub for a chambermaid who was bound to complain. The dripping-wet dog in the parking lot that morning had been Z-Rocks; the interior of Timmy’s camper had been very dirty and equally dry; and Duke had regretted a favor. What escaped me at first was Timmy’s cold-blooded calculation. Falsely charged with a demeaning offense, Duke could be counted on to take full responsibility for something he hadn’t done. The pattern, I suspected, was lifelong. As a kid in school, Duke would’ve silently accepted punishment before he’d have stooped to pointing a finger at the real culprit. A whiny I didn’t do it—he did? Not from Duke Sylvia. Not then. Not now.

  Only when Timmy and Z-Rocks lined up directly in back of Duke and Ironman in the aisle behind my seat did I realize that Mikki Muldoon had also figured in Timmy’s plan. Discovering that Z-Rocks came right after Ironman in the Best of Breed entries, Timmy had known (as I hadn’t) that Mrs. Muldoon judged in catalog order and, consequently, that Z-Rocks and Ironman, Timmy and Duke, stood a good chance of ending up as they were now: with Z-Rocks and Timmy right behind Ironman and Duke.

  Since the dogs were just behind my seat, I was perfectly positioned to overhear Duke’s predictable demand to Timmy for reimbursement for the damage payment he’d just made to the hotel. I would’ve overheard it, too, except that a nearby seal-and-white male kept repeatedly bleating an oddly ovine version of woo-woo-woo. Besides, Duke spoke quietly. He talked so softly that he didn’t even need a big stick. That little-boy Duke who’d’ve taken the punishment for another kid’s crime? The same little-boy Duke who’d’ve stayed after for detention and then gone out and beaten the shit out of the poor sucker who hadn’t known better, but learned fast.