Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  Hybrids. Wolf hybrids.

  “He doesn’t actually breed them anymore,” I informed her, without admitting that the guy was my father. As you’ll have gathered, his hybrids are a topic I prefer to avoid. “As a matter of fact, he’s getting back into golden retrievers.”

  An hour later, at three-thirty, I parked my Bronco on a narrow, mainly residential side street off Route 1 around the corner from a shop that, according to a fading sign, had once sold fresh-cut flowers and fresh-caught fish. By then, the juxtaposition didn’t seem strange. I was beginning to reorient myself to life in Maine. Here, economic survival depends on the kind of diversity evident in roadside signs that offer guns, ammo, live lobsters, worms, crawlers, ceramics, acupuncture, lawn ornaments, pick-your-own organic raspberries in season, and specials on permanent waves—all at the same establishment. In a copy of The Ellsworth American that I’d bought in the motel lobby, I’d noticed that on the following Saturday, a local club was sponsoring an event advertised as a “family fun shoot.” (“Sorry, Junior,” announces Dad, loading his target pistol, “I’m afraid you drew the short straw today, son.”) If you didn’t feel like practicing a radical and shockingly delayed form of family planning, you could attend what was billed as a “fire-walking seminar” at what was rather outrageously described as an “alternative wellness facility.” Truly! I quote: “. . . a fire-walking seminar on Saturday from 1:00 to 6:30 P.M. The seminar will facilitate a positive relationship with terror. Active participation in walking on coals is strictly voluntary.” The fee was fifty dollars. Pre-registration was encouraged—why, I couldn’t imagine. You’d think it would have been better not to leave time for second thoughts. I prayed to Almighty Dog that Kevin Dennehy’s ashram in the Berkshires didn’t supply hot coals. Fire-walking was the kind of macho challenge that Kevin would never be able to resist.

  Anyway, Tracy’s Doggone Salon was housed in a converted single-car garage attached to a small, neat lime-green bungalow. On the dormant grass in front of the house, the December wind inflated the bodies of two artificial Canada geese and sent a wooden Sylvester chasing after a fleeing Tweety. Tracy’s sign swung from a little wrought-iron post. Parked in the driveway was a dark van with white letters on the side that read JAMES W. LITTLEFIELD. PLUMBING & HEATING. Stacked against the side of the converted garage were a few dozen lobster traps. Leaving Rowdy crated in the Bronco, I got Kimi out. As I led her up the path to the door of the shop, a gust fresh from the pile of lobster traps washed me in the rank, salty reek of rotten fish. From Manhattan, are you? Well, remarkably enough, these cutesy coffee tables are, now and then, also used to catch lobsters. Hence the bait.

  “And now,” I said brightly to Kimi, “you get to have a lovely bath.” I’d chosen her because Rowdy’s pad cut was temporarily sparing him what he perceives as his frequent ordeals-by-water.

  My plan, such as it was, fell apart the second I opened the shop door. The plan was this: Catching sight of Tracy, I was to appear momentarily puzzled. “You look familiar,” I was supposed to remark. “Didn’t I used to see you at shows with Jack Andrews?”

  But I’ve leaped ahead of myself. The interior of the shop, I should first note, contained more equipment than I’d expected: a pair of waist-high tubs with wall-mounted force dryers nearby, two grooming tables equipped with arms and grooming nooses, three or four tall stand dryers, a row of empty wire-mesh crates, a crate dryer, a fat trash barrel overflowing with dog hair, scads of brushes. The setup was professional. The tubs had been built into the tiled wall, the grooming tables were hydraulic, and lined up on the floor were the same gallon-size brown plastic bottles of Eqyss Bio-Tek shampoo and grooming spray that I swear by and special-order myself. Near the door was a little waiting area for human clients: two plastic-covered chairs and a low Formica-topped table that held a coffee maker, mugs, sugar, powdered creamer, and a stack of dog magazines, including, I was happy to see, the latest issue of Dog’s Life.

  Her back to me, a tall, thin woman with short brown hair—Tracy, at last!—stood at one of the grooming tables and vigorously brushed the coat of a handsome little short-haired dog that, at a guess, was half Jack Russell terrier. Energetically sweeping up from the floor what looked like the shorn coat of a black standard poodle was a young man who wore jeans and a University of Maine sweatshirt. What immediately wrecked my plan was the kid’s uncanny resemblance to the affable face I’d studied in Jack Andrews’s college graduation photo: the cleft chin, the pleasant expression, even the oddly expectant suggestion of features on which character hadn’t yet been written.

  So exact and so startling was the likeness that I jumped when the boy spoke. “Hi. Mom’ll be right with you.”

  I nodded stupidly.

  Taking in Kimi, he asked, “What percent?”

  “She’s an Alaskan malamute.”

  His grin was identical to the one that Jack Andrews had flashed to Brat in the family snapshot. “If you say so.”

  Swiveling her head around, Tracy—she had to be—ran her eyes over Kimi, smiled at me, and said softly to the kid, “She’s not putting you on, Drew.” Catching my eye, she asked shyly, “Show dog?”

  As I was bobbing my head, Kimi suddenly emitted a prolonged peal of woo-woo-woos punctuated here and there with ah-roo and culminating in what was obviously a friendly question that demanded an immediate response.

  As Tracy listened to Kimi, her face lit up. An impish smile appeared. When Kimi had finished, Tracy replied, “Relax! I won’t strip out your show coat. I’m an old hand.”

  I liked her gentle voice. Just as everyone had remembered, she was very tall, probably five ten, and her hair was still short and brown, cut in a cap that framed an ordinary face, neither pretty nor homely, with forgettable features. But how could everyone have recalled her height and forgotten that quirky, elflike smile?

  “Drew,” Tracy said, “could you take Lucky home? Owner lives down the street,” she explained to me. “Elderly lady.”

  “Aw, Mom—” the boy started to protest.

  “And if she offers you a Coke, you say yes, and you say please and thank you, and then you sit there for a minimum of ten minutes, because . . .”

  “. . . you are going to be old yourself some day,” Drew continued, mimicking his mother, “and it won’t hurt you to take ten minutes to cheer up an old . . .”

  “. . . lady who really has been very nice to you,” Tracy concluded cheerfully.

  At the end of the ritual, Tracy picked up the Jack Russell mix and handed him to Drew. As the dog changed hands, the mother and son exchanged smiles. A photograph taken at that second would, I knew, have shown the kind of capture-this-moment family snapshot you see in ads for film and cameras. In reality, the photogenic little family dog belonged to someone else. And—sorry, I know it’s corny, but there’s no other way to say it—the father was permanently out of the picture.

  CHAPTER 25

  As soon as Drew lefit, Tracy took Kimi’s lead and walked her to one of the grooming tables. “You don’t have to wait,” she told me. “Really, I know what I’m doing. I won’t ruin her coat. What’s her name?”

  “Kimi.”

  “Kimi, up on the table! Woo-woo-woo!” Tracy, you see, really did speak dog. Kimi replied by hopping up. “Good girl! Anything I ought to know? Any issues about grooming?” She sounded oddly like Rita: issues!

  “Not really.”

  Tracy slowly and gently picked up one of Kimi’s front feet.

  “Drew,” I said abruptly. “Andrew?”

  Holding Kimi’s foot, Tracy deftly clipped nails. “Yeah.”

  “I thought it might be Andrews.” I dragged out the s. “Nice kid.” As soon as the clippers were safely away from Kimi’s foot, I added, “He looks exactly like Jack.”

  Tracy dropped the clippers into an open drawer attached to the table. Resting one hand on Kimi’s back, as if claiming ownership, she growled, “Who the hell sent you here?” If I’d suddenly punched Tracy in the stomach, she wouldn’
t have looked more angry or sounded more menacing than she did now.

  “No one sent me. I’m all on my own. I started to write a story about Jack Andrews. I’m a dog writer. I heard about his murder and the connection with his dog.”

  “There was no connection,” Tracy snapped.

  “Yes, there was. When Jack’s body was found, Chip was tethered to his desk.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Jack wasn’t alone. Therefore, murder. Not suicide.”

  Speaking more to herself than to me, Tracy said vehemently, “Jack would never have killed himself. Never.”

  “I didn’t know him. I wish I had. I feel . . . Tracy, I’m not here to make trouble. I write for Dog’s Life. I started working on what was supposed to be a little story, and then . . . Tracy, among other things, I grew up with goldens. I used to show them. My mother was a breeder. I did a lot of competition obedience.”

  Tracy’s eyes darted to Kimi. A hint of the elfin smile appeared. Her voice, however, carried a note of hostility. “But you weren’t happy with your scores, so you switched to malamutes?”

  Among the top obedience handlers these days, it’s fashionable to show off by switching from the so-called traditional obedience breeds, meaning the good ones—the golden retriever, the Border collie—to what are supposed to be the challenges of whippets or Afghan hounds. Hah! I am not impressed. Admittedly, whippets and the Afghan hounds are terrible obedience dogs, but for unparalleled thumb-your-nose-at-the-handler disobedience, the Alaskan malamute can’t be beat.

  “On the contrary,” I said. “My last golden was so perfect that . . . Anyway, I never meant to get a malamute. I ended up with one. Rowdy. I kept him. He has his C.D.X. He’s working in Utility. I have no complaints.”

  “I know who you are.” Tracy spoke in approximately the tone I’d use if I suddenly realized I was confronting Charles Manson. “I read your column. You write about your dogs.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “That was the other reason I, uh, got involved in the story about Jack. Because of Winter. His middle name.”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “No relation. It’s a common name. But goldens, the name, some other, uh, coincidences. I also happened to be working on a story about Hannah Duston. Jack Andrews came from Haverhill. My other dog, Rowdy, was born there. In Bradford. You used to groom for his breeder. Janet Switzer?”

  In the manner of a real dog person, instead of saying what a nice person Janet was or “Oh, I remember Janet. How is she?” or something else normal, Tracy said, “Beautiful dogs. Good temperaments.”

  You can probably guess the rest. Having driven all the way from Cambridge to Ellsworth to find the truth about Jack’s secret life as well as his murder, and having unexpectedly discovered that his hidden life in what I’d assumed to be show dogs had produced a human son, I naturally had to go out to the car to get Rowdy so that Tracy could see the descendant of the dogs she’d once groomed for Janet. As will be obvious to anyone in dogs, Tracy then had to drag out her old brag books and show me pictures of the champions she’d finished years ago. About thirty minutes into the uninterrupted dog talk, she suddenly asked, “Do you really want Kimi groomed?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  As promised, Tracy did an excellent job, and while she brushed and lathered and rinsed and dried and brushed, we kept chatting and hollering over the rush of water and the roar of the dryer about Janet Switzer, Violet Wish, my late mother, my infamous father, dozens of people in goldens she’d known years before, and, of course, dogs and more dogs. When Kimi’s coat was finally dry and stood off her body just the way it’s supposed to, I at last said, “You know, Tracy, I really didn’t come here to cause trouble. I honestly didn’t. Even before I saw Drew. I didn’t know about him, you know.”

  “No one did. Not even Jack.”

  The door to the shop abruptly burst open. Drew stuck his head in. “Mom?”

  “Dinner! Is Jim . . . ?” To me, she said, “Jim’s my brother. We share the house.”

  “He’s gone to volleyball,” Drew said. “He’s going to grab a sub. Can I—?”

  “When you took Lucky back, did you stay for a visit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For how long?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Good kid.”

  Drew had to be seventeen. His mother, I thought, treated him like a twelve-year-old. With remarkably good cheer, he rolled his eyes. “Mom, I’m—”

  “What time’ll you be home?”

  “I finish at eleven.” Turning to me, he said, “Nice to meet you.”

  When he’d left, Tracy said, “Drew’s a hard worker. He works with my brother, Jim—plumbing and heating—and he’s got a night job, and he helps me out here. He’s a smart kid. Good grades. He wants to go to college, but he’s got to take a year off first to save up.”

  “It’s not a bad idea, anyway.” But all I thought of were Jack Andrews’s other two children, who’d dreaded the catastrophe of switching from private to public school. To this day, Brat resented the threat. Meanwhile, the unknown brother who looked exactly like her deified Daddy was working three jobs to save for college, and doing it with apparent good spirits, too.

  Changing the subject, Tracy asked, “You hungry?”

  Instead of accepting her offer of dinner, I persuaded her to eat out with me.

  An hour later, after I’d fed and walked the dogs, Tracy and I were sitting at a booth in what I’d been happy to learn was a branch of Helen’s Restaurant that had opened in Ellsworth. Like the original in Machias, this Helen’s was a year-round eatery favored by the locals, not just a tourist place. At five or five-thirty, there’d probably been quite a few patrons. Now, at seven-thirty on a Wednesday evening in December, there were a lot of empty tables.

  Looking up from the menu, I said, “Lobster. My treat.” I lied: “I can charge it to Dog’s Life.” Have I mentioned that I train with food? Tracy ordered baked stuffed. I had what may seem like an odd choice for the time of year, lobster salad, but I prevailed on the waitress to serve it the way the Helen’s in Machias sometimes does, with the mayo on the side and the salad consisting of a mound of lobster meat.

  “So how did you meet Jack Andrews?” I asked Tracy.

  “By accident. Outside a motel in Stowe, Vermont. I was there for a show. I had three dogs with me, two of my own and one I was handling for someone else. And one of them got loose. Maybe the crate wasn’t latched right. Anyway, I had my van pulled up by the motel room, and I was unloading, and one second the dog was in his crate in the back of the van, and the next second he was loose. Jack helped me catch him. We started talking. He helped me walk the dogs. The next day, he came to the show with me.”

  “He was in Vermont selling books?”

  “Visiting bookstores. Promoting the guides. You know about those?” She cracked a lobster claw, extracted the meat, and dipped it in butter.

  “Yes. Tracy, when was this?”

  She finished swallowing. “Four years before he died. We clicked right away. Well, not exactly right away. The show was really what did it. He discovered this wonderful thing that had been missing from his life.”

  “Dogs,” I said.

  She gave that quirky smile. “Wrong,” she said. “Fun.”

  She proceeded to tell me, now with a straight face, that Jack’s wife hadn’t understood him. I almost choked on a piece of tail meat.

  Without the slightest show of emotion, Tracy added, “I’ve always thought she killed him. She always sounded to me like a perfect bitch. Her or Gareth. That was their son. From what Jack said, I thought she and Gareth had a really sick relationship. Gareth was glued to his mother. He always took her side against Jack.” Her, she, his mother. Never Claudia. I couldn’t help thinking of what had struck me as Brat’s deliberate insistence on referring only to Claudia, never to my mother.