Bloodlines

by Susan Conant

  “Yes,” I said. It took me years to master this kind of seductive patter. Just imagine my pillow talk. “So meet me there when you finish for lunch, at what? Noon? Twelve-fifteen? It’s in that sort of shabby little shopping mall near the—”

  “I know where it is. Holly, you aren’t going to buy—”

  “Of course not. I’ve written about it a thousand times, okay? The puppies will be all right. It’s the breeding stock that suffers.” You know about that, don’t you? Twenty-five hundred licensed puppy mills in this country, another twenty-five hundred unlicensed, only that can’t be right, can it? Because there are four thousand just in Kansas, and Missouri is worse. I know all the stats. Ninety percent of puppy mills are filthy, close to a hundred percent of pet shop dogs come from puppy mills, pet shops sell about half a million dogs a year, and when you buy a puppy from a pet shop, all you do is perpetuate the suffering of the breeding animals. “I know!” I said. “I write about this!” I thought for a second and added feebly, “Or I try.”

  “Holly, you’re going to have a real hard time seeing that puppy and walking out. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “That’s the point! I don’t want to do it. Steve, please come with me. I don’t want to go all alone. I need you. Please come with me. The puppy could be sick. He might need help. Please.”

  “Twelve-fifteen,” he conceded. “On the sidewalk outside.”

  “Beautiful. And Steve? Uh, don’t dress like a vet.”

  He laughed and asked what that was supposed to mean.

  “You remember that sweater your mother gave you for Christmas?” I said. “Did you put it in the Saint Vincent de Paul?”

  Just off Concord Avenue, a few blocks from my house, the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul maintains a large collection box in which prosperous Cantabrigians deposit wearable presents they don’t like. When Steve opened his mother’s Christmas package, saw the sweater, and said, “Huh. Saint Vincent de Paul,” I suggested that he attach a stamped envelope addressed to his mother so that the true recipient could thank her for the gift, but he refused. Steve’s main objection to the sweater was the crocodile. He said that his own mother should know that he didn’t specialize in exotic pets and that whoever ended up wearing the sweater probably didn’t, either, and wouldn’t be any more grateful than he was.

  3

  Puppy Luv occupied one of ten or twelve storefronts in a uniform strip of low, plate-glass-fronted shops erected twenty or thirty years ago and evidently intended as the acorn from which a mighty shopping oak would sprout. The vacant lots on both sides and in back had even been plowed under and left fallow. The developer must have expected to add a branch of Filene’s or Jordan’s or a Star Market, some large enterprise to attract heavy spenders whose late-model cars would fill the blacktopped acre that yawned between the dull shops and the tedious street. As it was, this nameless would-be mall looked like a seedy desert motel with oversize rooms and unwashed windows left curtainless for the pleasure of exhibitionist guests and voyeurist passersby.

  Well, there was ample parking. On that zero-degree, snowless, electric-blue-skied morning in February, I could have left the Bronco right in front of Puppy Luv, but just in case a pet shop employee happened to stroll by as I got out, I cruised past the pet shop, kept going, and parked in a remote corner of the cracked blacktop lot. I intended to visit Puppy Luv as someone other than who I am, and the Bronco might as well have had DOG PERSON painted in big professional red letters on its old blue doors. A new Euro-style wagon barrier fenced off Rowdy and Kimi’s area, which also held two large metal-mesh crates and two old blankets originally made of wool but now richly interwoven with soft, pale malamute undercoat and long dark guard hairs. The new seat cushions and floor mats, Christmas presents from Steve, were the ones you may have noticed in the Orvis catalog—gray background with handsome black paw prints? The bumpers didn’t proclaim that I heart Alaskan malamutes or urge “Caution: Show Dogs,” but a bumper sticker on the front read “My dog is smarter than your dog or your brother,” which is true except that they both are … and probably smarter than the average sister, too.

  I could’ve stripped off the brag and removed the barrier, crates, blankets, cushions, and mats, of course, but I’d had barely enough time to transform myself from a malamute-owned dog writer—furry jeans and T-shirt—to a semblance of my image of the ideal pet shop client, which is to say, as people actually do say here in Cambridge, the Significant Other of the kind of husband who knows that the little lady needs something to love and senses that in spite of his MasterCard, Visa, and American Express Platinum, he isn’t it. I’d washed and moussed my hair and blown it dry, rather skillfully, I might add, thanks to my experience in readying golden retrievers for the show ring and what my father flatteringly considers to be the uncanny resemblance of my own mop to their glowing coats. Marissa, my mother, disapproved of the AKC-banned practice of cosmetically eradicating pink spots on otherwise dark noses, and none of my show dogs has ever had pigmentation problems, anyway. Nonetheless, I own mascara, as well as foundation makeup, blush, and lipstick, all of which I’d applied rather heavily. I’d put on good knee boots and a suburban-looking green corduroy dress, and I hadn’t removed the dry cleaner’s suffocating plastic from my navy winter coat until I’d stepped out of my furry house.

  Even so, when Steve found me in front of the optician’s shop studying the display of tortoiseshell frames in the window, he managed to recognize me. In fact, I was the one who almost didn’t recognize him. For one thing, he’d shaved and, for another, he’d obviously just had one of his twice or thrice yearly haircuts, if you can call it that. His hair, when he has any, is brown, and it’s normally wavy, like the coat on the shoulders of a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Now he looked like a tall, upright Airedale with green-blue eyes and bad clipper burn.

  I kissed him anyway and then removed a glove and felt his whiskery scalp. “Um, did Lorraine do that?” I asked. It was a stupid guess. Lorraine, the vet tech who really runs Steve’s practice, is an excellent groomer.

  Steve suppressed a grin, shook his raw head, and said, “Rhonda.” His face shone with the amazed pride I’d last seen there three weeks earlier when India, his German shepherd, took Highest Scoring Dog in Open B. India is a wonderful obedience dog. Rhonda is no groomer at all. The German shepherd is not a clippable breed, but even if it were, Steve wouldn’t have trusted India to Rhonda. At least before. “She did a great job, didn’t she? I didn’t want to ask her or Lorraine, but when I went to take a look and see how booked up I was, Rhonda was there, and I said, ‘Damn, I don’t have time for a haircut.’ So she said she’d give it a try.”

  Steve was wearing the expensive Christmas-present V-necked cable-knit sweater over nondescript khaki pants. Despite weather almost too cold for my dogs, he’d left unbuttoned what is possibly the best men’s topcoat in the city of Cambridge. I can’t even imagine what it must’ve originally cost, but Steve picked it up at one of the world’s most venerable used menswear establishments. You know Cambridge? If not, I should tell you that Keezer’s is where gentleman’s-C-student, son-of-alumni-admitted Harvard preppies short of cash sell their Brooks Brothers and J. Press apparel and where Max Keezer resells it to straight-A-student, admitted-on-merit, full-scholarship undergraduates, thus enabling the brainy nouveau-Cantabrigian proletariat literally to wear the cloak of the elite. Anyway, Keezer’s is also open to the public and is how Steve happened to own a camel topcoat made of honest-to-God cashmere that felt as soft as a pussycat’s throat and didn’t advertise his profession by showing pet fur, either.

  Puppy Luv was two doors down from the optician’s shop, beyond a two-pairs-for-the-price-of-one women’s shoe outlet and before a discount drugstore. A large permanent sign hanging in the window advertised AKC PUPPIES. Taped to the plate glass underneath was a big red heart with a message in white letters: LOVE IS A WARM PUPPY. Next Thursday would be Valentine’s Day. Dotted around were small red hearts edged in white paper
lace, each bearing a breed name: Scottish terrier, cocker spaniel, Italian greyhound, Pomeranian, Dalmatian, poodle, Boston terrier, Maltese, Norwegian elkhound, chow chow. And Alaskan malamute.

  Steve stepped ahead of me, pushed on the door, held it, and ushered me in. Knowing what I knew about puppy mills, I expected … well, if you don’t know what I knew, maybe you’ll be offended, but I expected a canine Buchenwald Boutique, a woofy Auschwitz Annex—and if the comparison seems to make light of suffering, you know nothing whatsoever about puppy mills.

  Puppy Luv, though, was anything but grim. Red crepe paper streamers were looped from the ceiling, red hearts dangled here and there, and the place was bright, cheery, and spotless. A hint of the fragrance of small dog stood out against a pleasant background of cedar, Nilodor, and dog food.

  Directly ahead of us was a check-out counter banked by bins of what the wholesale kennel supply catalogs always push as “the perfect impulse items”: latex toy dragons, hedgehogs, ducks, fire hydrants, trumpets, pianos, and ears of corn in bright primary colors; rawhide chews ranging in length from three inches to a yard; plastic packets of beef jerky treats, freeze-dried liver, and dog cookies shaped like people. Ha-ha. Presiding over the cash register was a pretty woman with dark ringlets and the foreshortened face, wide cheekbones, and ever so slightly strabismic amber-green eyes of a Siamese cat. I am not making this up. Why should I? And if you don’t trust my take on her, consider that she’d evidently noticed the resemblance herself and liked it enough to accentuate it: The pink-tinted plastic frames of her glasses narrowed and flared up at the outer corners. Also, under a white surgeon’s coat she wore a pink angora sweater. Yes, angora. Real life, though, unlike fiction, never goes too far: According to the name tag pinned to the lapel of her white cotton coat, she was not called Kitty. There was nothing even remotely feline about her name, which, according to the tag, was Diane Sweet.

  “Good morning,” said Diane Sweet, briefly looking up from a pile of papers she was sorting. “Let me know if you need any help, okay?” Her unnaturally bright pink tongue darted rapidly in and out of her mouth. I wondered whether the intense rose color could be a sign of some mild zoonotic illness I’d never heard of: cat’s tongue fever, Persian glossitis.

  “Sure,” Steve told her. “Thanks.”

  He led the way across the front of the store, past a rack of greeting cards (basset hounds wearing sunglasses, goldens in silly hats), big displays of premium dog food (Eukanuba, Science Diet, Natural Life), and piles of plastic-protected dog beds in every size from ultratoy to maxigiant in colors to coordinate with every decor and ranging in shape from the basic circle to that popular anomaly, the dog-biscuit-shaped sheepskin nest. I mean, do you see children’s double bunks in the form of a Big Mac? Well, maybe you do. Anyway, turquoise fiberglass cages lined the left-hand wall of the store. Directly ahead of us were two tiers of small cages, twelve above, twelve below. A waist-high clear plastic barrier parallel to the cage banks was evidently intended to deter customers from sticking their fingers into the cages or opening the wire mesh doors. Each cage bore a placard showing the puppy’s breed. The labels were accurate. A neatly lettered and discreetly worded sign fastened to the wall above the cages read: “ASK ABOUT PUPPY LUV’S UNIQUE LUV ON TIME PLAN.” Another sign advertised Puppy Luv’s “SIX-MONTH COMPLETE HEALTH GUARANTEE.”

  At the extreme right of the cage bank were four one-story cages meant for large-breed dogs. Each of these cages was about the size of the inside of a dishwasher and just as interesting, too. The Alaskan malamute resided twenty-four hours a day in the first dishwasher.

  I wrapped my hands over the top of the plastic barrier and leaned toward the mal puppy, who sat alertly upright. She was in that unbelievably cute one-ear-up, one-ear-down stage that’s supposed to be temporary but sometimes lasts forever. Walt Disney’s Tramp? But a purebred, AKC-registered Tramp, of course. Just in case the ears didn’t get to me—they did—the little malamute cocked her head and returned my gaze. I couldn’t help bending forward toward her. She didn’t prance or bounce—there wasn’t room, anyway—and she didn’t speak, beg, sit up, or do anything else cute. She didn’t have to. All she had to do was sit there with her head cocked and her eyes locked in mine. Her nose wasn’t running. Her eyes were clear. She was almost irresistible.

  “Her eyes are too light,” I whispered to Steve. She had what are called “wolf eyes,” golden-yellow-amber. According to the breed standard, dark eyes are preferred, the darker, the better, but, according to me, that wolf gold is a knockout color, especially when the dog’s coat is a matching golden sable like this pup’s. “That ear might not come up,” I added, confident that it would. If it didn’t? I knew at least fifty people who’d tape it for me. “Maybe her tail is too short?” I paused and sighed. “Maybe it isn’t. God damn. Look at her. You can see the intelligence. And any stupid person—”

  Steve spoke very quietly. “You see that? Look at those feet.”

  I did. The little malamute’s feet looked fine to me—much too big for the rest of her, of course, but perfectly normal for a puppy of a big breed. “What’s wrong with them?”

  I tore my eyes from the puppy and looked up at Steve. His face was rigid and expressionless, his jaw tight, his eyes angry. I followed his gaze. In the upper of the two cages immediately to the left of the nameless malamute’s, a tiny Boston terrier puppy lay asleep on his side, his legs outstretched as if to display the swollen pink pads and upward curving toes of his misshapen feet.

  I spoke too loudly. “Jesus! What is that?”

  High heels tapped lightly toward us.

  “Later,” Steve murmured.

  “The Boston terrier is a lovely breed,” Diane Sweet said truthfully. She lowered her voice and addressed Steve. “And that’s a very good price.” Her oddly red tongue darted out and in. It reminded me of the swollen pads of the little Boston’s feet. “Valentine’s special,” Diane Sweet added brightly. She pursed her lips and tightened the muscles in her face so that her cheeks stood out. Maybe she was trying to smile. Then she quietly confided: “That’s a five-hundred-dollar puppy you’re seeing there.”

  I’d been concentrating so hard on the little dog’s poor feet that I’d overlooked the paper Valentine heart fastened to his cage. His sale price was two hundred eighty-nine dollars. Diane Sweet was right, though, I reflected. He was worth five hundred: five hundred dollars in vet bills. Otherwise? As a specimen of the breed? Well, maybe you don’t know the breed. The Boston terrier is a small dog, under twenty-five pounds, sometimes even under fifteen pounds, notable for the exceptional liveliness reflected in his intense but gentle eyes and a look of bold, unwavering intelligence—the famous “Boston terrier expression.” A black and white coat is acceptable, but the ideal color is brindle with white markings—white blaze on the head, white muzzle, white down the chest, and white on the feet and up the legs. Have I lost you? Brindle? Black hairs in a light base color, for instance gray, tan, or brown. You’ve probably seen a brindle coat on a boxer? Or maybe on a Great Dane? Well, never mind. This puppy was predominantly white, a show fault; his body was black, not the ideal brindle; and irregular flesh-colored blotches freckled his black nose. Even with the three of us peering at him and talking, he remained asleep. So what was he worth as a show dog? Nothing. But as a companion? Simply as a dog? Any dog? Like all the others, he was beyond price.

  “I was wondering about this one,” I said, pointing to the malamute.

  Diane Sweet once again did something odd with her mouth and cheeks, and then said in a congratulatory voice, “That’s an excellent choice. This is a very special puppy.” She made her way quickly and smoothly through a swinging door in the barrier, opened the cage, and gathered up the puppy, who wiggled and squirmed. Diane Sweet tilted her head toward the back of the store and said, “Come on this way, and I’ll let you play with her. See that door?”

  Just try missing a door marked CUDDLE SPACE. I remembered something I’d read once, something att
ributed to one of the head honchos of a chain of pet shops. “There are only two places you can buy love,” the guy had said. “A brothel. And a Docktor Pet Center.”

  “Could you get that for me?” Diane Sweet asked Steve, who compliantly held open the door.

  I followed Diane Sweet in. The Cuddle Space was a bright, cozy little white-painted room with red plastic-cushioned benches around the sides. Her eyes on me, not on Steve, Diane Sweet said, “Now you just play with her as long as you want. Do you know how to hold a puppy?”

  Roger Tory Peterson, who devised the famous system of bird identification based on unique combinations of field marks—yes, the Peterson system—once went to an eye doctor who advised him to take up a hobby that would require him to focus on small objects seen from a distance. Something like, say, bird watching? I felt just like Peterson.

  “I guess so,” I said, lowering myself to the red bench.

  “Well, there’s nothing to it.” Diane Sweet’s tone was obviously intended to boost my weak sense of self-confidence. “Just hold out your arms. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.” And with that, she lowered the squirming little malamute into my lap and added, “Anyone who knows how to hug can hold a puppy.”

  The Alaskan malamute is a tough breed, and this was a tough, fearless little puppy who immediately scrambled up my chest, sniffed my neck, burrowed her head, and licked. I wrapped my arms around her and stroked her soft baby coat. Against my own wishes, I lowered my head, rubbed my chin over the top of her head, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply.

  Diane Sweet addressed Steve: “Aren’t they the cutest thing you ever saw? This is the perfect picture of love.” I can’t even begin to imagine how Steve’s face looked, and I was too busy with the wiggling puppy to take a peek. Diane Sweet went on. “You know, I just have to tell you: This is a nice friendly puppy, but she’s never responded to anyone like this before.”