by Susan Conant
“This is a good-looking dog,” Betty said. She has the big malamutes—M’Loots—that you see in the Midwest and other parts of the country, not the smaller Kotzebues you see here in New England. Rowdy isn’t pure Kotzebue, and he’s a big boy—standard size—but I was surprised and happy to hear Betty admire him. He didn’t look like Betty’s dogs, and most breeders like the type they raise themselves. “You better keep your eye on him today,” Betty added as she reached into one of the pockets of her wolf gray suit. When I’d nodded an okay, she fed Rowdy one of those disgusting-looking chunks of dried liver for which dogs will do anything, absolutely anything, even behave themselves. “He’d go with anyone.”
“I know,” I said. “I didn’t even bring a crate. I’m just keeping him with me. Nothing’s happened, has it? I mean, here?”
In case you’ve spent the last few years exiled on some barren no-mail, no-dog-show island, let me explain. The militant wing of the animal rights movement, having evidently decided that love and protection are exploitation, had recently begun to release dogs from their servile state of bondage. In other words, they’d been going to shows and “liberating” dogs from their crates. Sound familiar? Yes, indeed, the American policy in Vietnam: To save the village, you have to destroy it.
Anyway, as I’ve suggested, Betty Burley, who is a tiny woman in her midseventies or so, looks almost nothing like a malamute, but when she answered my question about the animal rights extremists, her rather almond-shaped brown eyes blazed exactly the way Rowdy’s do whenever he spots that cocker spaniel that’s kept on a clothesline trolley a few blocks from my house. “Nothing’s happened yet,” said Betty, fingering a gray show lead, “but they’ve been turning up at a whole lot of shows. There’ve been incidents all over the country.”
“It scares the life out of me.” I clutched Rowdy’s collar. “And here? With that shopping mall and then 128? Betty, where are your dogs?”
“In their crates, but it’s okay. Lois is keeping an eye on them. So did you talk to that woman? The one that called me?”
“Yeah. Enid Sievers. I went over there Friday. I’m going to go pick the dog up tomorrow and drive her out to you, if that’s okay.”
Betty nodded. Her white curls shook. “What’s she like, what’s her name, Missy?”
“Yeah. Missy. For a pet shop dog, she’s really quite decent looking, and she’s really sweet. It’s just, really, it’s just a bad match. I mean, the husband got the dog from Puppy Luv, and then he died, and this woman is the last person who could cope with a malamute, and when you consider that, the dog is amazingly well behaved, housebroken, nondestructive, very submissive. She needs to be spayed, but that’s about it.”
“Great,” Betty said.
“Uh, but there is sort of a problem,” I said reluctantly. “It’s about her papers.” I examined a thin braided-leather lead.
“You get them?”
“No. But I got a look at them. There’s sort of a problem.” I rested my hand on Rowdy’s head and began to rub him gently. “I don’t exactly know what to do about it. I don’t even know …” Without thinking, I raised my hand to cover my mouth.
Betty guessed immediately. “AMCA breeder?”
The first provision of the code of ethics of the national breed club, AMCA, the Alaskan Malamute Club of America, is this: “No member shall knowingly be involved in the sale of puppies through pet shops or any other type of wholesale outlets, including mail-order houses, dog agents, or federally licensed dog dealers or individuals or institutions involved in research.” Just in case anyone misses the point, the second provision goes on to forbid the sale of litters for resale.
“She must be,” I said. “Yeah, I know she is.”
Betty’s wiry body stiffened. “Not—”
I interrupted. “No, not you.” I peered through the curtain of leads to make sure that no one was hanging around to overhear. “Lois Metzler,” I murmured.
Betty folded her arms across her chest. “Look, Holly, if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re new at this,” she said firmly. “Take any pet shop dog you want, and go back far enough, and what you find is a reputable breeder somewhere there. It can happen to anyone. How far back?”
A woman and a stunning Afghan hound, a snood on his head to protect his ears, appeared on the other side of the display of leads.
“Betty, could we, uh … let’s move somewhere else, huh? Where we can talk.”
Rowdy followed me to the Cherrybrook counter, where I paid about half what the same collars, treats, conditioner, and chew toys would’ve cost at Puppy Luv. Then Betty, Rowdy, and I made our way through the narrow, crowded aisles between the baby-gated rings to the cafeteria, bought some of that poisonous dog-show coffee, and stood at the vacant end of a long, high counter.
“From what I can tell,” I said, “Lois sold a bitch to a puppy mill. I’m sure she didn’t mean to, but Missy’s dam is Icekist. Do we tell her?”
“Who’d Lois sell to? Who’s the breeder?”
“Some guy I’ve never heard of. Walter Simms, his name is. You ever hear of him?”
Betty shook her head and said definitively, “He’s not from around here.”
“Probably in Missouri,” I said. “Minnesota. Iowa. Whatever.”
Although I didn’t know where Walter Simms was, it seemed to me that I knew who he was. I could see his face, fleshy, ugly, and brutal. His nose was like a pig’s, with open nostrils that spouted clumps and tufts of white hair. His laugh was ugly, too, and rotten teeth fouled his breath.
I cleared my mind. “The other names, on the sire’s side, all sound like puppy mill dogs, and there’s a whole lot of inbreeding.”
“Puppy mills do that. Look, Holly, I don’t know how well you know Lois.” Betty paused. “She breeds a lot of litters.”
“I’ve heard,” I said. “Betty, do we tell her? Or …?”
“You never know.” Betty stretched up an elbow and leaned on the counter. “And if it happened once, it could happen again. She’s got to do a better job of screening. It’s not just her. We all do. But, you never know, maybe she can try and buy the bitch back. It’s been done before. You end up paying two or three times the purchase price, but you get your bitch back.”
“It’d be worth it. It’d be worth anything.”
“Yeah,” Betty agreed. “You want me to tell her?”
“Yes,” I said with no hesitation. “It might be—”
“She’s going to want to talk to you. She’s going to need to see the papers.”
“Rowdy, get over here,” I said. In search of crumbs, he’d snuffled his way to the end of his six-foot lead. “Good boy. Stick around, huh? Anyway, I don’t know if I can get the papers, but I can show her the pedigree. I don’t have it with me, but I copied it down. This woman, Enid Sievers … Look, I know this sounds crazy, but she wants to keep the papers. They have sentimental value or something. They belonged to her husband.”
“People’ll buy them, you know. Puppy mills will. What’s she …?” I could see Betty envisioning Enid Sievers as a sharp, sneaky character with connections in the canine underworld.
I smiled. “Enid Sievers is just not that kind of person. I really don’t think we need to worry about that. She’s, uh, sort of vague. I mean, I think she really is the kind of person who’d give up her husband’s dog and insist on keeping the papers. She struck me as being sort of, uh, out of touch with reality.”
Betty didn’t trust my judgment. “She tell you about the husband?”
“She mentioned him. Edgar.”
“She tell you that he knew he was dying when he bought the puppy?”
“No.” Dog-show coffee is bad enough to make anyone choke, but I’d barely sipped mine. “You mean …?”
“Yeah. I do mean. From what she says, he walked into that goddamned Puppy Luv, told ’em all about how sick he was, he always wanted an Alaskan malamute, it was his last dying wish, and then he walked out with the dog. You like that?”
“That’s sick,” I said. “He bought a puppy when he knew …? And with a wife like that?”
“Yeah, well, you’re young,” Betty said. “Except for dogs, it’d be a pretty sick world out there. And even with them. Look, I’ve got to get back to my dogs. You coming with me?”
“Sure,” I said, following her, “if you want. Unless it’d be easier …”
“Yeah, maybe it would,” Betty said. “Give me ten minutes or so, would you? We’re set up over there against that wall. See where that deerhound is? In back of there and a little to the left.”
As soon as Betty left, a group of four or five people I didn’t know approached the counter, spread out their lunches, and began talking about the same thing that was scaring everyone else at the show. Before I tell you what they were saying, I want to make sure that, in case you’re a newcomer, you understand something about show people: This is not only the most diverse group of people you can imagine, but one of the least violent, philandering, or otherwise trouble-prone groups you’ll ever encounter. We’re too busy training and grooming dogs, cleaning out kennels, whelping puppies, driving to shows, and earning our dogs’ keep to get into mischief. We aren’t any more morally upright than anyone else; we just don’t have time.
With that preface, let me now report that a heavily muscled, bristle-headed guy leaned across the greasy linoleum counter, pointed a sausage-shaped finger at a plump, vigorous elderly woman, and growled, “One of them releases a dog of mine, and I’ll give ’em a lesson in liberation. I’ll liberate ’em back to the fucking Stone Age.”
7
According to a couple of recent surveys, the two most popular dog names in America are Lady and Max. Other favorites include Brandy, Shadow, Duke, Bear, Rocky, Princess, and Bandit. Food names are trendy now—Sushi, Twinkie. We seem to be naming our dogs after what we devour. If so, the next à la mode canine appellation in Cambridge is going to be Baby Greens. In Cambridge right now, if you aren’t going to serve a mixture of tiny, tender collard leaves, kale, beet greens, endive, and radicchio barely sautéed in hot olive oil, you might just as well proclaim your total rejection of fashion by dishing up a totally passé quiche Lorraine or beef Stroganoff. If we are what we eat, the residents of Cambridge are fast becoming infantile and wilted.
The point about mixed baby greens, though, is to illustrate the mysterious but intimate connection between people and dogs: At the exact moment the tiny leaf craze hit Cambridge, a parallel phenomenon sprang up in dogdom, namely, the lamb and rice fad. Every major manufacturer of dog food is now scrambling to get lamb and rice on the market. A couple of years ago, when everyone in Cambridge was dining on fresh pasta and warm goat cheese, the only dogs in America who’d so much as sniffed lamb and rice were allergy-prone canines on bland diets. Now, all of a sudden, you’re apt to be accused of endangering your dog’s health and well-being if you’re feeding him anything else. Why lamb and rice? Well, why baby greens? And, more importantly, what’s the connection? I mean, if the latest human food fad had been something Greek or Middle Eastern, you could understand it: a use for the leftovers. As it is, the human-canine bond is mysterious indeed.
Without entirely abandoning my obsession with this miraculous interspecies link, let me return to the subject of dog names. Lois Metzler grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. Icekist, her kennel name, wasn’t twangy or southern, and her dogs were New England Kotzebues, but their names reflected Lois’s origins in the country music capital of the world: Icekist Cheating Heart, Honkytonk Angel, that kind of thing. Lois was a Hank Williams fan, of course. Cheating Heart, one of the dogs she’d brought to the Shawsheen Valley show, had gone Winners Bitch that morning.
Ordinarily, then, Lois Metzler would’ve been in a moderately good mood, and she probably had been until Betty Burley broke the news about Missy. I’d given Betty ten or fifteen minutes alone with Lois. Rowdy and I had wandered around collecting free samples of lamb and rice dog food at the lams and Natural Life booths. Rowdy had attempted to augment our stock of free samples: He’d tried to snatch a mouthful of trail mix from one of the open bins at a concession stand that sold cashews, jelly beans, dried apricots, and other nuts, fruits, and candies for people, but I’d managed to haul him away in time. Then we’d plowed through the crowds to the area by the wall where Lois and Betty were set up.
Lois Metzler must’ve been acquainted with the theory that the handler should disappear in the ring to allow the dog to put himself forward, but I guess if you’re five feet ten inches tall and weigh as much as three or four Alaskan malamutes, disappearance isn’t a realistic goal. Today she was dolled up for the breed ring in a tentlike red dress with abstract splotches of gray and black. Her head was bullet-shaped, her shoulders were massive, she had thick arms and legs, and around the middle she was just plain fat. Despite her own bulk, she kept her dogs lean and fit, and I’d always thought she was a good handler. She moved lightly and had a knack of getting her dogs to show well even in hot weather and in overheated halls when everyone else’s dogs looked bored and lethargic.
When Rowdy and I approached, Lois lunged toward us, reached out, grabbed my arm, and said in a deep, scratchy, and rather loud voice, “You know, you’re new in malamutes. This is some kind of mistake.”
I wasn’t eager to handle the rolls of fat that made natural circle bracelets at her wrist, but I wanted her hands off me. Rowdy sat at my side and took an intelligent interest as I calmly and silently removed Lois’s damp palm from my thin wrist. Rowdy does not like people to grab me.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” she said. She lowered her voice and scratched the back of her neck. “How many people’ve you told about this?”
“Just Betty,” I said. “I’m not a blabbermouth. I don’t like gossip. I only told Betty because I didn’t know whether to tell you. I didn’t know if you’d want to know. She said you would.”
Lois Metzler had short, bristly gray-brown hair. Her pallid February skin was draped across small, blunt features. The pink powder blush on her cheeks, the blue powder shadow on her eyelids, and the traces of red around her lips had the paradoxical effect of draining her face of all color. For a second, I thought she was going to faint.
I gestured toward the folding chair by the big crates that held her dogs. “Lois, do you need to sit down?”
“No!” she said fiercely. She straightened her shoulders and added with a hint of anger, “You know, I screen my buyers. This could happen to anyone, absolutely anyone.”
“I know it could,” I agreed. “That’s the point. It could happen to anyone. I’m not blaming you, and neither is Betty.”
Like a dog responding to his own name, Betty Burley appeared at Lois’s side. They made a funny-looking pair, Brobdingnagian Lois, Lilliputian Betty, but dogs care nothing for outward appearance. Rowdy barged into the center of our circle and nuzzled at Lois’s hands. She absentmindedly dug a treat out of her pocket and watched Rowdy wolf it down and lick her hand clean. For a few seconds, no one said anything.
Lois broke the silence. Her voice was hoarse, sad, and belligerent. “Which puppy was it?” Her eyes stayed on Rowdy, almost as though she expected him to answer the question.
He didn’t, of course. I did. Same thing, more or less. “The dam is named Icekist Sissy.”
Lois’s eyes were blank. “Doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
In case you aren’t a specialist in AKC regulations, let me explain that Lois meant Sissy, not Icekist, which was her registered kennel name and couldn’t be used to register a dog from another breeder. Supposedly, puppy buyers aren’t obligated to use the registered kennel name prefix. In practice, though, virtually any reputable breeder will insist that you use it, and most will enter it on the puppy’s registration application, thus leaving you free to choose the rest of the dog’s name. Why? When your pup goes on to take Best in Show at Westminster, the breeder wants—and deserves—the credit, of course.
“I copied down the whole pedigree,” I said. “I should’ve brought it
with me. I meant to. I’m sorry. Call me tonight or whenever. Maybe you can find out where she is.”
“I screen my buyers,” Lois repeated. “I educate them. They have to visit. Everybody visits at least twice. I don’t ship to people I don’t know.”
“Stop it!” Betty ordered her.
“What are you supposed to do?” I added. “Move in with people? Live with them for a month before you’ll sell them a dog?”
“Maybe,” Lois said. “Maybe that’s what you have to do. That or something else.” Color began to return to her face. “Puppy Luv,” she said bitterly. “God damn. You know something? I’ll find out who did this. And I’ll get my bitch back, too. Count on it.”
“Good,” I said. “Lois, if there’s anything I can do …”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have to think. I have to do some follow-ups. I don’t know yet. But thanks, Holly. I’ll call you.” Then with a note of angry confrontation, she asked, “Hey, what does this pet shop bitch look like?”
“Pretty,” I said. I described Missy and added, “Nice temperament, too.”
“I’d take her,” Lois said, her eyes on Betty, “but I haven’t got room now, you know. I’ve got two litters on the ground. I’d like to help, but I’m full up.”
The merest flicker of annoyance crossed Betty’s face. “I’m taking her. Holly’s driving her out to me tomorrow. But the next time you get someone looking for a pet puppy …”
You probably don’t need a translation, but just in case: A pet puppy means one who isn’t of show quality and can’t go to a show home. Let me add that a pet-quality puppy from a good show kennel is precisely what to look for if you ever buy a purebred puppy that you aren’t going to show. You’ll get the benefits of buying from a responsible breeder—genetic screening for hereditary conditions like hip dysplasia and eye disease, selective breeding for good temperament, the permanent availability of a knowledgeable person who cares about the dog, and the comfort of knowing that your dog’s parents are healthy, safe, happy, and well-fed. And, of course, a pet pup usually costs less than a show pup. But please consider a rescue dog first. I mean, puppies chew everything, and they wake you up at night. They leave puddles and messes all over the floor, and before long, they turn into dogs, anyway.
