Bloodlines (9 page)

If I’d had any hope that they’d succeed in wringing out of Lois a decent description of the dark-haired “liberator,” I’d have stuck around. As it was, I gave a succinct account of my part of the story and offered the only excuse to leave that anyone at the show would’ve understood or accepted, namely, that although Rowdy appeared to be in good spirits, he was more sensitive than he looked and needed to go home. In truth, of course, Rowdy has the unflappable self-confidence of the truly fearless. I’m the one who’s more sensitive than I look.

Even so, Rowdy did a convincing, if unwitting, job of backing me up. He began by seating himself next to me and staring at my face the way I wish he’d always do in the obedience ring. Then he stood up, shuffled his feet around, and started a soft, high-pitched whine. When that didn’t work, he pranced around and burst forth in an uninterrupted series of sharp yelps and loud
woos
that drowned out human conversation. This apparent
trauma-victim behavior drew the sympathy of the officials, none of them malamute people, and Lois Metzler had the grace not to translate. Shall I? Rowdy unconditionally refuses to use a so-called exercise pen. He was pleading to go outside.

“I’m sorry,” I shouted over the din, “but I have to get him out of here!”

Mary Kalinowski and the other officials clucked and nodded, and Rowdy and I beat it to the obedience rings, where I grabbed the gear I’d left there, and, with Rowdy acting as a sort of canine siren to clear our route, we sped out of the building and into the parking lot’s ash gray fog, thick with the musk of auto exhaust from the departing vans, RVs, and big-breed cars like mine, as well as the diesel semis roaring by on 128. About halfway across the lot, thus halfway to the distant parking space where I’d left the Bronco, I spotted Faith Barlow’s van. Did I say that my Bronco might as well have
DOG PERSON
lettered on the doors? Well, forget that. Faith’s silver van all but did.
DOG PERSON
actually appeared only on one bumper sticker on the back fender, but painstakingly hand-painted on both of the wide sides of the vehicle were identical teams of gray-and-white malamutes pulling artistically rendered sleds driven by identical parka-clad Eskimos. The rear doors stood ajar, and Faith herself was leaning in and rearranging her crates and equipment. At the sight of Faith, Rowdy gave himself a massive overall shake evidently meant to fluff up his coat. Then he trotted straight up to her, walked himself into a four-square show pose, and raised his beautiful big head and eyes to Faith’s pretty, dimpled face.

Faith has looked about forty for the ten or twelve years I’ve known her. Her wavy, easy-care hair remains in perpetual transition from blond to white. The mist had given her a mass of ringlets that managed not to look juvenile or silly, probably because she has great skin. Fact: Dog saliva happens to contain a powerful cosmetic ingredient that prevents lines and wrinkles,
cures acne, and promotes a healthy, glowing blush. The hitch is that it has to be scoured on three times a day. Anyway, when Faith turned and caught sight of Rowdy, she bent from the waist, and he gave her complexion the full treatment. Am I making this up? No. Honestly. You should see Faith. Ponce De Leon and all those people were wasting their time crossing the Atlantic to muck around in the swamps. The true location of the fountain of youth is a dog’s mouth.

“You heard what happened?” I asked Faith.

“Yeah,” she said. “They catch her?”

“No, and I don’t think they’re going to. Among other things, Lois doesn’t even seem to remember what she looked like.”

“Lois is so unobservant,” Faith said scornfully.

Breed people are
so
competitive. When Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” he wasn’t talking about football. He meant dog shows. Anyway, Faith Barlow’s eagerness to beat Lois Metzler extended beyond the conformation ring. Lois was unobservant? Well, Faith wasn’t.

“She’s about twenty, give or take a year,” Faith said definitively. “Long dark hair plastered with some kind of gel. She had on a long skirt, kind of a dark paisley pattern, and a navy pea jacket, sort of a throw-back-to-the-sixties look. Bad skin. No makeup. And she’s short, maybe five one or two. Oh, and she was wearing a, uh, backpack—what do you call it?—like a little backpack. Rucksack. It was green, sort of loden. Dark green. Didn’t Lois …?”

I gave a sigh of exasperation. “Lois didn’t tell me any of that, and she didn’t tell the officials, either. Or she won’t. They’re probably still talking to her. Could you?”

“I have to go back anyway.” Faith waved toward the trade center. “I’m just getting something. I’ll tell them. But probably it’s too late. If she has any sense, she’s long gone.”

“But it’s not too late for next time. There’ll be other shows. People like that—”

Faith slammed the van door shut. Then she finished my sentence, but not quite as I’d intended. “People like that ought to be shot,” she said. “They ought to be shot on sight.”

In the foggy early darkness of that Sunday afternoon, Route 128 glowed red with the brake lights of the backed-up cars and trucks headed toward Boston. Instead of swinging onto the highway to await the inevitable multivehicle collision, I decided to take the back way, Route 38, all the way to Medford, where I could pick up Route 16 to Cambridge. I followed 38 over 128 and into the center of Woburn.

Woburn. You ever hear of a parts match? It’s a conformation fun match with categories for best head, ears, tail, that kind of thing. The point of a parts match is that every dog has at least one good feature. Cow-hocked or not, he has a great muzzle. Roach-backed? Sure, but with a spectacular coat. As I pulled to a stop at a red light in the center of Woburn, I was wondering what category you’d need to create in a parts match for small cities that would let Woburn win best anything or, for that matter, worst anything. I’d just awarded Woburn first place in the Most Ordinary competition when my peripheral vision registered something moving to the right of the Bronco. The object in motion turned out to be a gloved thumb. Attached to it was a small, drenched person stationed on a traffic island near the stoplight.

My only excuse is that my perception must’ve been slowed and distorted by the residual images of a parts match. Best size in a toy breed? Very short. Itchiest headgear? She wore one of those pointy-topped Peruvian hats with rows of cream white stick figures knitted into the brown wool. The ear flaps were knotted under her chin. Long, dark, sopping hair dripped onto her forehead and streamed over the shoulders of her navy pea jacket. In the dusk, the day pack was a dark lump. I wondered whether it had been safe for women to hitch rides in the sixties and how someone could imagine that it was still safe for anyone, male or female.

The light changed to green, and my mental processes finally shifted into first. Green. Sixties. Pea jacket. Very short.

I leaned over, unlocked the passenger door, opened it, and yelled, “Get in!”

She did. I wondered why. Rowdy, safe in a Vari-Kennel behind the wagon barrier, wasn’t visible, but the crate and barrier certainly were. Also, despite my persistent and repeated application of every commercial deodorizing product marketed to dog owners, as well as a few dozen folk remedies, the predominant odor in the Bronco wasn’t Outright or cider vinegar but distilled essence of dog. Especially on that cold, wet day when the windows were closed and the heater was blasting, she must’ve smelled it the second she approached the open door. Yet she got in. Why? If she’d bolted from the show the second she’d released Rowdy, she must’ve been out in that chilling weather for thirty or forty minutes. I guess she got in because she was cold, wet, and very young.

Massachusetts drivers being the charitable souls they are, every car behind me had begun to sound its horn the second the light turned green. As soon as I heard her pull the door shut, I stepped on the gas.

“You owe me thirty-five dollars,” I said flatly.

“Do I
know
you?” The voice was young, clear, and educated, with a hint of a British accent, and not Harvard
educated, pseudo-British, either, but real British, in other words, genuinely foreign. But just a trace.

“You owe me thirty-five dollars,” I repeated. “For trail mix. After you let go of his leash, he went to a concession stand that sells trail mix and candy and stuff. It has open bins.” I assume that I sounded cheerful. I was. In fact, I was having fun. I’d wanted to get one these people alone for a long time. “He didn’t actually eat thirty-five dollars’ worth, thank God, but he grabbed a lot of mouthfuls and threw them on the floor, which is what he does when he steals food. You wouldn’t know that, of course, because you don’t know anything about dogs, never mind malamutes, but he does. His name is Rowdy, by the way. He’s an Alaskan malamute. Anyway, what Rowdy didn’t eat or toss on the floor he probably drooled on or whatever, and the guy was nice about it, and we settled for thirty-five dollars.”

The Bronco was very warm by now. The wipers made a cozy swish back and forth across the windshield. And the car smelled homey, too, of course.

The indignant young voice broke the near silence. “You’re kidnapping me! Stop this car and let me out this instant!”

“Actually, I’m rescuing you. You’d’ve got into any car that stopped, so I’ve probably rescued you from rape and murder, and those dog people back there would hang you from the nearest grooming loop. I’ve practically plucked you off the scaffold. Actually, one of them was going to strangle you. I think I’ve got that right. And someone else definitely wanted to shoot you. Actually, what she said was that you ought to be shot on sight. But I didn’t shoot you, did I? I’m not even taking you back there.”

“You’re holding me in this car against my will! And that’s kidnapping. You could get in a lot of trouble for this.” Childish? That’s how she sounded.

“You were hitching. I picked you up. You’re lucky. I happen to be a nice, peaceful person. Let me introduce
myself. My name is Holly Winter. I live at two fifty-six Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is where we’re going, in case you wondered. I’d offer you my hand, but I need it on the steering wheel right now, so why don’t you just tell me your name, and we’ll save—”

She interrupted with a self-righteous announcement: “I am not going anywhere with the kind of person who keeps an animal locked in a cage.”

“Actually, you are,” I said. “Right now, that’s what you’re doing, but the word is
crate.
Question: Why is Rowdy in a crate? Why isn’t he
free?”
I answered for her. “So if I slam on the brakes, he won’t be thrown against the windshield. That’s why the wagon barrier’s there, too. Double protection.”

“You couldn’t let anything happen to your valuable
property
, could you?” she snapped.

“He
is
valuable,” I said. “He is one of the most important people in my life, and, in case you wondered, I am not joking. So is Kimi, my other dog. Hey, while you’re at this, have you ever considered releasing children?”

She didn’t answer.

“Really,” I said. “I mean it. I’m serious. A lot of people would be less pained and, uh, jeopardized, in a way, if you went around liberating their children instead of doing stupid things like this. I mean, for a start, children can at least
talk.
Not babies, of course. You’d go for preschoolers, I guess. On the other hand, there are these old statistics.…” I paused and explained. “I write about dogs. That’s what I do. I’m a dog writer. That’s why I know this stuff. Anyway, in 1982, Americans spent one point thirty-two billion dollars on pet accessories, and in the same year they spent only two hundred and twenty-two million dollars on toys for children under the age of eighteen months. Okay? So which would people rather lose?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said.

Finally. I felt delighted. “The point is,” I said, my
voice suddenly cold, “that the quality of the bond, if you want to call it that, is not very different. Love is love. It sounds corny, but that’s what this entire dog thing is about: absolute, unconditional love. And if Rowdy had been killed because you ‘liberated’ him, I would have been absolutely and unconditionally glad to see you dead. I might not actually have murdered you, but I’d sure have wanted to. I might even have done it. But since no harm came to him, thank God, I am taking a constructive, civilized approach to the situation.”

“Stop this car!”

“No,” I said, peering out to check a sign that pointed the way to Arlington. “Of course not. You haven’t even met Kimi yet. Do you have any other questions?”

She said nothing.

“Well, I do,” I said. “First of all, are you from A.L.F.?”

A.L.F.? Animal Liberation Front. The militant wing of animal rights extremism, the Irish Republican Army of animal liberation, but, oddly enough, British. Really, that’s true. Her accent was what made me ask, of course.

“No,” she said. “It was my own symbolic act.”

“Rowdy is not a symbol. He’s my dog. And if you think it was okay to let him loose indoors,” I went on, “you’re wrong. A dog fight would have been almost as bad. And he could have wandered out. It wasn’t likely, okay, but it could have happened. What you did was not just symbolic, you know. It was directed against
my
dog.”