The Wicked Flea (19 page)

Chapter 25

What about the blameless owners of the restaurant? Why should
they
pay? I really did feel sorry for them. But I felt worse for the little girls with the bad teeth and for the dog they loved. After the sad, vaguely frightening encounter with the Trask family, I needed an antidote, and my assignment for
Dog’s Life
provided the perfect one. As I may already have said, I write a column for that respected publication, but I also get assignments and do a lot of freelance work, too. Today, for example, I was interviewing a niece of Mrs. Waggenhoffer’s who was in charge of a demonstration of freestyle at the Micmac show. Freestyle, I remind you, is dancing with dogs and was the subject Kimi and I had been studying on the infamous Day of the Tail. Freestyle was a fairly new canine performance event, and the niece, Erna L. Sporter, was forever trying to recruit support for it by organizing demos at fairs, parades, and other public festivities as well as at dog shows. Like every other organized dog activity, freestyle involves competition and titles, but it distinguishes itself from conformation, obedience, tracking, agility, and such by emphasizing the aesthetic element in the performance of dog and handler. And the humorous one. I mean, just how seriously can you take dancing with dogs? Well, in Erna L. Sporter’s case, pretty seriously, but to other people, freestyle is the canine equivalent of pairs figure skating crossed with a wacky form of Vaudeville. It has rules and regulations, of course. For instance, the dog and handler are supposed to move in time to the music. But it has only one real point: it’s supposed to slap a grin on your face that you can’t wipe off. And it does!

So there I was, standing outside the freestyle ring beaming my face off at the sight of a tiny Yorkie and a great big woman in matching gold costumes boogieing to “The Chattanooga Choo Choo,” when Wilson lurched into me, apologized, and tried to drag me off to Llio’s crate to give him my opinion of her nails. Dog toenails!

‘They’re too long.” I spoke from memory. Keeping my eyes on the Yorkie, I added, “You could take a tiny bit off, but be careful you don’t hit the quick, or she’ll go lame on you.”

Mistake!

“I hate to ask you,” Wilson said, “but could you do it? I’m new at all this. And my handler doesn’t do any grooming.”

“Maybe Llio’s aren’t too long after all,” I lied. “They’re probably all right. And if Llio doesn’t like having her nails clipped, it might put her in a bad mood, and then she won’t show very well.”

“They’re too long,” he persisted.

“When are you due in the ring?” As may not be obvious, I posed the question in my native dialect, which succinctly encodes the assumption that you and your dog are one. In standard English, Llio would be in the ring with her handler and without Wilson, but in the heartfelt English of the dog fancy, where the dog is, there the owner is, too.

“Not for a long time. It’s for the group,” he said modestly and, I must add, deviantly. The guy obviously hadn’t mastered the social conventions yet. When your dog goes Best of Breed, you aren’t required to make yourself obnoxious, but you damned well are supposed to brag. Not that you even need to say anything! A smug expression is fine. But you are supposed to display pride! Why? Because you owe it to your dog, that’s why! Anyway, in English, Llio had already been in the Pembroke Welsh corgi ring, where she’d won. Consequently, she’d represent her breed in the judging of the Herding Group, which, like the judging of the Sporting Group, the Working Group, and so on, and eventually the judging of Best in Show, would take place much later in the day.

“Congratulations! That’s well deserved,” I said. “Were there a lot of specials?” Specials: dogs and bitches, technical term, who’ve already finished their championships. Going Best of Breed is good. Going B.O.B. over specials is worth a big, big brag.

“No. And it wasn’t a major.” (That’s a major win, one worth three or more points.) “A lot of people don’t like the judge.” In other words, there’d been a small entry, that is, a small number of Pembrokes in competition. The size of the entry determines the number of points awarded. The greater the competition, the more points given for winning. Sensible! Indeed, like many other aspects of dog shows, a model for the rest of the world. I could go on. And often have.

Before long Wilson had me where he wanted me, which was next to his brand-new grooming table with a pair of clippers in my right hand and Llio standing on the table casting beautiful but unhappy eyes at me. As I was informing Wilson that Llio’s nails weren’t too bad and that I was not going to trim them for fear of leaving her with a tender toe or a sour attitude, my eyes were taking an inventory of the incredible collection of equipment he’d brought to a smallish show for one smallish bitch.

The grooming table was new but fairly ordinary. The heavy-duty crate dolly was also new. The tack box from which he’d produced the clippers was the kind of large metal affair that professional handlers and big-time breeder-handlers use, and to my amazement, Llio’s crate was one of those luxurious, expensive wooden ones, a brand-new version of an old-fashioned model, fitted with brass hardware and probably weighing in the vicinity of a zillion pounds. Well, not quite. And I do admire those crates. I even own a few, antiques, really, that I inherited from my mother. But for shows, I use Vari-Kennels, which weigh almost nothing, or my Central Metal folding crates, not some weighty collection of flashy, unnecessary, and impractical gear that has to be loaded into the car, unloaded onto a dolly, hauled to the grooming area, set up, and eventually, broken down, reloaded onto the dolly, hauled back to the car, and loaded into the car, only to be unloaded at home, and so forth. For a cluster of three or four shows where Rowdy and Kimi are both entered, my cousin Leah and I take a fair amount of paraphernalia: crates, crate dolly, grooming table, tack box, chairs for ourselves, a cooler, maybe, and other odds and ends. But heavy, cumbersome wooden crates, no matter how impressive? They’re for people who pay other people to do the lifting and moving. I wondered how many trips it had taken Wilson to get this stuff in here. And how much he’d paid for all of it.

Then I turned my attention to Llio. Like malamutes, corgis are extremely intelligent and curious, but unlike malamutes, they don’t go out of their way to ingratiate themselves with every fool who comes along. For a corgi, Llio was almost cuddly. As I was stroking her throat, advising Wilson to think about putting herding and tracking titles on her, chatting with him about what he fed her and what I fed my dogs, and so forth, Mrs. Waggenhoffer’s melodious but penetrating voice suddenly rang out. “Holly! I had no idea you had a Pembroke! Nice bitch!”

Mrs. Waggenhoffer occupied lots of space, vertically and horizontally. In defiance of the stereotype, she didn’t have a pretty face. Her nose was tiny and pointed, and her jowls large and prominent. Her wavy white hair had always reminded me of the wigs worn by barristers and judges in English courtroom dramas. Today, she had on a robelike black dress.

I waved and said, “Hi, Mrs. Waggenhoffer! The bitch isn’t mine. Too bad for me! She took the breed today.”

The grande dame—she really was one—came striding down the aisle of crates, and when she reached me, looked Llio over carefully and pronounced, “Very typey head! Really, overall, very nice!”
Typey
means “correct for the breed.” If Lassie looks like what she is, a rough collie, then she’s typey, but if a malamute’s head reminds you of Lassie’s, it’s called a “collie head” and—horrors!—isn’t typey.

“I heard your father got married,” Mrs. Waggenhoffer said in a tone of odd triumph. “Is that true?”

After saying that it was, I immediately presented Gabrielle’s credentials. “She has a bichon. They met at a show.”

“Well, then, that’s all right.” Mrs. Waggenhoffer nodded her big head in such hearty approval that her jowls bounced. Pointing at Llio, she asked, “Who’s handling this bitch? You?”

“I should hope not. Actually, I don’t know who’s handling her. Wilson?”

The next few moments threatened to become awkward. The day I’d first met Wilson, he’d given me the impression that he knew Mrs. Waggenhoffer. Now, it was clear that he merely knew who she was. I quickly introduced the two. Wilson looked painfully intimidated, as if he were being presented at the Court of Saint James’s and not to the president of the Micmac Kennel Club. Instead of just saying that he was happy to meet Mrs. Waggenhoffer and then immediately making some socially appropriate remark, in other words, almost anything about dogs, he stammered a shy, formal, “How do you do?”

The silence lasted only a few seconds. I was about to break it, but didn’t have to, because the elder Mr. Trask did it for me. Navigating his way between the rows of crates that formed the aisle and around grooming tables, gear bags, jugs of water, coils of electric cord, and other dog-show accoutrements, he was trailed by Tim, Brianna, and the little girls. Pointing an accusatory finger as Mrs. Waggenhoffer, he abruptly demanded, “You! Are you Winifred?”

As I knew perfectly well, Winifred was Mrs. Waggenhoffer’s first name. I was probably old enough to call her by it. I never did. She wouldn’t have liked it.

Sounding more arrogant than she intended, I think, Mrs. Waggenhoffer responded with a question. “And who might you be?” Mrs. Waggenhoffer, as I hope I’ve suggested, is not the sort of ruffian who growls,
Yeah, and who wants to know?
But that was what she meant.

Instead of making sure that she was who she was, and instead of answering her question, George Trask pulled a sheet of paper from one of the pockets of his shabby jacket and began to shake it in the air and pelt her with questions. “Do you know what this is? And do you know how much my son paid for this dog? Is this your idea of fair? Is this—”

Mrs. Waggenhoffer blinked. Then she smiled in a way that people who didn’t know her must have seen as condescending. I saw it as an effort to make light of an unpleasantness. But, of course, I’d known her all my life. “How could I possibly tell what that is when you’re waving it around like that?” she said. “What in heaven’s name is all this about?” By now, to my annoyance, she’d taken a step forward and was blocking my view. Still, her tone of voice suggested that rather than speaking directly to George Trask, she was addressing some distant personage far superior to the man right in front of her.

George Trask finally quit shaking the piece of paper. Peering around the bulk of Mrs. Waggenhoffer, I got a quick look at the paper and easily identified it as a pedigree. I also got a glimpse of the rest of the Trask family. Tim, now standing next to George, wore a sullen, bullish expression. Brianna’s face was pale and pinched. The girls were peering through the wire mesh door of a Vari-Kennel. I hoped they knew better than to stick their fingers into the crate of an unfamiliar dog.

Feeling sorry for the Trasks, although far less sorry for George than for the others, I intervened. ‘These people, the Trasks,” I said, “have a dysplastic golden. Naturally, they’re very—”

“Pissed!” Tim Trask finished my sentence, although not quite as I’d intended. “Damn straight we are! Rightly so! And we’re not stupid, you know! My father went to the library and looked it all up in books and on the computer, the Internet, and this isn’t supposed to happen.”

Mrs. Waggenhoffer was all sympathy. “Hip dysplasia is a real heartbreaker,” she agreed. “But the good news is that in many, many cases, there’s lots to be done about it. I can give you the name of an absolutely marvelous orthopedic surgeon, not that I’ve ever needed his services. Not with
my
lines.” She paused. “Where did you get the dog?”

George Trask still had the pedigree in his hand. He thrust it at her. Unfortunately, she held it where I couldn’t see it. In a few seconds, she said, “Now, I find this really quite odd. Timothy Trask?”

“That’s me,” the father said.

“But that’s your dog’s name!” Mrs. Waggenhoffer crowed.

Tim Trask was red faced. He looked even oilier than ever, but the shininess of his face seemed now to result from perspiration. “That was a mistake,” he muttered. “The dog’s name is Charlie.”

His father sprang to his defense. “All that’s beside the point. The point is that you people let these goddamn breeders get away with this, that’s what the point is. You’re head of this outfit, right?”

Mrs. Waggenhoffer couldn’t let go of the error Tim had made in filling out the registration form. “You put
your
name where the dog’s name was supposed to go? Well, I must admit that that’s a new one to me!” Without intending to be mean, I think, she laughed merrily. “But the point, if you really do want to get to the point, is that all this pedigree shows is that your dog came from a backyard breeder. And that’s that.” She shrugged her broad shoulders. “This is exactly the sort of thing that happens when people don’t do their homework. If you’d read up and surfed the web and so forth before you bought a puppy, you’d have ended up with a reputable breeder, and the chances are excellent that you’d have a lovely, sound, healthy dog.” She tapped the pedigree with one finger. “Careful breeders, you know, screen for hip dysplasia. Sometimes the roll of the genetic dice tricks us, but we really do our best.” Shaking her head back and forth, she added, “I’m terribly sorry to hear about the trouble you’re having, but you should have gone_ to a careful breeder to begin with and not to this”—she consulted the pedigree—“to this Sylvia Metzner, whoever
she
is.”