Bloodlines (17 page)

Gloria startled me. “Is this a job at a pet shop?”

“Yes,” I said. Then a little chagrined at having been second-guessed, I added, “More or less.”

“I thought from the way you … the way you talked about them.” Her voice took on that ghastly tone of adolescent admiration. “I could tell that you had strong feelings about them. You sounded really
committed.”

I felt myself cringe. I’m so committed that I’d never even entered Puppy Luv until I’d practically been ordered there by someone who didn’t even have malamutes; so deeply concerned that whenever I’d read Janice Coakley’s offer of “any AKC breed,” I’d never even bothered to call and inquire. When I’d seen Missy’s papers, I’d conjured an image of the breeder, Walter Simms, against a convenient horizon of Iowa corn or Kansas wheat. The golden fields were so clear in my
mind that, even now, I found it impossible to force Maine pines or Vermont maples to take root in the rich topsoil and raise the skyline. “What we can do is probably very limited,” I said sternly, “but it’s not going to work at all unless you do exactly what I tell you to do. And
nothing
else. Okay?”

The plan I outlined to Gloria was that she apply for the unenterprising Ronald’s job at Your Local Breeder. She was to call Janice Coakley and explain that one of her neighbors, someone looking for a dog, had heard she was job-hunting, knew she liked animals, and mentioned the possible opening at Your Local Breeder. The scheme had several potential hitches, of course. One was that Ronald might have kept his job after all. Another was that I had no spare car to offer Gloria and was completely unwilling to encourage her to thumb her way back and forth to Westbrook. A final problem was that Gloria’s appearance wasn’t exactly what any employer looks for in a salesperson; even if Janice Coakley had made good on her threat to fire Ronald, and even if Gloria got an interview, Janice Coakley might still take one look and decide not to hire her. In fact, the repellent thought came to me, unbidden and unwelcome, that
dog
 … well, never mind. I was raised in the cult of dog worship. Some names I won’t speak in vain.

The transportation problem was easy to solve. When I presented it to Gloria, she said, “My mom’s away for two weeks. She left yesterday. I can use the car.” Gloria went on to explain: “She’s in New Mexico on a personal journey.”

A personal journey. A pilgrimage to meet her birth mother, right? Or reverse the roles: her first reunion with the child she’d given up at age sixteen. Or maybe a trip to the only clinic in the U.S. that even tried to treat her rare, painful, embarrassing, degenerative, and ultimately fatal disease. But the truth, it turned out, was a whole lot worse than I imagined. In fact, Gloria’s mother had signed up and actually paid an incredible amount of money to spend two weeks alone in the desert
with nothing but an ample supply of drinking water and one large plastic trash bag. Cambridge.

“I hope it’s at least puncture proof,” I said frivolously.

“What?”

“All those cacti? Never mind. Anyway, speaking of—Gloria, if you get an interview, it’d probably be a good idea not to look too, uh, Cambridge. The image they’re after is probably more sort of …” I fished for words. “Not, uh, academic? Not ethnic. Sort of more all-American.”

“Pigtails?”

“Yes! Great idea. Exactly. Unsophisticated. Anyway, we might not even get that far, so let’s not worry about it yet, okay? But if it works out, all I want you to do is collect information. I want to know where their puppies come from, okay? And Janice Coakley, the woman who runs the place, told me she could get malamutes. If you can, I want you to find out where. And who the breeders are. The names of the breeders will be on the puppies’ papers. There’s a name I want you to look out for: Walter Simms. And who her suppliers are. But for now, just call her. Maybe that’s as far as we’ll get.”

When I hung up, I felt guilty about that puncture-proof crack. I’m in no position to make fun of personal journeys that seem ridiculous to other people.

My research for the Sally Brand article had revealed the startling fact that between sixty and seventy percent of the members of the Yakuza, Japan’s Cosa Nostra, are
irezumi.
Stunned, aren’t you? Or maybe your Japanese is a little rusty.
Ire-zumi
means “insertion of ink.” The
irezumi
are those who bear what the Japanese consider to be an externalization of inner reality. Well, I guess Americans think the same thing. Just look how many guys wear their hearts on their sleeves. I wondered whether Enzio Guarini had a tattoo and, if so, what it depicted, but the inner reality of a jailed racketeer fell outside my experience. Clasped hands? A Mini-Uzi? For all I knew, though, Guarini had popped into Sally Brand’s on his way to jail—after all, they were both in Rhode Island—and now bore on his back, chest, or upper arm the perfect likeness of his pet chihuahua, the devoted companion that at this very moment, right here in Massachusetts … Bonnie, my editor at
Dog’s Life
, just can’t resist a story about any dog who’s pining away for anyone or anything. Just on the off chance, I made a note to ask Sally Brand.

So I was working, right? I mean, this
is
what writers do, you know. Being a writer is really wonderful. Most of your so-called work consists of kicking around
a lot of sticky ideas until they glop onto one another, by which time you’re low on dog food and people food. So you scribble something on paper, hit the keyboard, sprint to the post office, and eventually get paid to keep staying home with your dogs. Well, it’s a great life.

To return to the gummy ideas, consider the possible adhesions: local dogs, personal journeys, inner realities, families, organizations, my happy profession, and my futile effort to transplant New England pines and maples to the rich, flat agricultural acreage of porcine Walter Simms, who was, for a start, an inner reality of mine, not someone I’d actually used my resources to pursue.

If I want to find out who’s who in reputable dogdom, I know quite a few people to ask, and I can also consult the membership lists of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America and lots of other clubs I’ve simply had to join. AMCA and the other national breed clubs are highly selective in admitting members. The dog magazines, though, don’t screen the breeders and kennels that advertise puppies, so their listings are no guarantee of reputability, but there are a lot of ads placed by the famous, the infamous, and the unknown.

Then there’s the matter of disreputable dogdom, which you may be surprised to learn actually has what is in effect its own organization, namely, the United States Department of Agriculture, the branch of our government that licenses puppy mills and puppy brokers. Whoops, pardon the slip, Class A and Class B dealers. Class A dealers breed animals; Class A dealers breed and sell them. Or if you’re a sci-fi fan, maybe you aren’t surprised. Parallel universes? You don’t believe me? Write or call the USDA and ask for a copy of the booklet
Animal Welfare: List of Licensed Dealers.
Yes, welfare. Ha-ha. In fairness, though, I must point out that not every USDA-licensed dealer is a puppy mill operator or broker. A few dealers maintain rabbit and ferret farms. Some breed kittens. A few have names that sound above reproach. Johns Hopkins University, for instance, is a USDA-licensed Class A dealer. So there’s
no stigma, really, is there? After all, Johns Hopkins doesn’t mass-produce puppies for pet shops. Well, then, why the USDA license? Research, of course, including research on laboratory animals. Rats and mice? Probably. Also, I’ve heard, Alaskan malamutes. No stigma, huh?

Now that I’ve presented an unbiased account of USDA-license holders, let me continue. I had the booklet. I just hadn’t bothered to see whether Walter Simms was listed. I hadn’t checked anything else either. I’d asked a couple of local malamute breeders, and I’d stopped there. And my family resources? If I’d phoned my father, I’d have told you, wouldn’t I? Of course I would. I hadn’t.

So I made a big pot of tea and settled down to work. Let me summarize the results of my research. Walter Simms didn’t advertise Alaskan malamutes in
Dog’s Life, Dog Fancy
, or
DOGworld.
His name was absent from the listings of malamute breeders in the
Gazette
and the
Malamute Quarterly.
If he advertised malamutes anywhere, he didn’t include his name in the ad. No one called Walter Simms belonged to the national breed club or to any of my local clubs, either.

In case Walter Simms belonged to some local kennel club for which I lacked a membership list, I checked with the Dog Breeders’ Referral Service. You know about that? Kennel-club-member breeders take turns having their phone numbers listed in the paper and answering calls from people about where to find Skye terriers, boxers, whippets, or whatever. February happened to be Ray Metcalf’s month. You know Ray and Lynne? They raise Clumber spaniels. We train together. Anyway, Walter Simms wasn’t listed, and Ray had never heard of him.

Then I made more tea and got out the USDA booklet. If you’ve ever consulted the damn thing, you’ll remember that the Class A dealers appear in the front section of the booklet, the Class A dealers at the back, and that, in each section, the names are listed alphabetically
within each state. Consequently, you can’t just look under
Simms, Walter
to find out whether he’s licensed and, if so, where he does business. No, if you want to be thorough, you start with the Class A dealers, and you check through Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, and so forth for forty-one pages of single-space type with one dealer per line. Then you do the Class A dealers. They’re easier: only thirteen pages. By then, you have a headache and a heartache. In an attempt to spare my eyes and my soul, I checked the A and B lists for the New England States first, but I didn’t find Walter Simms. Then I turned back to the A dealers in Alabama and went through every single state. When I’d finished the A dealers, I did the A dealers. Walter Simms didn’t have a USDA license. Neither, by the way, did Bill or Janice Coakley.

Finally, feeling something like one of Enzio Guarini’s soldiers, I called the don of my family, namely, my father, who lives in Owls Head, Maine, where I grew up. In the dozen or so years since my mother died, though, Buck has transformed the place. My parents raised and trained golden retrievers. Marissa was also a dedicated gardener who labored over her perennial borders. The peonies have survived, and so have some lupins, but the only day lilies left are the orange ones she never really liked. Her beloved delphiniums vanished in a few years. Buck took her death very hard. What yanked him out of his despondency was his discovery of wolf dog hybrids, which, I am delighted to report, he has now quit breeding. The last litter (Clyde
ex
Millie) was whelped a while ago, and Buck refused to sell any of those pups or any of his adult wolf dogs, either. Also, he’s built a ten-foot security fence around the once-red barn. In Marissa’s day, the barn was a model kennel building—she paved the outdoor runs herself—and the inside has held up pretty well, but from the outside, the place now looks like a correctional facility for canines convicted of white-collar crimes.

But the great news isn’t the increasing disrepair of the place, the permanent neglect of the garden, the appearance of the ten-foot fence, or the apparent cessation of wolf dog breeding. Buck hasn’t actually sworn off wolves, at least not yet, but he has finally returned to the fold, which is to say that he not only worships his half-grown golden retriever puppy, Mandy, but has rediscovered dog shows, matches, and obedience trials. He never stopped attending them, but I’m sure he’d forgotten the thrill of entering. By the way, in case you ever spot him in the ring, let me warn you that he’s not the trainer and handler Marissa was. She taught him a lot, though. Also, even before the current attention-training craze
(Watch me! Ready? Ready, ready? Watch me, watch me!)
, Buck understood the principle that you get what you give. “A handler always ends up with the dog he deserves.” Slogan of the Royal Air Force Dog Training School. When my father trains a dog, he’s so overwhelmingly
present
that no matter where the dog turns his attention, there’s Buck again.

“So,” I said to my father, “how are you?”

He answered like the real dog person he is; he bragged about Mandy. “This is undoubtedly
the
most remarkable obedience prospect to set paw upon God’s green earth in the last decade,” he proclaimed.

I refrained from mentioning Vinnie.

Buck continued. “This little Mandy character is
the
most alert, curious, bright-eyed creature … never takes her eyes off my face. Did I tell you how she did at her first match?”

“First place in Pre-Novice. That’s really wonderful. Another Winter Wonder,” I blurted out. That’s what everyone called my mother’s dogs, Winter Wonders—they were, too—but the words brought Marissa back so vividly that my eyes watered. I shouldn’t have spoken the phrase aloud, not to my father.

To my surprise, though, Buck seemed flattered. He thanked me. Then he kept on bragging about Mandy, who is, by the way, almost as perfect as Buck claims.