Animal Appetite

Although Kimi is definitely mine and although I work with her, it’s mainly Leah who trains and shows her. Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, Leah’s studies at the ivy-infested place down the street had been interfering with Kimi’s education. The time-grabber was chemistry. Leah wants to become a vet. Anyway, on Monday afternoon while Leah was working with Kimi, I removed Rowdy from the audible evidence that Kimi was having fun while he wasn’t by taking him for the kind of long walk he needed. Purely by coincidence, our route on that sunny, chilly day just so happened to take us onto Cambridge Street and down a little side street where we just so happened to pass Damned Yankee Press.
    In truth, I’d noticed the address in one of the Damned Yankee guides. I’d borrowed the book from Rita, who relishes what I consider to be the gross discomforts of B&Bs and country inns—afterthought bathrooms, no privacy—and who, on arrival in heaven, will pose polite questions about local museums and historic buildings, and will expect to rent a tape recorder with a headset to wear while she takes a self-guided tour. Even to my critical Maine-bred eye, The Damned Yankee in Maine was surprisingly accurate. Portland does have a lot of good microbreweries. The Union Fair is well worth a visit. Helen’s Restaurant in Machias does serve the best fresh strawberry (or, better yet, raspberry) pie in the state. There really are snowy egrets in the wildlife refuge in back of the cement plant on Route 1 in Rockland. The listings had been updated since Jack Andrews’s murder. Eighteen years ago, there’d been no microbreweries, and Helen’s had been in the center of Machias, not on the way out of town. Still, I felt convinced that it was Jack Andrews who’d shared my love for the taste of Helen’s pie and my fondness for the long-legged, golden-slippered birds that improbably inhabit a marsh in back of a factory in Rockland, a community that happens to be right near my own hometown.
    I intended only to stroll by the press. Well, naturally, if Rowdy was seized by the impulse to mark a tree, fire hydrant, or utility pole, I might glance up at the third-floor windows and imagine the face of Jack Andrews on the other side of the panes. But I never meant to go inside. What impelled me to mount the steps was my startled realization that, after eighteen years, the doorbell still consisted of wires protruding from a small hole next to the front door. The press, I should mention, occupied a wood-frame building—once someone’s house, I suspected—with a small porch. Wide stairs ran almost to the sidewalk. The front lawn, such as it was, consisted of two little patches of dirt on either side of the steps. Dying dandelions poked through matted leaves. On the sign fastened by the door, the central letters had faded almost completely. Or maybe a disgruntled employee or neighborhood kid had scraped the paint. For whatever reason, the business now proclaimed itself:
     
    DAMN                      PRESS.
     
    Because I do most of the maintenance and repair on my own house, I knew that the loose doorbell wires didn’t carry enough current to hurt anyone, but instead of making the contact, I tried the door, found it unlocked, and walked in. Piled in a tiny foyer were two pairs of old-fashioned galoshes, a broken ski pole, three unmatched cross-country skis, and a stack of telephone
    directories still in the plastic bags in which they’d been delivered. Grasping the knob on the inner door, I scratched my hand on a loose screw. When I pushed the door open, escorted Rowdy in, and glanced around, it hit me that a loose screw was, indeed, the perfect introduction to the place.
    A wide hallway lay ahead of me. To my left, an archway opened into a big front office that must have combined the original living room and parlor of the house. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, were the greatest number and variety of objects I’d seen piled, heaped, stacked, and just plain dumped since my last visit to my hometown sanitary landfill. Antique IBM PC system units with gaps in place of floppy drives supported ancient dot-matrix printers on which teetered fat old monitors with dirty screens. A gooseneck lamp with a broken neck perched lifelessly on a radiator that was shedding dandrufflike chips of aluminum paint. What else? Rolled-up carpets; snakelike lengths of cable; overstuffed trash bags; a framed print displaying Notre Dame