Bloodlines

Massachusetts, but Westbrook doesn’t have a show site, kennel club, obedience club, or canine activity center. No one goes there for tracking tests, agility training, sled dog racing, sheep herding, lure coursing, flyball, or Newfoundland water trials. So far as I knew, there’d never been so much as a show-and-go held in Westbrook. With one exception, it wasn’t a dog town at all. The exception was a business shamelessly named Your Local Breeder. I’d seen its ads in the ‘Dogs, Cats, and Other Pets’ section of the Globe’s classifieds: “ Never buy a dog from a pet shop! Come to us first, Your Local Breeder!” Puppy Luv advertised there, too: “Adorable AKC puppies! Not from puppy mills! More than twenty breeds to choose from!” Below each come-to-us pitch there’d be a list of breeds and prices. Although I’d asked and sneered at the ads, I’d never visited Your Local Breeder for the same reason I’d never entered Puppy Luv until last Friday: The list of breeds had never included the Alaskan malamute.
    Yes. As if it mattered. As if it did.
    As I was saying, although I’d never stopped at Your Local Breeder, I’d driven through Westbrook from time to time on my way to and from real dog towns. The prettiest sections of the town had rolling hills thick with pines and maples, and leisure farms with saltbox houses, red barns, stone walls, white corrals, and brown Morgan horses. A few of the original working farms survived as side-of-the-road vegetable stands and garden supply centers, but most of the once-agricultural acreage was now given over to Acorn and Deck houses, Royal Barry Wills capes, and brandless, nameless neocolonial split-level hybrids inhabited by commuters who willingly traded the long daily round-trip to Boston for clean air and green trees. A few areas of Westbrook looked like the ugly parts of most New England towns. My own home town, Owls Head, Maine, has its share of hovels set in mud amidst flocks of filthy, squawking geese, broken-down cars, and the rusted remains of doorless refrigerators and irreparable kitchen stoves. Westbrook did, too. And, even viewed collectively, how beautiful can a McDonald’s, a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, a Wendy’s, a Stop & Shop, three gas stations, and a used-car lot really be? How distinctive? Westbrook’s fast-fill strip looked like a thousand others.
    The turn for Coakley’s was a right at the first set of lights after the third gas station. His house was picturesquely situated a quarter of a mile off the main drag, just beyond what had started out as the town dump and bad evolved into a sanitary landfill. A thin row of sickly hemlocks and a ragged, tilting snow fence failed to screen the landfill from the road. Coakley’s house was a seedy-looking cedar-shingled cape progressing toward hoveldom, which is to say that it did have lots of frozen, rutted mud, a dented old maroon Chevy sedan with no tires, and a harvest gold refrigerator-freezer with no doors, but it lacked the geese. The only dog run, if you can call it that, was a small chicken wire enclosure that fenced in a pile of rough plywood and the carcass of a dead chicken. The plywood was apparently the raw material for a doghouse that no one had ever gotten around to building or the remains of one that had tumbled down. The chicken? Killed by Missy?
    At the shabby front door, Bill Coakley greeted me in the same jovial tones I’d heard on the phone: “Hope you come about a dog, ’cause I ain’t got a lot else since the wife kicked me out.”
    Although the room into which he led me was almost devoid of furniture, the racket of dogs and the stench of God-knows-what would’ve been enough to fill the Astrodome. How many dogs? It was hard to count. Poms, Yorkies, toy poodles, Shih Tzus, mini dachshunds, and mini schnauzers were packed into cages, boxes, and orange crates stacked precariously on top of one another. A makeshift cardboard pen occupied a far comer of the room.
    The superabundance of little dogs certainly contributed to the odor, but its principal source may well have been Bill Coakley. One of the amazing things about Coakley was that he wasn’t very old. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. I mean, you’d think it would take longer than that for anyone to accumulate so much dirt. His yellow teeth were thickly encrusted with plaque or oatmeal, maybe both. His hair looked as if he’d coated it with cooking oil before standing out in a sandstorm. The layer of dirt