Bloodlines

course.
    “Kaktovik Pandora of Kaltag was never shown,” I told Kevin, “but she contributed a lot to the breed.” I explained how. In detail.
    Just as I was about to launch into a fascinating, if somewhat lengthy, description of Lois Metzler’s foundation bitch, Kevin interrupted me by pointing to Missy’s paternal line. “These two,” he said. “These LJS ones.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “If there are any genetic problems there...”
    “Six toes,” Kevin said.
    “I’ve never heard of... but, yeah, that’s the idea. On the maternal side, it isn’t just that these people show their dogs... I mean, that’s part of it, but the really important thing is that these breeders know their pedigrees back to Adam and Eve, and they understand genetics, and they screen. But with these puppy mill dogs, there could be anything, hereditary blindness, you name it, which is why this bitch, Missy, shouldn’t be used in breeding. The breeder, Walter Simms, whoever he is, is obviously some guy in Missouri or somewhere who doesn’t know OFA from CIA…”
    By now I could see Walter Simms clearly. He was a big, lazy> stupid man with a beer belly that hung out over the unbelted waistband of his drooping pants. His unbuttoned shirt revealed a white-haired chest with small female breasts. He stood, feet apart, in the barnyard of a sprawling farm in the Midwest. Behind him, the huge burning sun of Iowa or Missouri was sinking below a flat horizon.
    “Me, neither,” Kevin said.
    “What?”
    “CIA.”
    I started to explain OFA and CERF and stuff—Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, Canine Eye Research Foundation—but Kevin spread the fingers of his left hand, pointed to the names of two dogs, and said, “These two.” He tapped on the pedigree.
    “Yeah, you already... yes. They’re half sisters. Bred to the same stud.” I moved Kevin’s fingers to the left. “And these two, Sir Snowy the Fourth and Stupid Little Sally—God, I hate that name. Anyway... well, it’s very close.”
    “Close!” he said in disgust. He lowered his voice. “What this is, is incest.”
    “It’s really not the same, Kevin. These aren’t people. Dogs don’t know, and, besides, they get bred. They don’t commit incest.”
    “Yeah, well,” Kevin answered, “maybe they don’t know, but if they did, you can bet they wouldn’t like it.” He moved his fingers back to the names of Queenie and Lady. “Especially these two.”
    “Malamute bitches don’t usually get along too well with each other anyway,” I informed him.
    Kevin’s fingers resumed the tapping. “Jesus,” he said. “No wonder.”
     

16
     

     
    My Boston Globe arrives by seven A.M. On Tuesday morning, I read it over my second cup of coffee. The front page carried the usual Boston stories. Construction on the new central artery and the new airport tunnel would be slower than expected. (By whom? I, for one, expected it to take forever.) Mayor Ray Flynn’s arrival at a banquet had already been delayed. On route to the dinner, the mayor spotted a homeless man asleep in a gutter and stopped to pick him up and treat him to a Big Mac with a large order of fries. Ray Flynn is a man of the people. One of those people is, of course, his boyhood friend, Police Commissioner Mickey Roache. Boston, Boston.
    Lest you suppose that the Globe practices provincial journalism, though, let me add that the front page articles were not exclusively concerned with events that had transpired within the city limits or even within the boundaries of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A tractor-trailer had overturned all the way out on 1-95 in far-off Woburn, and in Rhode Island—practically a foreign country, right?—jailed racketeer Enzio Guarini (the Globe ’s words, not mine) was again appealing two or three of his convictions on twenty or thirty counts of fraud, conspiracy, and like crimes. Well, okay, get picky if you want. Sure, Guarini grew up in Boston, and Guarini’s whole family—and Family, presumably—still lived in Massachusetts, but just exactly how did you think he made the Globe’s front page, anyway?
    Probably because Puppy Luv did business way out in the distant reaches of Cambridge, the two scanty paragraphs about Diane Sweet’s murder appeared in the Metro/Region section. According to the paper, police were “investigating several possible leads.” And ignoring the impossible ones. This is news ? Diane Sweet’s obituary, though, reported a fact that was