Bloodlines

than used cars? If Janice, Bill, and Diane had been foisting off automotive lemons on the ignorant public? If so, Walter Simms and Diane Sweet would’ve ended up in the back seat of an old Chevrolet—or possibly a car wash—and I wouldn’t have cared at all. But now that I’d been forced to relocate Walter Simms to my own turf? Now that all roads led to Westbrook? It seemed to me that if Bill Coakley hadn’t sold Missy to his ex-wife, he’d probably sent Missy to join her mother, Icekist Sissy.
    How much had Missy been worth to Janice Coakley or Rinehart or Simms? Purebred dog fancy is my home, but I live above ground; I was a stranger in this underworld. I’d heard, read, and even written about it, of course. I knew, among other things, that in this underworld, both AKC papers and purebred dogs were sold at auction—and not necessarily attached to one another, either. In purebred hell, Missy could even end up as an AKC-registered Siberian husky and the dam of dozens of AKC-registered pet shop Siberians. Am I exaggerating? A man named Bob Baker once registered a nonexistent litter of Labrador retrievers with the AKC. Baker didn’t do it as a joke. He works for the Humane Society of the United States, and he did it to dramatize the point that AKC papers guarantee absolutely nothing. So, you see, people like Bob Baker had charted the slimy routes through this subterranean muck, but I’d done no more than study their maps. I was feeling my way around. My hands were dirty. I felt sick about the five hundred dollars I’d offered Bill Coakley, scared that the bribe was laughably inadequate, nauseated by this whole business of buying and selling dogs as commodities, angry at the AKC for accepting registration fees from puppy mills, and, most of all, disgusted with myself for having lost Missy.
    I was slumped in a chair at my kitchen table mulling over these sad matters when Kimi suddenly trotted in from the bedroom, spotted a Nylabone on the floor, clamped it between her teeth, raised her head, and began a private game of releasing and catching the toy. She’d open her big jaws until the Nylabone just barely began to drop from her mouth, then she’d seize it, loosen her grip, and once again snap the toy between her teeth. The click of her teeth on the artificial bone, the slight ripple of her neck and shoulder muscles, the glamourous glint of her thick coat—Kimi and her playful joy were unimaginably lovely. She does not foresee her future or any other beyond her next meal. She is a Zen master, intensely here and now. She restores my soul.
    Thus renewed, I called Jane M. Appleyard, who... Well, this isn’t a diversion. You know what a battle-ax is? Yes, of course, a powerful weapon of war. Bear in mind, by the way, that I’m not the one who decided to call Jane M. Appleyard a weapon of war. The term was Bill Coakley’s, and when he bitched about “the battle-ax from the Humane,” I immediately knew that he meant Mrs. Appleyard, a breeder of golden retrievers and a vigorous force in the Eleanor J. Colley Humane Society, which is located two towns away from Westbrook. Mrs. Appleyard runs the society because such was the wish of its eponymous benefactor, a dear friend of Mrs. Appleyard’s. Mrs. Colley, whom I knew slightly, was a strong-minded Radcliffe graduate who got ticked because her alma mater wasn’t lobbying Harvard to grant tenure to women and who left most of her money to dogs on the grounds that Labrador retrievers had done more to advance the cause of women than Radcliffe ever would. I’ve shown under her son, Wilfred Colley, who judges in Open and Utility. He’s a good judge, tough but fair. Just like his mother, I guess.
    But back to Mrs. Appleyard, who is what purebred dogdom calls “a very typey animal.” She’s the quintessence of who she is—Bryn Mawr ’37, golden retrievers, white linen, man-tailored khaki, practical shoes, and, of late, an ebony cane—and all of her parts fit together perfectly. Five feet seven is tall for a woman of her generation, and Jane Appleyard has not permitted age to reduce her by so much as an inch. Her large frame supports a head shaped almost exactly like a football but covered on top with silver hair hacked short by a hand that must wield a pair of grooming shears, a hand that is most certainly her own.
    When she answers the phone, you can practically see her in her rich, full, low-pitched, but rather booming voice. She never bothers to say hello,