Bloodlines

to be a narrow but paved rural track overhung with New England maples. When I pulled the Bronco to the side of the road in front of the Simmses’ place, I realized that although I’d discarded the pigfaced slob, I’d unconsciously located my revised Simms on the original’s turf. But the faded, sloppy white letters painted on the dented black mailbox by the gate definitely spelled out “Simms.” The name matched. The place didn’t. I’d been picturing exactly what I’d seen in the films and photos of puppy mills in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa, places like that. Kansas? No. I haven’t seen many pictures from there, certainly no recent ones, and for good reason: In Kansas, it’s a felony to photograph a puppy mill. If it weren’t for the First Amendment, Kansas would probably declare it a felony to make word pictures, too. Anyway, thick New England underbrush and February-bare maples encroached on Walter and Cheryl Simms’s little lot. When Mrs. Appleyard had said that you could smell the place from the road, I’d imagined a quarter-mile drive across flat fields to a big farmhouse and a collection of widely scattered dairy barns and substantial outbuildings. The Simmses’ seedy little two-story dirty-white house sat at the end of about ten car lengths of rutted mud. The only large structure on the place, a long barrackslike sheet metal chicken coop in back of the house, had half collapsed from an original two floors to a single story. The side yard held an avocado green refrigerator with the doors still on, the wrecks of two wheelless cars, some little plywood shacks, several oil drums, and a flashy-looking late-model car that I was instantly able to identify as a Mustang, a Camaro, or possibly what I thought might be called a Trans Am. In any case, its color was black, and it was trimmed with red and white racing stripes.
    Probably because I’d watched films of raids on puppy mills, I’d imagined driving into a farmyard, but, at the Simmses’, a rusted barbed wire and wood gate blocked the entrance. Cheryl and Walter’s landscape designer had cleverly repeated the texture and materials of the gate in the treatment of the fence that separated the property from the verge of the road. It, too, was constructed of sagging, aged uprights and cross pieces, and its chicken wire harmoniously echoed the reddish-brown of the barbed gate’s hydrated ferric oxide. A big store-bought black-and-orange sign nailed to the dead center of the gate announced:
     
    NO TRESPASSING
    KEEP OUT
    THIS MEANS YOU
     
    I parked by the gate, grabbed the briefcase, and got out of the Bronco into the rain. When Mrs. Appleyard had said that you could smell the place from the road, she hadn’t exaggerated; the air, in fact, smelled foul. A few dogs barked. I slammed the car door. I’d removed the bumper sticker, but should I have left the Bronco down the lane? In back of Rinehart’s, I’d seen nothing more identifiable than a dark van. I reasoned that Walter Simms had seen nothing more distinctive than a large dark car. The night had been very black, and the Bronco’s headlights must have reduced his night vision. He’d had no reason to notice and remember the number on my license plate. And if the Bronco looked like the property of a dog person? Well, why not? Dogs were, after all, my pretext as well as my real reason for being there.
    I reached the gate and was searching for a latch when the torn screen door at the front of the house squealed open and discharged a scrawny young woman in a hot-pink nylon raincoat. She began to scream at me.
    “This’s private property,” she shrieked. “Me and Walter don’t want nobody sticking their big fat noses in our business!”
    I’d heard those frantic, terror-driven tones before, but only in the snarls of fear-biting dogs. Some fear-biters strike with no warning. I considered myself lucky. I removed my hand from the gate, took a deep breath, gave a smile that cramped my cheeks, and held up the briefcase. “Ever have a problem with fleas?” I asked brightly. “Sure you do,” I went on. “Let’s face it. So does every other breeder.” I tried not to stare at her. Sudden direct eye contact will sometimes trigger a rapid flash of teeth and a swift lunge.
    “Me and Walter—” she began to bleat.
    I interrupted. I’d spent the long drive to Afton composing this spiel, and I intended to deliver it. “And we’re all tired of being offered easy solutions that cost a