Stud Rites

it illegal for those to be here?”
    ”Only if you sleep in them.”
    Unexpectedly money-conscious, my cousin said, ”So people don’t sponge off the hotel.”
    On the grass at the edge of the blacktop, Rowdy squatted and produced. Ms. Responsible Dog Owner that I am, I pulled a plastic clean-up bag from my pocket and scooped up after him. As I deposited the waste in a nearby trash barrel, I said, ”Also so they don’t start their generators at six A.M. and wake up the paying guests.”
    Strolling past the enviable campers, Leah and I played at choosing ours. In the dim parking lot, all looked—and probably were—the usual dog-show-camper beige. A sort of stretch-camper the length of three limos was so intimidating that neither of us wanted to drive it. We rejected another: two people, two dogs, too small.
    ”I wonder if what’s-his-name’s is here.” Leah has beautiful enunciation. Highly educated people can be very embarrassing.
    ”Shh!” I hustled Rowdy away from the campers and onto the grass at the edge of the field. ”Tim Oliver. Probably. It’s possible that he’s talked Betty into telling the hotel that his camper is hers. She’s more softhearted than you might think. Oliver might’ve called her room or just showed up there and given her some story about how he doesn’t have the money to pay the campground because he spent it all on vet bills.”
    ”You know, Holly, he’s just the kind of little shit who’d get off on making sure someone like Jeanine heard him say ’trash dogs.’ And then turn around and suck up to Betty.”
    ”Actually, I had the same thought myself. Rowdy, hurry up! This is a n-i-i-i-ce place to go! Hurry up!” Rowdy anointed the wall of a little white shed that was apparently used to store recreational equipment. I thought it was the same place he’d marked that morning. Whether because of the killing of Elsa Van Dine or my own anger about Jeanine’s pain, Rowdy’s harmless leg-lifting made me wonder about murderers who revisit the scenes of their crimes. Do they, too, get some kind of incomprehensible satisfaction from making sure that their scent is fresh?
     

 
     
    AS WE RETURNED to the hotel, Leah remarked that she was thirsty. ”There’s a Coke machine right near our room. And an ice machine. Room service would be a lot more fun,” I acknowledged, ”but even as it is—”
    ”This is costing you a fortune because you’re paying for me.”
    ”You’re handling Kimi for me. You’re working for expenses. I’m lucky you don’t charge me.”
    Unexpectedly, she asked, ”Have you ever thought about writing your memoirs? You could probably make a fortune.”
    ”My what!”
    ”Memoirs. Romantic memoirs. You could call it Women Who Run with Vets.”
    ”Leah, I do not ’run with’ vets!” I thought the matter over. ”As far as I can remember, Steve is the first one.”
    ”You could just make up the others. Or pretend that they were vets even though they weren’t.”
    ”Sure,” I said, ”just tack D.V.M. onto their names, and-”
    ”Not all of them,” said Leah, as if there had been thousands. ”And at least one ought to be an M.R.C.V.S., like Mr. Herriot.” Ascending the hotel stairs inspired Leah to literary heights. ”I know! Look, you have to change their real names anyway, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed or sue you or whatever. So as long as you’re doing that anyway, you call him James. So your readers would naturally assume—”
    I halted at the top of the stairs. Rowdy sat. ”That what? That I’d had an affair with James Herriot? Leah—”
    ”It’s important to let readers draw their own conclusions. Why should you do all the work? You wouldn’t say Herriot. You’d just say James,” Leah pronounced emphatically.
    As if in answer to a summons, an elderly man stuck a lizardlike head out of the open archway to the room that housed the vending machines. His head and, as I soon observed, his body as well weren’t lizardlike in some vague, generic sense. Rather, he bore an astonishing resemblance to a pet horny toad—a horned lizard— that a childhood friend of mine had bought in Arizona as a living souvenir and had brought home to Maine. There the little reptile entered a permanent state of dormancy and spent year after year in suspended animation on a bed of dry sand in a glass aquarium. Oddly devoted to the creature, my friend provided food and water that the animal never touched. Every day or so, she gently lifted