Stud Rites

owned R.T.I., I now reasoned, Finn’s ship had gone out, and he’d had to take shelter in a dog house.
    ”Yeah. A second cousin of mine got me into it. I was in California until a couple of months ago. Then I got transferred.” Finn was cheerful enough. The language of canine reproduction was easier than Portuguese, I suppose, and he didn’t seem to be working very hard. At this show at least, he’d been away from his booth most of the time. ”Of course, I travel a lot.” Then he told me all about the car he drove. I can’t remember what kind it was. He described the route he’d followed to get from a New Jersey show site to Danville. And then the highways he planned to take after he left. My first retake on Finn had been abysmally correct: Something horrible had happened to him. But I’d been wrong about what. The terrible change was the last one I’d ever have imagined: If he’d joined a motorcycle gang, become a Roman Catholic bishop, or pursued a career in worm farming, I’d have been less astounded than I was by the incredible truth, which was that he’d gotten really boring; and when I say boring, I don’t mean slightly tedious or a little dull, but radically stupefying. Amazing! That summer, the sight of him had turned me to liquid. Now, all these years later, I was still producing fluid: copious tears of passionate boredom.
    I eventually squeezed in a word about what I was doing at the R.T.I. booth in the first place. Mistake! I heard everything I already knew about fresh chilled and frozen semen: Although I’d displayed no interest in an international breeding, Finn went on and on about avoiding problems with customs and quarantine. Maybe Rowdy was gratified to hear that large dogs usually produce more semen than small dogs. I wasn’t; I’d read it somewhere. How long did it take Finn to get around to long-term storage? Well you might ask! Frozen semen is expected to stay good for ten thousand years, the approximate length of time that it took Finn to tell me so. As to the preservation itself, the semen was evaluated, and if it passed inspection, extended with a buffer solution, and then counted, diluted, and frozen in liquid nitrogen in individually labeled straws. Yes, straws, ten to twenty per ejaculate, more than enough to put you off milkshakes for the rest of your life.
    To my extreme annoyance, instead of cooperatively whining to be taken outside or drowning Finn out with a series of woo-woo-woos, Rowdy remained silent and attentive throughout the monologue, which eventually led through legal aspects of the ownership of frozen semen—an asset just like any other, Finn said, no different from a house or a car—to R.T.I.’s claim to unmatched superiority in complying with AKC regulations about record keeping. Not that the topics were unimportant. I mean, no matter how much of a real dog person you are, your stud’s semen still isn’t the kind of thing you tuck in the back of your freezer with the orange juice and the TV dinners. Even if you could get the temperature down to minus one ninety-six Celsius, what would you do in a power failure? With a banquet’s worth of unexpectedly defrosted food, you can always invite a few hundred neighbors to dinner, but with thawed-out sperm, you aren’t going to throw a spur-of-the-moment potluck orgy for bitches in season. And the labeling and record keeping mattered, too. You don’t go to the bother and expense of immortalizing your stud so that ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now, you or whoever buys or inherits and uses his semen gets a surprise litter of mal-a-poos or Dober-mutes.
    Finn was droning on. I cut in. ”I guess I still need to think it over. My main hesitation is”—I perched on the verge of heresy—”that, uh, am I ever really going to use it? Rowdy is a typey dog, he’s sound, and he really has a classic Kotzebue head, but what I keep hearing about frozen semen is that it hardly ever gets used. What I’ve heard is that when the technology first became available, in the sixties, and then when AKC approved it, in the early eighties, there was a lot of initial enthusiasm, and a lot of breeders did it without realizing that, uh, the popularity of types would, uh, change over time.”
    As Finn’s had with me. My face burned. I had as little desire to hurt Finn as I had desire for him. He must have written me ten letters? My mother, I realized, had committed a federal offense. I suddenly knew how. I’d been home