Stud Rites

people crowded around to ask what had happened and how Mrs. Lunt was doing, she kept saying that she was shaken up, that was all, and that there was nothing wrong with her shoulder that an ice pack wouldn’t fix. Before long, someone appeared with a plastic bag of ice cubes, and a woman I didn’t know introduced herself as a doctor and tried to persuade Mrs. Lunt to let her look at the injury. Mrs. Lunt, however, was exclusively interested in finding out whether anyone had seen her assailant. ”You were the first one here, weren’t you?” she asked me.
    I had the sense that she didn’t remember me. ”Yes, but all I saw was that door over there closing. What happened?”
    ”I really have no idea,” she said. ”I was asleep. I heard a tap on the door. That’s what woke me up. And I assumed it was Sherri Ann or Victor, because Bear’s been having a little trouble with the change in the water, and I told them I had some Lomotil, if they wanted it. They said no, but when I heard that tapping on the door, I thought maybe Bear had gotten worse, and they’d changed their minds.” She paused. ”Should’ve,” she commented. ”Nothing like Lomotil.”
    ”Very effective,” I agreed.
    ”So I threw on my robe and went to the door. But when I opened it, there was no one there. And then I heard... I thought I heard someone say my name. So I took a step out and I said ’Hello?’ But there was no answer, so I thought I’d imagined it. Or maybe I’d heard somebody’s dog. So I turned around to go back in my room, when all of sudden! Out of the blue! Something came crashing down! And I must have spied something out the corner of my eye, because I managed to duck my head and raise up my arm. And that’s where he got me: right here. Knocked me to the ground.” She wrapped her right hand around the injured shoulder. ”What did he get me with?”
    ”A paddle,” I said. ”One of those Hawaiian paddles that are hanging on the walls.”
    ”Poor Elsa,” sighed Harriet Lunt. ”And then James. And now me.”
     

 
     
    EPITHALAMIUM: a marriage song.
    The gray, wet day of Crystal and Greg’s wedding dawned with the music I’d have chosen myself. One voice rose, then another and another joined the first, caught the tune, and lifted the melody to the rainy sky. How many dogs? Fifty? A hundred? But how many voices? Countless. A full choir of choristers, each singing multiple simultaneous songs, each canine voice soaring in dissonant harmony with itself and all the others. Crescendo! The climax reached, one by one— diminuendo—the voices fell almost to silence until a lone note sounded, then another and another, and the song rose again in this weirdly circumpolar Ode to Joy. For all that happened in those days in Danville, my most vivid memory is of that early-morning howling.
    Unloading cardboard boxes of paper products from the back of a delivery van in the parking lot, a guy nodded in my direction and said, ”Jesus, don’t those damned things ever shut up?”
    To my ear, the damned things that never shut up weren’t the dogs, but the forced-air dryers already blasting like horrid mini-hurricanes in the grooming tent where I’d just delivered Rowdy, Kimi, and Leah to Faith Barlow. Over the roar, I’d shouted to Faith about the predawn attack on Harriet Lunt, and Faith had bellowed back that she’d already heard.
    After surrendering my dogs and my cousin to Faith, I left the grooming tent. I was heading across the parking lot in search of breakfast when a drenched and dripping Z-Rocks splashed through a puddle, shot to the end of Timmy Oliver’s lead, wiggled, shook hard all over, and gave me my second before-breakfast shower of the day. I didn’t mind. The old issues of the Malamute Quarterly that I’d brought with me to leaf through while I ate were safely stowed in my newest malamute-decorated tote bag. After breakfast, I intended to change into real clothes and spiff myself up. In the meantime, I was wearing my old yellow slicker over jeans and the new national specialty sweatshirt that already sprouted fur. My hair was damp from the light rain, and the dogs had licked off the moisturizer I’d patted on. It’s hopeless. Why I bother, I don’t know. I should just get out of bed, throw on the clothes that Rowdy and Kimi slept on, reach into my pockets and dust myself with the powdery residue of dried liver, let the dogs cover my face with saliva, and then go outside and roll around in mud. No