Stud Rites

happened.”
    Out of curiosity, I suppose, Lisa Tainter trailed along with us. Crystal kept eyeing Lisa’s furs and skins, but otherwise ignored her. As we passed the breed club booth, I caught sight of Betty Burley at the booth beyond it. ”Lisa,” I said, ”would you get Betty? Ask her to come out to the parking lot and find me. Tell her what’s going on.”
    Crystal, however, came to a standstill at the door and started fussing about the rain.
    ”All right,” I conceded. ”So we’ll just stand here, and you can tell me about it. Tim Oliver offered to sell you a puppy. Is that right?”
    ”Yes, only it isn’t a real puppy. What it is, is a dog, and who wants a big, grown-up dog?” she wailed.
    ”Anyone who doesn’t enjoy washing floors,” I said, more to myself than to Crystal.
    ”Can I ask you?” Crystal said. ”Why is that woman dressed like an Eskimo?”
    ”It’s a costume,” I said inadequately. We are one with our dogs, I could have explained, some of us more visibly than others. ”Look, selling dogs or puppies at a show is strictly against the rules. So, when you said what you did back there, it, uh, made everything very awkward for everyone.”
    ”He told me we had to keep it sort of, uh, low-key.” Crystal caressed the sequins on her abdomen and pouted at the rain. ”Like there was this rule, but, really, nobody cared.”
    ”You’re getting married today. This is a really big wedding. Aren’t you going on a honeymoon?”
    ”Hawaii.” She made it sound like a famous industrial wasteland.
    ”Well, what were you going to do with a puppy?”
    ”One of my friends was going to keep it for me till we got back,” she answered defiantly. ”My maid of honor.”
    ”You know, a puppy is a lot of work—”
    ”But I wanted one! It’s my wedding, and that’s what I—”
    ”I want, I want,” mimicked Betty Burley, popping open an umbrella and raising it over Crystal’s bedecked head. ”Enough of what you want! Now stop whining and show us where this camper is.”
    The parking lot was thick with dog-show vehicles —campers, motor homes, vans, minivans, and four by fours—and especially crowded because the parking area at the opposite end of the hotel was cordoned off with crime-scene tape and unavailable to show people, wedding guests, and ordinary travelers and tourists. Despite Betty’s injunction, Crystal groused her way across the blacktop. She knew when she’d been ripped off, she said, and she didn’t take this kind of shit from anyone. Ask her father. Ask her mother. Ask Gregory. She wanted her two hundred dollars, and she wanted it now.
    ”That’s it,” she said, breaking off in the middle of what promised to be a bloodcurdling threat. ”That one over there.”
    The beige camper at the far end of the lot looked exactly like dozens of others. Without bothering to knock or call out, Betty reached for the handle, opened the door, and stepped up into the camper. ”The dogs are crated,” she told us. The occasional malamute actually will defend property, especially a vehicle, and for all we knew, Tim Oliver’s camper might’ve housed a loose dog of some seriously protective breed.
    Even before I followed Crystal up into the dimness of the interior, the reek hit me, a nauseating combination of dog feces, urine, chemical toilet, and spoiled food.
    Betty whipped open a big, ugly flower-patterned beige curtain. ”Well, the dogs don’t seem to be living any worse than Timmy is.”
    There were three malamutes in three big wire crates: a silver male as dirty as Z-Rocks had been and two big puppies, one male and one female. Both looked about four months old; by four months, a malamute is far beyond the little-ball-of-fluff stage. The adult dog’s tail thumped. Happy to see anyone at all, the puppies scrambled through disgusting nests of damp, torn newspaper and unidentifiable junk, and nosed the doors of their crates. A fourth crate, a big Vari Kennel— Z-Rocks’s, I thought—was empty. As Crystal had reported, the dogs had no food available, but, then, thirty seconds after I feed Rowdy and Kimi, neither do they. All four crates held small buckets of water. The dogs seemed well-nourished. If anything, they, like Z-Rocks, were heavier than I’d have liked. Maybe the secret ingredient in Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote really was some kind of fat, if not actual snake oil. Cardboard shipping boxes of the stuff stacked three deep in a corner bore telltale stains: The big male