Stud Rites

years. She looked the same as ever: same dimples, perfect skin, wavy hair in apparently permanent transition from blond to silver, same neat, conservative, multipocketed suits or dresses in colors chosen to camouflage dog hair.
    But it wasn’t a people show, was it? And I am a dog writer. Z-Rocks’s coat, after what must have been wrist-spraining brushing, still retained a vaguely dead look. At the risk of making myself obnoxious by bragging about Rowdy, let me just remark in passing on the shiny, stand-off perfection of his coat, the gleam of vigor and health in his ideally dark eyes, the visibly and palpably well-conditioned tone of his musculature, and the indefinable yet unmistakable air of top-dog self-confidence radiated by this miraculous incarnation of the official standard of the Alaskan malamute. In truth, the dog was so beautiful that I could hardly believe he belonged to me. And he was just standing there on the grooming table wagging his tail. You haven’t seen Rowdy until you’ve seen him move.
    ”Timmy Oliver!” Faith’s voice was sharp. ”Get that bottle off that table before I open it and pour the whole mess down your throat!”
    Oblivious to Faith and Z-Rocks, Timmy Oliver was making his usual sales pitch for Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote to Finn Adams, who was ignoring Timmy to deliver his usual R.T.I. spiel to Duke Sylvia, who had Ironman up on the grooming table beyond Timmy’s. I’d seen show photos of Ironman before, but in the flesh and bone and steel-gray coat, the dog was bigger and more imposing than I’d pictured him. To my eye, backed by the official breed standard, Ironman was too big; and his small, rather light eyes made him look strangely cold and frightening. The standard, of course, calls for dark eyes, the darker the better—Rowdy’s eyes —and the correct facial expression is warm, sweet, and open, not icy or steely: nothing like Ironman’s and everything like you-know-who’s. Ironman was impressive, though. He had the kind of gorgeous coat that results from a combination of good genes, robust health, excellent diet, and regular grooming, and is never obtained just by dosing a dog with any of those magic-bullet powders, tablets, or liquids, including that stupid Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote, a large glass bottle of which now sat prominently on Z-Rocks’s grooming table.
    To promote his product, Timmy had set the bottle next to a bitch with the kind of ready-to-shed coat that the glop was supposed to prevent. As a time to try to sell Duke on R.T.I.’s services, Finn had chosen a moment when Duke was eager to get Ironman off the grooming table, past Finn, out of the tent, and into the ring. In jest, I assume, Duke told Finn that what Ironman liked was insemination without artifice, thank you; and furthermore, in Duke’s experience, after people went to the trouble of freezing semen, they hardly ever used it anyway. Take Comet’s. Why, on three separate occasions, he himself had taken Comet to—
    Catching sight of Leah, Duke broke off. In her flower-print dress, Leah could have passed for thirteen. Dog people speak with wholesome frankness about absolutely everything, but we occasionally remember to censor ourselves in front of other people’s children. After kneeling by Kimi’s crate to treat her to torn-up bits of steak sandwich, Leah had startled Duke by suddenly rising.
    ”Don’t let me stop you,” Leah told him.
    But Duke took advantage of the interruption to get Ironman off the table. As Duke led the dog away, Timmy Oliver resumed his effort to convince Finn Adams that that damned food supplement would make an ideal addition to R.T.I.’s product line. Gentleman that he’d been reared to be, Finn was doing his best to get out of the way of the handlers and dogs heading out of the crowded tent—he obviously wanted to join them— but Timmy had scooped up the bottle of Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote and was shoving it in Finn’s face.
    In the meantime, Faith had removed her grooming coat and was stocking the pockets of her gray wool blazer with bait, stashing a comb and a plastic spray bottle in her skirt pockets, and otherwise preparing to earn her fee by getting Rowdy into the ring on time. Attentive to the familiar cues, free of the grooming noose, Rowdy shook himself all over. The dog is a born performer. I stepped up to him, smacked my lips, and got a kiss. ”Hey, big boy,” I whispered in his ear. ”Go out there and wipe the floor with them.” Then I got