Stud Rites

her own wide-open mouth. Having dampened her dog and sated her thirst, she pulled out a metal comb and ran it though the dog’s coat and then through her own hair.
    Just then, Leah noticed a couple of seats being vacated in an ideal location near the judge’s table and the gate. The long sides of the rectangular ring were lined with hotel-supplied chairs and spectators’ aluminum lawn chairs three and four rows deep, but at this short end, the aisle between the single row of seats and the booths along the wall teemed with handlers and dogs awaiting further judging and with people visiting the rescue booth, which was directly behind the seats that had just opened up. Leah and Steve left to check on Rowdy. Naturally, as soon as Kevin had settled himself next to me, the handler in our direct line of vision, only a few feet away, stacked her male by unceremoniously thrusting her hand under the dog’s tail (Good God! Not THERE!) and lifting and lowering him into position, thus leaving the dog and Kevin with identical expressions of consternation. The malamute, however, must’ve been used to the procedure. Kevin was not. In involuntary self-protection, his beefy hands flew to his lap, and when Mikki Muldoon came along and checked the same dog for the presence of both testicles, Kevin’s face turned purple. He stood up and excused himself, thereby missing the opportunity to observe the same handler repeatedly transfer a single piece of liver back and forth between her own mouth and the dog’s.
    I took advantage of Kevin’s hasty disappearance to find my place in the list of Best of Breed entries in the catalog—forty-five dogs, thirty-five bitches. The entire entry, of course, wasn’t crammed in the ring all at once. With a big entry, you sometimes see the males judged first, then the females, but Mikki Muldoon was judging in catalog order, in other words, according to the arbitrarily assigned numbers printed in the catalog and on the handlers’ arm bands that enable the spectators to tell who’s who while supposedly keeping the dogs’ identities secret from the judge.
    Not to have recognized Ironman, Bear, Daphne, Casey, and the other top contenders, as well as their handlers, Mikki Muldoon would’ve had to stay away from shows and never open a dog magazine for a great many years, but she had a reputation for impartiality. Near the gate to her ring stood Duke Sylvia and Ironman. Standing up and turning around, I saw Al Holabach and Casey near the exit to the parking lot. Al’s idea, I suppose, was to let Casey cool off in the fresh air. Far from availing himself of an offstage moment, the sable show-off was devoting himself to polishing his already gleaming act. In looking around for Casey, I’d intended to compare him with Ironman. Compare I did: Ironman had impelled me to look elsewhere; Casey, however, refused to let me look at another dog.
    Thus Casey’s charisma made me miss the start of the fracas. It broke out right near me when the Border collie of a hotel manager herded Freida Reilly up to Duke Sylvia and then backed off as Freida unsheepishly charged Duke with violating the absolute and universal show-site ban on bathing a dog in a hotel bathroom. By the time I looked, Freida was shaking a rolled-up show catalog at Duke so fiercely that the badge, the purple flowers, and the little gold team of sled dogs pinned to the bodice of her lavender dress jiggled wildly. ”No bathing or grooming of dogs in hotel rooms!” she bellowed. ”This is the first time you’ve encountered this rule? No, no, no! This is the ten thousandth time you have encountered this rule! Five other clubs are booked here this year, and you have taken it upon yourself to threaten their ability to use this site, and at my show!”
    Karl Reilly forced his way to his mother’s side, grabbed her elbow, and, in tones too soft for me to hear, somehow mediated the dispute. Within seconds, Duke Sylvia had pulled out his wallet and was offering the manager a fistful of cash. Everything about Duke’s gesture, from the upraised hand to the angle of his head, was so familiar, so unmistakable, that I had to wonder whether the effect was deliberate: Except for the money in place of the usual liver, Duke looked ex-actly as if he were baiting a dog. Throughout the little episode, too, even when Freida was hollering, Duke made no observable effort to control Ironman, and no one—not Duke, not Freida, not Karl, not the hotel manager,