Black Ribbon (21 page)

I spoke hesitantly. “You didn’t think about limited registration?” A limited registration wouldn’t have prevented Bingo from pouncing on bitches, but in making his offspring ineligible for AKC registration, it would sure have neutered Eva’s breeding plans.

“Well, of course, now I wish I had, but I have … had, I should say … Well, I still have a hard time shaking the idea that when you buy a dog, you
buy
him. And I know. Limited registration doesn’t change that. But I’ve just never done it that way.” Liquor and anger, which should have aged Ginny, had had the reverse effect: Her eyes were clear, her expression unguarded, her face fresh.

“Ginny, you ever thought about trying to buy Bingo back?”

Ginny drained her glass and ordered another martini. “Let me count the ways. I started offering half the purchase price. Then the full purchase price. After this mess at flyball, I even said I’d give her double.”

“And?”

“And I will not repeat what she said. Obscenity is one thing
that has no place in dogs.” Unspoken words formed on Ginny’s lips. When she spoke again, she said, “You know, Holly, that was a lovely, lovely puppy. It makes me sick to see him so fat, and I know he’s not getting any exercise—look at him! And it would be bad enough if she left him home, but every time she takes him anywhere, I feel like crawling into the ground.
You
know what it’s like! Eva lets him get away with murder, and then all everyone says is, well, he came from
my
breeding. Have you ever seen one of my dogs act like that?”

“Never,” I said. “But you’re right. People are going to say that. They always do. Instead of always asking ‘Where did he come from?’ they ought to stop and think about where he went and what’s happened to him. They should, but they hardly ever do.” And that’s the truth. The only people in this country who take even more unfair blame than mothers do are diligent, ethical, hardworking breeders of purebred dogs.

I was saying as much to Ginny as we left The Pub and entered the main hall, where hungry campers were filing into the dining room. Stuck in the bottleneck, I glanced at the bulletin board, still propped on its easel. Prominently displayed at the top was a copy of Waggin’ Tail’s release and waiver of liability. In the ones mailed to us, however, the sentences about Maxine’s right to expel a camper for almost any reason had not been highlighted in bright yellow. The board had another change. The announcement of CGC testing had been replaced by a big red-lettered list of the new Canine Good Citizens and their presumably proud owners.

Stepping up behind me, Heather, our Chief Fecal Inspector, murmured, “What bullshit! Passed!
Bought
it is more like it.”

As the line moved, Heather expanded on the topic by citing examples of dogs that finished their AKC championships because their owners hired professional handlers and entered the dogs hundreds of times, if necessary, until the judges got so
sick of looking at the same awful dogs that they put them up just so they’d never have to see them again. As I was about to pipe up in defense of judges, Eva Spitteler came barging up, shoved ahead of me, and accosted Ginny with, of all things, the suggestion that they sit together at dinner.

“Miss Social Skills,” I whispered to Heather, who grimaced. At a normal pitch, I said, “Look, I agree that titles shouldn’t be up for sale, and, yes, there are a few people who abuse the system—”

Before I could finish, Eva butted in. “A few? The whole thing stinks. Hey, Holly, you ever thought about writing about that business with fixing gay tails? Because if you ever want to do it, I can tell you—”

As I’ve admitted, my Danny had a gay tail, one that’s carried above the horizontal, a position that’s fine in some breeds, faulty in others. The malamute’s glorious over-the-back plume could, I suppose, be considered the ultimate in canine caudal gaiety, but the dog person who says “gay tail” is usually talking about a golden retriever or maybe a Chesapeake with a tail carried too high for the breed standard. As published exposés had reported, a few sleazeball professional handlers would perform surgical butchery to correct the fault; and according to widely-circulated rumors, so would a few AKC judges. They’d do it for less than a vet would charge, and they’d leave no written record, of course. Anesthesia? Hey, forget it. After all, these are just dogs we’re talking about, right? Show dogs, which is to say, objects brought into this world to do one and only one thing, and that’s win, win, win.

“People have written about that before,” I told Eva. “I’ve heard rumors—so has everyone else—but you can’t publish rumors.”

Eva leaned so close to my ear that for a crazy second, I thought she meant to kiss me. “Eric Grimaldi,” she whispered. “Eric Grimaldi.”

Almost like a vision, Elsa’s image appeared to me, the joy in her eyes, the beautiful head, the deep chest, the powerful shoulders and hindquarters, the whole put-together look of a very typey bitch, and that ultra-Chesapeake expression that always seems to me to indicate an exceedingly high and perfectly justified regard for the intelligence and judgment of the Chesapeake Bay retriever and a correspondingly low opinion of everyone else’s. Oh, and Elsa’s tail, too. Elsa’s correct Chesapeake tail.

“Eva,” I said, “I’ve been in dogs my whole life. And one of the things I’ve learned is that if you listen long enough, sooner or later you’re going to hear everything about everyone, including yourself.”

I must have spoken more loudly than I’d intended. Myrna, the raucous New Yorker who’d been at my table the night before, caught my words. “You can say that again,” she boomed. “Half of what you hear from some of these people,” she added, glaring in Eva’s direction, “half of it, you gotta take with a grain of salt.”

Yes
, I thought.
But which half?

THE MASONIC SHTICK is no joke. Take blackballing. As I understand it—maybe I’m wrong—in Freemasonry,
blackball
is no figure of speech. If you want someone in, you cast a white ball; if not, black. That’s
cast
as in
cast a ballot
, or so I assume. As far as I know, in casting their secret votes, the members just slip table tennis balls, white or black, into some sort of container, probably something more or less like a flyball box stripped of the pedal and the resulting ball toss, of course. Unless I’ve been seriously misinformed, the poor applicant doesn’t have to sit on some specially designated ceremonial seat in the middle of the temple and get pelted, pro or con, by member after member of the entire elected assembly. All secret societies play games of one kind or another, but the exclusion-inclusion game is inevitably more complicated than either Ping-Pong or flyball.

As I look back, though, I realize that if we’d wanted to find a considerate way to deny Eva’s bid for admission, we might as well have placed her on a hard-backed chair in the center of the dining room and taken turns slinging scraps of rejected
food in her bulldog face. Would I have participated? Certainly not. Neither would any of the rest of us. Or so I like to suppose. I want to think that we were and are civilized, and I persist in believing that what characterizes civilization is something other than the refinement of cruelty.

As it was, I cast my vote quite discreetly. When Eva reached into the pocket of her mud-colored, grass-stained jacket, produced a brochure for her kennel-supply and dog-training enterprise, and thrust it at me, I did accept the thing. Before shoving it in my own pocket, I even gave it a cursory look. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. The name of her business infuriated me. “High In Tail,” she called it. If you’re active in obedience, you’ll understand why I thought then and still think that “High In Tail” was a shameless rip-off. If you’re not? Because High In Trial,
T-r-i-a-l
, is a well-established, well-known, reputable, and otherwise altogether estimable mail-order supplier of leather leads, dumbbells, scent articles, practice jumps, harnesses, and other goodies used in obedience, herding, tracking, Schutzhund, and plain old having fun with your dog. If I’d shown any sense, I’d have realized that the people at High In Trial were capable of looking after themselves; they didn’t need any help from me. It might also have occurred to me that even a language as rich, diverse, and wondrous as that of my own community offered only a limited number of word plays and catchy phrases that might suitably be dogtrotted out into the dog-eat-dog free-market economy of canine commercial enterprise. In brief, had I paws’d to reflect—see what I mean?—I’d have kept my mouth shut.

But this is a story about how things were, not about how they should have been. In what was probably a nasty tone of voice, I said, “High in Tail? You’re not calling the
catalog
that, are you?”

“It’s my name,” Eva said. “It’s what I use.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s very fair to High In Trial.”

“My catalog’s not like theirs. It’s nothing like theirs. They
aren’t going to mind. You’ll see. I’ve got a lot of good stuff lined up. New. Not like what everyone else has.” After that, Eva tried to worm my address out of me. It seemed to me that she almost tried to buy it. Her exact words were:
Ten percent off for my friends.
So I told her that she could send me anything she wanted in care of
Dog’s Life.
As I didn’t tell her, I failed to understand why she’d want to bother, because there were scads of kennel supply and dog training businesses all over the country, and the existence of hers wasn’t going to merit so much as a sentence in my column. I want to admit, though, that my response was petty. Stupid, too. If you’re in dogs, your address is no secret. Whenever you enter your dog in a show, your name and address appear at the back of the show catalog. Furthermore, dog people are dedicated joiners. I, for example, belonged not only to a great many clubs in which I had an obvious personal interest—my obedience clubs, our national breed club, the Dog Writers’ Association of America, the Alaskan Malamute Protection League—but to numerous others, including two organizations for fanciers of breeds I’d never even owned … or not yet, anyway. Dog sources failing her, Eva could have looked me up in the Cambridge phone directory. But would I
give
her my home address? No. So you see? A forkful of pot roast or a lump of lobster in her face might have been a kinder blackball than the one I hurled.

That was the choice, supposedly, anyway. Some choice, pot roast or lobster Newburg, except that whereas everything else was self-serve, the lobster, if you could call it that, was doled out onto toast triangles by an unfortunate and probably generous-hearted young fellow stationed behind an industrial-size chafing dish containing liquified cheese so free of
trayf
that a Hasidic rabbi could have lapped it up in good conscience.

The Orthodoxy of the dish did, however, enable me to escape from Eva Spitteler, who lingered in fierce dispute with the cheese-sauce server while I fled. Hailed by Maxine, I had
the good fortune to end up at her table with the VIP’s—Eric Grimaldi, Phyllis and Don Abbott, Sara, Heather, Cam, and Ginny. Eric was, of course, a Sporting Group judge; Phyllis, an obedience judge; Ginny, a tracking judge. Sara and Heather were extremely well known in agility. Cam was there partly because she was married to John R.B., an emerging AKC pooh-bah in his own right and the son of the legendary R.B., and partly because she wrote her column, showed a lot, won a lot, and knew a great many people, most of whom liked her and respected her judgment. I was there as a representative of
Dog’s Life
, thus as the recipient of the courtesy owed to my employer, and as a stand-in for my editor, Bonnie, who was too good a friend of Max’s to publish anything really negative I might write about Waggin’ Tail, anyway. Bonnie, however, couldn’t spice up my article with the authentic zing of first-person enthusiasm that my inclusion among the notables was probably meant to inspire.

My luck, though, consisted less of finding myself in elevated company than in discovering myself protected from the food-griping that would dominate the conversation everywhere else in the dining room of Waggin’ Tail. Not that dog people are picky eaters. Far from it. The food at most dog shows makes lunch at the typical American high school cafeteria taste like a banquet at the Tour d’Argent. But we do want value for money. A few bucks for a plastic-encased ultrasoggy tuna on dry-roasted cardboard was one thing; gourmet-crustacean prices for Welsh rarebit were quite another. My position at the VIP table had another bonus, or so I imagined: Since my place was the last vacant one, there was no way I could end up having to endure yet more of Eva Spitteler, or so I was assuring myself when an unseen force slamming against the back of my chair sent me lurching forward so hard that my solar plexus collided with the edge of the table.

“Hey, sorry about that!” The voice drowned out my involuntary moan. “You wanna move so I can get in here?”

I’d been right: Eva and I wouldn’t be at the same table. Instead, we’d be back to back.

“Shit!” Eva exclaimed. “Shit! You guys got real
lobster!
I’m going back.” And away she stomped.