Black Ribbon (10 page)

She swung dramatically toward her husband, meaning, I think, to aim a finger only at the offending card. As it was, however, she appeared to be directing the avenging wrath of the American Kennel Club straight toward Don Abbott.

TWENTY MINUTES after Judge Phyllis Abbott pointed an AKC-authorized finger at her husband, I was seated in the dining room at a round table for eight. Somewhat to my surprise, dinner really was quite formal: white linen, wine, a buffet offering roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, stuffed scrod, scalloped potatoes, broccoli, salad, and, as the brochure had promised, wine, red and white, and not in jugs, either. After the cheapskate packet, I’d half expected to find a genuinely traditional New England Sunday-night supper: hot dogs and beans with ketchup, and brown bread straight out of the can, the ridges still visible, followed by mealy Indian pudding, also canned, but mushed up, heated, and topped with vanilla ice cream, accompanied by the traditional Yankee choice between milk and nothing. Real WASP food is nowhere near as bad as people say; it’s much, much worse.

I was sitting with Cam and Ginny, and also with Sara Altman, the head agility instructor, a dark young woman with long brown hair bound back in a ponytail. As I’ve said, Rowdy and I had once done a miniclinic with Sara, and I’d liked her a
lot. Instead of admonishing me to praise my dog while telling me everything I was doing wrong, she’d used positive methods on both of us. Also, when Rowdy had pried the lid off a big metal canister of dog treats and scattered them all over the mats, she’d simply commented how helpful it was in agility to have a dog who was motivated by food. As I’ve mentioned, that’s how agility people are: obsessed. If a falling tree had crushed in the roof of Sara’s house, she’d probably have viewed the trunk and branches as an interesting new agility obstacle, and her only worry would have been whether the bark gave proper traction. The others at the table were strangers to me: three women—Myrna, Marie, and Kathy—and a young man named Michael whose left upper arm displayed a still-healing tattooed portrait of his dog, which he said was a cream-colored long-haired Akita named Jacob.

“What a big dope I was.” Ginny stabbed her fork into a slice of roast beef. “I’m just glad I didn’t go to Max and tell her how touched I was that she’d remembered.” Phyllis’s dire announcement had somehow cheered Ginny up. The endless braid around her head was still damp from her swim, she’d touched up her tracking tan with a little makeup, and she looked altogether happy to be who she was and where she was. With a smile she added, “Old gullible me.”

“I wasn’t sure,” I said. “Before, it was sort of remotely possible that my card was a mistake, and yours wasn’t.”

“Come off it,” Cam said. “With both of the cards unsigned?”

“Clarity of hindsight,” Sara commented.

“Sara,” I pointed out, “the other odd thing is all those brochures out there in the lobby, on the coffee table and in the magazine rack. By the fireplace.”

“Maxine has a lot of friends here,” Sara replied. “She’s been coming to Rangeley since she was a kid. That’s just her way of showing she’s supporting the other local businesses.”

With her usual concern for distinctions, Cam, the obedience
legal-eagle columnist, said, “Not
those
brochures. The other ones. The ones about gravestones and urns and whatever.”

Sara tightened her neck muscles, and her head moved back and upward like a cobra’s. “What!”

Cam said, “They were all around, by the fireplace. Holly took them. So nobody’d get upset.”

One of the other women at the table spoke up, Myrna or Marie. Neither wore her name tag, and I couldn’t keep them straight. They both had short, fluffy hair and heavy New York accents. “Hey,” said whichever one it was, “maybe it’s a whole new dog activity, right? ‘Come on, big boy, for the casket, you like the white, or you want blue? And while we’re at it, how about your headstone. Plain old Rest in Peace do for you? Fun, huh?’ New dog sport. I mean, why leave him out? It’s his funeral.”

“Myrna, please,” said her look-alike friend, who must have been Marie. “You can laugh, but it’s not all that—”

Myrna interrupted. “So what are you going to do? You got some way to keep them alive forever? You lose a dog, and you’re a wreck, and you’re never going to laugh again, and you’re never going to get another dog?” Myrna’s raucous style and brassy voice had initially put me off, but when I listened to what she said and ignored how she said it, I admired her attitude. If fate snatched one of her dogs, she’d immediately get a new puppy and thumb her nose in death’s face. “So,” Myrna went on, “who left that shit out there? Sorry. Marie? Marie, I’m cleaning up my act. No more dirty words until we cross the Long Island border. So who put that stuff out?”

“And who’s sending these cards?” Cam added. “And who got them? Ginny. Phyllis. Holly, you did. Did anyone else?”

No one answered.

“I wonder if Eric Grimaldi did,” I said. “I was just thinking. When Mrs. Abbott was talking about AKC and being a judge,
I assumed she was taking it a little too personally, in the sense that she’s a judge.” I lowered my voice. “It did seem to me that she was overreacting. I didn’t exactly enjoy getting that sympathy card, but I mostly assumed that I got it by mistake. And Ginny thought hers was real. But even when she found out, she didn’t decide that she got it because she’s a tracking judge. Did you?”

Ginny shook her head. “I never thought of it. Why would anyone …?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Holly, what about you?” Cam asked.

“Me! Why would I …?”

“In your column. In an article. Somewhere else? Have you written anything that could’ve made someone want to get back at you? I don’t remember anything, but …”

“The anti-puppy mill stuff,” I said. “The usual stuff about not buying anything from pet shops that sell dogs. But I’ve been writing that for a long time, and so have plenty of other people. And I’m not AKC’s favorite person, but it’s no big thing.”

In case you don’t subscribe to
Dog’s Life
, I should mention that I’d written about the miserable conditions of the AKC-registered breeding stock in the puppy mills. In a recent column, I’d discussed a report published in the
Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association
, according to which the puppies in three California pet shops were about twice as likely to have kennel cough, giardiasis, diarrhea, vomiting, severe gastroenteritis, or some other illness than were pups from private sources. The AKC connection? Every time a puppy mill operator registers a dog, a bitch, or litter; and every time a puppy mill operator transfers a puppy to a puppy broker; and every time the broker sells a puppy to a pet shop; and every time a puppy buyer registers the puppy, the American Kennel Club collects a fee. My great offense, I think, was to point out that in revoking the AKC registration privileges
of about twenty puppy mill operators every month, the AKC was actually closing down each month only about 4 percent of the estimated 5,000 puppy mills in this country. I may also have commented that it didn’t seem like enough.

Cam looked embarrassed. Her husband, John R.B. White, was an AKC delegate who sat on some committee or other, but his father, Richard Burton White, had been a real power in the fancy and at the AKC. I had the impression that the son had inherited some of the father’s clout. “That’s not what I was thinking of,” Cam said. “It was more like, oh, show reports, something like that. If someone felt slighted, you know, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t do show reports.” I tried to keep my voice neutral. A show report in my own national breed club newsletter reads something like this:
On June 25 at the East Podunk K.C., BOB was CH Wolfwhistle’s Silver Dagger, Buzzy, owned by John and Jane Bishop.
It goes on to say that BW, WD was another dog owned by the same people or by someone else; that BOS, WB was a bitch owned by so-and-so; and so forth and so on, all of which is glorious to read if you happen to be John or Jane Bishop, whose dog went Best of Breed, or if yours went Best of Winners and Winners Dog or Best of Opposite and Winners Bitch. Otherwise? Sure, all of us love to see our dogs’ names in print, and we want to see how other people’s dogs are doing, but what everyone, absolutely everyone, wants to do with show reports is read them or skim them or just know that they’re there; there’s not a dog writer on earth who honestly enjoys writing them. I mean, you slave over them trying to inject a little spirit, a little dash, a little humor, and what happens? Either no one notices, or someone whose dog just got a plain old mention snubs you or yells at you at the next show and accuses you of playing politics by promoting someone else’s dog when all you did was give it an extra two adjectives. So, as I told Cam, I don’t do show reports anymore.

“You
ever thought about judging?” Ginny asked me, referring,
as I understood, to obedience judging. “You judge any matches?”

“No,” I said. “I could, I guess, but I don’t really have the right temperament. It’s not something I’ve ever wanted to do. I’ve helped out at a couple of Canine Good Citizen tests, but that’s different. I had to fail some dogs, but no one’s going to hold a grudge against me for that, and I don’t think there’s anyone at camp who was there, anyway.”

“Actually, I was,” Ginny admitted. “Last fall. At Cambridge. Didn’t you just do that ‘accepts grooming’ part?”

“Yes. Yeah, now I remember. But you passed, didn’t you?”

“No, as a matter of fact. I had Magic, and you failed her for being too friendly.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember. She jumped on me and grabbed the brush, and then she wouldn’t let go of it. I had to fail her.”

“Look,” Cam said, “if Holly didn’t remember that Ginny was there, maybe she’s forgotten someone else. And Ginny’s a tracking judge, and Phyllis judges a lot. So maybe it really is someone with something against the three of you.”

“But what?” I demanded. “Obedience judging is really quite objective, at least compared to breed. If your dog refuses a jump or breaks a stay or whatever, there’s nothing the judge can do except score you zero on the exercise. And if the dog’s perfect, sure, the judge can dock you a few points for supposedly crooked sits and handler errors that no one else saw, and that does happen.”

“Does it ever!” Marie groaned.

“Does it ever!” I agreed. “But if a judge is really bad, all the spectators complain to AKC, and if it’s just a matter of losing a few points you should’ve kept, you have to think that the next time, maybe you’re going to keep a few points you should’ve lost. So, if you avoid the really bad judges, in the long run, it all evens out.”

“The voice of experience,” Cam told Marie. “But what I’m wondering about is Eric Grimaldi, because he’s a breed judge,
and that’s where you’re more likely to get exhibitors with real grudges.”

True. Obedience and tracking judges follow detailed sets of rules. In contrast, breed judges pick the dogs they like, and that’s pretty much it; they’re supposed to interpret breed standards, but there aren’t any rules about how they’re supposed to interpret them.

(Still
lost? Sorry. Let’s get this straight.
Breed:
conformation. How well does the dog
conform
to the breed standard? Like Westminster? On TV? That’s breed. In fact, that’s a dog show. What confuses newcomers is that obedience trials are often held in conjunction with dog shows, and when they aren’t, they tend to be small events that the general public never hears about. And tracking, I’m afraid, just doesn’t make it as a spectator sport, because each dog follows a track across a field—and, at advanced levels, through woods—and if the public were allowed to go galumphing after the dog, the scent and commotion would obviously ruin the dog’s work. Also, tracking tests have small, limited entries, so the casual visitor who expects anything like Westminster is going be extremely disappointed.)

“Except,” I said, “in tracking? TDX tests”—that’s Tracking Dog Excellent—“are hard to get into, so it’s
possible
that if someone had some problem with a judge.…” I faltered. My real source of uncertainty was the high esteem in which I hold tracking judges, who are a remarkably dedicated, fair, straightforward, congenial, and altogether likeable group of people, most unlikely targets for anyone’s rancor. I thought, for example, of Ginny Garabedian; it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to do something mean to her. Unless, I suppose, you counted the five dead husbands.