Bloodlines (28 page)

But I hit it lucky. To my right, I found the remains of an old path, maybe the trace of a lumber road, maybe the vestige of a long-dead friendship between neighbors whose houses had sunk into cellar holes. With the filtered beam of the flashlight aimed at my feet, I took firm steps on the packed-down earth. Then the barking of a couple of dogs gave way to a voice entirely different from theirs. I have no ear for human music, but I am a connoisseur of howls. This one lacked the volume, range, and melody of Rowdy’s—he is a canine Pavarotti—but it was unmistakably the song of one of his kin, the howl of an Alaskan malamute. Missy? Or maybe not. But a malamute, one of my own.

As if the sound waves carried scent, at the exact second the howl reached my ears, the stench invaded my nostrils and pressed like a determined finger on the back of my throat. I’d eaten breakfast. Maybe I should have started out on an empty stomach. The fresh coffee I’d drunk had turned as stale and bitter as if I’d swallowed the filter and grounds. My breath stank of indigestion, and the damp air reeked of dogs and filth.

I reached the clearing around the Simmses’ place.
The road was somewhere to my left, hidden in the night. The sagging roof of the shabby little house dipped in a U-shape against a patch of sky visible through the cloud cover. The ruins of the sheet-metal broiler farm were straight ahead. Scattered between the remains of the big, ugly building and my spot at the edge of the woods were three little sheds that looked something like outmoded and abandoned overnight cabins and even more like miniature outhouses, which, in case I’ve lost you, is the only word for privies ever spoken by loyal natives of the State of Maine.

In the shelter of the woods, I turned off the flashlight, slipped off the backpack, and transferred the camera, a collar, and a lead to the pockets of my parka. I removed my gloves, stowed them in the pack, and hefted it on again. Then I made for the nearest little shack. The closer I got to it, the more it smelled like an outhouse, but the less it looked like one. It was roughly the shape of a prefab tool shed intended for the suburban yard of a diminutive gardener. To avoid stumbling on the pieces of unidentifiable junk that seemed to be strewn everywhere, I circled carefully around and located the door on the side that faced the back of the property. With the little shed and the high walls of the ruined broiler farm between me and the house, I removed the penlight from my pocket, held it against my hand, flicked it on, and used its beam to find a big, sturdy hook and eye, the door’s only latch. I had to push up hard on the cold, wet metal to raise the hook, and it cleared the eye with a sudden snap that sounded loud enough to awaken Diane Sweet. I held perfectly still. Inside the building, something stirred. I switched to the big flashlight, and holding it poised to turn on, I inched open the door.

I’m not afraid of dogs, of course, but I’m not naive, either. Ever been bitten? And I mean
bitten
, not just pinched or nipped. Like being slammed with a nail-spiked baseball bat, right? Intense pain and sorely wounded feelings, too. But I lost my pride a long time
ago. Sure, dogs understand that I love them, but they’ll bite me nonetheless.

Consequently, before entering the windowless little shack, I braced the door with one hand, and with the other, I raised the flashlight and inserted it in the crack of the door. I flicked on the beam and peered in. The first thing I saw was a slowly moving mass of white that momentarily baffled me. A motherless litter of Westie puppies? For a second, I scanned for tiny heads or eyes or tails, details that would let my brain read this pale, teeming blob as squirming newborn pups. For God’s sake, the stench should have told me; I didn’t really need my eyes at all. And even the ugliest, wettest newborn pup looks nothing like a thick swarm of maggots feeding on a disgusting pile of feces.

I tugged the door closed behind me and turned on the big flashlight. There were puppies, too, an unborn litter that swelled the belly of the emaciated golden retriever bitch who barely dragged herself to her feet when I entered. I was raised by golden retrievers; compared with goldens, my human parents were the incidental figures of my early childhood. Vinnie and Danny were goldens. I have handled goldens in breed and obedience. I have trained dozens of them, groomed hundreds, and admired thousands. This bitch’s coat was so caked with filth that it took me a second to identify her breed. Or maybe I just couldn’t let myself see her as a golden. Lack of food and exercise had left her with bone in place of muscle and flesh. Although she managed to rise to her feet, she didn’t approach me. In fact, she seemed neither friendly nor wary, but merely stood there aimlessly, her tail immobile, her eyes vacant. The golden retriever is a superb obedience breed, of course. Acting as her own trainer and handler, this golden seemed to have taught herself the trick of feeling nothing at all. In her circumstances, she couldn’t have chosen more wisely.

My hands dripping with sweat, I pulled out the camera and photographed the living things I saw: the golden retriever bitch and the maggots that lived
on the feces she’d pitifully tried to confine to one end of the shed. Then I got a couple of tiny dog biscuits from my pack, placed them on my open palm, and slowly extended it toward her. At the sight of a moving hand, though, she cringed. I’d been wrong. She hadn’t lost all feeling after all. I dropped the treats onto the dirt floor and left.

The damp air outside the shed should have seemed almost fresh after the toxic-smelling fumes the poor golden breathed, but it didn’t, and my mouth tasted as though I’d caught a gum disease that was spreading to my tongue and throat. I wanted to find Missy and get out. But was she here? I leaned against the shed and gave my eyes a chance to recover from the camera flash and readapt to the darkness. I was facing the back of the property. Ahead of me were two more little outbuildings. A black mass of trees rose in the distance. In the cleared area to my left, between the trees and the nearby ruins of the massive chicken coop, I could make out a scatter of low, dark lumps. Oil drums? Then one of them moved. A chain rattled. I glanced around the corner of the shed to check out the house. No lights were on. Stepping much more slowly and carefully than I’d have liked, I started toward that moving lump chained in the field. The darkness made the Simmses’ whole spread look vast, but, by daylight, it had seemed small, and my feet covered the ground quickly. In what seemed like seconds, the lump came into focus as a big, wolflike dog.

As I stepped forward, the clouds opened, and I saw the white of the dog’s bared teeth, the flattened ears, the
stiff legs, the low angle of his head and tail, the whole posture of fearful aggression. Carelessly and stupidly, I stared directly at him, and with an almost inaudible growl, he took two quick paces, the warm-up for a powerful lunge. By the time he hit the end of his chain, I’d backed up out of reach. I shouldn’t have stared at him, but I couldn’t help it. Even in the darkness, an Alaskan malamute is unmistakable. Besides, Rowdy and Kimi had dulled my reflexes. If you stare at either of them, what you’ll get is a highly polished see-how-cute-I-am routine designed to convince you that you’re the greatest thing to come along since Eukanuba. Their ridiculous and universal friendliness to human beings is as typical of the Alaskan malamute as the bulky muzzle, the brown eyes, or the plumy tail waving over the back; and, to my mind, bad temperament is a far worse fault in the breed than the snipiest muzzle, the palest eyes, or the shortest, baldest little whip of a snap tail. Where does it come from? Careless breeding. Human cruelty.

I gave this guy the benefit of a doubt. “My God,” I whispered to him as I backed away, “what have they done to you?”

Underfed him? Even in the darkness, his body was skeletal. And his thick chain was moored to bare ground. In a fierce blizzard, he could have nestled snugly in the snow, but he had no natural shelter from the rain and, worse yet, the summer sun, not so much as an empty barrel, not the poorest excuse for a doghouse. Inflict this misery on Rowdy, and how long would his lovely temperament endure? How long would Kimi’s?

But they were safe at home. Where the hell was Missy? I turned away from the malamute. Showing him my back may have been a mistake, or maybe I suddenly gave off a scent of terror. In any case, since my arrival, there’d been a few low barks and growls, but nothing even approaching the deafening canine warning I’d feared, the sudden outbreak of cacophony: Intruder! Intruder! But now? And from a
malamute?
The breed that
can bark, but almost never does? The world’s worst guard dog? His sudden roar must have doubled my heart rate. Within seconds, the pack was off my back, and my right hand was gripping a rawhide bone, knotted at both ends, shaped more or less like a wooden dumbbell. I’m no good with balls of paper, but even under pressure, I can hurl a dumbbell-shaped object through the air and place it in the exact spot I choose. Hardest part of teaching a dog to retrieve, right? Teaching yourself to throw the dumbbell.
Dog
training? People training. If the rawhide bone landed just beyond the dog’s reach, where he could see it and smell it? He’d stretch, bellow, and tear the ground to get it, and he might snap his chain.

But I have dead aim. The malamute fell silent. How long had his alarm lasted? Ten seconds? A few more? I hoped that the dog barked like that every time a raccoon turned its back on him. I almost wished for the sound of a window opening in one of the bedrooms and the sound of Walter Simms’s voice hollering, “Christ, can’t you ever shut the fuck up!”

But I heard nothing. Almost immediately, I headed toward the outline of the big ruined broiler farm, which turned out to house—if you can call it that—four more golden retrievers—three bitches and a dog—and five Norwegian elkhounds—four bitches and a dog. Males don’t actually produce puppies, right? Anyway, the nine dogs lived—if you call it that—on what my hand-filtered flashlight revealed as a small patch of mud and feces in a chicken-wire enclosure attached to the building. A ragged lean- to along one side of the wire offered more shelter than the malamute had. I caught a glimpse of an open sore on the head of one of the elkhounds, one of the goldens limped badly, and all the dogs were hideously thin, but this group was nonetheless in better shape than the first golden I’d seen.

But maybe Walter Simms had something against motherhood. Jammed into a wire-floored rabbit hutch
—honest to God, a rabbit hutch—at the corner of the building, I found a Norwegian elkhound bitch with a litter of three puppies. You know what an elkhound is? Well, if not, this isn’t the time to tell you in detail. Gorgeous breed, wonderful dogs, but for now, let’s just say that an elkhound would remind you of a half-size gray malamute, at least if you didn’t actually know anything about dogs. This elkhound bitch was jailed in a space that would have cramped a chihuahua. She had no room to stand up, and if she’d been able to rise, the wire floor would have cut into her pads. The pups actually seemed to be nursing, though, and both the bitch and her litter looked better fed than the other dogs I’d seen, which is to say that they weren’t skin draped on bare bone. If Simms liked her enough to feed her, I wondered, why confine her to this cage, with its pile of droppings underneath where they had fallen through the wire? Why feed this one? Then the explanation came to me, cruel and sick: She was fed while she nursed the puppies, then and only then, while she was preparing the merchandise for the clean fiberglass cages of Puppy Luv and the spotless concrete runs of Your Local Breeder. After all, customers
see
the puppies. But who sees a puppy mill brood bitch? Who even imagines her?

The elkhound bitch watched me suspiciously, and when she began to growl, I moved on. Where the hell was Missy? The male malamute was chained in the open. The bitches, too? I’d first seen him as one of a series of dark lumps, the one that moved. Should I check out the others? Or try the two little sheds I hadn’t yet entered? The sheds had one advantage over the open ground: I could use my camera inside without the risk that Walter or Cheryl would make an early morning bathroom trip and catch sight of the flash. I wanted Missy, but I also wanted more evidence than I’d been able to get so far.

I headed in the direction of the sheds, back toward the woods from which I’d emerged. The shack I’d already
entered, the one that held the golden, was to my right. The other two were clustered together to my left. My progress toward them was maddeningly slow, mainly because the direct route led across what seemed to be Walter and Cheryl’s private dump. The handgun at my hip was loaded; I couldn’t afford to fall. The ground was littered with beer cans that no one had bothered to turn in and the spilled contents of what seemed like a few thousand torn plastic trash bags. To detour around the heap without tumbling into it, I simply had to use a flashlight. With my hand blocking most of the beam and my heart hammering, I picked my way along. Want a survey of the Simmses’ product preferences? Oreo cookies, Kraft macaroni and cheese, generic potato chips, and—I swear—Lysol air freshener. The family beer was Miller Lite. Cheryl used tampons with pink plastic applicators. The headline of a soggy but legible tabloid newspaper caught my eye: “The Curse of Elvis Strikes Lisa Marie!” Poetry, right? At every supermarket checkout aisle. No wonder nobody reads Robert Frost anymore.