14 Degrees Below Zero (2 page)

2. MAYBE HE NEEDED TO HAVE A WORD WITH STEPHEN.

N
ow he had to walk the dog every morning before work—the beast had needs. Lewis had named it Carew, after the baseball player, and had regretted the decision ever since. Rod Carew, in his playing days with the Minnesota Twins, had exemplified subtlety and finicky precision. Carew the dog, in the prime of his canine days, was the polar opposite. Carew the dog was spastic, perpetually overexcited, and utterly oblivious to the finer points of his master’s moods.

Lewis Ingraham held Carew’s leash in the chill air, the breath of man and beast condensing in the gray morning, with the leafless trees and dim blues and whites of the autumn morning. And a thought occurred to Lewis.

He had come to realize—or at least believe, with the heartfelt conviction of a man uncovering an essential truth until then hidden beneath the mundane surface of things—that Carew had single-handedly (granting the beast, for the moment, the symbolic gift of hands) tipped Lewis’s life from stoically bearable to entirely unpalatable. Oh, the fucking
dog.
The walking, the feeding, the constant emotional thirst for attention—they all entailed an added level of obligation and toil, and had transformed an otherwise flat but satisfyingly habit-ridden stage in a man’s life into a hectic, fecal-tinged routine of unrewarding strife.

Not that it was all Carew’s fault, to be fair.

It was acceptable to Lewis to admit that he didn’t like his dog, and never really had—he was a man untroubled by some of the more unseemly aspects of his personality. The dog had been a gift from his daughter Jay, and as such was laden with so much symbolism and implicit significance that it was nearly unthinkable for Lewis to, say, simply unleash the animal and encourage it to amble from sight and disappear forever. Actually, no, he had tried that. The dog always came back.

The day they went to get the dog had been a scorcher, burning with heat and humidity. Lewis had been hungover and numb with grief. They’d gone together to Animal Control with Jay’s daughter Ramona—Lewis’s granddaughter, his consolation prize for continuing to exist. The thought of Ramona enlivened Lewis’s step and robbed the sting from the morning air. He remembered going that day to the derelict city facility near downtown, nestled near the steel prison of the automotive impound lot, on a mission to get a dog for himself. It was understood that the dog would also be Ramona’s—that Lewis would care for it, and that it would provide him with a supplemental reason for continuing to live, but that Ramona was also gaining a dog-by-proxy, saving Jay the trouble of adding more direct responsibility to her aimless and fairly feckless young womanhood.

Funny, he hadn’t thought about that day in a while. The dog was also Ramona’s. And Ramona
loved
Carew.

“You might not realize it,” Lewis said to the dog, who looked up with perked ears. “But you just earned a reprieve. Again. You fucking mutt.”

Yeah yeah yeah, Lewis,
the dog said.
You’re the man.

Ramona had selected the spotty, shaggy thing—it had the wild-eyed look of the career convict who had come to enjoy prison. Jay had paid the adoption fee (still more symbolism) that sprang Carew from his death sentence—it was just a few days from euthanasia, according to the tag on its cage. Then she paid for the veterinarian visit, a one-stop extravaganza including Carew’s neutering, delousing, and treatment for kennel cough. Jay had granted Lewis the gift of a living being, a companion, an entity to dilute his solitude.

How long had it been since Anna died, anyway? Soon it would be closer to seven months than six. Her clothes still hung in the walk-in closet in their bedroom—
his
bedroom, where he rarely slept now. His shirts, suits, and shoes were all in the guest room, Jay’s former bedroom, to which he’d transferred many of his things after his only child left for college. He used it as a dressing room, and he liked to see himself in the full-length mirror hanging on the closet door. He liked to inspect his naked body, proud of his flat belly and strong thighs—he still ran at least three times a week around Lake of the Isles, no matter the weather. He took care of himself, and had a better physique than a lot of the soft, doughy twenty-somethings he saw padding around his neighborhood. But he didn’t make a point of it. No one needed to know he was vain about his body, or his full head of hair, or the way time had carved his features into a mask of masculine solidity.

Anna had been attacked by pancreatic cancer, and it rotted her out from the inside. She was like waterlogged wood at the end, soft and porous. In the last couple of weeks she smelled terribly. Lewis had burned incense constantly. He had camped out on the sofa downstairs in a mess of pillows and blankets and books. He slept only a couple of hours at a time, vigilant for the sound of her coughing or moaning in a semiconscious stupor of pain and narcotics.

“Sit, Carew,” he said to the dog, who had spotted another canine on the other side of the street. A female, Lewis thought, but his assessment was certainly clouded by the creature holding its leash—a girl of about twenty-five in those hip-hugger pants and spaghetti-strap top that was apparently handed out as a uniform these days.
She
didn’t seem cold, but Lewis’s hands were shaking.

Lewis, at forty-seven, prided himself on not being the sort of man who took untoward notice of girls almost half his age—girls, he reminded himself with a wince, who were essentially the same age as his daughter.

“I said
sit,
” he growled, more loudly. Carew did not comply. Carew had gotten a taste for chaos during his wild, predomestication days, and ran wild through the house and slept on the sofas. He was most definitely not getting with the program. The dog
knew
that Lewis was in no condition to train it.

In a full-fledged pique, Lewis jerked on Carew’s leash—all right, granted, probably
too
hard, but how else was he to get his message across? The girl across the street looked up, and a flash of concerned consternation played across her admittedly pretty face. Lewis imagined himself through her eyes: an old guy, bundled up though it wasn’t really that cold, losing his shit and committing borderline animal abuse.

Lewis smiled and gave her a
what’re-you-gonna-do
shrug. She would have been in his range, back when he was young. Now it was out of the question. It was unsavory to even think about it. But he thought about it.

The girl gave Lewis a little half-smile, noncommittal, and went on her way. Her ponytail bounced on her shoulder blades as she walked.

Now why the hell had she given him a look like that? All right, he was dressed far too warm in his hooded sweatshirt and black burglar’s cap. The girl was sleeveless, her arms fetchingly lithe and tanned. It wasn’t his fault he was bundled like an old man—the goddammed antidepressant his doctor had forced on him made him feel high and giddy in the morning, his face and fingers borderline numb, and random pains and chills flitted through his chest cavity. Maybe the girl wouldn’t have been so standoffish if she’d known that he’d just lost his wife. The pretty ones always thought they were above you—and all because of a chance genetic fluke that inspired behavior in men that was, in the end, little more than a complicated mask over extremely simple desires.

He could have had that girl when he was younger. He was sure of it.

He’d been married to Anna for twenty-five years when she died. He couldn’t say they were all good years, especially when he was younger, more angry. The last years, before she got sick, were also no picnic. But time had passed, they had stayed together. Sometimes he thought they shouldn’t have. But there was no point thinking about it now.

Lewis and Carew reached the empty park. It was silent and still, too early for the children to be out.

“Here we are, boy,” Lewis said, his voice morning-hoarse. “Your earthly paradise—Dogshit Park.”

Lewis walked gingerly through the grass, fastidiously avoiding the plethora of turds that decorated the turf. They were like synesthetic land mines, their sight and smell permeating his oversensitized consciousness and senses in a way that had been the norm for the past year, since Anna had learned she was sick.

Taking in a measured breath, Lewis massaged his chest. He was light-headed, and everything seemed unreal. He tried to will the world back into focus, to make everything take on the somber tones of reality. He sent out internal feelers for the catastrophic explosion of pain behind his sternum that would be the last thing he ever felt.

It didn’t happen. He didn’t die. He came back to himself.

There was a big sign posted:
CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG
. Someone had painted over some of the letters, and now it read:
LEAN AFT YO DOG
. Everyone apparently felt they had a special dispensation from the rules, anyway, because there was shit everywhere. Lewis counted a half-dozen mounds before he found a clear patch of grass and unclipped Carew’s leash. He wasn’t supposed to let the dog run free in the city, but fuck it. He felt a certain sympathy for Carew’s plight—it couldn’t be easy, living with Lewis.

Carew took off and ran a big circle in the grass. He looked back with undisguised doggy affection, his big tongue hanging out.

Yeah yeah, Lewis. OK OK yeah.

“Yeah, OK to you, too,” Lewis called to him. “Now go play. We have to get home soon.”

There was another sign in the neighborhood that read:
BEGIN ONE WAY
. Someone had obscured two letters to make it read:
GIN ONE WAY
. The gag rankled him every time he saw it. The better joke, obviously, was to erase the
GIN
and make the sign read
BE ONE WAY
. Wasn’t that apparent to everyone?

Lewis took his cell phone out of his pocket and, with surprise, realized that he was smiling. He was too emotional these days; it was as though some defensive barrier inside him had been breached and couldn’t be put in place again. For the moment it was working in his favor, though, because the sight of Carew’s mottled brown pelt gave him pleasure. He thought of the animal’s not-disagreeable smell, and the satisfying clack of his claws on the hardwood floors at home, and the feeling of Carew’s body against his when they watched TV on the sofa together. And Lewis felt all right.

After dialing a familiar number Lewis pressed the phone against his ear and, with his free hand, fished for a cigarette in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He managed to get the thing lit before Jay picked up.

“Hello, what?” she mumbled. “Dad?”

For the moment he had no aches, no chills, no heaviness of heart and mind. The sound of his daughter’s voice was a warm fire on a winter day—he could melt, he could die. He lived to hear her call him Dad. He loved her like music, like light. She and Ramona were all that he lived for, and he knew how much they needed him.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked, watching Carew digging in the grass.

“Who else would call so early?” she said.

“Early?” he repeated, an unintentional note of mockery in his voice. “It’s almost seven-thirty. I’m out with Carew. Isn’t Ramona out of bed yet?”

A moment of silence.

“Dad, it’s more like ten after seven,” Jay moaned. “Ramona’s asleep. I need to rest, Dad. You’re twenty-five years ahead of me in melatonin depletion. Is there something important you want to talk about?”

“What do you mean, you need to rest?” Lewis asked her. “What time did you get to bed last night?”

Another pause. Lewis had miscalculated. He shouldn’t have asked her that, at least not in that
tone.
Jay and Anna had always been major sticklers in the matter of Lewis’s
tone
—he was too cutting, too acerbic, too
something.
He wasn’t sufficiently empathetic. He had been made to understand that sometimes he
came on too strong.
He lacked warmth. The criticisms of the mother had been passed on to the daughter. At least some part of her still lived.

“Stephen was here last night, if that’s what you mean,” Jay said. She was waking up, her voice turning sharp.

Lewis took a drag on his cigarette. He needed to be alert. He was entering a conversational wilderness.

“Honey, you know I didn’t mean anything,” he told her. “Did Ramona at least get to sleep at a decent hour?”

Jay let out a long breath. “Yeah, Dad, she
did.
She’s
fine.
”

“You make it sound like I’m giving you a hard time,” Lewis said. “Truce, all right? I just called to talk to you. It’s a beautiful morning—cloudy, but the sun’s coming out like a big bald head. You remember that song?”

“Yeah, Dad, I do.” Softer now.

“You should get up,” Lewis told her. “Get your day started.”

Carew was fussily smelling trees, the grass, turds. His back twitched with the olfactory explosion of the park. Lewis winced as a plume of cigarette smoke found his eye.

“So you’re walking the dog?” Lewis heard the sound of his daughter adjusting herself in bed.

“I already told you that,” he said. “Hey, did I hear Ramona? Does she want to talk to Grandpa?”

“Ramona isn’t up yet.”

Lewis realized, all at once, that Stephen was in bed with Jay. He had spent the night there, in Jay’s little two-bedroom apartment on the far side of Hennepin Avenue, about six blocks from Lewis’s house. Lewis had suspected Stephen of sleeping over before, but it was an apprehension he’d never had confirmed.

She wasn’t required to live like this. Jay had an open invitation to come home, to bring Ramona, to unite what was left of the family. Of course, should that happen, Lewis knew he wouldn’t approve of allowing Stephen to spend the night.

What was this doing to Ramona’s psyche? He was no kinky Freudian, but things were hard enough for the little girl—she was growing up with a single mother, and she almost never saw her father. And now the confusion of seeing a boyfriend parading in and out of her mother’s room, the sleepy male face at the breakfast table, Stephen half-clothed and giving her mother confidential caresses to commemorate the erotic adventures of the night before.