Lost & Found (4 page)

“Mrs. Todd, don’t go out to the garage and absolutely don’t let your dog out of the house. What kind of dog do you have? Oh, a terrier. Don’t even open the door when you see me drive up because your little terrier thinks the skunk is a big rat and he wants to grab it by the neck. You don’t want that to happen. I’ll be there shortly.”

Rocky took her time loading the tarp and the trap into the truck. She dawdled in the grocery store after picking up the cheapest grade beef available. Her preference was to give the skunk a good head start and not deal with it at all. She sat in the truck and read in the Peterson guidebook about the skunk. If it was a female, it would be likely to burrow with another female for the winter. Males were more solitary. But they don’t hibernate. Their eyeshine was deep amber. That’s the reflected color of their eyes at night, when they peer at you from the darkness. With nothing left to do, Rocky drove out to Mrs. Todd’s house.

There was no sight of a skunk, but evidence of trash that was not tightly sealed. Rocky offered suggestions for a new garbage can and offered to pick one up the next time she was in Portland. Solutions in this job were easy.

For the remainder of October, she rounded up the discarded cats and took them to the shelter on the mainland. They had seven days to be located or rescued before they were euthanized. She pitied the person who had to kill the cats. Bob used to rage about people not neutering their animals.

He called his neutering clinics Nip and Tuck Day, neutering as many cats and dogs as he could from early morning until seven
P.M
. He’d said that for every pair of male and female cats that go unaltered, who lived uneventful lives, and if all their descendents lived for six years also unaltered, that would amount to 420,000 cats.

Rocky had at first scoffed at him. She suspected an urban myth. She wasn’t against neutering, but she saw no sense in exaggerating. Then one day he took her with him to the veterinary school where the cats and dogs were being euthanized in staggering numbers.

“Nobody wants these animals and they can’t all survive. And some dumb fuck was too stupid and too cheap to get them neutered. Even if two cats couldn’t produce a lineage of 420,000 babies, every one that gets set loose to fend for itself will either be killed by a car, a dog, a coyote, by illness like feline leukemia, or they get the terminator injection. It’s not right.”

Nip and Tuck Day was twice a year, when it was off with testicles and tucking at the bellies of the females, making them all the last of their line. Bob would call up all his vet school buddies weeks before to see if any of them had fourth-year students who could be trusted with scalpels. If he was lucky, he got at least one who was eager and capable. Bob charged everybody the same fee, $10, which also entitled them to one can of food as a treat for the recuperating patient.

By the time he’d get home, it would be around eight o’clock. Rocky catered to him on those nights. The rest of the time they both might forget to buy groceries or quarrel about who should cook. But on these nights, she’d forget all about that
and order Chinese for them, serve warm sake. His eyes would get bloodshot and his shoulders would sag, and she’d know he wasn’t really noticing anything that she did and wouldn’t really remember details. After eating, she’d coax him out of his clothes and lead him to the bathroom, the one downstairs with the old claw-footed tub. She’d take off her clothes and slide in behind him, making the water go perilously close to the top, gurgling the release valve into action. She’d start at his head and rub and massage him. She knew he wanted to be held, to be the one who had things done to him, not to be the deciding one. She’d wash him from top to bottom, rolling him on his side when she needed to slip her hand under his winter white bottom.

“Let go, I’ll do everything,” she’d whisper.

She thought that this was how people loved in war camps, or when ocean liners sank and a few survivors clung to lifeboats; all daily defenses fell away. She knew that he needed to be filled up again with hope and tenderness because all of that had been drained out of him on Nip and Tuck Day. Neither of them would speak much, only bits. “Here, roll over, there, I’ll do that,” was all Rocky would need to say before she’d mount him in the water gone cool.

Rocky met Tess for breakfast the next morning before she was due to meet Isaiah to talk about additional duties. “He wants me to start documenting any change in erosion along the south beach. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to do that. I mean erosion is change, and that is probably best done over a number of years.”

“You sound like a scientist. What did you say that you did before?”

“I worked with kids, young kids, in a day care center,” Rocky said. The lie felt partial and thus tolerable.

Tess sipped tea. Rocky had gotten her coffee from the self-serve part of the counter where she pumped out something called Morning Ethiopian. It was too early for her to eat. When Rocky bent over to pick up a dropped napkin, she whacked her elbow on the metal strip along the edge of the table. She grimaced, closed her eyes, and let out one prairie dog yelp.

“That must be pure orange. I can feel that from here,” said Tess.

“What?” said Rocky, cradling her elbow.

“When I hit a nerve like that I see orange for as long as it throbs.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have synesthesia. Two places in my brain go off at once. When I stub my toe, I holler orange, because that’s what I see and feel at the same time.”

Rocky paused, recalling only vaguely having read about this in a neuropsych journal.

“I didn’t know the name for it until about ten years ago when I heard a guy on NPR who wrote a book about us. I broke down and cried. I didn’t know I was a member of a club.”

“Do you see colors only when you hurt yourself?”

“No. Everything has a color. Like letters,
B
is light green with a dark base.
T
is gray and shiny. The days of the week each have their color and shape. Tuesday is a blue cube and Wednesday is muted red globe. Sunday is light yellow and sort of floppy.”

“You are a multi-media event,” said Rocky as she sipped her coffee.

“That’s just the half of it. Now that I’ve learned more about synesthesia, I know just how plain and unfortunate your poor world is, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’ve never thought of my world as plain.”

“That’s because you don’t know any better. Your name is green because
R
is green. How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-eight.”

“OK. Numbers one through ten go up a gradual slope, then eleven through twenty are on a plateau, twenty-one through thirty turn right and the thirties zigzag back the other way. So now when I think of you, I’ll see a green
R
zigzagging backwards.”

“Jesus,” said Rocky.

“Exactly. Now, doesn’t that make your number system seem a little plain? I’m sorry; I don’t mean to say that your world is plain. It’s just that I’m a synesthete out of the closet. There’s nothing as annoying as the newly converted.”

Tess did not regret for one minute the uniqueness of synesthesia, only that it took her so long to know its name and that she was not alone, that there were others. There were a few kindred spirits out in the world who were touched by the cross-firing of senses, touched by the same tweak in genetics as Tess, and finding them had changed her life. As a child, she was driven to silence when she discovered that none of the other children saw numbers as colors. She would say, “The answer is number four, right next to the red three.” The second-grade teacher tilted her head as if to hear her better and squinted her eyes trying to see her better. “No, Tess. We’re only doing the numbers now, not the colors.” In one horrible moment, built up from a few months of clues, Tess understood that her teacher and her classmates lived in a monochrome world where numbers were only black lines, sad lonely things. Piano notes did not brush against their cheeks and smell like cinnamon, and most odd of all, when they fell and scraped their knees, they did not shout, “It’s too orange, now red!” They cried of course, as she did, but they
could not see the pulse of the pain in great orange splats with a deep red core.

Tess was a freak and she knew it, hid it from everyone except her mother who said, “You can say it to me, but don’t let anyone else hear you. They’ll say you’re crazy.” Tess did not know until much later that synesthesia is an inherited trait, and that her mother probably struggled with and then hid her own multisensory world. But her mother’s appendix burst when Tess was eight and things got bungled up at the hospital and before Tess knew it, she was staring straight at the colorless body of her mother laid out in the coffin. She had never seen her mother without color before. She had always loved the apricot glow of her mother’s laugh and her warm, smooth touch. A body without color was the most terrifying sight of her life and she had nightmares for years of a monochrome body. Synesthesia didn’t stop for Tess when she buried her mother, but she didn’t speak of it again for over fifty years.

When she graduated from high school, the war in Europe and Japan had ended, and she begged her father to send her to college. Tess had a huge capacity for memorizing anything and she graduated at the top of her small Nebraska high school. When teachers marveled at her academic abilities, she failed to mention to them that she had a different way of remembering facts and ideas. When numbers and letters each have their own color, shape, and size, subjects like history and math fit into neat packets that Tess could pull out at will; she had constant access to a color-coded file system in her brain. Math was particularly easy for her. She was most fond of the number five, which was a metallic shade of turquoise and had a commanding sound.

Her father sent her to a teacher’s college, where, in the midst of taking as many math classes as seemed logical for an aspiring teacher, she moved on to biology. When she took a class in anatomy, she was in heaven, at last picturing the heart, the blood vessels, the hard-working liver, all the interiors of the body opened up to her in a splendor that she had not known existed. Other students agonized over the nervous system, forcing their monochrome brains to memorize an unseen world. For Tess, optics nerves were bright yellow and looked exactly like clothesline rope. The nerves that ran down the arms and spread out across the hands were sky blue and smelled like lilacs. Who could not remember them or what they did? Her anatomy professor said, “If you were a young man, I’d say you had all the makings of a fine doctor. But you’ll be married before graduation.”

Tess, for all her fine multi-sensed brainwork, had not noticed what her professor had seen from the first day of class; a sandy-haired boy in the back of the room who stared at Tess everyday. By finals, they were spending evenings in nearby cornfields, sipping beer, and gazing at the stars from their entwined position on a sturdy wool blanket that Len had stashed in his return luggage from the war. By their final semester of college, Tess was pregnant and uncomfortable in her simple wedding dress. Len had promised the most exciting thing of her life; they would marry and go to Boston where he would start medical school in the fall.

Tess often told people that alcoholism is a thief of the worst sort, and it is the camouflage of the monster that throws even the most observant person off guard. By the time Len’s drinking had resulted in the despair of vomit, broken glass, one fractured wrist, two car accidents, and a serious threat to
his job security at the hospital, Tess took the two children, by then in junior high, and divorced the man who no longer resembled the sandy-haired boy she met in college. After some urging by a friend of Len’s, she applied to a school to study physical therapy and excelled as if she had never paused from her years at college.

She had been almost sixty years old when she heard a program on National Public Radio about synesthesia. That was ten years ago and she counted most of her time before that as painful and ill spent. She made friends with her ex-husband again and let him get to know her. He had remarried in an alcoholic whirlwind and when he finally sobered up, discovered he had married someone far more addicted to alcohol than even he had been. After losing his medical license Len attended AA five times a week. When Len sobered up, his second wife left him. He summed up his life.

“My first wife left me because I was a drunk. The second one left me because I got sober.”

Tess came out to her grown children. Her two little grandchildren were born knowing that their Grannie heard motorcycles as jagged brown, streaked with battleship gray. If they spotted motorcycles, they cried, “Grannie cover your ears, the brown and silver are coming by!”

She knew that synesthesia had skipped her own children, but her grandchildren had a filtered down version and Tess gloried in it.

And now the new woman on the island, the animal control warden, was keeping Tess busier than she had been in years. Tess was drawn to things that didn’t fit; shoulders that had popped out of their sockets, vertebrae that had squiggled to one side, muscles that had tightened so much that they were
unrecognizable, and people who didn’t fit, either in their own skin or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. She didn’t know if synesthesia accounted for it; she’d seen no evidence of that in on-line chatter from the synesthetes. But she was sure that Rocky did not fit.

Lift with your knees, not your back. Rocky heard the old tape running through her head. She wondered why some tapes automatically turn on. Other well-worn messages too: be careful of eating fish, you could choke on a bone. She never ate fish without hearing her father’s voice, “Check for bones, this is bony fish.” Her father hadn’t eaten fish unless forced to and sat nervously glancing at his two children and his wife who flirted recklessly with death as they ate. He was Italian and without fear of Italian stereotype, preferred to eat pasta seven days a week. When things went well between Rocky’s parents, her mother gave him ziti when they ate fish. When they were in their bad spells, she slid a bony piece of fish onto his plate and turned her back.

Now Rocky wondered how she could lift with her knees and not her back. Someone had called in a complaint about a black lab sort of dog who had been scrounging the south beach for several days and was acting strange; drooling and limping, bobbing his head. Rocky dreaded the thought that he might have rabies. When she got the call, the dog was last seen by the Dumpster in back of Stan’s Seafood Diner.

“He could be sick. Eighty percent of all raccoons have rabies and he could have been bitten by a raccoon,” said Phil, who washed dishes at the diner.

How did people come up with these statistics? If eighty percent of all raccoons were rabid, then why weren’t they dead? This was the kind of question that she would have asked Bob, as if he were the encyclopedia of wildlife. She made a mental note to go back to the bookstore.

Rocky watched one large raccoon visit her garbage can nightly, wrestling with it, standing on its back legs, tipping the green plastic garbage can on its side. That raccoon had looked healthy enough. After cleaning up too much sticky, aromatic garbage from her walkway, she bought a bungee cord that finally raccoon-proofed the can. Her raccoon visitor didn’t have rabies; she was just hungry. Most of what humans do is not so different from what animals do; much of what we do is based on hunger, or the fear of being hungry, selecting a mate, and protecting our young. The guidebook of mammals said that raccoons,
Procyon lotor
, did not mate until late winter or early spring, so this gal was just beefing up for courtship.

Rocky stopped at the grocery store and bought a small package of low-grade ground beef. She drove the old truck up to the diner, hoping that the dog had not left already. As a dogcatcher, she learned how to make animal-catching easier. Bring food, squat on the ground, talk sweet, say “Good dog, what a good dog,” letting her voice rise slightly, moving slowly. And try not to appear vicious. In dog language, she wanted to show first the offering of food, then firmness and calm.

She pierced the plastic wrap around the meat with her truck keys and walked around the back of the building. She
felt a sharp tingle in the early November air. Tonight would be hard on a sick dog outdoors.

She saw him scrunched next to a pile of wood covered by a bright blue tarp. She announced her arrival.

“There you are, good dog.” He lifted his head with a cloudy-eyed weariness. She crouched down about eight feet away.

“Come get some breakfast, buddy.” She held out the meat. His deep brown eyes focused on her and she thought for a moment that this was the look of great despair that she saw on people who were deep in mourning or in the throes of a major depression. She shook her head to unscramble her brain.

The dog tried to stand, and yelped when he put his weight on his front legs.

“OK, big boy. I’ll come to you. I’ll deliver breakfast.”

He lowered himself back down and accepted the meat that she placed right in front of his nose. For a moment his eyes softened. He sniffed the meat and gave it one lick. He looked too sick to eat. She rubbed his head after letting him smell her hand.

She reached over to the front leg that he was protecting and gingerly felt around.

“Oh, no.” Her hand stopped on something jutting out of his shoulder. She leaned over cautiously. He had a shaft sticking out of the front of his chest and she could feel the heat of the infection.

“Bend with your knees and not your back.” She couldn’t possibly pick up this dog without hurting him. She untied the blue tarp from a woodpile and went inside to get Phil. The two of them slid the dog onto the folded tarp and then they lifted him to the back of the truck. Rocky closed the
camper shell and headed straight for the ferry landing. The first ferry of the day was getting ready to go to Portland and she knew Sam Reynolds would be on it. He was a vet with a practice in South Portland.

She reached the ferry as the crew was starting to latch the closing chain across the landing.

“Wait!” yelled Rocky as she jumped out of her truck. “You’ve got to let me on. I’ve got a dog that’s been hurt.” Then she scanned the deck for Sam and saw him, hugging a plastic coffee mug. She waved her arms at him. He lowered his mug and headed down the metal staircase. The ferry opened up and waited for Rocky. There was room for her truck and she pulled in beside the other pickup trucks, mostly carpenters going off island for the day. Sam opened up the back of the truck as Rocky described the injury.

“Let’s just wait until we get to my office. There’s not much I can do here,” he said. Sam felt the shoulder and the chest area. He unzipped his green jacket. “This is an arrow. He probably broke it off trying to get it out.” He got in the truck when they landed in Portland and she drove to Sam’s office. They backed the truck up to the front door. Within thirty minutes, Sam and his vet tech had the dog inside and hooked up to an IV.

“He’s being prepped for surgery. Nothing left for you to do here, Rocky. I can get a ride to my car in Portland. Why don’t you go back home and I’ll give you a call tonight.”

Sam and his wife kept one car parked at a friend’s house off island and one car exclusively for the island. Rocky knew that he would save the dog if he could. She had already taken a series of sick cats to him on his one morning per week that he had office hours on the island.

But instead of taking the next ferry back, she drove to Portland and parked the truck in a parking garage to get it off the street. She had breakfast, went to the library, read the newspaper, and used the library’s Internet to check email, none of which she answered.

She returned to Sam’s office in the middle of the afternoon. He rubbed his head as if searching for hair that he used to have, now only a memory of dark fuzz on the top of his head that he clipped short. Sam handed her the tag that had hung around the dog’s neck. It was a piece of octagonal aluminum, painted with yellow reflective paint.

“This would have been a lot more helpful if it had all the rabies information, and the local vet. But it probably helped the owner to see this guy at night. We went ahead and gave the dog a rabies shot along with enough antibiotics to clean out Boston Bay.”

Rocky tossed the dog tag in her hand. “How’s he doing?”

“Thought you’d never ask. Come on back. Be careful. He probably won’t remember you.”

Rocky knew if she were a dog she would run like crazy to get out of a vet’s office. The smells were awful. Even her inadequate human nose could smell fear and pain, loneliness. Sam pushed open the new metal door to the recovery room where postoperative animals stayed. And it smelled like Bob.

The Lab was in the largest cage that they had and he was on his left side. The white bandage around his right front leg made Rocky wince. They had shaved off his fur right up past his shoulder. He lifted his head when Rocky knelt down. Sam opened the door wide. The dog thumped his tail once when Rocky put her hand near his nose.

“He’s well enough to sniff out a good-smelling woman.”

“Sam, you’re too young to be saying stuff like that and get away with it. Old-geezer vets can say things about how women smell and we excuse them and call them cute, old men. Even your lack of hair doesn’t put you into the geezer category.”

“That’s unfair.”

“You’ve been hanging around dogs and cats too long. Don’t start telling your clients how they smell.”

Sam was in his late thirties and had worked long enough so that all his student loans were paid off and he and his wife, Michelle, were finally feeling expansive. Business in the winter was slower with all the summer people gone, but this gave Sam time to flirt with the dog warden.

The dog gave a heave and tried to stand up. When his right leg hit the floor he yelped, but he stood up anyhow, dizzy from the anesthetic, keeping most of his weight on three legs. She remembered Bob telling her how Labs and golden retrievers will overcompensate; if they feel pain, they will grit their teeth and plow on, especially if it meant running or being with their people. She winced at his pain.

“You know they heal faster than we do. He’s a young, strong dog, probably four or five. In a couple of days, we’ll start looking for a foster home for him until we can locate the owner.” The dog turned his head and looked straight at Rocky.

“Be careful, he has just given you the look. When Labs give people the look, it is a powerful, mind-altering drug that makes you think you have been personally locked into a soul contract.”

“I’m not an easy mark. I just don’t like to see a good dog
suffering. If you haven’t contacted the owners by the time he’s ready to be released, I can be the foster home until we find them.”

She stood up and wiped her hands on her thighs. This is what she and Bob would have done. “Or maybe I shouldn’t. I just remembered, he’ll be alone while I’m working…”

“That’s right. And while you’re out, he’ll be sleeping. Dogs would hate for this secret to get out, but they’re a lot like cats. They look for a good place to curl up and sleep.”

Rocky took a breath and shook the memory of past foster dogs away. “Yeah, yeah. Show me his meds. Or will he be done with meds by then?”

The conversation was making Rocky’s head go woozy. In the early days of their marriage, Rocky had assisted Bob in checking on animals that had to stay overnight. This was the longest time that she had spent in the back room of a vet clinic since Bob died. She walked over to a cool steel table, put her hands on the edge and leaned into it.

“Are you feeling okay? This dog is going to be fine, I’m not trying to stick you with a dying dog.” Sam sounded like he was trying to reassure her.

“You really are new at this, aren’t you?” Sam asked.

For a moment Rocky wanted to tell him that nothing was new, everything was new, that he should be careful because he and Michelle could have their world pulled out from under them by a drunk driver, a predestined heart attack, or lightning could strike and everything that he loved would be taken from him.

She pushed off from the table. “You’re right. I’m new at this.”

In two days, Rocky got the call that the dog was ready to be released.

“I’ve been out of town for a day. When you come get your dog, I want you to come and take a look at the arrow that I pulled out of him,” said Sam.

“He’s not my dog. I’m just sort of a canine rehab center for this guy. He belongs to somebody. He misses somebody.”

“Whatever you say. We close at noon today. Stop over then. You’ll need to bring your truck.”

Reserving a place for vehicles on the ferry was difficult for visitors to the island, especially during the season; full-time residents had a year-round pass. But Rocky discovered she had the additional power to make last-minute requests if she was on emergency business, as she had been with the Lab. And this time of year, there was a pleasing absence of vehicles loaded down with deck chairs, bikes, and beer.

Dr. Reynold’s clinic had a cat door and a dog door. The two sides of the clinic were delineated by the neutral zone of the receptionist’s island. Rocky paused a moment and went in the dog door.

Sam opened the door behind the examining room where all the supplies were kept. On the counter was the shaft and point of the arrow that he removed from the black dog.

“Did you notice anything about this arrow?” he asked her.

“I didn’t see it. I only saw the shaft of the arrow and I was honestly thinking a lot more about the dog. But you want to tell me something, so let’s jump to that part.”

He rolled the shaft around in his palm. “This entire arrow is handmade. Look at this,” he said, pointing his finger at the string around the arrowhead.

“This stuff that looks like string? This is made from tendons of a deer, wrapped around the shaft to attach the point. Probably used hide glue. Do you know how long it takes to make one of these? From start to finish? If you include the time it took to cut and dry the wood, and I’m told this is probably Osage, about three months. I know that if you go to the trouble of making one of these, you don’t shoot it at a dog. You go for the whole, pure experience. You want to shoot a deer, a turkey, a pheasant. Something is very wrong here.” He dropped the arrow into her hands.

“Does anyone on the island have this as a winter hobby, like rug braiding or bookbinding? You must know everyone,” said Rocky.

“I have never heard anyone brag or do a show and tell about making a bow and arrow the good old-fashioned way. And that’s the kind of thing someone would have to brag about.”

Rocky leapt through the obvious possibilities in her brain. “So this probably wasn’t the work of a child. This was an adult hobby. Have you ever seen a dog shot by an arrow before?”

“Not on the island, but it happens. That’s why I got on the Web when I took a good look at this thing. I found several places that specialize in this type of arrow; one in Minnesota and one in Nebraska.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The good news is that this is a strong animal, and he will heal without too much damage to the quality of his life. The surgery was messy. Had to remove some necrotic tissue, which was unfortunately muscle. I’d say he walked around with that arrow sticking out of him for maybe three days. No matter how bad he’s feeling now, he’s feeling better than he was.”

“Can I keep this?” she asked, holding up the remains of the arrow.

“It’s yours.”

Sam had already called the Portland police to let them know about the dog. He said they sounded unimpressed. They sent over an officer a few hours after Sam made the call and asked a few questions. They said it was probably the last of the tourists who thought the island was a good place to shoot, and the dog was in the wrong place. One of the Portland cops came over every morning, drove his car around the island and left on the next ferry.