One Good Dog (29 page)

Adam gingerly pulls the pad away from his cheek. Has it stopped bleeding? He turns his head to see Big Bob, and feels a fresh drizzle of blood. He’ll give them ten more minutes and then he’s going to leave, despite his blood-soaked shirt and bleeding face. He’s got to find Chance.

“You don’t have to stay.”

“’Course I do. You got hurt on my watch.”

“I’m fine. You should go home.” Ten minutes, as soon as he can convince Big Bob to leave, he’ll bolt. “Really. Go.” He can see Big Bob’s temptation to get out of this depressing place, to go home, versus his good nature working against that temptation. Adam pushes. “Face wounds bleed worse than serious wounds. I’ll be all right.”

“You have anyone to call? Anyone who can come get you?”

“I’ll grab a cab.”

“Adam, I’m not going to let you do that.”

“I need to find Chance.”

“You need to get stitched. The dog’s fine.”

“Gina. Gina DeMarco.” Give Bob a name and then get him out of here.

“Okay. What’s her number?” Bob, ignoring the
NO CELL PHONE USE
sign, pulls out his Nokia.

“I don’t know.”

“Not a close friend?”

A slight dizziness, as if he is standing on the roof of a tall building and looking down. “A neighbor.”

“Listed?”

“Try DeMarco’s A to Z Tropical Fish.”

Bob’s massive hand fondles his cell phone and he speaks first to an automated voice, then to a real person. “Okay.”

A nurse scowls at Big Bob and he walks outside to make the call. She then beckons Adam.

Gina is sitting by herself in the waiting area when he comes out. Her hand goes to her own cheek in spontaneous reaction
to the sight of him, face swathed in bandage and surgical tape, bloody shirt and pants. “Oh sweet Jesus, what happened?”

“Chance is gone. He got out. I need to go look for him. Now.” Adam shoves his discharge papers into his back pocket and grabs Gina’s hand. “It’s almost dark. Can we please start looking?” Adam has inadvertently made a good choice in giving Bob Gina’s name. Of all the people he knows, she is the only one who understands his frantic desire to drive around the mean streets of Boston with half of his face numb, looking for a half-eared pit bull.

They drive in slow squares, block by block, radiating outward from the Fort Street Center. As they drive, Adam talks. “It’s all tied together; Jupe’s attack and Chance’s disappearance are two sides of the same coin. Because I failed to find Benny. No, not my failure to find Benny. It was my lack of understanding as to how much the dog meant to the man, that one dog is not like the next. I just didn’t get it, and the poor guy has been mourning—” Adam’s voice catches with a sudden and powerful dismay.

Gina takes her right hand off the wheel to place it over Adam’s. “We’ll find him. There are plenty of good ways to locate lost dogs. We’ll keep looking until we do.”

As dark descends, making the search well nigh impossible, the lidocaine begins to wear off and suddenly Adam’s face feels like he is being seared with a hot poker. The pain distorts his thinking, overwhelms him, and he lets Gina take him home. As they make the corner, he prays that his brindled dog will be sitting on the steps,
Lassie Come Home.
There is nothing there. No dog waiting for him.

Adam dreams of Sophie, of his hand on her face, but somehow it is he who feels the pain of the slap. He wakes. He
is given only a split second before the pain and worry return.

His face aches with the seventeen stitches that form a neat crescent from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth on the left side of his face. He knows that he is lucky. Jupe’s blade missed his eye and didn’t penetrate through his cheek. The slice is deep, but his plastic surgeon has promised that he’ll look piratical, not disfigured.

The hollow space under his ribs aches with emptiness.

Deep in his heart, Adam fears that Chance’s fate is going to be the same as Benny’s. His breed will be his demise. The prejudice toward his type: the automatic death sentence for animals like him in some cities. A dog can wander a long way, and he may be well away from the Animal Advocate shelter, which has his photo and his description and his tag number. Adam deeply regrets not getting around to microchipping him. Even though there is a better than even chance that no shelter would bother to run a reader over a brindled, half-eared, scarred pit bull.

The hollow place is filled with panic. He keeps losing those he loves. Veronica. Ariel. Now Chance. He presses on his sternum, willing the panic to subside. The panic begins to diminish. He is breathing too hard for someone sitting in a chair. He concentrates on slowing it down. He’s back where he started. Alone. The leash hanging on the door mocks him, tells him that he was soft and stupid to let emotional well-being be dependent upon the presence of a mere animal. Animals die; they disappear. Veronica disappeared. She died.

The bolus of grief may be for Veronica; it may be for Chance. It is indistinguishable, these two losses, and he feels guilty about that. He should mourn his sister more, but it is the dog he misses. He is alone again.

Alone with the thought that his father, his abandoning father, lives two miles away.

Adam wasn’t even ten when he last saw the man who had turned him over to the state. The visits had winnowed down to once a year, usually in the fall, so that returning to school, usually a new school, became synonymous with being made to dress in too-short dress pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt. A tie would be clipped at his throat. A knock, or sometimes the doorbell. This last time Adam had shot up so much in the previous year that he nearly reached his father’s chin. They were almost eye-to-eye, a fact that clearly startled his father. “You’ve grown some.” Adam couldn’t read the look in his father’s face. Was it concern or pride? His father wore a gray jacket, like the kind mechanics wear. He smelled of cigarettes, his fingertips stained with nicotine; his hair was still dark, slicked back, giving him a wolfish profile.

As usual, they walked to the nearest McDonald’s. All around them were families with small children, teenagers banded together, and senior citizens sipping endless cups of coffee to kill the empty hours. “You want a Happy Meal?”

“No. Quarter Pounder with cheese.”

“Please.”

“Please.” Once a year, and his father had to correct his manners.

Adam doesn’t remember much of what they talked about. His father asked the usual litany of questions an adult asks of a child he barely knows: school, friends, sports.

School was fine, he told him. He had a couple of friends. He played baseball and basketball.

Just like his exchanges with Ariel. Brief and unadorned.

This time, Adam ate quickly. Did not want to prolong the
interrogation, had nothing to ask of his father but one thing. “Will I see you again?” Meaning, “Are you coming back into my life?”

“Sure. Soon.”

The last words his father ever spoke to him. For the first time, Adam wonders why he never asked his father any questions. Why hadn’t he asked the important ones? He knows now that by this time Veronica had been dead for four years. Why hadn’t he asked about her? Had he known but not known? Suppressed the knowing? Certainly by this time, Stein would have weaseled that out of his subconscious. Along with why he never thought that his father was still alive. That after all these years, he’s never imagined him as still alive. And yet he’d never truly imagined that Veronica was dead.

A knock on his door, purposeful. At once, Adam jumps up; the hopeful grin hurts, as he wants to believe that someone has found his dog, maybe someone in the building who has been generously quiet about the illegal tenant in 3A. Adam wrenches open the door. Gina stands there, a gentle, empathetic smile on her face. A mourner’s smile. She carries a casserole dish, a carry bag full of bread and cheese and all the comfort food that she will press on him.

Adam wants to take her in his arms; instead, he goes into hers. The panic is gone. The hollow place is slowly filled as he tells Gina about Veronica being dead all these years, about his father living almost in the same neighborhood where Adam has been living since his expulsion from Sylvan Fields. She sits with him, holding his hand, rubbing his back. He doesn’t
know if she’ll stay in his life, but right now, she’s here, and he is so grateful.

Gina is slowly knitting Adam back together. She takes care of his wounded face, applications of vitamin E and gentle cleansing. She feeds him, turning his inadequate kitchen into a source of delight. She lets him hope. She lets him howl. She lets him talk. She lets him be silent. She finds his phone, which has fallen behind the futon. She makes up a list of shelters and calls in her animal-activist troops. She promises that if Chance is to be found, they will find him.

She calls Ariel for him, recruits his daughter into helping. Day by day, they scour the neighborhoods, the good ones and the bad, hanging lost-dog posters, making calls. Ariel holds Adam’s hand as they walk the streets. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s simply growing up a little that has changed the dynamic of their relationship to something that, if not perfect, at least has the seeds of hope in it. Sometimes Adam thinks that, even absent, Chance has brought them together.

Ariel has Photoshopped a picture of a brindled pit bull into a reasonable resemblance of Chance. Adam can’t bear looking at the picture. Sometimes he wonders how he ever came to lay so much human emotion at the feet of a dog. Wonders if this is normal. Gina has lent him a plaque from her store with Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Power of the Dog,” the last line of each stanza warning against giving your heart to a dog to tear.

The only light that works its way into the cellar is a thin border of gleam surrounding the cardboard squares set against the rectangular windows. I can judge day from night only by the strength of that thin line as it goes from bright sunshine to dull streetlight glow. I’m not taken outside even to defecate. My cage grows ever smaller as I try to keep the mess to one side. I am fed, watered. Talked to in low mutters, but not the kind that means sweetness, but which indicates a surliness at my mess, at having to feed and water me. All too clearly, I understand what is coming. I’d left this place a champion; now I’m the underdog. Upstairs, the sound of toenails on linoleum. Men’s voices, challenging each other. Laughter. A sharp bark followed by the sound of a hand on flesh. Shaddup.

The cellar is divided into two spaces—the space where we live and the space where we fight. When I hear the sound of feet on the stairs, I look at the other two dogs in residence. The male lowers his head, his eyes barely reflecting in the dim light. He raises a lip at the scent of the challenger. This is
someone he knows, someone he’s fought. A soft growl.
He’s a tough one. Lost to him last time.
The female circles three times and lies down. This isn’t her game.

I am on my feet. The idea of impending battle sends the adrenaline coursing through my body. I fill the room with my voice.
Hey, pal, you just wait and see. Better look to your hind end.
All sorts of flimsy challenges. Bravado. The truth is that I no longer want to obey the orders of these boys. The game that I once was compelled to play, that once was my job, has been supplanted by a new and better job. I am no longer a gladiator. I am a pet, a leash dog. I miss my man. I didn’t think that was possible, but that is the image that fills my mind, my man. Why hasn’t he come to get me? What is taking him so long? I stop barking and start howling.

One of the boys pokes me with a break stick to get me to shuddup. In one smooth action, he opens my cage and slips a muzzle over my mouth, then a pinch collar over my head. Good. Let them take me seriously, let them understand that I’m a danger to them, and maybe they’ll let me go. He doesn’t have to drag me from the cage; I leap, roaring and twisting in an attempt to intimidate him into letting go. He just laughs, and the pinch collar obstructs my breathing until my roar is squeezed off into a pitiful choking sound.

I will not be dragged. I pull against the one holding the short chain attached to the pinch collar, pull him toward the other half of the cellar. Pull toward the pit. Okay. Let’s do it. I may be out of shape, soft from good living and affection, but I’m still a dog. I’m still a fighter. Maybe a lesser challenger than this mass of muscle on feet in front of me, but I am. Woe betide the gladiator who doesn’t understand that there is a better life away from this pit. I want that life back, and the
only way to it is through this moment. Then the boy not holding my chain, he does it: wraps my jaws together with silver tape. I am not a fighter; I am bait.

I will not describe what happens. A dogfight is best left to the imagination. Suffice it to say that it will be my last fight.

It has been a very long time since Adam was with a woman. Even longer since he touched one who didn’t counter his efforts with instructions, with time limits, or with conditions. Adam knows that comparisons are madness, yet he can’t help but compare the soft curves of Gina with the exercise-hardened ridges of his former wife. Gina isn’t self-conscious about the shape of her hips, or the full, swinging weight of her breasts once released from her brassiere—breasts that are natural, unaugmented, soft and sweet. She doesn’t make excuses; she makes love.

In the end, Adam feels as though he’s been borne away.

They have left a side lamp on in the bedroom and have dozed beneath its gentle light. They wake and nuzzle and Gina reaches over to turn off the lamp. The streetlights outside his bedroom window keep the room flooded in a pale light; he hadn’t pulled the curtains, too hurried when they slipped into his room, drew back the heavy corduroy bedspread, and lay for the first time together. It wasn’t inevitable,
this act. Like their friendship, this moment has never been a foregone conclusion.

Adam flops backward on the mounded pillows and pulls Gina to him upside down across his lap. He’s told her so much about himself, his life and troubles, that he’s ashamed he’s asked so little about hers. She’s come to him whole, not in pieces, and that’s how he imagines she’s always been. But that can’t be true. There are photographs on the shelf in her store; an elderly man and a set of twins—her grandfather, with whom she lived from the time she was seventeen, and her siblings from her mother’s second marriage, no longer little kids, now young married people themselves. There are other people in her life. Certainly other men. Surely, Gina would have had someone besides lovers, surely someone better than damaged goods like him. “So why hasn’t some smarter guy than me snapped you up?”