The Dogs of Winter (46 page)

Oddly enough it was Chance who had experienced a number of recurring nightmares together with intrusive memories and vivid recollections of the photographs he’d been asked to look at and these accompanied by the purely mental image of this shy and diminutive creature, alone in those still dark hours, inquiring of the now speechless effigy at her side. Off this, he would move to imagining her out there in the apartment in Palo Alto, alone in some no doubt terminally banal setting, attempting to “distract herself by watching television.” What would she watch? He wondered. What could she possibly find in that barren land that would not lead to the gouging out of one’s own eyes? The image suggested Lear and unaccommodated man, the thing itself. Job at least had God in the whirlwind. Mariella got police procedurals and vampire bloodletting. And that was just the news. He seemed to recall that she worked full time as a packager for Granny Goose potato chips in San Jose and that prior to the accident her interests had included painting, drawing, and collecting small statues of frogs.

There came a night, alone in his new apartment, half in the bag, he had actually gone so far as to imagine his driving the forty-five minutes it might take to reach her. She was not unattractive. In his report, he had described her as follows:

A petite 39-year-old woman of Italian descent with black hair that is pulled back tightly into a bun. She has straight, almost classical, features and large brown eyes. Her fingers are well manicured and she wears no nail polish. She wears a leather coat over a tan pin-striped suit and brown leather high-heeled lace-up boots. Her general manner, while pleasant, is marked by an absence of spontaneity. The interview proceeded in a series of questions followed by unelaborated answers.

What he had thought but not recorded, what set her apart from so many of the others, was that she had about her some aspect of the caged bird, of a life un-lived. And it was just that, he thought, the horror of the life un-lived that had found him out, in the midst of his own decline, wherein each day seemed at risk of being even more dimly lit than the one before it.

He held to the belief, possibly illusory, that there are times in a person’s life, moments really, when the right word or motion, when a single touch might wound or heal. It was to this end that he imagined the drive. It was not about some sexual conquest. He might just as easily have enlisted the aid of another had another arrived. It was the
striking through
that he envisioned, the freeing of the caged heart, and he went so far as to imagine the flowers he would carry, the bottle of wine . . . He knew better, of course. He could see all of this for what it was, the half-mad quixotic gesture better dreamt than executed because well . . . because that was what life was like in the end. It was an image in a glass darkly. It was all just half lived. There would be no drives and no interventions. The workings of the world would not permit them. In lieu of these he opted for additional wine. But my God, he thought a moment later, refilling a glass, imagining for the simple sake of imagining it his arrival at her doorstep, what
would
she think? He heard the night made horrible with her screams.

He dozed thinking of Blake:
“Every night and every morn / some to misery are born. . . . Every morn and every night / some are born to sweet delight. / Some are born to sweet delight, / some are born to endless night.”
He woke later in the still dark to the waves of Ocean Beach pounding through the walls of his room. Rising, he was treated to a strange orange light through the tiny window of his bathroom facing east, where in the hills around Richmond the fires continued to burn.

MARI KORNHAUSER

Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose novels include
The Dogs of Winter
,
Pomona Queen
,
Unassigned Territory
, and
Tapping the Source
, a National Book Award Nominee.
Tijuana Straits
won a L.A. Times Book Award. He lives in Southern California, where he also writes screenplays. His credits include episodes of Deadwood, Sons of Anarchy, and John from Cincinnati, which he co-created with David Milch.

ALSO BY KEM NUNN

Tapping the Source

Unassigned Territory

Pomona Queen

The Dogs of Winter

Tijuana Straits

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

SCRIBNER

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Copyright © 1997 by Kem Nunn

Originally published in hardcover in 1997 by Scribner

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-79334-9
ISBN 978-1-4391-2515-1 (ebook)

First Scribner trade paperback printing March 1998

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Cover design by Joe Perez

Cover photo by G. Motil/Westlight