Watchers (44 page)
On the last day of June, Nora spread a score or more of unlabeled pictures on the floor.
“It’s test time again,” she told Einstein. “Let’s see if you can do better than you did on Monday.”
Einstein sat very erect, his chest puffed out, his head held high, as if confident of his ability.
Travis was sitting in the armchair, watching. He said, “If you fail, fur face, we’re going to trade you in on a poodle that can roll over, play dead, and beg for its supper.”
Nora was pleased to see that Einstein ignored Travis. “This is not a time for frivolity,” she admonished.
“I stand corrected, professor,” Travis said.
Nora held up a flash card with TREE printed on it. The retriever went unerringly to the photo of a pine tree and indicated it with a touch of his nose. When she held up a card that said CAR, he put a paw on the photo of the car, and when she held up HOUSE, he sniffed at the picture of a colonial mansion. They went through fifty words, and for the first time the dog correctly paired every printed word with the image it represented. Nora was thrilled by his progress, and Einstein could not stop wagging his tail.
Travis said, “Well, Einstein, you’re still a hell of a long way from reading Proust.”
Rankled by Travis’s needling of her star pupil, Nora said, “He’s doing fine! Terrific. You can’t expect him to be reading at college level overnight. He’s learning faster than a child would.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so!
Much
faster than a child would.”
Much
faster than a child would.”
“Well then, maybe he deserves a couple of Milk-Bones.”
Einstein dashed immediately into the kitchen to get the box of dog biscuits.
As the summer wore on, Travis was amazed by the swift progress Nora made in teaching Einstein to read.
By the middle of July, they graduated from her homemade primer to children’s picture books by Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Phil Parks, Susi Bohdal, Sue Dreamer, Mercer Mayer, and many others. Einstein appeared to enjoy all of them immensely, though his favorites were by Parks and especially—for reasons neither Nora nor Travis could discern—the charming Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. They brought armsful of children’s books home from the city library and purchased additional stacks of them at the bookstore.
At first, Nora read them aloud, carefully moving a finger under each word as she spoke it, and Einstein’s eyes followed along as he leaned in toward the book with undivided attention. Later, she did not read the book aloud but held it open for the dog and turned the pages for him when he indicated—by a whimper or some other sign—that he had finished that portion of the text and was ready to proceed to the next page.
Einstein’s willingness to sit for hours, focusing on the books, seemed proof that he was actually reading them and not just looking at the cute drawings. Nevertheless, Nora decided to test him on the contents of some of the volumes by posing a number of questions about the story lines.
After Einstein had read
Frog and Toad All Year,
Nora closed the book and said, “All right. Now, answer yes or no to these questions.”
Frog and Toad All Year,
Nora closed the book and said, “All right. Now, answer yes or no to these questions.”
They were in the kitchen, where Travis was making a cheese-and-potato casserole for dinner. Nora and Einstein were sitting on chairs at the kitchen table. Travis paused in his cooking to watch the dog take the quiz.
Nora said, “First—when Frog came to see Toad on a winter’s day, Toad was in bed and did not want to come outside. Is that right?”
Einstein had to sidle around on his chair to free his tail and wag it.
Yes
.
Yes
.
Nora said, “But finally Frog got Toad outside, and they went ice-skating.”
One bark.
No
.
No
.
“They went sledding,” she said.
Yes
.
.
“Very good. Later that same year, at Christmas, Frog gave Toad a gift. Was it a sweater?”
No
.
.
“A new sled?”
No
.
.
“A clock for his mantel?”
Yes, yes, yes
.
.
“Excellent!” Nora said. “Now what shall we read next? How about this one.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
.”
Fantastic Mr. Fox
.”
Einstein wagged his tail vigorously.
Travis would have enjoyed taking a more active role in the dog’s education, but he could see that working intensely with Einstein was having an enormously beneficial effect on Nora, and he did not want to interfere. Indeed, he sometimes played the curmudgeon, questioning the value of teaching the pooch to read, making wisecracks about the pace of the dog’s progress or its taste in reading matter. This mild naysaying was just enough to redouble Nora’s determination to stick with the lessons, to spend even more time with the dog, and to prove Travis wrong. Einstein never reacted to those negative remarks, and Travis suspected the dog exhibited forbearance because he understood the little game of reverse psychology in which Travis was engaged.
Exactly why Nora’s teaching chores made her blossom was not clear. Perhaps it was because she had never interacted with anyone—not even with Travis or with her Aunt Violet—as intensely as she had with the dog, and the mere process of extensive communication encouraged her to come farther out of her shell. Or perhaps giving the gift of literacy to the dog was extremely satisfying to her. She was by nature a giving person who took pleasure in sharing with others, yet she had spent all of her life as a recluse without a single previous opportunity to express that side of her personality. Now she had a chance to give of herself, and she was generous with her time and energy, and in her own generosity she found joy.
Travis also suspected that, through her relationship with the retriever, she was expressing a natural talent for mothering. Her great patience was that of a good mother dealing with a child, and she often spoke to Einstein so tenderly and affectionately that she sounded as if she were addressing her own much-loved offspring.
Whatever the reason, Nora became more relaxed and outgoing as she worked with Einstein. Gradually forsaking her shapeless dark dresses for summery white cotton slacks, colorful blouses, jeans, and T-shirts, she seemed to grow ten years younger. She had her glorious dark hair redone at the beauty salon and did not brush out all the styling this time. She laughed more often and more engagingly. In conversation, she met Travis’s eyes and seldom looked shyly away from him, as she had done previously. She was quicker to touch him, too, and to put an arm around his waist. She liked to be hugged, and they kissed with ease now, although their kissing remained, for the most part, that of uncertain teenagers in the early stages of courting.
On July 14, Nora received news that lifted her spirits even higher. The Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office called to tell her that it was not going to be necessary for her to appear in court to testify against Arthur Streck. In light of his previous criminal record, Streck had changed his mind about pursuing a plea of innocence and waging a defense against charges of attempted rape, assault, and breaking and entering. He had instructed his attorney to plea-bargain with the D.A. As a result, they dropped all charges except assault, and Streck accepted a prison sentence of three years, with a provision that he serve at least two years before being eligible for parole. Nora had dreaded the trial. Suddenly she was free, and in celebration she got slightly tipsy for the first time in her life.
That same day, when Travis brought home a new stack of reading material, Einstein discovered there were Mickey Mouse picture books for children and comic books, and the dog was as jubilant about that discovery as Nora was about the resolution of the charges against Arthur Streck. His fascination with Mickey and Donald Duck and the rest of the Disney gang remained a mystery, but it was undeniable. Einstein couldn’t stop wagging his tail, and he slobbered all over Travis in gratitude.
Everything would have been rosy if, in the middle of the night, Einstein had stopped going through the house from window to window, looking out at the darkness with obvious fear.
By Thursday morning, July 15, almost six weeks after the murders at Bordeaux Ridge, two months after the dog and The Outsider had escaped from Banodyne, Lemuel Johnson sat alone in his office on an upper floor of the federal building in Santa Ana, the county seat of Orange County. He stared out the window at the pollutant-rich haze that was trapped under an inversion layer, blanketing the western half of the county and adding to the misery of hundred-degree heat. The bile-yellow day matched his sour mood.
His duties were not limited to the search for the lab escapees, but that case constantly worried him when he was doing other work. He was unable to put the Banodyne affair out of mind even to sleep, and lately he was averaging only four or five hours of rest a night. He could not tolerate failure.
No, in truth, his attitude was much stronger than that: he was
obsessed
with avoiding failure. His father, having started life dirt-poor and having built a successful business, had inculcated in Lem an almost religious belief in the need to achieve, to succeed, and to fulfill all of one’s goals. No matter how much success you had, his dad often said, life could pull the rug right out from under you if you weren’t diligent. “It’s even worse for a black man, Lem. With a black man, success is like a tightrope over the Grand Canyon. He’s up there real high, and it’s sweet, but when he makes a mistake, when he fails, it’s a mile-long drop into an abyss. An
abyss
. Because failure means being poor. And in a lot of people’s eyes, even in this enlightened age, a poor miserable failed black man is no man at all, he’s just a nigger.” That was the only time his father ever used the hated word. Lem had grown up with the conviction that any success he achieved was merely a precarious toehold on the cliff of life, that he was always in danger of being blown off that cliff by the winds of adversity, and that he dared not relent in his determination to cling fast and to climb to a wider, safer ledge.
obsessed
with avoiding failure. His father, having started life dirt-poor and having built a successful business, had inculcated in Lem an almost religious belief in the need to achieve, to succeed, and to fulfill all of one’s goals. No matter how much success you had, his dad often said, life could pull the rug right out from under you if you weren’t diligent. “It’s even worse for a black man, Lem. With a black man, success is like a tightrope over the Grand Canyon. He’s up there real high, and it’s sweet, but when he makes a mistake, when he fails, it’s a mile-long drop into an abyss. An
abyss
. Because failure means being poor. And in a lot of people’s eyes, even in this enlightened age, a poor miserable failed black man is no man at all, he’s just a nigger.” That was the only time his father ever used the hated word. Lem had grown up with the conviction that any success he achieved was merely a precarious toehold on the cliff of life, that he was always in danger of being blown off that cliff by the winds of adversity, and that he dared not relent in his determination to cling fast and to climb to a wider, safer ledge.
He wasn’t sleeping well, and his appetite was no good. When he did eat, the meal was inevitably followed by severe acid indigestion. His bridge game had gone to hell because he could not concentrate on the cards; at their weekly get-togethers with Walt and Audrey Gaines, the Johnsons were taking a beating.
He knew why he was obsessed with closing every case successfully, but that knowledge was of no help in modifying his obsession.
We are what we are, he thought, and maybe the only time we can change what we are is when life throws us such a surprise that it’s like hitting a plate-glass window with a baseball bat, shattering the grip of the past.
So he stared out at the blazing July day and brooded, worried.
Back in May, he had surmised that the retriever might have been picked up by someone and given a home. It was, after all, a handsome animal, and if it revealed even a small fraction of its intelligence to anyone, its appeal would be irresistible; it would find sanctuary. Therefore, Lem figured locating the dog would be harder than tracking down The Outsider. A week to locate The Outsider, he had thought, and perhaps a month to lay hands on the retriever.
He had issued bulletins to every animal pound and veterinarian in California, Nevada, and Arizona, urgently requesting assistance in locating the golden retriever. The flyer claimed that the animal had escaped from a medical research lab that was conducting an important cancer experiment. The loss of the dog, the bulletin claimed, would mean the loss of a million dollars of research money and countless hours of researchers’ time—and might seriously impede the development of a cure for certain malignancies. The flyer included a photograph of the dog and the information that, on the inside of its left ear, it bore a lab tattoo: the number 33-9. The letter accompanying the flyer requested not only cooperation but confidentiality. The mailing had been repeated every seven days since the breakout at Banodyne, and a score of NSA agents had been doing nothing but phoning animal pounds and vets in the three states to be certain they remembered the flyer and continued to keep a lookout for a retriever with a tattoo.
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