One of the Its got too excited and vomited on my pant leg. Twice.
“I see even our four-legged friends aren’t immune to your considerable charms,” said Mr. Weis.
“Watch out or I’ll put him in your lap.”
“I’ll have you know that animals happen to adore me. Why, I handled an animal act back in the day-”
“Here.” I picked up the It and dropped the animal in his lap. The dog licked his face, nuzzled his cheek, and puked on his shoulder.
“I shall have my revenge, dear boy.”
“On the bright side, at least we have one clean set of clothes between us.”
“I brought an extra set of clothes for both of you,” Mabel called over her shoulder. “I had a feeling there might be some redecorating going on.”
“‘Redecorating,’ ” said Mr. Weis. “What a tasteful way to put it.”
Beth pulled a hand towel from her bag and handed it to me so I could clean off my shoes. The Its had once again gathered on or around the wheelchair in back and were craning their necks to stick their heads out the back window, which was opened a third of the way.
We pulled into a gas station and I helped Mr. Weis into his wheelchair so he could go into the restroom and change his shirt. According to the directions, we were only a mile or so away from the facility.
As I stood outside the restroom door waiting for Mr. Weis, I saw another station wagon drive past, this one heading back toward Hebron. There was a woman of about forty driving, and two young children riding in the backseat. A happy little dog was bouncing between the kids, sticking its head out the window, having a grand time. The children were laughing and the mother was smiling. I wondered if the dog was a new pet, and if they’d just gotten it from Keepers. I caught sight of Beth and Mabel (who’d also seen the children and the dog) and knew they were wondering the same thing. I hoped the children had just gotten their new pet from the same place we were about to deposit four more. Even if that weren’t the case, I hoped Beth and Mabel thought it was; it would make leaving the four Its there easier for them.
Both of them had cried a little that morning as we loaded the dogs into the station wagon. They might as well have been abandoning newborn babies in trash cans, it hurt that much for them. Mr. Weis planned on treating everyone to an “extra-special” lunch after everything was finished, “… and maybe even a movie, if there’s time.” I thought that was a great idea. We’d all need to do something happy after this was done, regardless of how much Mabel and Beth insisted this wasn’t going to upset them.
Mr. Weis rolled out in a crisp, clean white shirt, tossing his soiled one at me. “Easy on the starch next time, pal.”
“Thanks for the Keaton book,” I said. His gift to me had been a copy of Buster Keaton’s autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick .
“Ah, so you can read as well as launder clothes. Every day in every way, I find you more and more adequate.” He winked at me and grinned. “Glad you liked it. If you want, I got Groucho’s autobiography, as well. Might learn a few pointers about comic timing from it-God knows you could use some.”
I helped him back into the car, folded up and replaced his wheelchair, then went into the men’s room to change pants and clean myself up.
Onward.
The facility came into view about two minutes later.
It sat on the right side of the road, at the end of a long asphalt drive, directly in the middle of a wide expanse of blacktop like a passenger ship on a flat dark sea; Noah’s Ark, Day 41. It was quite a large one-story building, made of limestone, concrete blocks, and metal. It could have been a city jail, or a building from an old prison compound suddenly displaced in the center of a field. There was no sign on the road telling you what the place was, if it was open, or why it was even here.
The asphalt drive branched off in two directions, and at least here there was sign telling you why: VISITOR PARKING TO THE LEFT. The right-side parking lot was for SANCTIONED PERSONNEL ONLY, and was half-filled with about a dozen vans (some of which looked to be converted bread delivery trucks), each a dull tan color with only the word KEEPERS painted on the sides.
It took us a minute to find a parking space because the lot was quite full. What struck me was not that there were so many cars, but that so many of them were expensive cars, rich-people cars, cars driven by owners who were too important to be bothered performing a distasteful duty like the one we were here to discharge.
Beth parked, shut off the engine, then looked at Mabel. Neither of them said anything for a few moments which, in this heat, seemed two-and-a-half eternities long.
“I really don’t mean to sound like I’m trying to take over or assume the role of cantankerous old fart,” said Weis, “but it seems to me that this is the point where one of us should at least pretend we’re going to get out of the car.”
“In a minute,” said Mabel, very softly, but underlined in steel.
Farther back, the Its sat still and silent, as if they knew why we were here.
“Maybe I should go check it out first,” I said.
“‘Check it out’?” said Weis. “ ‘Check it out’? What are you, Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar? We casing the joint for a heist? ‘Check it out.’ Lord save us from amateurs.”
“I think that sounds like a good idea,” Beth said. “We don’t want to be wandering around with the dogs and have no idea where to put them.”
Mabel nodded. “I don’t think the dogs would like it if we dragged this out for too long.”
I looked at Weis the same instant he looked at me.
The dogs. They had said “the dogs.”
I suppose in a way it must make it easier for a person to do something like this if they can remove their hearts from the event to some degree. Put your father in a nursing home, you suddenly stop referring to him as “Dad” and just as “him” when talking to the admissions nurse; “Dad” gives his identity a too-close proximity to your conscience, but “him,” “him” is safe because it’s nonspecific, “him” is a term applied to a Person You Don’t Really Know, someone removed from you, someone you haven’t spent your entire life around and who has helped determine the kind of person you’ve become. So “Dad” becomes “him,” “Mom” becomes “her,” and “the Its” become “the dogs.”
Christ, I felt suddenly so sad. I suspected Weis did, too. When our gazes met I could see the signal flares going off behind his eyes: Mayday, Mayday, we’re sinking fast, jettison all unnecessary cargo immediately, Mayday, Mayday…
I opened the door and started to climb out. “You wanna come along, Mr. Weis?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
I retrieved his wheelchair and got him situated, then leaned down by Beth’s window. “I’ll find out what we’re supposed to do, where we take them and all of that.”
“Thanks. It’ll give us a couple of minutes to say good-bye.”
“I figured.”
She leaned out and kissed me. After all this time, her lips on mine still made my knees melt.
I grabbed the handles of Weis’s chair and moved toward the building.
“Alone at last,” he said.
“I didn’t know you cared.”
“No one ever does, it’s part of my well-honed mystique.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that so I left it alone. “Any thoughts on what movie you’d like to see later?”
“So long as it doesn’t have Meryl Streep in it, I don’t care. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a great actress and a looker, but she reminds me too much of my daughter. Have I mentioned that I’m a little irked at my daughter right now? I mean, I don’t expect her to fly up here from L.A. every chance she gets, but I have trouble believing that someone can be so busy that they can’t pick up a goddamn phone and call for five minutes once a week. I’m not asking to be the center of her life, you understand, but it gets boring as hell out here on the periphery sometimes. Was I raving there for a moment? Sorry.”