“I know you think this was my fault,” I said. “But it wasn’t. You break the law, you take the consequences, right?”
“Don’t you sad-sack me,” Gerry said. “I got some serious side projects going on, real entrepreneur stuff. You think I give a turd about being fired? I work nights at the prison. I work weekends at the casino. I’m a survivor, Hanky. I’ll have a new day job by tomorrow, my friend. I’ve worked every day of my life. But you wouldn’t know anything about work, would you?” Gerry hefted the box, tucked it under his arm. “By the end of the day, tomorrow,” he repeated, then took a long look at those dogs, as if this was all he’d miss about the Parkton County Sheriff’s Station.
* * *
Evening came. My breath turned white. Darkness blued the corners of the room. The dogs huddled in the center of their cell, sleeping as one, their nit-lined coats rising and falling in a patchwork of snores and dream-whimpers that kept the cold at bay. It seemed those dogs knew something we humans had forgotten. In the next cell, all that remained of Gerry’s ex — old lady’s kids were crayon drawings on the walls. In the muted light, they resembled ancient cave paintings. Across the cement was depicted an arcing dog team, purple and brown in the near dark, towing a great sled that seemed to lift and take to the sky. It was like some mythic story, or an interpreted constellation, an arm of the Milky Way tamed by humans, man and animal jumping the hoop of the North Star.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Vadim.
The hardest thing in life is to see beyond the known. What I knew was that there was a little boy seven hundred miles away, and he was alone in a room I couldn’t picture. He liked science, feared dogs. And that was it. He would stay that way in my mind until I knew otherwise. His mother worked — in a lab, a classroom, an office? — on campus, and unless I knew where she picked up fried chicken on the way home, without knowing the rights and lefts of her drive, whether she entered through the front door, the side, through the garage, I’d never be able to put them together in my mind. That boy would always be alone.
As it grew dark, I could see, through my one mesh-reinforced window, the red safety lights come to life atop the smokestacks of Hormel. The towers were hard at work, pluming steam vented from the rendering floors, where hogs danced their way into sausage casings, where pigs poured their hearts into patties and links. It was easy not to think about the grim work that went on twenty-four hours a day in the meat factory below. The simplest thing in the world was not to visualize the hydraulic slaughter line or picture the busy air knives and cauterizing belts.
As the moon rose, a soft light illuminated the smokestacks, setting to glow the lime in their mortar, giving the giant towers a mosaic look — like the pattern of fish scales, or the blue-and-white weave of old maize. The bricks glinted with bits of silica that had baked to glass in a Kansas City kiln a hundred years ago, and the blinking crowns of the towers were glazed maroon with a buildup of carbon. The towers made me think of the minarets of Herat, pillars that stood tall during the sacking of the year 1222, hovering blue and floral above the executions of all Herat’s 160,000 inhabitants.
I decided, lying on my metal bench, to drop this tidbit into my next pop-culture lecture, maybe let my students jaw on the jerky of perspective for a while. A hundred and sixty thousand, I’d tell them, is a fair guess as to the sum of people you meet in life, the number of humans you make eye contact with, the tally of beings who accidentally brush your shoulder in the hall or unintentionally knuckle the back of your hand in a tight elevator. I’d ask my students to imagine that many people disappearing. Picture them missing. See that birth-to-death chain of every person you would’ve met — broken. See yourself walking alone, moving through life without each of the thousands of human moments that confirm you’re alive.
I thought of all the people I’d hoped would come visit me, and the list was ridiculous. They were the people that I’d never see again, that I probably wouldn’t recognize if I did. Peabody was dead. He had to be. Janis’ face, when I conjured it, was now the stranger on the bronze plaque. My mother had never been anything more than a crumbling plaster cast and a yellowy X-ray.
Then it struck me that I probably wouldn’t be lecturing tomorrow.
The room grew cold, and as I drifted toward sleep, I’d have lain down with the dogs if I could have. A bird landed on the perch outside my window. It was a pretty thing. I wish I could tell you which kind it was. Except for the noteworthy birds, all the rest have merged in my memory into a representative variety, a catch-all composite: medium-sized, pigeon-color, grainy beak.
This bird flapped its wings and pecked twice at the glass.
Did I mention that birds were supposed to be symbols of freedom and liberty?
As quickly as it had arrived, the bird startled and was gone.
Before bed, I, too, urinated on the floor.
Chapter Seven
Sheriff Dan woke me in the morning. He extended a paper cup, half full of coffee, through bars that were white with frost. “Reveille,” he said.
His breath shone crystalline in the morning light.
Like many people, I sleep in a fetal position, with one hand in my drawers. And I’m not used to doing anything before my morning ritual — I hadn’t stretched or flossed, let alone gargled, and who would greet visitors before enjoying that heavenly, cottony, first Q-tip of the day?
Shirttails out, wet spot on my collar, I shielded my eyes, calling out, “What?”
The light was painfully bright. As I stood wincing, I located its source: A loading-bay door stood open at the end of the room, a rolling steel shutter that I hadn’t noticed before. Through it, a parking lot glowed afterlife-white.
Sheriff Dan shook his head. “You can snooze through anything, Professor.” He glanced at his watch for effect and handed me the cup of coffee.
I spit the first sip all over the floor. “It’s ice cold.”
“Get used to it,” he said.
I was getting a little tired of Sheriff Dan’s tone. As far as I could tell, he possessed no special attributes that qualified him to boss around his fellow man. But I hesitated to say anything. I imagined, behind him in the stationhouse, a desk on which sat Keno’s second ball. I pictured a spare handgun or maybe a nightstick as the only thing that blocked it from rolling off the desktop and smashing open on the floor. How could I get my hands on that ball? I sweetened my approach:
“I’m willing to meet you halfway on the coffee,” I said, very politely. “A little warmer-upper would do.”
“The teat of Christian tolerance has about run dry, my friend,” Sheriff Dan said. “And I’m not about to let you scald the face of peace and justice.”
His voice was more than a little snarky.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I’d never throw coffee on anyone.”
“This from a man who defiles scripture?” he asked. He pointed to the dogs’ cell next door. “The deputy who took care of these dogs this morning was a Christian, and he didn’t take kindly to hosing Bible pages down the sewer, not on his first day of dog duty.”
I followed his gesture to the cell in question, to where the dogs had shredded that ten-cent Bible, and I saw that it was empty, hosed clean except for a few soggy, uneaten biscuits. Those sad, stupid dogs, I thought. All that remained of them was a series of wet streaks on the floor, leading from the cell to the back door, places where their fur had mopped comet tails of filth as their limp bodies were dragged out back to some pickup, waiting to haul them to the dump.
“What’d I tell you?” Sheriff Dan asked. “Peace and quiet.”