There were no spaces available to park along the street—signs warned nonresidents away—so I turned around and drove back toward the more commercial area, where I found a parking spot about a block from the beach. I clipped Digitaria’s leash back on his collar, got out of the car and led the dog toward the boardwalk.
In just a couple of weeks, when the summer season officially opened, lifeguards would be stationed at regular intervals along the sand and police cars would be patrolling the boardwalk, so I would never have been able to take Digitaria down to the beach because dogs were officially not permitted. But at this time of year there was no one around to object, so we crossed the boardwalk and went down a wooden ramp to the sand.
Since the day was cool and windy and the sky was overcast, there weren’t very many people on the beach, though an occasional group had set up lounge chairs and umbrellas and were playing cards or just chatting. Other people—some singly, some in pairs—were stretched out on towels, reading or listening to the radio. It was a pleasant scene and I felt more at ease here. Now, finally, I was glad I had come.
Digitaria didn’t seem so sure. He let me lead him onto the beach but then sat down before we’d gotten halfway to the shoreline and stared out at the ocean, which I suppose he’d never seen before. He tilted his head from side to side as if examining this unexpected vista from every possible angle.
He must have finally decided that this new environment was not threatening, because he soon raised himself off his haunches and trotted down to the water. He began—at first tentatively and then eagerly—to splash around at the edge of the waves as they rolled in and out, growling low in his throat. I assumed he was playing some sort of chasing game with the tide, and unclipped his leash to give him more freedom to run around.
But after just a few minutes of carefree play, he suddenly stopped where he stood, and became absolutely still. I could see his body tense as the chilly seawater bubbled around his feet. Slowly, he turned his head to the left. He sniffed the air. His eyes glittered.
And then, as if a tightly wound spring inside him had been released, he took off running. This happened so fast that he quickly became a vanishing object, already passing the first of the wide stone jetties that separated different sections of the beach from each other, before I reacted. I started running after him, calling his name as loudly as I could. As I ran, people turned their heads to stare at me. One man, thinking to help me, ran toward the dog and tried to grab him, but Digitaria just changed course, swiveling away from the Good Samaritan and sprinting straight up the beach, away from the water, finally disappearing under the boardwalk. He was now running free on the streets. My heart was pounding from running and it was only because I was almost out of breath that I didn’t break down into tears. I was sure that I would never see my dog again.
I didn’t know what to do, but some part of my brain had kicked into override mode and I found myself running again, this time heading for the car. I found it without even consciously thinking about where I had parked it, got in and started the engine. My first organized thought since I had seen the dog take off down the beach was to drive around, looking for him. What else could I do?
So I drove up and down the streets in an ever-widening grid, stopping to ask people if they had seen a small, thin dog with a tightly curled tail roaming around anywhere. Everyone said no, so I kept driving. I drove for half an hour, and after that, half an hour more. The afternoon was getting later, the weather turning unseasonably cold. And then it began to rain.
Sheets, buckets, pails of water, rain was pouring from the sky. Streams of water formed along the curbsides; rain pooled in potholes and spread across the asphalt roadbed like a watery veneer. For a few minutes, the rain started to come down so heavily that I couldn’t see well enough to drive, so I pulled over and let the engine idle.
Then, finally, I did start to cry. To the core of my being, I felt incredibly sad, terribly lonely and completely bereft. I remembered reading once—in the magazine TV Guide, of all places—that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to make television shows and movies about pets who are lost or in some kind of trouble because small children tend to identify with small animals in dangerous situations. At that moment, sitting in Jack’s car, imprisoned by the rain, that was exactly how I felt—like I was a helpless child and Digitaria was an extension of me, wandering lost and frightened in the rain. I seemed to be reexperiencing every feeling I’d ever had about abandonment, about being estranged from my family long ago, about being on my own for most of my life and too often living near the edge of the economy, supporting myself but just barely, about needing to take care of myself because there was no one else to help me. All of that got mixed up with my terrible sense of responsibility for having lost the dog and the imminent prospect of having to abandon my search and leave him alone in a world where he would face hunger and cruelty and loneliness. I cried until I had the dry heaves. I cried until I just didn’t have any tears left. I cried until I felt I had cried for everything bad that had ever happened to me in my whole life.
And then, suddenly, as I was leaning back against the car seat with my eyes closed, feeling exhausted as I listened to the rain continuing to pound on the windshield, an image came into my mind. That’s the only way I can explain it. Maybe there was a reason I had thought about the TV Guide, because it was like a screen had been turned on somewhere in some viewing theater in the back of my brain and a scene was being projected in a little bright, white square of light. The scene was made up of pixels of memory and intuition, little bits of experience and dreams and stories. It had a fire escape in it and a small dog orbiting Earth in a satellite and my uncle in his worn-out old suit, showing me how to turn the dial on a radio. Before the scene faded away, I had an idea of where Digitaria might be.
The rain was finally beginning to let up just a little as I eased the car back into the street. I left the condos and surf shops behind, heading down the peninsula on the badly torn-up road that ran between the elevated train tracks and the boardwalk—if you could call it a boardwalk, here, where many of the wooden slats were warped or missing and the beach beyond had been overrun by salt grass and tall stands of sea oats. Now, I was driving up and down the same ruined sidewalks, passing the same empty lots that I had passed by last winter. This was a no-man’s land of litter and rubble and it was going to take a long time for urban renewal to march its way down to this lonely area and reclaim it with bulldozers and backhoes. It had the look of a place that intended, almost deliberately, to continue its decline. The buried foundations of old bungalows, the piles of rotting, painted planks that used to be stairs and porches seemed more like archaeological relics than urban debris waiting to be replaced with upscale versions of what used to be.
Peering through the rain, I kept watch for the dog as I passed the remnant of each cross street, but I didn’t expect to find him yet. I just kept driving until I reached the corner where, up the block, I could see the squat brick box that was the shell of the Sunlite Apartments, framed on either side by the blackened trees that I remembered from the last time I’d been here. The rest of the landscape around me was flat, overgrown with tangled weeds.