“Officer,” she said as he turned to go.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Are you all right?”
“Ma’am?”
“I mean, you just don’t look like you’re doing so hot there. I thought maybe you had the flu or something.”
“No, ma’am. It’s not the flu. Good night, now.”
17
IT WAS JUST gray dawn when his crying woke her, and whatever she’d been dreaming fled from her like the warmth of the bed as she drew back the covers, as she sat up and pulled the robe around her—“It’s all right, boy, I’m up, I’m here”—and in the dark there was the weak thump of tail as she bent to collect him from his nest of blankets and old stuffed toys at the foot of the bed, the dog like an old stuffed thing himself with all the stuffing dragged out, all the living heaviness gone from him now, hardly more to this creature in her arms than the sack of skin and the brittle bones it held, the riddled bones, and her dream, whatever it was, was gone.
Downstairs she set him on his feet by the door and waggled her own feet into the soft boots there and fed her arms into her father’s old canvas jacket and unlocked and swung in the wooden door, “Watch your toes, boy,” and pushed open the stormdoor and followed him out onto the small wooden deck that overlooked the long slope of the yard and the wire fence and the fifty acres beyond that she rented to old Jimmy McVeigh, or, rather, to his sons now. The dog making his way over the top crust of snow to the iron clothesline bar, and no sound at that cold hour but the soft press of the snow under his paws. Stopping and lowering his haunches at the foot of the iron bar, no longer able to lift his leg, the snow hissing and steaming beneath him.
There he squatted, the dark outline of a dog in the glistening white. A thin and homely shadow of a dog, much as he’d looked when the boys had first brought him home, what—thirteen years ago? Brought him to her as if there would be no question, no resistance, this starved and dirty animal. Danny and Marky coming up the walk with the animal wobbling along behind them and nearly through the front door before she pushed them back outside, then reached to pull the boys toward her, to separate them from the animal, the shocking thing, a creature that surely would’ve died given another day.
Get inside, she’d told them. She would call the pound, the Board of Health, the county sheriff.
But Danny had looked at her, and then at Marky, who with his strange agility had twisted free of her and stood petting the animal’s skull.
You know what they’ll do to him, Danny said quietly.
He was sly, her Daniel, so sly. And Marky knew at once what he meant, and the fight was over; she could never do that to her son.
Danny kneeled next to his brother and began stroking the dog’s ragged spine. What will we call him? he asked, and Marky said Snickers, but then rethought; the boys had been watching westerns on TV. Wyatt Earp! he said, and Danny nodded. The outlaw sheriff, he said.
Fifty feet of hose lay sun-heated in the grass and as they washed the filth from his coat Wyatt Earp stood docile, soaked, the more wasted and pathetic for his soaking, a living skeleton. Rachel at the kitchen window shaking her head. Her good fabric shears flashing in the sun as the boys snipped the burrs from the dog’s coat, the boys quiet and serious as surgeons. Danny emptying one of Roger’s old jelly jars of screws and pouring in lawnmower gas and dropping into this—he alone, not Marky, who could not be the cause of any creature’s death—tick after tick, some as fat as blueberries. They cleverly made a collar out of an old leather belt, and lastly they pooled their savings for the vet’s shots and for dogfood. The county would do the neutering for free.
Well. He’d been a good dog, after all. Smart, obedient, happy—devoted to Danny as if he’d never forgotten that day, that sudden change of fortune. When Danny went away, years later, leaving him behind with Rachel and Marky, he was not the same animal. His heart was broken. Sickness saw an opening.
Now in the dawn, in the cold, the dog returned to her. “Good boy,” she said and held open the stormdoor. So much life, so much love, and memory, and grief in such a short-lived life. Does he have any idea what a life is? What his might have meant?
In the kitchen she filled the kettle and lit the burners and took out the half can of dogfood from the fridge and spooned the remainder into the saucepan. She crushed up one of his pills and added that to the dogfood, and with the spoon began to break it all down over a low flame while he sat on his kitchen blankets, watching her, shivering with cold and pain. Rachel at the stove stirring his breakfast, her eyes on the window where the new day was coming, the sky growing pale in the east and you should put him down, Rachel. The only kind thing to do. The vet’s advice.
But Danny is far away and Marky knows only his love of the dog, his terror of death, and Roger is gone. There’s no one but you to make that choice, to say whether this animal, this member of the family, after all, goes on living or has come now, so quickly, to his end.
It was the water, she remembered—the sound of water in the pipes. If he had not used the outdoor spigot she would not have come downstairs. She would never have seen him standing out there with the hose in his hand. Would never have seen the look on his face the moment he knew she was there, the moment he knew he’d been seen.
Of course, if she had not had a date with Gordon Burke—if she’d never had feelings for Gordon Burke—Danny would not have been out at all that night.
This was her final thought on the matter, again and again, all these years later. Standing at her grandmother’s stove, the winter sun rising, stirring dogfood and drugs in a saucepan for the outlaw sheriff.
18
SUTTER WOKE UP coughing as if he would drown and he coughed his way into the bathroom and put his hands to his knees and stood bow-backed until at last he hocked the thing up and into the bowl, thick ball of Jesus knows what that bobbed in the water in a spreading cloud of pink. He spat again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood over the bowl dizzy and sweating.
He got into his jeans and his shirt and stepped barefoot onto the cold concrete of the motel’s second-story walkway and lit the day’s first cigarette and stood looking down on the gray lot below. Birds somewhere, calling and whistling. Iowa birds. Semis somewhere, brakes gasping, the big diesel engines rumbling. He looked down from the height of the balcony and he remembered falling though space and then he remembered his dream: he’d been on the river with his father, the two of them in his father’s old johnboat way up north above the falls, his father heavy in the stern and himself just a small boy riding high in the bow. But in the dream they had no outboard and when he searched the floor for the paddle he found nothing but dead fish, the boat rocking in the current and moving fast as the falls roared louder and his father yelling, Just hold to the gunwales, Tommy, and don’t… but he could not hear for the roar of the water, and then the bow was out in open space and he with it, way out over the drop with the weight of his father in the stern, nothing under the bow but the plunging water and the open air and the far small rocks below. He hung there and he hung there, the world below him, before the boat fulcrumed over the edge and began its dive and he’d woken up with his fists gripping the gunwales and his lungs full of water.