Billie took out a key ring and unlocked the door to Ward 4A, where the Dangerous Dogs were kept. In this ward, on each kennel card affixed to the top of a cage were the red-inked words CAUTION — SEVERE. This was their temperament rating. On the concrete wall facing the row of cages were thick steel rings hanging from exposed screws — tie-outs that these strong dogs had pulled clean out of the wall. Propped against the wall in one corner was a catchpole, next to the industrial, coiled black hose.
Cloud was not where I had last seen her, the first cage near the door. Instead of Cloud, that cage held a large white dog with cropped ears and pink eyes; it sat coolly facing the front bars.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“She’s been moved to the end of the row.”
I felt a moment’s guilt at not tending to the dogs in the cages I raced past to find my own. When I saw my girl, her white coat defiled, I cried out her name and then just cried. She moved to the front bars as Billie opened the door just enough to attach her collar and leash. Billie told me to let her walk Cloud out of the ward, Cloud to the left of her, Billie’s body between Cloud and the caged dogs. When we reached the entrance to the ward, I saw the white dog with cropped ears, but it was not in the first cage by the door. It was in the second cage from the door, where George had once been next to Cloud but unable to see her. I realized that there were two white dogs with cropped ears and pink eyes, mirroring each other’s stance in their respective cages. The dogs had short hair and broad, muscular chests. They were not pitties, but seemed to be Molossers, the predecessors of the bully breeds. The dogs looked to be about 130 pounds, larger even than Cloud.
“Are they Presas?” I asked Billie. Years before, when Steven had lived in San Francisco, a pair of untrained Presa Canarios had gotten out of their owner’s apartment into the hallway of a tony apartment building in Pacific Heights and mauled a young woman who could not get the key to her apartment out fast enough. The woman had died from her injuries, which included nearly eighty wounds, with only her scalp and feet unharmed. The resulting trial sent the dogs’ reckless owners — one of them a lawyer — to jail for fifteen years for second-degree murder.
“They’re Dogos Argentinos,” Billie said. “But really they’re scapegoats, brought in last night.”
“What’s their story?”
“Same old story.”
Either she was giving me credit for knowing or she was blowing me off.
As we passed their cages, the Dogos rose and circled their quarters; their movements were identical, like synchronized swimmers. Yet they could not see each other to know what the other was doing. Each dog looked at me, growling and curling its lip.
Once out of the ward, I dropped to my knees and hugged my dog. Her ears were still flattened in fear, but her tail began wagging, and she leaned into me, shoving her massive head into my chest.
“You’re safe now,” I said.
As happy as she was to see me, she caught a whiff of the ham awaiting and dug her nose into the tote bag.
Billie waited just long enough for Cloud to get a big mouthful, then slipped a muzzle on her and fastened it. “Let’s sign her out.”
In the crowded lobby, a young Hispanic boy came over and asked why my dog was wearing a cage on her nose and what I was going to name her.
“Her name is Cloud.”
“Cool. Can I pet her?”
I went to the desk while Billie stood with Cloud, but I heard her tell the little boy not to pet the dog, because it was dangerous. Coming from Billie, that comment spun me around. She believed that? Or she was following the rules.
A young man with a frightened-looking chow mix stood beside me, furious at the woman behind the desk, who told him that the fee to surrender a dog was $35. “Fuck that. I’ll tie the dog up outside.”
Billie told him to leave the dog, that she would pay the fee.
“Not again,” said the woman behind the desk. Because Billie knew her, she expedited the process, and in just minutes we were walking out the door with a freed Cloud. After the din inside, noisy East Harlem seemed welcoming. I waited for Cloud to relieve herself at the curb. Distracted by the world of normal smells, she seemed overcome with the information she received from the sidewalk, the fire hydrant, the occasional city tree. We say someone has “come to her senses” to mean that person has come around to acknowledge reality, but here a creature was literally coming to her senses, and it was deeply moving. I was in no hurry to pull her along; I took my cue from Cloud. I could see that she was torn between her interest in what was around her, and her desire to be in my arms. I crouched and Cloud simply leaned against me. Billie bent down and scratched Cloud’s ears and took off the muzzle, which earned her a lick and a lean.
I realized that I was laughing. Then Billie was, too, trying to stay upright while my enormous dog toppled us.
Billie started toward the car, but I said we should give Cloud a walk first. We turned east to walk to the river. The wind had died down, and there was a feeling of the coming spring, or so I imagined in my happiness. It wasn’t as if early crocuses had appeared, just that the air had a softness that had been absent before. A slight breeze off the river reached Cloud and her head lifted. I realized that my dog had not set foot on grass since the temperament test five months ago. A scabby park around the corner would do for now. It also had a long sand pit for broad-jumping. Billie found a stick and threw it, but Cloud was no retriever. She stayed in the pit and rolled on her back in the sand.
I opened my tote bag and took out her celebration dinner, the pound of Polish sliced ham. After she swallowed it in a couple of gulps, Billie offered her one of our scones. I brought out a bottle of water with a squirt top, and Cloud drank from the arc of water I squeezed for her.
A police boat was patrolling the river alongside us. Across the river was Wards Island, which housed the Manhattan Psychiatric Center and Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center. The light brown brick buildings were forbidding, with long rows of barred windows and the look of inherent desolation. They seemed a monument to suffering and despair, but they could not take the shine off this day.
We walked to the car and put Cloud in the backseat, which Billie had covered with a clean quilt. But Cloud insinuated herself into the front by pushing between the bucket seats until I could not see Billie at the wheel. Before she started the car, she took out her phone. “I know someone else who would like to be in on this.” She pointed the phone at Cloud, virtually in the front seat, and took a couple of photos. “McKenzie will appreciate these.”
And she would know.
We buckled in and headed up the FDR to the Willis Avenue Bridge — the way to beat the toll — to get out of the city.
Billie turned on the radio — Lolawolf.
“You know,” Billie said, “you ask yourself what you want. And you try your first choice first. If you can’t get away with that, then you go to the next thing you want, and try that. But you must try the first choice first.”
“I’ve taken risks. Just a different kind. I used to write poetry.”
Billie howled with laughter. “You make me think of what that guy said, that if it weren’t for poetry, eighth-grade girls in corduroy jumpers and black tights would have to make some friends.”
“I wasn’t that bad. I just liked to read, and I tried to write now and then. I tried it, is my point. When I saw that I wasn’t getting anywhere, that’s when I started the work I do now.”
“You’ve never told me what your research is about.”
“Pathological altruism.” Just saying it aloud centered me. It reminded me that I was working on something worth the attention, that I had a life that included work worth doing.