One Good Dog Read online

  I made short work of him in the practice pit, but he stuck in my mind as someone whose story was not singular, but indicative of a whole world beyond my cellar. The idea began to take hold. I spoke to others as we waited our turn, and, yes, they knew of these fellows who lived in houses, who didn’t bite for a living. Fellows who owed everything they had to packs of humans. Fellows who were expected to submit at all times like puppies to a grown male, even up into their mature years. They’d seen them, and not just in the arena. They’d seen them as my competitors were walked down the streets of the city, being brought to me on their own chains, they’d seen these others attached to light, meaningless leashes, happily gazing up at the faces of those who held the ends. They were usually dragged away to one side as the gladiators lumbered by, the fear in their people telegraphing caution to those at the end of the leash. The occasional lifted lip, not in challenge, but in submission. They were a hoot. Can you imagine?

  I could, and, increasingly, I did. I was good in the pit, but I knew that there would always be the day when I’d be beaten—either by another fellow or by my boys. Beaten as punishment for being beaten. It’s what happened to Dad at least twice in my life.

  But there was another sort of fellow that I met on a more regular basis, the one that lived an entirely independent life: the street dog. Usually more intelligent than the occasional leash dog, these street dogs were savvy. They understood the freedom of a life lived naturally. If they were often cold, hungry, and in danger of being run over, they lived their lives as they pleased. Unfortunately for them, they were also an easy target; put a plate of food out and, wham bam, they were snagged. Not just by my boys and their ilk but by the authorities, the men or women who made such dogs disappear in exactly the same way as my boys. One minute licking their hindquarters on the sidewalk, the next in a cage. But their stories were the best. High adventure, travel, frequent mating. Oh boy. It was rumored that the street dogs who were captured by the authorities only made it out if they were charming. Those who weren’t charming didn’t. But it’s hard to know charming when your whole life has been directed toward being irascible. No one knew where they went, but it didn’t take a standard poodle to figure it out. The odor of charring meat and bones that threaded through the miasma of scents that filled the city air was enough of a clue. Through the diesel and effluvia, doughnuts and wieners, the sweaty population and its overlay of artificial scent, working its way like a winding river of finality, the smoke of oblivion.

  I was resting in my cage after a particularly challenging bout. My opponent had nearly prevailed, until by sheer bull force I pushed him over the line that demarcates winning. They thrust the breaking stick between my jaws and the game was over. I was sliced up pretty good, and one of the boys had made a squeamish attempt to stitch up the gash on my chest. The stitches pulled the skin together something like a badly made baseball. I licked at them, tasting the rough edges of my blood-crusted trussed skin, but I couldn’t reach the worst of it. My opponent lay on a pile of newspapers, his head flung back like he was baying at the moon. There was still a light in his eye, so I knew he hadn’t yet bled to death. I snortled an apology through the bars of my cage and he lifted his head. He snortled back, a kind of absolution for just doing my job. We’re a brutish lot, but we don’t hate one another. If we had hands, we could break out of here. He agreed, then laid his head down, and I watched as his spirit lifted away.

  A pounding above our heads. Mom sat up, dispersing her latest litter onto the bottom of her cage. The men. The men are here. We’d heard about them, the men who come and our kind disappear. We’d heard they removed us to bigger cages, smaller cages; to fight us with other species, to simply cut our throats. Rumors of the men circulated most often after one of us died. A dime is dropped and things happen.

  We heard the percussion of big boys’ feet upstairs, dashing toward the back of the apartment, clambering down the back stairs. I knew that there was a door to the outside, to the square of dirt where we were allowed to defecate twice a day. None of the boys ever stepped foot out there in the field of shit. We who used the yard, trotting around the perimeter, sniffing out one another over and over again, raising our legs against one another’s mark, we knew how to skirt the worst of the mess. If we lived on the outside, we’d be careful to place our business away from where we lived.

  I heard the back door open; I stood and pressed my very sore nose against the wire of my cage and pricked my ears. I sniffed the air, an amalgam of our boys’ pungent sweat and the scent of the men. The men and one female. Her female scent lightly mingled with her heat. My mother shoveled her brood against the back of the cage with her nose, a worried gargle in her throat. I shook myself, ready for anything.

  Chapter Four

  The one-bedroom apartment is his accountant’s idea. “Until your lawyer straightens out the alimony and child support, you can’t afford to go on living in hotels.”

  As the months rolled by, Adam had moved from one hotel to another, each one losing a star as the costs of keeping his almost ex-wife and child provided for, writing check after check to keep up with the billable hours of his lawyers fighting on the three fronts of his wife’s complaint, Sophie’s complaint, and what he determined was Dynamic’s illegal firing, drained his nonrenewable resources.

  “Get yourself a little place, cook your own meals. Economize a little, Adam.”

  “Afford?” For some reason, Adam is stuck on that word. It has been thirty-five years since the word afford and its ugly stepsister, economize, have been used against him, and then by one of his foster fathers with an electric bill in his hand. Not since the early days of their marriage had Adam expressed any concern about finances to Sterling. Maybe even never. By the time they met at a corporate retreat at which her father was keynote speaker, Adam was well on the way to self-made millionaire. A man whom her father, the all-powerful Herbert Carruthers, could admire.

  Maybe he even encouraged spending, or at least did nothing to discourage the acquisition of possessions required of their place in life. For Sterling, it was the beautiful fashion-forward clothes, the legitimate designer accessories, the best and most current automobiles—gas consumption be damned—the home entertainment systems, and the luxury vacations. For Ariel, the increasingly more expensive horses, the promised Miata for her sixteenth birthday, and a guarantee that she would never suffer a student loan in her life. His little girl wants for nothing. His little wife had always wanted for nothing, and she intends to keep it that way.

  Sterling knows what their marriage is worth and is scooping everything up with both arms. The houses, the portfolios, the cars, except his 2007 Lexus, a car that he would have been trading in this year as outmoded, time for a new one. The real estate investments. Her lawyers are really good. Words like mental cruelty are being lobbed at him; he is accused of being threatening, then is threatened himself with a restraining order. The documents chronicle the shadow of fear under which his family now claims to have lived. Adam knows exactly what threat he’s levied against Sterling, the threat to her social standing. Her husband is the crazy man who struck his PA. He is the executive whose massive takeover campaign failed to launch.

  She can no longer hold her head up in polite society. People like them don’t strike underlings, at least not in public. People like them don’t fail.

  His helpmeet, his partner in life, his Sterling has turned on him.

  Adam leans his forehead against the glass of the picture window that looks out onto the street. There are no curtains on the window, and the landlord has yet to install the promised venetian blinds. There is one bedroom, just big enough for his double mattress on its frame and a bureau that he liberated from the attic of the Sylvan Fields house. It might have belonged to Sterling’s grandmother, or an aunt. Neither one could recall, and the possession of it was one of the rare moments of noncontention they have enjoyed in the last year and a half. A tiny bathroom with a puke green carpet on the floor opens into the livi
ng room. He has a futon, purchased from the same discount furniture place where he bought the mattress, a television on a pressboard stand, a hideous coffee table, a small kitchen table, now tucked against the opposite wall, and two folding chairs. The kitchen is a galley kitchen, barely big enough to turn around in, which makes it surprisingly efficient, especially as he uses only the microwave and the kettle.

  The apartment is on the third floor of a four-story building in a row of four-story brick-faced buildings facing west. Not quite town houses, no bay windows or granite steps, these postwar buildings are utilitarian. A line of city trees soften the landscape, promise that this downscale Boston neighborhood is still inhabited by taxpayers who care.

  Across the street, a line of small mom-and-pop businesses, a newsagent, a yarn shop, and a store with a jaunty rainbow of colors splashed in an arc across the plate-glass display window: A to Z Tropical Fish and Pet Supply. Little hand-painted fish gambol around the letters.

  Standing at the bare rectangle of picture window, Adam stares down onto the early-morning street until he sees a light go on in the hole-in-the-wall paper store. He pulls on his pants, zips the fly but leaves the button undone. His two-day-old T-shirt hangs out, a small hole beginning under the right arm. Adam hasn’t taken well to doing laundry. He hasn’t figured out the rhythm of keeping a supply of clean underwear and is continually surprised to find none in his dresser drawer a mere week after having dragged his pillowcase of dirty clothes down to the Laundromat that anchors the fleet of businesses across the street from his place.

  Adam roots around in his pants pocket for enough change to buy his daily fix of newspapers, The New York Times, which once simply appeared at his breakfast table, and The Wall Street Journal, which Sophie would leave on his credenza, important articles neatly highlighted in yellow. Nowadays, he adds the local rag to his pile as he scans for news about himself. His loss of control has become a metaphor for the rapacious greed of today’s overcompensated executives. If time heals all wounds, the year that the court cases have taken has diluted the amount of coverage. He’s old news now.

  His sentencing is today. The final chapter for public consumption.

  It’s pretty amazing at how effective some lawyers can be. Cadres of them. Ranks of men and women in expensive suits, carrying bulky briefcases crammed with the weaponry of law, filing into and out of windowless conference rooms with broad tables and dry-erase boards scarred with the wrong markers. The heavy scent of the knowledge of the law emanating from their very pores. Red-painted lips closed over perfect teeth; rep ties stroked downward, inanimate pets. Adam dreams of them at night. The red lips of the women parting to reveal razor teeth. The rep ties becoming reptiles, hissing and forking at him. Sometimes the faces become those of his adversaries: Wannamaker, Sophie, Sterling. In his scotch-drenched dreams, Adam shrinks as they rise above him like hot-air balloons, and he feels the flames of their anger torch his skin.

  The predawn air is thick with humidity, a vaporous scrim obscuring a rising sun that casts no shadow on the street in front of Adam as he crosses over to the newsagent’s shop. It’s gonna be another hot one. The weather this year has been an example of extremes—miserable cold, nonexistent spring and now a September heat wave that lends credence to the wails of the global warming alarmists he and Dynamic had contradicted with their own cadre of experts. Barely five-thirty, and already Adam feels the slick of sweat coat his underarms, and perspiration trickles down the back of his neck, sliding around in fat drops into the depression of his clavicle. A fast-moving car threatens Adam as he crosses midblock to reach the other side. Adam does not walk any faster, challenging the driver to go around him, or hit him. The car swerves, its honk an afterthought. Adam raises his left hand in comradely salute, a single rude finger extended. It’s a gesture he hasn’t made since undergraduate days, but it pleases him in some atavistic way.

  A man is coming down the street, north to south. He is dressed in the full-dress uniform of a businessman, defying the crack-of-dawn heat with a summer-weight suit, a crisp white shirt that glows in the humid murk, a beautiful yellow print tie done up in a proper Windsor knot, and spit-polished tassel loafers completing his look. Adam sees this man every weekday morning, since he’s begun waking so early, and assumes that he is walking to the T, perhaps the only physical exercise he can eke out of a busy day. Adam imagines that he works in one of the law offices, or for a management firm. Instead of a briefcase, he carries one of the modern soft-sided bags that laptops fit into, with a wide strap to carry it over a shoulder. He probably lives in one of the better neighborhoods that abut this one and is taking a shortcut. Not once has the walker acknowledged Adam’s presence on the same sidewalk at the same time five days a week. He marches by, his eyes averted. Just the tiniest pursing to his lips to indicate he is aware of Adam standing at the doorway of the newsagent’s; a slight acceleration in his pace.

  Adam wrenches open the door of the shop, the old-fashioned clanging bell above the door announcing his arrival. There is an old man behind the counter. He perches his wide bum on a stool, an unlit cigar clamped into the corner of his mouth. His apron is newsprint gray, and his hands are black with it. His thin gray hair is highlighted with the ink, as if he’s been drawing new hair on his head. He looks up from his crossword puzzle. “Mornin’.”

  “Mornin’.” Those are the only two words of conversation Adam has had since yesterday morning at this same time. Except for his lawyer’s secretary’s message in his voice mail, reminding him of the time to appear today at the county courthouse, he’s heard no human speech save that of the voices on the television, which he keeps on most of the time. Ariel won’t return his calls. His friends, plucked from the ranks of people like himself, the self he was for the last twenty years, rich, powerful, well connected, don’t return his calls. He is anathema.

  It is in the dark of the night when Adam knows the most isolation. In the gray dawn, he shrugs off his self-pity as self-indulgent. But in the night, when the street is silent and the only sound in his apartment is the tink tink tink of the leaky bathroom faucet, Adam feels the weight of solitude bearing down on him. He has never cultivated a real friend, someone who knows him well enough to offer the simple support of a shared beer at the local bar. He lacks the quiet comfort of companionship, of sympathy. Strangely enough, the only person who comes to mind in the witching hour of sleepless waiting is Veronica. The only one who might understand his need to move far beyond his upbringing, to forge a new life. Once her existence was reintroduced into his life by accident, she persists in entering his thoughts. He finds himself wondering if she ever thinks of him, the little boy she never even said goodbye to. He could have hated her; instead, he had forgotten her. Denied her.

  Adam sorts through the array of newspapers fanned out across the long counter as if he’s choosing the right cut of meat. Behind the counter, lottery tickets are on display, the true meat and drink of the small store. There is a coffee service, a double-burner stainless-steel maker offering one glass pot of regular and another of decaf. The regular is fresh—there is profit in being an early riser—and Adam helps himself to a large cup. He picks up a package of peanut butter crackers, which have become his breakfast of choice.

  “Four-seventy-five.” The proprietor shifts his cigar to the other side of his mouth.

  Adam digs out three crumpled bills and makes up the rest in coins—coins he should have saved for his laundry. He’s got to make an ATM stop sometime today, see if he can get by on a hundred till next week. Maybe he better do it before the sentencing. The sentencing. A wave of dismay percolates through him; the hand holding the coin trembles slightly, as if Adam is standing on the platform as a train blasts through.

  Will the judge send him to jail? It wasn’t an outright assault, despite what Sophie kept slipping into the testimony. It was a slap. She wasn’t really traumatized; that whole bit about counseling and fear of men is hogwash. He isn’t a danger to anyone. He hasn’t made it impossib
le for her to work. Her leave of absence from Dynamic is a sham. The accusations and effect of his, albeit stupid, action had risen in graduated levels of absurdity as the trial went on.

  Adam takes in a breath, letting the pain of breathing distract him from his line of thinking. Lately he has experienced pain like that from cracked ribs, as if he’d been the one attacked. “Do you have anything stronger than aspirin?”

  The proprietor gestures toward a small display of patent medicines and shrugs. “Tylenol, Advil, the usual stuff. My wife likes Aleve.”

  Adam studies the boxes, reads the ingredients, thinks back on the various commercial claims each one professes, and then checks the price. “You take credit cards?”

  “Ten-dollar limit.”

  Adam gathers one of each brand into his arms and dumps them on the counter with his paper and the coffee.

  “Thanks, pal.” The proprietor bags his stuff and hands the plastic bag to him. Outside, Adam shoves his papers under his arm, shifts the plastic bag of drugs. Glancing next door, he sees the tropical fish store woman unlocking her door. She’s dressed in low-rise jeans and a tank top that just about touches the waistband. Her hair is still damp from her shower or from the early heat, and it hangs in gentle waves to her shoulders and is the color of molasses. She nods to him, a fellow early bird.

  Adam has seen her before, just not this close. He spends a great deal of his day watching the street from his bolt-hole of an apartment. He’s watched her perform what seems to be a daily ritual of washing her front window—a willowy undulation side to side, up and down as she squeegees the plate glass with her long-poled blade.