One Good Dog Read online

  The light goes on across the street. Adam shrugs on his parka, finds his ski hat tucked into the pocket of his coat and puts it on. He shoves his feet into his boots, laces them loosely, grabs a clean travel mug from the collection he has acquired. The carless street is filled with unsullied snow; the stoplight waves in the wind like a demented flag, threatening to rip loose from its wires and plunge into the intersection. Adam pushes against the wind, the blinding snow making it a dreamlike quest, his objective coming no closer. When he finally makes it across the street, his cheeks are tingling, his eyes watering, and he’s breathing like a long-distance runner. Adam has to fight to get the door open, the wind pressing it closed against his pull, a zephyr’s game of tug-of-war. As the wind takes a breath, Adam gets the door open. “Mornin’, Artie.” Adam scoops up his crackers and drains fresh coffee into the travel mug with CUMBERLAND FARMS printed on it. He looks for the papers, but they haven’t been delivered.

  “Hell of a day.” The newsagent shifts the unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Fit for neither man nor beast.”

  “Or papers, evidently.” Adam digs into his pocket for change.

  “They’ll get here. Don’t you worry. Come on back in an hour.”

  “If I can. Getting worse out there.”

  “You be careful out there, Adam.”

  “You, too.”

  Now it’s hard to push the door open, but once he does, Adam stands in the shelter of the doorway, pulling up the hood of his parka, taking what might be the last hot slug of coffee out of his plastic mug. As he’s about to step into the storm, a figure appears, another soul out in the storm.

  It’s the businessman. He trudges along, head down, full-length dress coat buttoned to his throat. Tears are streaming down his cheeks from the wind and cold. Adam feels like he should grab the guy and send him home. Why is he walking? Why is he even trying to go to work? Even Adam would have called it off today. Either this guy is an idiot or his boss is.

  “Hey, Buddy …” Adam sticks out a hand, the one holding the plastic travel mug, to stop the guy.

  “Get away from me, you freak.” He thrusts an arm out to fend Adam off, knocking the Cumberland Farms cup out of Adam’s hand. “Go get a job.”

  “Well, fuck you, too.” Adam darts to pick up the mug before too much leaks out of the drinking hole. What the fuck? Pulling the strings of his hood tighter, Adam catches sight of his own grainy reflection in the newsagent’s plate glass. He starts to laugh. He looks like a Fort Street Center client in this getup. No wonder the guy freaked. Buddy? Did he really call the guy “buddy”? He must have picked it up from the men. They all use it, a generic “buddy” directed toward the people they solicit—“Buddy, can you spare some change?” They use it with one another, a dining room filled with buddies.

  If the center is closed, where will they go?

  Unbelievably, another figure struggles out of the storm. The aquarium woman. She’s bundled in a gigantic parka that makes her look like she’s been swallowed by a polar bear. The wind is forcing her back, so that every step taken is a battle won. Adam feels the wind beat against his back as he runs to her. With his ballast, she is finally able to get to her storefront. Adam takes the keys from her hand and unlocks the door, then stands back to let her in.

  “Come in. Come in.” Inside, she disarms the alarm, stamps her feet to rid them of the snow. Her cheeks are bright pink; a lock of dark hair not captured by her scrunchy is dripping with fast-melting snow. “Thanks for the help. It’s windier than I realized.”

  She shrugs off her parka, revealing a thick fisherman’s sweater, corduroys tucked into Uggs. “I’m Gina DeMarco.” Ah’m. There it is again, that faint coloration of accent. “Welcome to A to Z Tropical Fish and Pet Supply.”

  Adam pushes his own hood off. “I’m Adam March.”

  Gina stops smiling. “Adam March. You didn’t just work for Dynamic Cosmetics; you were the boss.” She says boss like it tastes bad.

  “Yeah, I was.” He’s not going to deny it. He ran that division well, even if NATE disagreed with some of its policies.

  Adam steps away from the door, looks around at the rows of glowing aquariums full of colorful fish, racks with collars and leashes, shelves with squeaky toys and treats, baskets with tartan pillows, displays with all manner of canine and feline likenesses on coasters, mugs, figurines, place mats. There is a freestanding cage containing the brilliant colors and racket of a pair of parrots, which are happy to see her arrive. A handprinted sign says NOT FOR SALE.

  A gust of supercharged wind bangs against the shop door, rattling the pane of plate glass. “Gina, you can’t think that anyone is going to come out on a day like this and buy a fish? This is a ‘stay at home, where it’s safe’ storm. The National Guard is posting warnings against driving. The state—”

  She cuts him off. “Electricity goes out and I’m out of business. I’ve got to be here to get the generator working. Besides, big fish have to eat, or some of them will eat each other.”

  The center won’t be closed. Adam pulls his hood up over his watch cap. “I’ve got to go.”

  Gina runs the back of her hand along her forehead to wipe away the moisture from that lock of wet hair and picks up her dripping coat. “Have a nice day.” Nahss. He is dismissed.

  Adam lets go of the door handle, turns back to her. “How will you get home?”

  “I won’t. Not till the storm ends. I can’t take a chance.”

  Adam debates for a moment whether he should offer to stay, but he can’t come up with a reason for doing so. She is obviously capable, and, after all, they are strangers, nodding acquaintances, onetime adversaries, maybe still adversaries in her mind, and not responsible for each other. “Okay. Good luck, then.” He pushes hard against the door, putting the force of his shoulder against it, against the wind.

  Adam March goes back into the storm, trudging toward Fort Street, hoping he’s made the right decision.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was a bitch of a storm. I huddled under the culvert with several others, a nominal truce in place. My mentor was there, alone. A little wiry-haired bitch went up to him in submission, obsequiously licking at his muzzle, begging for kindness. I’d scented her before in the neighborhood, a tough little cookie with an underbite.

  Two fat Labradors made up the rest of our party. They’d gotten out of their yard; surprised to find the electric fencing neutralized and unable to handle the temptation, they had fled down the street and immediately gotten lost. Nice pets, kinda naïve. We all knew that their people were going to be frantic. Because of that, we knew they posed a real threat. Being leash dogs, not street dogs, the pair of them had left a trail a mile wide and a fathom deep. It would only be a matter of the storm ending before the authorities and a host of volunteers would be rushed out to seek the lost. Signs would be posted. Cunning photos plastered on every telephone pole, smiling, panting yellow Labs, Buffy and Muffy, or whatever their human-given appellations were. Reward!

  But for now, the storm kept us squeezed into the tunnel, our body heat protecting us all from the cold, which made the fat Labs a welcome addition for a while. A bite of snow, a quick pee, and we rearranged ourselves to snooze the day away.

  My mentor lay back-to-back with me. Out of mild curiosity, I asked him where his man was.

  I don’t know.

  So he just wandered off?

  I think he might have been captured.

  By the men?

  He went into a building and never came out.

  The food building?

  No, one he’s never gone into before. We’re not welcome in any building; that’s why we stay outside. Buildings aren’t for us. Besides, we might be captured if we go into a building. You should remember that, stay out of buildings unless they are empty.

  I was surprised then to hear my mentor whine, a plaintive, lonely sound evocative of worry.

  I don’t know where he is.

  You’ll find him. After the
storm.

  He’s gone.

  As I said, dogs are existentialists. We don’t understand the concepts of past or future. My mentor’s man might have been gone six days or three hours. In any event, my mentor was uncharacteristically mournful. I rolled over, aligning my back with his for his warmth. But all through the storm, I could feel him shuddering with anxiety.

  Chapter Seventeen

  By the time Adam makes it to the stoop of the center, he feels as though he is Shackleton reaching his destination. He half-expects seal stew on the menu today. Mike is outside, flailing impotently with a broom against the rising drifts on the steps. He looks at Adam, the angry psoriasis on his face rubbed red in the cold, but he’s smiling, the first time Adam has ever warranted a greeting from the notoriously silent man. “Welcome to Fort Street.”

  “Thanks, Mike. How’d you get here?”

  “I never left.”

  “Wish I’d thought of that.” Adam claps a hand on Mike’s thickly padded shoulder and goes in.

  There are more men in here than Adam has ever seen. Although lunch is an hour off, the dining room is open to accommodate the crowd and they sit at the cafeteria tables, still wearing their soaked jackets, unbuttoned or unzipped. It’s something that has long since stopped puzzling Adam. These men take no chances with personal items. The worst fight he’s seen, and he’s witnessed quite a few, was when a Vietnam vet accused another vet of stealing his pocketknife. Claiming that the object in question was his own similar weapon, the accused hauled off and bashed his accuser in the face, drawing blood and inciting the group into cheering them on. Rafe and Big Bob had pulled the pair apart before the knife became part of the fight.

  Knives, Adam has learned, are one of the most highly valued objects a homeless man can have. Protection, threat, a tool, a memento of childhood or war. They are also forbidden inside the center. Everyone knows that a blind eye is turned on pocketknives, like army-surplus store Swiss Army knives, but anything with a blade more than six inches long is immediately confiscated. The knives the men use in the dining room are stainless-steel table knives. This isn’t prison, but it is a safe house. Big Bob has rules.

  Adam kicks the snow off his boots and pushes his way through the crowd to get to the kitchen. Rafe is there, bebopping to his iPod, skillet in hand, his toque jaunty on his shaven head and his jacket still clean. He glances up and sees Adam in the doorway. “Hey, bro, good of you to come early.”

  “It’s a bitch out there.”

  “We half-figured you’d bag it today. You a volunteer, man. No cause for life-threatenin’ action.”

  Adam sags against the doorjamb. The effort of walking through the storm has tapped him out. His legs are quivering with the exertion. He’s still got his cheese crackers in his pocket, but somewhere along the route he lost his mug. Or maybe he left it at Gina’s A to Z Tropical Fish, where she braved the storm for goldfish and parrots. And here’s Rafe, telling him that he didn’t have to come. For a split second, Adam thinks that he should be mad, that Big Bob should have called him to tell him that. Should have called and said to stay put. Told him to sit there and watch the storm on the television, keep warm, keep dry. A good manager makes sure his people are informed.

  Then he thinks, Maybe he did call. He’s been walking to work since seven-thirty. The feeling of incipient anger passes. He hasn’t seen Ishmael, and the noise from the dining room is unusually loud. “No. I’m here. But I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee before I get started.” Rafe adjusts the heat under the skillet and walks to the cupboard. He takes down a mug for Adam and fills it from the Bunn coffeemaker. Adam slides onto a stool; the snow adhering to his jacket trickles onto Rafe’s clean floor.

  “Here you go, man.”

  Adam pulls off his wet hat and stuffs it into his pocket before taking the mug from Rafe. “Thanks.” Two sets of brown eyes meet, and Adam sees a flash of respect in the other man’s eyes. Adam quickly takes a sip of the strong coffee, the flush in his cheek partly the heat and partly wonder. He’s never seen respect without fear before.

  Today there are women in the center. Fort Street has a sister center two blocks over, but the ferocity of the storm has blurred the divisions. No one cares which center they’re in, just happy they’re out of the storm. An unofficial attendance is taken by Big Bob as he wanders through the groups, greeting individuals, mentally tallying who is here and who isn’t. He’ll make a phone call soon to see if some of his people are seeking safety at the Alice Crandall Center. AC, as they call it, is named for its benefactress, the woman who had donated her Victorian brownstone to the city for a shelter for battered, homeless, displaced women. AC is more radical than the Fort Street Center, but an amiable relationship exists between the two managers.

  Adam is relieved to see Ishmael come in out of the storm; he’s been worried that he might have to serve all these guys alone and run steam trays, too. Like a dog, Ishmael shakes his head with its mass of dreadlocks, spraying the walls of the back hall with droplets. He tucks his dreads up under his toque and sits to change his boots for the shoes he’s brought in a plastic bag. Ishmael, too, looks at him with a smile. “You made it, man.”

  What the fuck? Did everyone expect that he’d shirk his duty? Adam finds himself growing a little annoyed at the suggestion that he’s a wuss, a coward, a fair-weather volunteer. He’s fucking walked all the way here. Six blocks that might as well have been six miles, it took him so long.

  He’s about to tell Ishmael to stuff it, when he feels Big Bob’s hand on his shoulder. “I tried to reach you.”

  “I got an early start.” Adam shrugs. “I’m here.”

  Big Bob squeezes Adam’s shoulder. Like that of a good teacher or a respected scoutmaster, this small manly sign of approval is clear and touches Adam in a place he’d long ago buried. It has been so long since anyone approved of him. He’d been compensated, rewarded for performance with bonuses. He’d enjoyed the claps on the back from upper management for achieving goals. Even once the applause of a roomful of executives for a PowerPoint presentation outlining an acquisition. They had cheered like pirates coming across a gold-laden barque.

  The only approval Adam has lusted after for more than two decades is that of his father-in-law. Adam has grieved as much for the withdrawal of Herb Carruthers’s esteem as for any other loss. Herb Carruthers had approved of Adam, had, as a sonless man, treated him like an heir. Sterling, Papa’s darling, had absorbed the lessons of her socially connected mother and, when Adam asked her to marry him, insisted that he get her father’s blessing.

  Adam invited Herb to meet him at the Harvard Club. Both were greeted as members, one freshly made, the other a generation ago. Adam loved the club, loved that he was a welcome member, that he had earned the right to sit in this room, an equal among giants even at the age of twenty-six. Over a meal of grilled salmon, Adam carefully laid out his ambitious plans, constructing a vision of the future that his potential father-in-law would approve of. A highly attainable future, particularly with Carruthers’s influences, but Adam carefully avoided any presumption of expectation that, as a father-in-law, Carruthers would be of help. Instead, Adam affirmed that he envisioned a good life, one in which Sterling would enjoy all the rights and privileges of her class. The older man never raised his eyes off his plate, shoveling in the food like a longshoreman while Adam laid out his game plan. Finally, Adam paused, waiting for Carruthers to say something.

  Plate cleaned, Carruthers sat back, wiped his mouth with his linen napkin, and belched. “That it?” Now his blue marble eyes met Adam’s, his pupils tiny pinpricks even in the soft light of the room. Predator’s eyes.

  “I won’t disappoint you, sir.” Adam fretted that he’d come across as too pompous, or that Carruthers would detect in his speech the Dorchester of his adolescence, despite his carefully cultivated Harvard accent.

  “One question.”

  “Yes, sir.” Adam felt a little pull of anxiety, a shadow of fear that Carruthers might approve o
f him as a wunderkind but not as a prospective son-in-law. That Carruthers wouldn’t approve of him after all.

  “Do you sail?”

  Adam’s little pull of anxiety faded into warm relief. “No, sir.” An honest answer.

  “You join my family, you’ll have to.” Herb Carruthers stood up and offered his hand to Adam. Done deal.

  Big Bob’s hand on his shoulder squeezes a rough emotion out of Adam, a sense of what he has lacked most of his life: someone who genuinely approves of him.

  “I should get to work.”

  An hour later, Big Bob joins the men behind the steam tables. “I’m missing Jupe.” Ishmael ladles out a bowl of butternut squash soup, sprinkles a garnish of parsley on top, and slides it on a tray. “He’s weird about that dog. Maybe he won’t come in if his dog can’t.”

  “I’m not stopping anybody today. Slicker is here with his dog. Course, she’s in his pocket, but he knows I know she’s here.” Big Bob drums his fingers on the metal counter. “No, he’s been acting a little off the meds lately. In fact, I don’t recall seeing him yesterday, either.”

  Adam hefts a new tray of potatoes into the steam table. “Check the hospitals?”

  “I usually start with the police. Okay, then. If anybody sees him …”

  “We’ll give you a shout.” Ishmael fills another bowl.

  Adam takes the soup bowl and places it on the ledge. “So, Jupe’s mentally ill?”