Now I raised the blind at that same window and saw him in the yard below. He was busily digging a black hole in the moon-silvered lawn. This was peculiar, because he was a well-behaved dog and never a digger.
As I looked on, Orson abandoned the patch of earth at which he had been furiously clawing, moved a few feet to the right, and began to dig a new hole. A quality of frenzy marked his behavior.
“What’s happened, boy?” I wondered, and in the yard below, the dog dug, dug, dug.
On my way downstairs, with the Glock coiling heavily in my jacket pocket, I remembered that July night when I had gone into the backyard to sit beside the mewling dog….
His cries grew as thin as the whistle-hiss of a glassblower shaping a vase over a flame, so soft that they did not even disturb the nearest of our neighbors, yet there was such wretchedness in the sound that I was shaken by it. With those cries he shaped a misery darker than the darkest glass and stranger in form than anything a blower could blow.
He was uninjured and did not appear to be ill. For all I could tell, the sight of the stars themselves was the thing that filled him with torment. Yet if the vision of dogs is as poor as we are taught, they can’t see the stars well or at all. And why should stars cause Orson such anguish, anyway, or the night that was no deeper than other nights before it? Nevertheless, he gazed skyward and made tortured sounds and didn’t respond to my reassuring voice.
When I put a hand on his head and stroked his back, I felt hard shudders passing through him. He sprang to his feet and padded away, only to turn and stare at me from a distance, and I swear that for a while he hated me. He loved me as always; he was still my dog, after all, and could not escape loving me; but at the same time, he hated me intensely. In the warm July air, I could virtually feel the cold hatred radiating off him. He paced the yard, alternately staring at me—holding my gaze as only he among all dogs is able to hold it—and looking at the sky, now stiff and shaking with rage, now weak and mewling with what seemed despair.
When I’d told Bobby Halloway about this, he’d said that dogs are incapable of hating anyone or of feeling anything as complex as genuine despair, that their emotional lives are as simple as their intellectual lives. When I insisted on my interpretation, Bobby had said, “Listen, Snow, if you’re going to keep coming here to bore my ass off with this New Age crap, why don’t you just buy a shotgun and blow my brains out? That would be more merciful than the excruciatingly slow death you’re dealing out now, bludgeoning me with your tedious little stories and your moronic philosophies. There are limits to human endurance, Saint Francis—even to mine.”
I know what I know, however, and I know Orson hated me that July night, hated me and loved me. And I know that something in the sky tormented him and filled him with despair: the stars, the blackness, or perhaps something he imagined.
Can dogs imagine? Why not?
I know they dream. I’ve watched them sleep, seen their legs kick as they chase dream rabbits, heard them sigh and whimper, heard them growl at dream adversaries.
Orson’s hatred that night did not make me fear him, but I feared for him. I knew his problem was not distemper or any physical ailment that might have made him dangerous to me, but was instead a malady of the soul.
Bobby raves brilliantly at the mention of souls in animals and splutters ultimately into a tremendously entertaining incoherence. I could sell tickets. I prefer to open a bottle of beer, lean back, and have the whole show to myself.
Anyway, throughout that long night, I sat in the yard, keeping Orson company even though he might not have wanted it. He glowered at me, remarked upon the vaulted sky with razor-thin cries, shuddered uncontrollably, circled the yard, circled and circled until near dawn, when at last he came to me, exhausted, and put his head in my lap and did not hate me anymore.
Just before sunrise, I went upstairs to my room, ready for bed hours earlier than usual, and Orson came with me. Most of the time, when he chooses to sleep to my schedule, he curls near my feet, but on this occasion he lay on his side with his back to me, and until he slept, I stroked his burly head and smoothed his fine black coat.
I myself slept not at all that day. I lay thinking about the hot summer morning beyond the blinded windows. The sky like an inverted blue porcelain bowl with birds in flight around its rim. Birds of the day, which I had seen only in pictures. And bees and butterflies. And shadows ink-pure and knife-sharp at the edges as they never can be in the night. Sweet sleep couldn’t pour into me because I was filled to the brim with bitter yearning.
Now, nearly three years later, as I opened the kitchen door and stepped onto the back porch, I hoped that Orson wasn’t in a despondent mood. This night, we had no time for therapy either for him or for me.
My bicycle was on the porch. I walked it down the steps and rolled it toward the busy dog.
In the southwest corner of the yard, he had dug half a dozen holes of various diameters and depths, and I had to be careful not to twist an ankle in one of them. Across that quadrant of the lawn were scattered ragged clumps of uprooted grass and clods of earth torn loose by his claws.
“Orson?”
He did not respond. He didn’t even pause in his frenzied digging.
Giving him a wide berth to avoid the spray of dirt that fanned out behind his excavating forepaws, I went around the current hole to face him.
“Hey, pal,” I said.
The dog kept his head down, his snout in the ground, sniffing inquisitively as he dug.
The breeze had died, and the full moon hung like a child’s lost balloon in the highest branches of the melaleucas.
Overhead, nighthawks dived and soared and barrel-looped, crying peent-peent-peent as they harvested flying ants and early-spring moths from the air.
Watching Orson at work, I said, “Found any good bones lately?”
He stopped digging but still didn’t acknowledge me. Urgently he sniffed the raw earth, the scent of which rose even to me.
“Who let you out here?”
Sasha might have brought him outside to toilet, but I was sure that she would have returned him to the house afterward.
“Sasha?” I asked nevertheless.
If Sasha were the one who had left him loose to wreak havoc on the landscaping, Orson was not going to rat on her. He wouldn’t meet my eyes lest I read the truth in them.
Abandoning the hole he had just dug, he returned to a previous pit, sniffed it, and set to work again, seeking communion with dogs in China.
Maybe he knew that Dad was dead. Animals know things, as Sasha had noted earlier. Maybe this industrious digging was Orson’s way of working off the nervous energy of grief.
I lowered my bicycle to the grass and hunkered down in front of the burrowing fiend. I gripped his collar and gently forced him to pay attention to me.
“What’s wrong with you?”
His eyes had in them the darkness of the ravaged soil, not the brighter glimmering darkness of the starry sky. They were deep and unreadable.
“I’ve got places to go, pal,” I told him. “I want you to come with me.”
He whined and twisted his head to look at the devastation all around him, as though to say that he was loath to leave this great work unfinished.
“Come morning, I’m going to stay at Sasha’s place, and I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
His ears pricked, although not at the mention of Sasha’s name or at anything I had said. He wrenched his powerful body around in my grip to look toward the house.
When I let go of his collar, he raced across the yard but then stopped well short of the back porch. He stood at attention, head raised high, utterly still, alert.
“What is it, fella?” I whispered.
From a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, even with the breeze dead and the night hushed, I could barely hear his low growl.
On my way out of the house, I had dialed the switches all the way off, leaving lightless rooms behind me. Blackness still filled the place, and I could see no ghostly face pressed to any of the panes.
Orson sensed someone, however, because he began to back away from the house. Suddenly he spun around with the agility of a cat and raced toward me.
I raised my bike off its side, onto its wheels.
Tail low but not tucked between his legs, ears flattened against his head, Orson shot past me to the back gate.
Trusting in the reliability of canine senses, I joined the dog at the gate without delay. The property is surrounded by a silvered cedar fence as tall as I am, and the gate is cedar, too. The gravity latch was cold under my fingers. Quietly I slipped it open and silently cursed the squeaking hinges.
Beyond the gate is a hard-packed dirt footpath bordered by houses on one side and by a narrow grove of old red-gum eucalyptuses on the other. As we pushed through the gate, I half expected someone to be waiting for us, but the path was deserted.
To the south, beyond the eucalyptus grove, lies a golf course and then the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club. At this hour on a Friday night, viewed between the trunks of the tall trees, the golf course was as black and rolling as the sea, and the glittering amber windows of the distant inn were like the portals on a magnificent cruise ship forever bound for far Tahiti.
To the left, the footpath led uphill toward the heart of town, ultimately terminating in the graveyard adjacent to St. Bernadette’s, the Catholic church. To the right, it led downhill toward the flats, the harbor, and the Pacific.
I shifted gears and cycled uphill, toward the graveyard, with the eucalyptus perfume reminding me of the light at a crematorium window and of a beautiful young mother lying dead upon a mortician’s gurney, but with good Orson trotting alongside my bike and with the faint strains of dance music filtering across the golf course from the inn, and with a baby crying in one of our neighbors’ houses to my left, but with the weight of the Glock pistol in my pocket and with nighthawks overhead snapping insects in their sharp beaks: the living and the dead all together in the trap of land and sky.
11
I wanted to talk to Angela Ferryman, because her message on my answering machine had seemed to promise revelations. I was in the mood for revelations.
First, however, I had to call Sasha, who was waiting to hear about my father.
I stopped in St. Bernadette’s cemetery, one of my favorite places, a harbor of darkness in one of the more brightly lighted precincts of town. The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns, supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns, and the quiet space below is laid out in aisles similar to those in any library; the gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those who have been blotted from the pages of life, who may be forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.
Orson wandered, though not far from me, sniffing the spoor of the squirrels that, by day, gathered acorns off the graves. He was not a hunter tracking prey but a scholar satisfying his curiosity.
From my belt, I unclipped my cellular phone, switched it on, and keyed in Sasha Goodall’s mobile number. She answered on the second ring.
“Dad’s gone,” I said, meaning more than she could know.
Earlier, in anticipation of Dad’s death, Sasha had expressed her sorrow. Now her voice tightened slightly with grief so well controlled that only I could have heard it: “Did he…did he go easy at the end?”
“No pain.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Yeah. We had a chance to say good-bye.”
Fear nothing.
Sasha said, “Life stinks.”
“It’s just the rules,” I said. “To get in the game, we have to agree to stop playing someday.”
“It still stinks. Are you at the hospital?”
“No. Out and about. Rambling. Working off some energy. Where’re you?”
“In the Explorer. Going to Pinkie’s Diner to grab breakfast and work on my notes for the show.” She would be on the air in three and a half hours. “Or I could get takeout, and we could go eat somewhere together.”
“I’m not really hungry,” I said truthfully. “I’ll see you later though.”
“When?”
“You go home from work in the morning, I’ll be there. I mean, if that’s okay.”
“That’s perfect. Love you, Snowman.”
“Love you,” I replied.
“That’s our little mantra.”
“It’s our truth.”
I pushed end on the keypad, switched off the phone, and clipped it to my belt again.
When I cycled out of the cemetery, my four-legged companion followed but somewhat reluctantly at first. His head was full of squirrel mysteries.
I made my way to Angela Ferryman’s house as far as possible by alleyways where I was not likely to encounter much traffic and on streets with widely spaced lampposts. When I had no choice but to pass under clusters of streetlamps, I pedaled hard.
Faithfully, Orson matched his pace to mine. He seemed happier than he had been earlier, now that he could trot at my side, blacker than any nightshadow that I could cast.
We encountered only four vehicles. Each time, I squinted and looked away from the headlights.
Angela lived on a high street in a charming Spanish bungalow that sheltered under magnolia trees not yet in bloom. No lights were on in the front rooms.
An unlocked side gate admitted me to an arbor-covered passage. The walls and arched ceiling of the arbor were entwined with star jasmine. In summer, sprays of the tiny five-petaled white flowers would be clustered so abundantly that the lattice would seem to be draped with multiple layers of lace. Even this early in the year, the hunter-green foliage was enlivened by those pinwheel-like blooms.
While I breathed deeply of the jasmine fragrance, savoring it, Orson sneezed twice.
I wheeled my bike out of the arbor and around to the back of the bungalow, where I leaned it against one of the redwood posts that supported the patio cover.
“Be vigilant,” I told Orson. “Be big. Be bad.”
He chuffed as though he understood his assignment. Maybe he did understand, no matter what Bobby Halloway and the Rationality Police would say.
Beyond the kitchen windows and the translucent curtains was a slow pulse of candlelight.
The door featured four small panes of glass. I rapped softly on one of them.
Angela Ferryman drew aside the curtain. Her quick nervous eyes pecked at me—and then at the patio beyond me to confirm that I had come alone.
With a conspiratorial demeanor, she ushered me inside, locking the door behind us. She adjusted the curtain until she was convinced that no gap existed through which anyone could peer in at us.
Though the kitchen was pleasantly warm, Angela was wearing not only a gray sweat suit but also a navy-blue wool cardigan over the sweats. The cable-knit cardigan might have belonged to her late husband; it hung to her knees, and the shoulder seams were halfway to her elbows. The sleeves had been rolled so often that the resultant cuffs were as thick as great iron manacles.
