Animosity (18 page)

The last thing poor Norman did before he left this world… was lick my right hand. Twice.

As if to say,
Goodbye.

“I was thinking maybe Samantha shouldn’t come back over there until all of this is resolved,” Karen said. “Don’t you agree?”

We weren’t arguing. I knew she was right. But that didn’t make the conversation any easier.

“I mean… what if they decide to take it out on
her
, Andy? At this point, I wouldn’t put it past them. What if they hurt Sam?”

The phone line crackled and popped between us like the whispers of disembodied spirits eavesdropping on our conversation.

“Andy? Are you still there?”

“Just tell me that’s the only reason, Karen,” I said. “Tell me… tell me it’s because you’re worried about Sam, and promise me…
promise
me… that you don’t think there’s any
truth
to what my neighbors are saying…”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my ex-wife replied. “I
know
you, Andy. Jesus. We’ve had our… problems… but I could never think anything like that. Ever.”

“Norman never hurt anybody,” I said.

“I know. He was a good dog.”

“I hope they burn in Hell for what they’ve done.”

“This is all gonna blow over,” Karen assured me. “Soon. It has to. The police will catch the killer in a few days, and these people will realize they’re gravely mistak—”

“That won’t bring Norman back,” I said, my voice cracking.

Karen sniffled softly on the other end of the line. “No. It won’t.”

“I’ve asked myself a million times if there’s anything I could have done differently,” I said. “If there might have been some way to save him, if I’d only found him sooner.”

“Andy, you can’t blame yourself. It’s not—”

“I caught them in the act the night they vandalized the Explorer. How in the hell did I not hear them in the middle of the fucking afternoon, when they were sneaking through the gate, slipping rat poison into his food bowl?”

“You know how friendly he was,” Karen said. “He probably never even barked once, if he knew the people who did this.”

“Oh, he knew them,” I said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“I’m sorry, Andy. I’m so sorry. I know how much you loved that dog.”

A nervous twitch seized my body, and I nearly dropped the phone. I felt as if I had finally fallen off the precipice into insanity. And now there was no turning back.

“I hope you filed a police report,” Karen said.

“That’s not going to do any fucking good.”

“You should, Andy! At least then you’ll—”

“It’s the media’s fault,” I interrupted her. “You know that, don’t you? It’s all their fault. The newspaper. And the TV. They’re just as fucking guilty as the people who live on this street. They’ve convinced my neighbors that I’m something I’m not. And there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do about it.”

“What about libel? Maybe you could—”

“It’s not libel,” I said. “Everything they’ve printed about my books, my criminal record—it’s all
true.
So far, they haven’t lied about anything! You can’t sue if they’re reporting facts.”

“But the things they’re insinuating! I usually agree with his editorials, but did you see what that Jeremy Webster guy said in the last
Indepe
–”

“Insinuation isn’t grounds for a lawsuit either,” I said.

“What if… do you think it would help if you talked to them?”

“The press?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“But if they finally heard
your
side of the story, then they might—”

“I’m not going to let them twist my words, take them out of context. Because I know that’s what they’d do. It would only make things worse.”

Karen sighed, but did not reply. She knew I was right.

“The same goes for you,” I told her. “If they call you, wanting to ask questions about me, don’t tell the bastards anything.”

“I won’t.”

“Just say ‘no comment.’”

“I promise.”

“Thank you, Karen.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Andy. I’ll do whatever you think is best.”

“How is Sam handling this, by the way?” I said.

“Not well. She loved Norman too, you know.”

I quickly wiped away a tear that tickled its way down my cheek and caught in my five o’clock shadow.

Neither of us spoke for a long, awkward minute or two.

“Karen?” I said then.

“Hmm?”

“Do you remember that weekend we spent in the mountains? At Keene’s cabin?”

“Of course,” she replied, a wistful tone in her voice. “How could I forget?”

“I keep thinking about that weekend,” I said. “Of all the memories I have of poor Norman, I can’t get out of my mind what he did the last night we were up there…”

Norman had been a member of our family for a little less than a year on the evening in question. One late-summer afternoon, on a whim, we had decided to pack our things and embark on an unplanned vacation up in the Catskill Mountains in New York. Ever since I had known him, a fellow horror writer and good friend of mine had offered to let us use his summer cabin there; after damn near succumbing to mental burnout following a long period of penning two novels simultaneously, I finally accepted his invitation. We had taken Sam with us, of course, and Norman too, and as long as I live I shall never forget the night Karen and I sneaked out of the cabin like two horny, giggling teenagers. A few minutes after Samantha drifted off to sleep, we crept naked into the darkest part of the woods, where we spread out an old blanket on a carpet of pine needles, lit up a fat joint for the first time since our honeymoon, and proceeded to make the kind of passionate love usually reserved for young people naïvely innocent to the pitfalls of married life, fools who believe with all their hearts that nothing will ever tear them apart.

We
began
to make love, anyway, until our good buddy Norman came looking for us.

Just as we found our rhythm, our bodies merging as one, the retriever’s worried bark filled the night. So loud was his call, he woke Sam right away. We heard our daughter crying for us from the back porch of the cabin, and before we had a chance to compose ourselves Norman leapt out of the darkness, his sloppy wet tongue attacking our sweaty limbs with an urgency that could only have been borne from extreme jealousy. Like a big, ornery kid demanding every bit of our attention.

No matter how hard we tried, we were unable to stay angry with him. We laughed and laughed, wrapped ourselves in that dirty blanket and—our faces flush with embarrassment—we quickly followed Norman back to the cabin. Samantha’s tiny arms were crossed, I remember, and one foot tapped impatiently as she watched us emerge from the pitch-black night.

“God, I miss him,” I said into the phone now. “I miss him so bad.”

Karen did not reply.

Another long minute of silence passed between us. I stared at the crayon drawing Samantha had given me two months ago, that homemade HAPPY FATHER’S DAY card attached to the refrigerator door by teddy-bear magnets. Stick figure effigies of myself and Sam and a big brown Norman frolicked without a care in the world beneath an enormous bright yellow sun.

My vision grew blurry with tears until I could no longer see the picture at all.

I sniffled softly. Karen followed suit.

A few seconds later, in the background, I heard Jason Burke say something to my ex-wife that I couldn’t quite make out.

“You gotta go?” I said.

“Jason wants to, um, drive over to Pet World. He hasn’t told her yet, but he’s thinking about letting Sam pick out a puppy.”

I didn’t have the energy left in me to get pissed off about that. In some strange way, I even respected Jason for it. Despite the fact that my best friend’s corpse was barely even cold.

“I guess I should get going,” Karen said.

“I understand.”

“We’re probably going up to the lake again in a day or two, but I’ll have my cell-phone with me. Promise you’ll call if you need me?”

“I will,” I said.

“I’m serious, Andy. I’m worried about you.”

“Okay.”

“Please keep me updated?”

“Okay.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“I’ll try.”

The evening was quiet, serene. Dusk had just begun to wrap its long gray arms around my property.

“What are you burying there, Andy?” Ben Souther called out to me as I huffed and puffed and salty sweat burned in my eyes.

I turned to see Ben peeking over the privacy fence separating our properties. The fence stood seven feet tall, but Ben kept a small stepladder on his side that he ascended any time we chatted back and forth while working in our respective backyards. As always, my next-door neighbor’s eyes were hidden behind his purple-tinted glasses—in fact, the brim of a floppy straw hat obscured the entire top half of his face on the evening in question—yet I could tell he was staring at the tarp-covered form on the ground behind me.

At first, I did not reply. I just returned to my task without saying a word. A few feet away, Norman’s doghouse lay on its side, empty and abandoned forever. Something about that depressed me even more than the shrouded, buzzing bulk at my feet. Never again would Norman curl up inside his miniature Bates Manor while he chewed on a plump chicken bone or drifted off into lazy canine slumber on a sunny afternoon.

I hadn’t decided yet what I planned to do with the doghouse, but where it had once sat in the far corner of my yard I now dug a hole in which to inter the retriever’s body. Before me, the results of my labor resembled a gaping brown wound in Mother Nature’s lush green flesh.

The ground was soft, still slightly muddy from yesterday’s rain, but that did not make my job any easier.

“Andy,” Ben said again.

I stopped digging, sighed. “What is it, Ben? I’m busy here.”

“Sorry to interrupt. I was just wondering what it is you’re burying there.”

My grip on the shovel’s handle grew tighter. Splinters dug into my callused palms.

Ben said, “That’s not… who I think it is—?”

His curious expression could not have been more fake. He knew. Whether he had played a part in Norman’s murder or not, he knew goddamn well what lay beneath the tarp.

I wanted to take my shovel to his head, knock that stupid fucking straw hat off and watch it go flying. I wanted to see his skull collapse beneath my wrath, consequences be damned.

Instead, I said, “It’s my dog.”

“Oh, man,” Ben said. “Man, that’s rough.”

“Someone poisoned him.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Wouldn’t joke about something like that, Ben.”

A cold breeze made the hair on my arms stand up. It caused the tarp covering Norman’s corpse to billow slightly. I imagined its invisible fingers caressing the retriever’s death-matted fur, tickling his floppy golden ears.

Ben continued to stare toward the shape on the lawn, as if he could not tear his eyes away from it. It infuriated me. This was a personal matter, a private good-bye between my best friend and me. I did not want anyone else to see this. My beloved pet’s makeshift funeral was none of Ben Souther’s fucking business, and Norman deserved so much more.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Would you like me to lift up the tarp and show you, so you can see for yourself it’s really Norman under there?”

He frowned, shifted his weight from one foot to the other atop his little stepladder. “Whatever do you mean, Andy?”

“You know exactly what I mean, Ben. So you can tell all your friends”—I tilted my head in the direction of the street, toward the other houses on Poinsettia Lane—“that it’s not something
else
I’m burying in my backyard.”

Silence between us. Another strong breeze sighed through the treetops a few feet away. A dog barked in the distance.

For a second or two, I wondered if Ben was about to take me up on my offer. If he might jump across the fence to inspect the figure under the tarp for himself.

Finally, though, his face fell.

“Norman was a good dog,” he said. “I always liked him.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Andy. If I knew who did it, I’d tell you. I think you deserve that, at least.”

“Would you, Ben?” I said. “Would you tell me?”

“Of course.”

“I’d like to believe that,” I said. “And I might have. Once upon a time.”

“You should ask Officer Keith to look into this for you. He’ll get to the bottom of it, I’m sure.”

I guffawed loudly, in spite of myself. “ ‘Officer Keith.’
Right.
”