The Dogs of Littlefield (26 page)

Julia groaned aloud. Last week when Nicholas was having a tantrum after one of his Lego towers collapsed, she told him the story of how she'd fallen through the ice of Silsbee Pond and had to be saved by a fireman in a yellow rubber raft. Nicholas made her repeat it three times. Finally, to avoid telling the story a fourth time, she found the YouTube video on his mother's computer while she was lying down in her bedroom. “Help! Help!” Julia could be heard shouting, voice like a wisp of smoke. Suddenly the camera view jostled up toward the sky; when it came back down there was a hole in the ice where she had been standing.

“Where'd you go?” Nicholas kept asking, eyes big and deerlike. He wouldn't believe her when she said she didn't really remember, though this in fact was true.

“Someplace cold,” she said at last.

“But you came back.”

“Of course I did. You see me here, don't you?”

“Help! Help!” he repeated all the time now. It was his new favorite saying.

“Help! Help!” Nicholas cried again at the old lady in front of Walgreens.

“Sorry,” Julia told her, just as Nicholas darted away down the sidewalk. At that same moment Binx wrapped his leash around a streetlight. By the time Julia had pulled the dog free, Nicholas was out of sight.

— —

In the woods of Baldwin
Park, five or six yards off the trail, Matthew Melman sat on a rock smoking a joint and swatting at a mosquito buzzing around his head. The mosquito was making it hard for him to concentrate on the rock. He was trying to figure out the rock's exact color. Recently he'd been trying to categorize things other people never noticed, as part of his blog:
The Importance of Not Giving a Fuck about What's Important
.

The rock was full of other rocks, various colors of gray. Steel gray. Lead gray. Gunmetal gray? Could he
see
something as gunmetal gray if he had never seen a real gun? Trippy question.

He tried to imagine what his mother would say if he pointed a gun at her.

You're having separation issues
.

After another toke he swatted at the mosquito again, wondering if the mosquito might
be
his actual buzz. Also a trippy question. Trippy questions, he'd decided, were the only questions worth asking. At the end of ninth-grade English, Mr. Wechsler had given him an old copy of
On the Road
and a Xeroxed copy of “Howl.”

“Time to start driving your brain, kid,” he'd said, “before somebody else does it for you.”

Matthew was flattered at having been singled out by Mr. Wechsler, whom he admired for occasionally using profanity in class, but also afraid he'd been insulted. He hadn't read either the book or the poem until last winter, when he'd seen Mr. Wechsler at the Downings' freakish Christmas party and then went home and found them in a backpack stuffed under his bed.

Immediately he recognized himself as Sal Paradise with a touch of Ginsberg. Unshaven, untamed, a poet-blogger vagabond. Sort of like Mr. Wechsler. That's when he'd started growing a beard. For a while he smoked in the icy garden shed behind his house, surrounded by bicycles, rakes, hoses, the lawn mower, a small plastic red tank of gasoline, also the Nautilus machine his mother never used and had finally banished from the house because it made her feel guilty. (“And God knows,” she'd said, “I have enough of
that.
”) But one afternoon when his mother was nagging him to clean up his room, he slammed out of the house and rode his bike to the park to uncork his head. After leaning his bike against a tree, he walked into the snowy woods, taking the trail to the left and then plunging off into the trees, looking for a good place to light up, when suddenly there it was: the rock, rising up like a huge knee, in a little clearing all by itself. The Philosopher's Stone, he decided to call it. For stoned philosophers.

After that he went to the woods as often as he could, reserving the garden shed for rainy afternoons. He kept matches, rolling papers, and a lid of pot in the pocket of his denim jacket at all times, enjoying the outlaw thrill of sauntering through the halls at school with concealed narcotics. Getting high—even thinking about getting high—gave him a sense of raffish travel, of hasty departures and dusty sunset arrivals, which made up for the burnt taste in his mouth afterward and the irritable feeling that nothing good was ever going to happen to him.

It wasn't his fault he had not gotten into any of the colleges he'd applied to. It was even kind of a distinction. Unlike the douche bags in his class, he had not lied on his college applications about spending spring break building outhouses in Costa Rica; he hadn't claimed that being a camp counselor for two months at the Jewish Community Center had taught him the values of responsibility and caring for others. Under “Extracurricular Activities,” he'd listed “Police interrogations” and “Driver's Ed.”

I am a wastrel,
he wrote in his application essay, which he had refused to allow his mother to proofread.
I believe in the value of blowing it, of fucking off, of rejecting the phantasmal capitalist scurry and 21st-century techno-cultural Moloch mind traps
.
I am awed by all that is out there that I don't want to do. The number of things I don't want to do is so huge that I don't have a clue of what I don't want to do.

Secretly, he had believed his essay, lifted straight from his blog, would strike admissions panels as so brutally honest and profound that he would be accepted everywhere. It was a shock when rejections began to arrive. He felt betrayed and humiliated for trusting college websites, which had advised him to be himself and claimed that admissions officers valued originality over grades and SAT scores. Moronic colleges. Totally unserious. All people did in college was get drunk and fall out of dorm windows. But on a cold, wet day in April, huddled on the Nautilus machine in the dark garden shed amid the smell of mildew and gasoline, he had wept over his final rejection, from the University of Chicago.

When at last he left the garden shed, his mother had been waiting at the kitchen door. At the sight of her long, anxious face, his eyes had filled again. He'd wanted to run across the yard, throw his arms around her, bury his face in her shoulder, have her stroke his back and tell him again that there was a college for everyone and that somehow (she would call someone) it would all work out.

“Well, I guess you'll have to get a job and apply again next year,” his mother had said instead, when he handed her the rejection letter.

What kind of a mother
says
that?

This morning she'd told him Radio Shack was accepting job applications. Also that it was time to shave; he was starting to look “scruffy.”

“And honey,” she'd said, “enough smoking dope. It's immature.”

Shooting was too good for her.

— —

Dragging Binx along, Julia ran
toward the Walgreens parking lot, calling and calling for Nicholas to come back, seeing his little red shirt bobbing far ahead of her on the sidewalk, vanishing, then reappearing. Twice Binx wound his leash around a parking meter. He kept planting his feet mulishly on the sidewalk and growling; she had to jerk hard on the leash to make him move. Several people stopped her to ask if something was the matter. Because they were adults, she tried to explain, but it took too long, so she had to apologize and then continue running, hauling Binx with her.

Somewhere beyond Walgreens she lost sight of Nicholas's little red shirt. She ran down Brooks Street toward the elementary school. Maybe Nicholas had run to school to play in the playground. She ran past the elementary school. The playground was empty. Beyond the playground, the soccer field was empty. In another half a block she was running along the weedy sidewalk above the park's bowl-like meadow.

— —

The joint had burned down
to a roach and was singeing his fingertips. As he tossed it to the ground he felt his mind disconnect from his body and float with a gentle whine over his left shoulder.

I have nothing to offer anybody, he thought, except my own confusion.

Pretending that he had authored this statement, not Jack Kerouac, and envying Sal Paradise, who probably didn't have a mother, he watched himself lie back on the rock, holding a last lungful of smoke, and then gaze up at the shifting leaves and sky, his face going slack as a breeze lulled his cheek.

Hush,
said the breeze.

Someone was crying. Slowly he exhaled the smoke from his lungs and watched it spiral into the sky. From a great distance, it came to him that what he was hearing was a real cry. High and forsaken, like air escaping a balloon. His own unuttered howl. Recorded by the universe and played back to him.

— —

“Nicholas,” she screamed.

No one was in the park. Mothers didn't let children play on the grass anymore; most of them wouldn't even walk through with strollers. But Nicholas probably only remembered the park as fun, where kids played games after school. Red Rover. Hide and Go Seek. That's what he was probably doing right now. Hiding behind a bush or behind that old tree in the meadow, waiting to pop out and yell, “Help! Help!”

Nicholas was so clearly before her in his red T-shirt that she felt herself grab his small sweaty hand, heard herself say in a furious, relieved voice, again like her mother's,
I was so worried. Don't make me worry like that
. But as she started to sprint down the slope into the meadow, she tripped over Binx's leash.

Down she went, Binx yelping with her. Julia banged her knee on a rock and got a grass stain on the elbow of her new shirt. By the time she looked up again, the meadow stretched vast and indifferent, sprinkled with white clover. In the community gardens, chicken-wire fences sagged in the afternoon sun; the handle of a shovel gleamed silver, stuck in a heap of black compost.

“Mama,” she whimpered, holding her throbbing knee. Beside her on the grass, Binx whined, licking a paw. Then he sat up and sniffed the breeze.

Nothing moved but the tops of trees at the dark mouth of the woods.

Julia staggered up, clutching the leash as if it were the end of a rope, and limped down the rest of the slope and past the community gardens. When she reached the meadow she began to run in the direction of the creek and the footbridge, calling, “Nicholas, Nicholas,” while Binx forged ahead, big shoulder muscles working, tugging and twisting on the leash, until it lifted, as if by its own accord, right out of Julia's hand. He streaked across the meadow. A moment later she saw him spring toward the creek, hang suspended in the air for a black split second, before he splashed, with an oozy gulp, into the mud. The next minute he was swarming up the bank on the other side and then, as if sucked into the woods, he was gone.

— —

Matthew stared down at the
figure before him. An elf or a troll in bright red and yellow. Some kind of Technicolor woodland creature. He understood that it was a vision, granted to him by a celestial force aligned with his brain waves, and also that it must be addressed.

“Hey, dude,” he said finally, “what the fuck are you doing here?”

In response the creature opened its mouth and gave a piercing wail.

Instantly it morphed into a kid Matthew recognized from day camp last summer at the Jewish Community Center. A pale, snivelly little kid, in saggy orange swim trunks, a kid who peed in the pool and kept announcing it, making all the other kids squeal and demand to get out.

“Dude,” he said, scrambling down off the rock. “Dude. Shut
up
, okay?”

To his amazement, the kid closed his mouth and lifted his small tearstained face to gaze up at him. Matthew tried to think of what he should say next; he was so thirsty his tongue felt like a gym sock.

“So, like, where's your mom?”

Mistake. The kid's peaky face crumpled; once again his mouth went square. For three full seconds there was an immense and absolute silence, and then he howled again. A long, terrified, inconsolable howl that went on and on, ululating like a siren.
The
howl, Matthew realized. Like something cosmic, it infused the whole woods, making branches sway and twigs snap.

“Whoa,” said Matthew, crouching down and grabbing the kid's shoulder. “Whoa, whoa.”

He was surprised to find himself shaking. What a lot of noise one little kid could make. Thank God he was just whining now. But as Matthew leaned against the rock to catch his breath, a shadow flickered through the trees. And from no more than twenty yards away came an answering growl.

— —

Julia stumbled across the footbridge,
limping toward the mouth of the woods, tall grass whipping her bare calves. Her throat ached from calling, “Nicholas, Nicholas,” her breath coming in gasps; she had a stitch in her side, and for some reason she couldn't stop picturing her mother staring at the clock and wringing the dishtowel.

Two trails stretched before her. After hesitating, she plunged off to the right, running along the trail past a tree trunk split in half and a gray boulder the size of a baby elephant. She had never been in the woods by herself before. Branches and leaves closed above her so that it was like running into a green tunnel. Left she turned, then right. She was covering a lot of ground—but there again was the tree with the split trunk and the elephant boulder. How had that happened?

She kept running, taking a different path this time, one marked by a blue blaze on a tree. More trees, more branches overhead, the world a soft green blur. She heard the sound of someone else's footsteps and realized Nicholas must be just ahead; but no, it was only the drumming of her heart. How could she have run so far and not found him? After a few minutes she saw the split trunk once more and the elephant boulder, and now she no longer had any clear idea of where she was running to, or even why she was running, and as she was running a branch hit her in the face and there was the elephant again, and then something she had refused to think about was suddenly, sickeningly right in the middle of the trail. Her mother asleep on the sofa, face white and sunken.