The Dogs of Littlefield (27 page)

“I can't hold on much longer.” Her mother had been talking on the phone to Hannah's mother two nights ago. “Dr. Vogel says we'll have to tell Julia soon—” Then she'd broken off. “Julia, is that you?”

Hardly eating dinner. Headaches. Collapsing at Christmas (“Just tired,” her father had said, looking away).
I love you. No matter what
.
I want you always to remember . . .

— —

Three children in the woods.
No one knows where they are, and at this point neither do they. The meadow of Baldwin Park (now empty) leads to a wooden footbridge over the creek and then stops at the woods, where after a short distance two trails fork in opposite directions: Matthew and Nicholas both followed the one to the left and have wound up together in a small clearing fifty feet off the trail. The woods are full of brushy white pines and an understory of scrub oak. Matthew and Nicholas are quite hidden. Even loud sounds become muffled in such a dense place, though creaks and rustles seem amplified wherever one is standing. As for Julia, she took the other trail, a loop, something she did not know, and she is running in circles.

But where is Binx?

— —

Another growl, this time closer.
A footfall in the dry leaves.

“Get up on the rock, dude.” Matthew seized the kid and boosted him up, a hand on the seat of his shorts, realizing too late that the kid's shorts were wet.

A shrill chorus started up:
icky Nicky, icky Nicky
.

“Hey, Nicky.” He tried to make his voice sound camp-counselorish. “Stay up there, okay?”

The kid crawled to the top of the rock and then turned to stare down at him, eyes dark and round in his little white face.

“Okay? Don't move.”

Matthew wiped his damp hand on his jeans, heart beginning to hammer as he bent down to pick up a stick lying near his feet, but he was still stoned enough to think, This is pretty cool. Like, there's something OUT there, when another twig snapped.

— —

Never, ever go into the
woods alone,
her mother used to say every time they visited the park when she was little.
You could get lost and no one would hear you.

No farther than the bridge. Promise me.

Once when her mother was talking to another mother, Julia had run across the little bridge and stood at the mouth of the trail, looking in at the fanlike green ferns and dark tree trunks rising from quiet brown heaps of dead leaves. What a relief it would be to go into the woods and get it over with. To find out what happened when nobody could hear you. She'd imagined a cave, vines, a pool of black water. Rising from the pool, a white, beckoning hand. But then her mother had snatched her up, scolding, and carried her back to the park.

Julia stopped running and slid her hands to her knees, gasping for breath. High above branches of leaves and pine needles, the sky was still as blue as a circus balloon.

— —

Head hanging low, ears laid
back, the creature stepped darkly into the little clearing, drawing some of the shade of the woods with it. Matthew stared; all the stories he'd ever heard about coyotes in the woods stared back at him. But this was no coyote. Foam collected at the corners of its wide, panting jaws, dripping greenish slime.

The creature stopped and began moving its heavy, slick head back and forth, so that for a moment in the uncertain light of the woods it seemed to have three of them. And then Matthew smelled it, rank and rotten, like waterlogged dead things at the bottom of a well.

Stoned or not, he knew what he was facing: something terrible, something old and terrible. And though he understood that he would never be able to defeat it, that it was too powerful, too basic, too faithful to its own dark instincts, he recognized that it had been conferred upon him to try.

He waved the stick in his hand,
swish, swish
,
like a sword.

The creature bared its teeth. Black gums. White fangs. Yellowish eyes.

Its big muscles quivered. And then it growled. Deep and low in its chest.

He waved the stick again.

“Scat?” he said.

— —

A child's faraway scream.

Then nothing.

Julia stayed where she was, standing on the trail in the middle of the woods. As long as she stood there, as long as she didn't move in any direction, she could remain just as she was, not knowing anything, not responsible for anything, just a girl lost in the woods.

Eventually she stepped off the trail and sat down on an old, rotting log covered with bright green moss. The log, when she looked at it, was lively with charcoal-colored armored bugs crawling in and out of holes. Everywhere she heard cracklings, like a hidden fire, secret stirrings beneath old leaves, all the way into the clayey soil down to the roots, which she understood to be stirring, too, sending hairlike feelers toward the surface of the earth. The world was full of live and dead things.

What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?
she used to ask her mother. And then one day not long ago she asked her father and he told her.

“Did you bury them?” she'd asked afterward.

Her father had looked confused for a moment and then said something about building the waterfall by the pool, a kind of memorial.

As this conversation came back to her, she knew at last what her mother was seeing when she stared out the kitchen windows. This realization reached Julia numbly, as if once again she were standing on the ice, cold air rising up in drafts. She was not all that her mother had ever loved or worried about.

I will never forgive her, she thought, surprising herself because she knew this was true.

Voices called out. Shadows moved in and out of the trees. The sun shifted overhead and a patch of whiteness shone beside her, a kind of neutral blankness that was strangely reassuring. She had been shivering; now the coldness let her go. For a long time Julia stayed where she was, sitting on the log, fingers of sunlight reaching toward her through silvery pine needles. And though she did not notice, when she got up at last and walked back to the trail, the patch of whiteness followed her, all the way out of the woods.

I
t could have been a lot worse,
Naomi told Clarice Watkins over a glass of wine at the Tavern, though it was bad enough. Matthew bitten three times on the arm and once on the leg. Eighteen stitches. The animal had to be destroyed, of course. Sent to a farm, they told the girl, to look after sheep, but she wasn't stupid. Kids always know when you're not telling them something. Better to be truthful, no matter how bad the truth is.

Clarice nodded as she listened. She had finally mastered the record feature on her iPhone, which allowed her to relax during conversations and actually hear what people said.

“I mean I love dogs, I have one, too,” Naomi was saying. “But that thing wasn't safe around children.”

The postman had testified the dog tried to bite him every time he came to the house. Even Margaret admitted it wasn't the first time he'd gone after someone. They'd had him fixed, thinking that was why he was so aggressive, but it was just bad nature. Some dogs were like that. Out of control.

And poor Emily. Scared to death when she realized little Nicky was lost, though he'd been fine, of course, thanks to Matthew. Naomi had seen Emily last week at Clean Up Littlefield Day, picking up trash around the trolley tracks. That brute of a husband, running off with a student. Someone should clean up
him
. What was wrong with people? Didn't they understand that actions had consequences? That little boy was a mess already and now—

Naomi ordered another glass of chardonnay and talked on in a way Clarice had come to recognize: a busy woman drinking wine on an evening out, freed from kitchen tyranny and from helping with homework, enjoying the brief luxury of feeling fortunate, moved to consider all the hard luck among her friends.

On and on she went:

Poor Margaret especially. A lovely woman, but an absolute wreck. This last episode with Julia has pushed her right over the edge. Now she thinks she's seeing things. One minute she's looking at a bush, the next it's a dog. Well, no surprise, given the monster she had right in her house. That's what I told her. I said, Margaret, you are projecting, and it may even be helpful, a defense mechanism, given all your stress. Because the woman is barely functioning. Marriage on life support. She's been having an affair, which I'm sure you've already guessed, so this isn't news: George Wechsler. I know. I don't see it, either. Anyway, Bill's firm shut down, the poor man out of work and on antidepressants. About time, frankly. I suggested that months ago.

And then Julia. One thing after another. First her stunt on the ice, then taking the boy and that crazy dog for a walk and losing them both in the woods. Comes home afterward and doesn't say a word, with half the village out looking for her. Just goes to her room and closes the door. Probably posted the whole thing on Facebook. That YouTube video of her received almost eight hundred thousand hits. Can you believe it? Margaret's finally got the girl in therapy. I finagled an appointment with someone I know, a very good person. No easy thing these days, let me tell you—every child in town has some kind of anxiety disorder. I blame it on the dogs. Kids are resilient but there's a limit.

Sweet, though, how Matthew stuck up for little Nicky, saying
he
didn't think the dog should be put down. Wrote about it in his blog. Very political. Quotes poetry. I'll give you the link. Of course, I'm his mother, but I can't help feeling proud. Out for a walk in the woods, just to clear his head—high school these days! so much pressure!—when he finds little Nicky sitting on a rock, all alone, bawling like a lamb. Tries to calm him down and that creature
springs
out of nowhere. Had to fight it off with a stick. Frankly, if there were more kids like Matthew, sacrificing themselves for others, the world wouldn't be such an awful place. He's taking a gap year, by the way. “Mom,” he said, “when I go to college I want to go there to learn something.” Isn't that smart? But he's very interested in the University of Chicago. Oh, that's
right,
that's where you teach. How funny. I was just saying to Stan—

— —

After listening to Naomi talk
at the Tavern until almost eleven, Clarice was at her usual window table the next morning at the Forge Café, drinking a third cup of coffee and listening to Ahmed Bhopali in his stained white kitchen coat.

Ahmed's voice was wounded, intimate; he kept his mouth very small, like a man lodging a protest through a keyhole.

The Littlefield police had been harassing him for months. Ticketed him for chaining his bicycle to a parking meter in front of the post office; cited him for jaywalking across Brooks Street; gave him a warning for sitting in Baldwin Park after dusk. All because a dark-haired man with facial hair had been spotted spray-painting the front of a college test preparation office on April 16. A person of interest.

Ever since then, the police had been stopping anyone who met that description, including Ahmed, twelve times.

LEASH YOUR BEAST
was all over town, stenciled on banks, nail salons, the Dairy Barn, even across the front door of a yoga studio. The whole village was hysterical. The Department of Public Works could no longer keep up with graffiti removal.

Last week Ahmed had decided to shave off his beard in the hope of looking less interesting; but yesterday (“the final piece of straw”), a policeman threatened to arrest him for shoplifting as he left Walgreens with an electric razor he had tried to return. His beard was too thick for electric razor blades and had burned up the motor. Thirty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents.

“I did not poison any dog,” he said. “Why would I? I do not care about any dogs.”

Clarice nodded. She had adopted her professional receptive look: raised eyebrows, head tilted to the side.

“But no more,” Ahmed was saying.

His white coat looked like a painter's smock with its dabs of pink and brown icing, the yellow smears of batter. Ahmed's fingers, too, looked like a painter's fingers: long and sensitive, not very clean under the nails. He also had something of a painter's way of looking critically around the room, displeased by its composition. At a nearby table sat a large, pale, bearded young man, wearing a green sweatshirt in spite of the heat, slumped over a cup of coffee. Ahmed glared, perhaps at the man's beard.

He had quit his job, he told her. Baked his final batch of doughnuts.

“I will be very happy to leave this place. It is too crazy.” Gingerly he patted his clean-shaven chin, pocked with bloody nicks.

Clarice put a hand to her eyes to see him more clearly in the glare from the windows. The sun had risen past the rooftops of the village since she first sat down; now sunlight blazed in at an angle that made it difficult to look at anything but what was directly in front of her.