The Hand That Feeds You (25 page)

When the phone rang, I jumped.

“I’ve got good news,” Billie said. “But I feel like a ghoul, saying so. I just found out that the sick dog at For Pitties’ Sake has a day at the most to live.”

“How come they called
you
?”

“I’m here with Alfredo, dropping off the patty-cakes. We were able to transport four. Alfredo just got them settled in their comfy, new quarters. We already have homes for three of them.”

My admiration for Billie in that moment was genuine. But I still had to rally to acknowledge the good work she had done.

I thought, if I can’t protect myself, I can still protect my dog.

•  •  •

I snapped on Olive’s leash and took her out for a walk. Soon, Cloud would be able to go outdoors, too. We headed toward Petopia. Olive picked up her pace as she recognized the route to her toy store. By the time we turned the final corner, Olive was flying along. Inside the store, I saw a medium-size beagle-mix, unaccompanied, walk up to a dog-height barrel of rawhide treats, nose around, and select one, then trot out the door with it. I laughed and asked the clerk if he had seen that. “Rudy runs a tab,” he said. Rudy worked in the travel bureau next door. We left the store with a tub of freeze-dried liver bits for Cloud.

The simple joy of pleasing a dog strengthened me enough to return to the job ahead. Back at the computer, something was obscene about having to slog through Bennett and Libertine’s flippant sniping for a chance to find out who she was.

Libertine:
Are you in her will?

Whose will?

Bennett:
The apartment is rented, and she doesn’t have a car. She didn’t come from money, and she gives away most of what she makes.

My donations to animal-welfare agencies?

Libertine:
Nothing like keeping busy without making money!

Bennett:
Isn’t that what you do?

Libertine:
I can afford to, as you well know.

Bennett:
I keep thinking of that documentary we liked,
Grizzly Man,
the way Timothy Treadwell’s passion for grizzly bears led to his ironic death. I mean, a homeless man? In the shelter where she worked to help them?

The relief that I felt was twofold: relief that it wasn’t me they were talking about, and more powerfully, relief that Bennett was dead. I thought I knew what a sociopath was; I could profile one for you. But not until that moment did I understand viscerally what one did.

He had talked this way about a woman he had planned to marry, a woman who had been killed in compassionate service to others. I even had the time-worn thought
Is nothing sacred?
And what of
Grizzly Man
? They both liked the documentary, according to the e-mail exchange, but I had seen it, too, and remembered that Treadwell’s girlfriend accompanied him and she was also killed by the grizzly that mauled him.

I read to the point where the homeless man under suspicion for the murder of Susan Rorke had been cleared and released. After that, the tone of Bennett’s e-mails changed. He became concerned that the police might look at him. Rather than offering reassurance, Libertine failed to take his concerns seriously. She even changed the subject, moving on to thoughts of where they might go next on vacation. But Bennett brought her back to the subject at hand. I read on, seeing the ways in which his expression of fear affected her. At one point she wrote,
Who
are
you!
And then I landed on a sentence I reread over and again, looking for a trace of sarcasm, not finding it. It was Bennett defending me to her:
Morgan is deeply kind. She would never treat me the way you do.

I was disappointed in myself for feeling flattered.

Libertine didn’t take the bait. Or maybe she did. She issued a challenge to Bennett:
I want you to fuck me in her bed. Tomorrow morning.
Bennett wrote back,
She’ll be gone by 9.

There were no more messages from Libertine. That last one had been sent the night before Bennett’s death.

•  •  •

I needed to be in motion. I could not bear another moment in the apartment. Grabbed a coat and scarf, hat and gloves, and left to walk—anywhere. I needed to pass people whose mistakes I knew nothing about. I felt safer out among others. I passed the Metropolitan pool, a rack of Citi Bikes, the Colombian food truck, and a juice bar. Who doesn’t need juice? I stopped in and got a small carrot juice, a nod to nutrition.

The closer I got to the water, the more the cold wind picked up. I walked out onto the pier where men fish, but no one was fishing. My eyes watered and my face stung. I surrendered to numbness. That surrender allowed me to surrender also to what I had just learned, that Libertine had been in my apartment the morning Bennett had been killed.

Is that what had ignited the dogs? Being locked in the bathroom and hearing the sounds of Bennett and this woman in my bed? It would certainly ignite me. I found myself suffused with heat. I didn’t feel the cold anymore; the blood was rushing to every cold part of me. Confusion fell away, and I felt a clear, piercing understanding move through me. Another word for this feeling was anger. Normally, anger blinded me, but this time it allowed me to see. It was bracing, and welcome. It was stronger than fear. I valued this clarity; I did not want to blur it. Libertine had been in my bedroom with Bennett.

B
oss died during the night. The call came in the morning from Alfredo at For Pitties’ Sake. Now there was room for Cloud. Alfredo said he’d be ready to do an intake for Cloud that afternoon.

Finally, something clean. I had been able, just barely, to protect a creature I loved until I could lead her to safety. I was filled with joy that my dog was going to a place where she would be cared for with love.

Before I reserved a Zipcar, I called Billie. We’d been working toward this moment for nearly six months. I asked her if she wanted to go with me, and she told me she would pick me up. When she arrived, she had coffee and scones for the drive. Plus a rawhide chewie for Cloud. For my part, I had packed sliced ham in my tote bag.

“We did it!” Billie said.

She was right to use the plural,
we
. I could not have gotten this far without her help, and I told her so. She raised her hand to give me a high five, and I met it with my own. I noticed then that her arm, her face, was as pale as mine. She had no tan at all though she had just come back from the Caribbean. Billie didn’t strike me as one to wear a big hat and gloves in the sun, but what did I know. Even people who stay out of the direct sun get tan in the Caribbean.

“I thought you’d have some color.”

“I was only there for forty-eight hours. I didn’t go there to tan on the beach.”

“Did they finish the new shelter? Did you meet Lesley?”

“Lesley was off island. I picked the dogs up at the old one.”

But every time I had gone down to pick up these dogs, Lesley, the director of the Humane Society, had brought them, paperwork completed, to the airport.

I realized I was testing Billie and I suspected she knew it. I still wanted to know if she’d gone away with McKenzie.

I asked if she had any sugar packets in the car for the coffee.

“Look in the glove.”

I found several lipsticks—though I’d never seen her wear any—but no sugar. I picked up a tube of lipstick in a shade called Tiramisu. “Why don’t I just eat this?” I asked in a lame attempt to joke away the tension I felt between us.

“That’s hard to come by. Been discontinued.”

We had been making good time on the FDR Drive north. Joggers ran along the riverside, wearing extra gear against the cold. Few boats were out on the river in the afternoon, just a single barge being pulled along by a tug. The booze cruises were a spring and summer phenomenon. These were working boats doing their best in the icy water, navigating the famously difficult currents in the inlet known as the East River.

We took the Ninety-Sixth Street exit and passed the many discount stores with merchandise displayed on the sidewalk even in the cold, and the cut-rate grocery, the White Castle, the projects, and gas stations packed with cabs. A frosted-over community garden interrupted a row of tenements just before we turned onto 119th Street.

“Have you got her leash?” Billie asked.

We had just pulled into a parking space (no meter) just short of the iron gates in front of the nearly windowless, concrete structure. My dog had been imprisoned since September, and we were about to break her out.

“Leash and collar,” I said. The nylon web collar had peace signs in a rainbow of colors printed on it. Her name tag, her license, her rabies tag. Billie must have sensed my going soft because she said, “Act as if you come here all the time.”

She steered me past the intake desk after waving to a kennel worker she knew. The woman at intake had recognized Billie and buzzed us in. The noise assaulted us immediately, combined with an overpowering smell of urine and feces. I followed Billie on slippery linoleum—she moved with the purpose of a soldier. It should have inspired strength in me, but I felt disequilibrium.

The occasional wall-mounted sanitary dispensers would have held antibacterial gel had they ever been filled. We passed door after door leading into the wards. Each ward contained about two dozen dogs, the large ones housed in a row of cages, the smaller dogs inhabiting smaller cages stacked three high. Overflow made it necessary to place a wall of these stacked cages in the main hallway. I saw that frightened cats in carriers were mixed in with the dogs. Fluorescent lights in the hallway pulsed and crackled, an instant headache. The ward doors were on one side of the hallway; on the other was a door marked
MEDICAL.

“Don’t go in there,” Billie said.

I glanced in when a vet tech opened it as we passed. I saw blood on the linoleum floor.

“Told you,” Billie said.

Food storage was on the same side of the hallway down a ways from Medical. There, a deep sink was filled with aluminum water bowls and opened cans of dog food under a leaking faucet.

“Eyes right,” Billie said, noting my wandering gaze. But I looked anyway. Each ward door had a narrow panel of glass at about eye level, and I looked in at the dogs. Some were clearly depressed—they sat in the back of their cage facing the wall. Others, as soon as they made even passing eye contact with a potential rescuer, began to perform tricks that someone had once taught them—a lifted paw to shake, though no one was there to shake it. I felt as though I would disintegrate. I must have gasped because Billie turned to me and said, “This is why I come here.”

Adoption hours were still in effect, and we had passed clusters of people looking at dogs behind bars. Dogs cleared for adoption were in the first two wards, with small dogs in a separate room. The small dogs always had more visitors looking for a pet. I saw children holding trembling Chihuahuas and miniature poodles, as well as big-eared mutts. I saw families walk from cage to cage in the big-dog adoption wards, debating the merits of one over the other, which dog was cuter, which would require less exercise. I paused while Billie walked ahead for a moment. I’d overheard a grungy-looking guy around twenty or so gauging the likelihood of a young male pit bull’s chances in the ring. I caught up to Billie to tell her about him, and she said, “We know all about that guy. Intake knows not to release a dog to him.”

But the public was not allowed in the ward we were headed for.

I would not last an hour in this place. I had known this all along, but I could only now acknowledge it fully, since I was getting my own dog out. The only thing that went in the face of this horror was the generosity shown the animals by the kennel staff and volunteers, other women like Billie, for she had told me the volunteers were nearly all women. She had also told me that most of the kennel workers, there to do a difficult and distressing job, were kind to them, called the dogs by their names, even though those names were usually assigned to them at intake.

“At the end of the hall, that door goes into a backyard,” Billie said. “It’s the one place where dogs can be off leash. Though
yard
isn’t really accurate—it’s not as if there’s any grass.”

We were nearly to the ward where Cloud was confined when Billie said, “If the elevator were working, you’d see all of this replicated on the second floor.”

When that fact washed over me, I was stricken with guilt at not being able to take more than just Cloud out of here. But where did that lead, and where would it stop?

“I can see what you’re thinking,” Billie said. “You can’t save them all. For me, it’s a matter of translation, always translating what I spend money on into what it would pay for in this place. That pair of shoes would inoculate twenty-five dogs against bordetella. Those sunglasses would spay ten dogs.”

Billie took out a key ring and unlocked the door to Ward 4A, where the Dangerous Dogs were kept. In this ward, on each kennel card affixed to the top of a cage were the red-inked words
CAUTION—SEVERE.
This was their temperament rating. On the concrete wall facing the row of cages were thick steel rings hanging from exposed screws—tie-outs that these strong dogs had pulled clean out of the wall. Propped against the wall in one corner was a catchpole, next to the industrial, coiled black hose.

Cloud was not where I had last seen her, the first cage near the door. Instead of Cloud, that cage held a large white dog with cropped ears and pink eyes; it sat coolly facing the front bars.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She’s been moved to the end of the row.”

I felt a moment’s guilt at not tending to the dogs in the cages I raced past to find my own. When I saw my girl, her white coat defiled, I cried out her name and then just cried. She moved to the front bars as Billie opened the door just enough to attach her collar and leash. Billie told me to let her walk Cloud out of the ward, Cloud to the left of her, Billie’s body between Cloud and the caged dogs. When we reached the entrance to the ward, I saw the white dog with cropped ears, but it was not in the first cage by the door. It was in the second cage from the door, where George had once been next to Cloud but unable to see her. I realized that there were two white dogs with cropped ears and pink eyes, mirroring each other’s stance in their respective cages. The dogs had short hair and broad, muscular chests. They were not pitties, but seemed to be Molossers, the predecessors of the bully breeds. The dogs looked to be about 130 pounds, larger even than Cloud.