Why They Run the Way They Do (9 page)

“You gotta lot of room for a dog to run,” I called to him as I got out of the car.

“I don't want a dog to run,” he said, crossing those arms as I climbed the steps toward him. “I want a dog to lie on my feet.”

“Most dogs'll want to run every so often,” I said, reaching the top. My words came out thin and wheezy. It was weary work, climbing, and I wasn't sure how many stairs I had left in me.

“Don't you have a fat, old dog?”

I gathered my breath. “Sure I do. I got a few of 'em in fact. But even fat, old dogs need to get up every so often.”

He twisted his lips into a lopsided frown. He looked like a child when he did it, a young child experimenting in the bathroom mirror with what his own face could do, and I nearly busted out laughing.

“What is it you need to see?” he asked.

By now, frankly, I was more than a little curious. I'd been to a lot of houses, met a lot of people. And I know they say everyone's different, that we're just like snowflakes, no two alike and all that, but I think that's a load. I think most people are alike. I think most people go from the job to the TV to the pillow. In between are meals and a quick game of catch or checkers and a telephone call and one minute of looking out the window wondering what happened to someone.

But there was something about Jerry that wasn't like a person you met coming and going, something about the way he was old and young all at once. Plus, if I was going to talk him into taking more than one of my dogs (four was the number I had in my head right then), I was going to have to warm him up a little bit first.

“I need to look inside,” I said. “I need to see where the dog'll be kept.”

“The dog will be kept in the dungeon,” he said. “And forced to wear a clown costume.”

“Listen, you'd be surprised,” I said. “I've had some real weirdos. Once I—”

“No need for stories,” he said, opening the door.

I figured he must have just been moving in. The first two rooms we entered—what might have been a living room and dining room—were empty of furniture, the walls peeling paint. Our footsteps on the wood floors echoed all the way to the high ceilings.

“Where you comin' from?” I asked. “Out of state?”

“Pardon?”

I gestured to the emptiness. “I'm guessin' you just bought the place?”

“I've lived here for fifty years,” he said. “So it depends on your definition of ‘just.' ”

In the kitchen there was a breakfast-nook-type area with a small circle table and two wood chairs. There was nothing on the counters, and I don't mean there were no plates or cups or cereal boxes. There was just
nothing
—no toaster or sugar bowl or roll of paper towels. The only thing in the whole room that would have moved in an earthquake were two dog bowls in the corner by the fridge. One of the bowls was filled to the rim with water.

“You got a dog already?” I asked. “Lookin' for a pal?”

“No dog.” He cleared his throat. “Just the bowls so far.”

“A dog needs bowls, all right,” I said.

“Then you're satisfied. I can—”

“Just one more thing,” I said. “I need to see where the dog will sleep. Some people, they—”

He held up his hand. “No stories,” he said.

He led me to a small room off the kitchen. If it hadn't been connected by wood and plaster you couldn't have convinced me it was part of the same house. First off, it was tiny compared to everything else—maybe it had been a laundry room or a mud porch. But now it was carpeted with thick brown shag and stuffed with furniture: a fat brown recliner, a rickety old tray table, and one of those big fancy TVs with cables and speakers and slots for movies and whatnot.
The Andy Griffith Show
was playing on the TV. There was an open jar of pickles and three cans of ginger ale on the tray table, and at least four or five socks flopped on the floor like dead fish.

“This is where it'll sleep?”

“I expect so,” he said. “It's where I spend most of my time.”

No kiddin',
I thought. But instead I said, “Are there others in the household?”

“Possibly,” he said, taking a small step away from me. “But they won't have anything to do with the dog. The dog will be my responsibility.”

He said this like he was repeating something he'd been told a bunch of times, and I thought again that he was like a gray-haired boy. Here he stood, seventy-five, eighty years old, and I could imagine that crackly woman on the intercom saying to him, “I'm not feeding that dog, not walking that dog, not brushing that dog. You bring a dog into this house you better be willing to take care of it, buster.” And Jerry toeing the floor, like little Opie Taylor on TV, saying, “Oh yes, ma'am, I'll take care of it, I promise.”

“Here's the thing,” I said. “There's paperwork you gotta fill out, and there's a form that needs signed by everyone in the household. I don't want a dog coming back to me because someone here doesn't want it.”

“I won't return the dog,” he said.

“I know you're thinking that's true,” I said. “I know you—”

“I won't return the dog,” he said angrily. “No matter what.”

“You feel that way now,” I said. “But you might change your mind if there's someone harping on you about it every time it makes a noise or sheds some fur. Everyone has to sign off on the form. Everyone. No form, no dog.”

He scowled. “I'll be in touch,” he said.

Here's a fact: nobody wants a dog in November. Spring's the best—no surprise there—and summer's fine and early fall calls to mind pictures of happy dogs playing in leaf piles and even December brings out a few folks looking for a Christmas present. But nobody in the state of New Hampshire's thinking about dogs those first weeks of bitter cold, leading up to Thanksgiving, when the threat of snow sits over every house big and small and it's only a matter of time before simple things—getting to work, picking up groceries—aren't so simple.

Not that I didn't knock myself out trying. I spent extra money for color ads in the local paper, taped signs in every store window, waived the twenty-dollar fee. This brought out a couple more people than usual, and after the home visits and the paperwork I was down to sixteen dogs by the middle of November. But I had to move faster. At this rate it would take well into the new year to find spots for them all, and I was pretty sure I didn't have that long.

My sister called, asking me to come down to Boston for Thanksgiving, but I told her I was too busy. I might have gone—there was something nice even thinking about it, a heavy meal and voices talking over each other and a football game on somewhere—but I was afraid if I went I would buckle and tell her about what was inside me, and I knew right where that would lead. By the time that turkey's bones were simmering for soup I'd be in some specialist's office and there'd be cousins and nieces and god knows who turning up with flowers.

“Some day I'm just gonna come up there and kidnap you,” she said. “All alone in the old house with those dogs out back, it's not right. You come live near me and we'll go for lunch every day and play bridge with the other ladies on the block. Two sisters growing old together.”

“What'll Joe think of that?”

“What Joe thinks of everything—that he should turn up the TV.”

We'd thought, for almost a year when I was twenty-three and she was twenty-one, that her and I and the men we were fixing to marry would take vacations together, play shuffleboard on the deck of a cruise ship, ride donkeys down the Grand Canyon.

“I miss you,” she said. “You might as well be a million miles away.”

“I'll see you soon,” I said. “Not now, but soon.”

It was the next Friday, around lunchtime, when Jerry came out to my place. He drove a big pickup truck, shiny black and no more than a couple years old. He pulled past the dirt drive and onto the grass and on up to the kennel, which most people have the common courtesy not to do. He was already out of the truck and looking at the dogs by the time I'd gotten on my coat and gloves and made my way up there. He wasn't dressed for the weather—it was twentysomething degrees, I bet—and he had his hands tucked into the pits of his flannel shirt.

“Talked her into it, did ya?” I asked him.

He didn't look at me, just kept checking out the dogs. “Talked who into what?”

“The one who didn't want a dog. Promised her you'd take good care of it?”

He rubbed his hands together and then blew into them. “Are there any fatter ones?”

True, most of the outright strays were skin and bones. But there were at least three overweight dogs—orphaned by divorce or allergy most likely—standing not ten feet from him when he said this.

“Look at that black one,” I said. A bit of dizziness blew through my head and I took hold of the fence pole to steady myself. “You want fatter than that?”

“He a barker?”

“They're dogs,” I said. “They bark. But no, he's not one that keeps you up nights. That one in the corner—he's a fatty, too, and quiet. The two get on well. You want 'em both, I'll charge you just for the one.”

He shook his head. “I don't want two dogs,” he said. He still hadn't looked at me.

“You got a big yard, all fenced up. Shame to let it go to waste.”

Now he finally turned. In the cold his face was a little gray, his eyes watery. “It's not going to waste,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “Come on down to the house and we'll write it up.”

I was stalling, really. The sky promised snow and probably no one else would come by today, and though being alone wasn't something that'd bothered me for the last forty or so years, the truth was in the early afternoons it was starting to get to me just a little bit now. Plus maybe I could convince him if I gave him a cup of coffee. We walked down to the house. I hadn't been much for picking up in the last couple months, and there was a lot of mess around the living room, including a couple empty boxes that the bulk Milk-Bones had come in that I'd just left lying near the front door.

“You want a coffee?” I asked him, a little embarrassed by the state of things.

“You're moving,” he said, looking around the room.

“No,” I said. “I just—”

“You are. You're moving. I saw the sign on the gate.” He pointed a bony finger at me. “You don't want any more dogs because you're moving down to Florida to live in a condominium. You're going to get skinny and leathery and wear shorts with flowers on them.”

I laughed a little. “All right,” I said. “Have it your way. Do you want a coffee or not?”

“You're not going to like it down there,” he said. He sat down at my kitchen table, which was covered in junk mail and paper napkins.

“Now how could you know that? You don't even know my name.”

“You're not going to like it,” he said. “This is your home. Look at this place. Nobody in Florida lives like this.”

“Where's your paperwork?” I asked. “In the truck?”

“I don't have it,” he said. “And I'm not going to have it. But you're going to give me that fat black dog anyway, because you're moving to Florida and you want to get rid of those mutts as soon as you can.”

I thought about making a deal. I thought about saying, okay, mister smarty-pants, take two, the black one and his pal, and I'll take your word for it that you won't change your mind, that you'll keep them no matter what that crackly woman might say. I thought about it for five or six seconds, probably, which is likely the longest I've taken someone's word for in thirty years. But then I remembered, and felt like a fool for forgetting: you never knew what a person will do. They'll tell you one thing and five minutes later do something else. I'd seen it again and again.

“She needs to sign,” I said, pushing back from the table. “I'll get you another copy if you—”