The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  Suzanne Berne

  THE DOGS OF LITTLEFIELD

  Contents

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Acknowledgments

  Follow Penguin

  By the same author

  A Crime in the Neighborhood

  A Perfect Arrangement

  The Ghost at the Table

  Missing Lucile

  For Maxine Rodburg

  1.

  No one was very surprised when the signs began appearing in Baldwin Park. For years people had been letting their dogs run free in the meadow to the west of the elementary school and no one had said much about it; but once an authorized off-leash ‘dog park’ was proposed and a petition presented to the Littlefield Board of Aldermen, fierce arguments erupted over whose rights to the park should be upheld and the town broke into factions, those who loved dogs and those who did not, at least not in the park.

  At first the signs were polite reminders to dog owners to curb and pick up after their dogs, but as the off-leash proposal gained support among the aldermen, several of whom owned dogs themselves, the signs became more pointed. ‘Respect the Park,’ they read. Or ‘The Park is for All of Us.’ On St Patrick’s Day, a sign was posted on a telephone pole at the frontier of the elementary school playground where wood chips gave way to grass and dog-walking parents often congregated after escorting their children to school. Printed in black ink on the kind of thin, flexible cardboard that comes slipped inside of men’s dress shirts, it read:

  Pick up

  after Your Dog.

  Aren’t You Ashamed

  that You Don’t?

  This sign created a small uproar among the parents, who objected to its tone, and it was taken down by the custodian. Then, on March 21st, according to the ‘Crime Watch’ column in the Littlefield Gazette, an unidentified man threatened to shoot an unleashed dog for colliding with his bicycle while he was riding in the park; the dog owner reported this threat to the police. The man had dark facial hair, ‘scruffy’ was her actual term, and was between eighteen and twenty-five in age. A description, she acknowledged, that fitted half the young men in Littlefield. Not long after the collision between dog and cyclist, another sign appeared overnight on a telephone pole, this one at the eastern edge of the park, bordering Endicott Road:

  Leash Your

  Beast

  It was also quickly taken down, though not before being seen by two gardeners, several dog walkers and a woman out jogging.

  A week later the aldermen voted to postpone discussions of the dog park proposal until an independent task force could conduct a site review, and for a while the controversy quieted.

  Soccer season resumed in mid-April and once again whole families sat together in the park, wearing sweaters and baseball hats and fleece lap rugs against the chilly morning air, cheering from folding nylon chairs on the sidelines, mist rising from the grass at their feet, many of them holding dogs tightly on leashes while children flew back and forth across the damp green field, hair backlit by the low morning sun. On weekend afternoons as the weather warmed, families strolled down Brooks Street with ice-cream cones from the Dairy Barn. Soft-hipped mothers wearing large dark sunglasses stopped to exchange greetings and to share mild mutinous jokes about driving to Manhattan one of these days instead of doing the three o’clock school pick-up in the minivan. Elderly women from Avalon Towers wandered slowly past in turtlenecks and boiled-wool jackets and elastic-waisted slacks, holding onto each other’s thin arms, shaking their heads at flocks of flamingo-like girls in black leggings and oversized hooded sweatshirts texting each other in front of Walgreens. Now and then the trolley rumbled to a stop at the old fieldstone station, people stepped onto or off the platform, and then the trolley rumbled on again. Almost always a dog was tied by its leash to a parking meter outside the Dairy Barn or the Bake Shoppe or the Tavern, looking hopefully at passers-by, or cringingly, or indifferently, but as much a part of those busy village afternoons as anybody else.

  Spring turned to summer. Families went away on vacations to the Cape or Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, taking their dogs with them or boarding them at kennels. The park was quiet and hot and smelled of mown grass and faintly of car exhaust. Gardeners in sun hats and rubber clogs worked in the collective gardens; young parents who could not afford to go on vacation pushed strollers to the elementary school playground and then across the soccer field and into the park for a picnic or to nap on a blanket under the big spreading maple tree that stood alone in the bowl-like meadow. In the background floated the oceanic roar of the Massachusetts Turnpike. No new signs about dogs were posted; the old ones faded in the sun and eventually were torn down or blew away.

  In September, just after school was back in session and the evenings turning cool, the aldermen voted to grant a three-month trial period to dog park proponents. The meadow of Baldwin Park would be ‘off-leash’ between eight a.m. and ten a.m. on weekdays, and for two hours on Saturday and Sunday evenings. If all went well, these hours would be expanded. An editorial in favor of the dog park appeared the next day in the Gazette, pointing out that Littlefield had historically embraced free-thinking. Collective gardens occupied half an acre of Baldwin Park; Clean Up Littlefield Day was an institution, as was Celebrate Your Heritage Day (twenty-two different countries with tables last year in the elementary school gym), and for the past six years the high school had celebrated Gay Pride Day with speeches and banners. Let us not be guided by visions of what could go wrong, wrote the editorialist, but by what could go right. Certainly we are tolerant enough of our fellow creatures to designate an off-leash area in Baldwin Park. That same morning, a woman named Margaret Downing drove her dog, Binx, into town for a walk in the meadow.

  On her way to the park she stopped at Whole Foods grocery to pick up a loaf of bread for dinner, parking near the store entrance where a bearded young man in a yellow T-shirt stood with a clipboard, shaking a ballpoint pen that appeared to be running out of ink. Canvassers often hovered outside the glass doors and on her way back to her car Margaret made a point of signing their petitions for Green Community initiatives or to ban plastic bags, though usually she declined requests for donations. She contributed online to three charitable organizations and was trying to keep an eye on which ones did what with the money; but after being asked twice this morning for a donation to the Nature Conservancy, she did offer the canvasser a pen from her bag. He was thin, morose, dark and foreign-looking in his yellow T-shirt, and was being avoided by other shoppers.

  ‘Here’s to a better world,’ she said, handing him the pen.

  He frowned as if she’d made an off-color remark and took the pen without thanking her. Walking quickly to her car, she passed a small fat black woman in an orange turban; normally Margaret would have made an effort to smile at the woman, even more out of place in the Whole Foods parking lot than the canvasser, but she kept her head down, feeling his eyes on her still as she climbed into her Volvo station wagon, the back window decorated with Audubon Club and Sierra Club decals. Had he thought she was being snide?

  She was glad to find she had the park a
ll to herself; by ten o’clock the dog owners and professional dog walkers who visited each morning had come and gone. Against a taut blue sky the heavy crowns of oaks and maples were dark green, interrupted here and there by a few gold leaves.

  Her dog was a black Lab, still a puppy at ten months old, a big handsome sleek animal, already almost sixty pounds. She didn’t often let him off his leash; despite months of puppy kindergarten, he didn’t come when she called, he rolled in dead things – during their two weeks at the beach he’d found every decayed seagull carcass, every washed-up fish – and he jumped into any kind of water. You accept certain responsibilities, the breeder had told her, when you have a large dog, and one of them is simply holding onto it. But the day was so lovely, and he was whining and pulling hard, dragging her across the grass, making the gagging noises dogs make when they lunge against their collars. Sometimes a dog needs to run away with itself – an unruly thought that might not have occurred to her had she not been brooding about the incident in the parking lot. She’d only meant to be encouraging. Why was even the simplest gesture so complicated? You worry about everything, Julia was always telling her.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Binx.’ She bent down and unclipped the leash from his collar, watching as he shot away across the meadow, immediately realizing her mistake.

  He ran toward the woods, divided from the rest of the park by a shallow creek where primordial-looking skunk cabbages flourished greenly in black mud along with greasy clusters of poison ivy, just turning scarlet. Ignoring Margaret’s cries, he leapt into the creek and wallowed for a few moments before clambering out of the mud and up the opposite bank. Then he shook himself and galloped toward where the pine trees cast jagged shadows onto the bright grass.

  But instead of running into the woods he stopped to nose a boulder under a tall clump of sumac, his back legs muddy and gleaming. The creek smelled like water in a vase of dead chrysanthemums as Margaret hurried across the little wooden footbridge, calling his name, knowing that she would have to catch him by the collar and drag him away from whatever he had found.

  The sun was in her eyes and at first she noticed only sumac, the stalks already turning the chalky lavender that comes to sumac in the fall. Underneath was not a boulder at all but something enormous and pale, its coat so short as to make it seem hairless. Teeth bared, huge furrowed face contorted in a snarl. Bloodied yellowish foam had collected around the folds of its muzzle.

  A breeze brushed Margaret’s forehead and stirred the tasseled grasses and a spray of goldenrod at the verge of the woods. From deep within the trees came the high igniting sounds of small birds and the stirrings of insects in the bracken. In a moment it would come to her what she was seeing and what she should do about it. But in the vast divide between one moment and the next, she could only stare at the creature, white and motionless, almost too big to be believable, the smooth skin of his underbelly spotted with wide pale freckles, so exposed, so tender-looking, so innocent and perverse.

  2.

  Bill Downing was eating Goldfish crackers, shirtsleeves rolled partway up his forearms, describing a crisis with the network server at his office while he and Margaret sat on the patio by the pool, having drinks and waiting for the lasagna in the oven to finish baking. A tall, balding man with light blue eyes and a blade-like nose, he often wore pink button-down shirts with his gray summer-weight suits. In the dusk his shirt was nearly the same color as the pink sky lowering into the trees, while at his feet the patio flagstones had turned a pale aquatic blue.

  ‘Everything went dead. Roche was going nuts.’ He noticed a daddy-long-legs scaling his trouser leg and brushed it away. ‘The IT guys got us up again after about twenty minutes. But for a while we were all just sitting there. Passano kept joking that it was some kind of hostile takeover.’

  ‘Weird,’ said Margaret.

  His office had a seventh-floor view of the Charles and during those twenty minutes he’d looked down at the plaza below the building, at Storrow Drive and across at the river, glassy and full under the afternoon sun, winding past green banks and the stone bridges and brick buildings of Cambridge. While he was staring out of the window, the strangest thing happened: he saw himself walking across the plaza below. There was his pink shirt, crossing the street, walking toward the stone walkway that stretched above Storrow Drive. Hands in his trouser pockets, he strolled across the walkway and then took the steps down to the Esplanade, where people were sitting on the grass, having lunch or sunning themselves by the water as sailboats tacked back and forth. For a minute or two he’d stood by a bench, still with his hands in his pockets, gazing at the sailboats. It looked as if he might be whistling. Then he walked across the grass to the river and threw himself in.

  ‘Well, I’m glad it all got fixed,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bill, staring at the pool.

  The pool had come with the house; it was small and oval, more like a reflecting pool, ringed by fieldstones. Margaret never liked the idea of owning a pool – she thought it required too much upkeep and later worried about Julia falling into it as a toddler – but he’d always wanted one. A pool was a sign, his father used to say, of ‘having it made’. The summer before Julia was born Margaret had added an electrically powered waterfall trickling down rocks at one end, banked by tall hydrangeas tumbling with pink and blue flowers. It had been a kind of mania with her, planning that waterfall. ‘Margaret’s Niagara’, Bill’s father had called it. Yet he was the one who helped Margaret build it, first wiring the pump, then spending days piling up rocks and taking them down until Margaret was satisfied. Already the waterfall had been switched off; in a week the pool would be drained and covered with a tarp.

  An acorn caromed off a patio slate. Binx had been asleep beside Margaret’s chair. He scrambled to his feet and began barking at the pool. Margaret grabbed his leash and ordered him to lie down and with a reluctant groan he obeyed, metal tags clinking.

  ‘So, how was your day?’ he asked.

  She sighed and lifted her wine glass. ‘I’m trying not to get too freaked out about it.’ The chardonnay in her glass caught the light, a minute twin to the sun going down behind the trees. ‘I found a dead dog at the park.’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘A huge dog. A white bullmastiff.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’ He watched a black line of ants emerge busily from a crack in the patio slates. ‘Had it been hit by a car?’

  ‘The animal control guy said it looked like the dog had been poisoned.’

  ‘Poisoned?’

  ‘That’s what the guy said. I had to call the owner.’

  ‘That can’t have been easy.’

  ‘No,’ said Margaret. She was rubbing Binx’s belly with her foot. ‘It wasn’t.’

  The pool lights had come on. For a few minutes they sat looking at the shifting web of reflected watery light thrown across the hydrangeas. When Margaret began speaking again her voice sounded disembodied, as if it were coming from a dark margin beyond the hydrangeas, somewhere at the edge of the yard below the oak trees.

  ‘I can’t stop seeing that dog. How could someone do something like that? And of all the people who could have found it, why did it have to be me?’

  Bill shook the ice in his Campari and soda, listening to the low whine of the pool filter. Noticing also a smell mixed with the scent of chlorine. Earthy, dank, slightly fecal. The daddy-long-legs he’d brushed off a few minutes ago was now delicately ascending the side of Margaret’s chair. From near the back steps, a cricket had started up.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.’

  Another acorn ricocheted off the patio. Binx tried to scramble up again but Margaret held him down with her foot. He jumped into the pool at every chance, so he had to be kept on his leash even in the yard.

  A long silence followed, broken only by the steady creak of the cricket. Bill could sense Margaret waiting for him to go on, to say things were never as bad as th
ey looked and a dog being poisoned wasn’t a sign of anything else. Instead he kept staring into the depthless turquoise glow of the pool; from where he sat, a single underwater light was visible, round and convex, like an enormous unblinking yellow eye.

  Something is wrong with me, he thought.

  But he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know why every time he looked at Margaret, for instance, he noticed the faint puckering above her lips or the moth-colored spots dappling the backs of her hands. On the side of her neck was a small dark mole. It appalled him. Even her gallantry in carrying on despite these indignities, in getting manicures and facials, buying lotions, taking yoga classes – even that appalled him. He couldn’t help it. Just as he couldn’t help flinching when she put her hand on his back at night, or straightened his shirt collar. Hoping she wouldn’t notice, knowing that she did.

  And yet once she’d been all he could think about. Every evening that first spring he’d walk across the Back Bay to meet her for dinner, repeating her name like an incantation, each step a syllable, Mar-gar-et, as he strode through the rinsed air of late April, passing magnolias along Commonwealth and the wide front stoops of brownstones, their brass doorknockers shaped like pineapples and fox heads, smiling at girls and women on the sidewalks. Smiling especially at the homely ones, the ones with big noses, heavy legs, pitted cheeks, smiling at the pains they took to fix their hair, wear earrings. He’d wanted to sleep with every woman he saw, the unbeautiful ones most of all – for their hair and their earrings, for their continued brave hopefulness despite not being Margaret, despite not being loved by him.

  Often when he arrived at the girls’ school on Exeter Street where she taught English, Margaret would be playing the piano at the back of the old building, in a hall used for assemblies. She liked to practice at the end of the day, so he would wait for her by the open front windows in the high-ceilinged wood-paneled parlor where the school secretary had a desk and cork boards held school announcements that rustled whenever anyone opened the door. Ivy hung over the window casements, leaves glowing in the evening sun, turning the light greenish. As he stood reading announcements for auditions and swim meets, listening to quiet piano music from within, he felt suspended within that greenish light, surrounded by a sweet lucid membrane, like being inside a grape. By the time Margaret appeared, walking quickly, shyly, smoothing her blonde hair as she crossed the uneven parquet floor, he was often trembling.