The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  Snowiest December on record, Bill heard someone say. Someone else began talking about five skiers in the Alps who had just been buried in an avalanche. Even specially trained dogs couldn’t find them. Everyone looked appreciatively at the fireplace, where the crackling and hissing of burning logs provided a cheerful counterpoint to the storm outside, though every so often a gust of wind blew down the chimney with a hollow shriek.

  ‘More wine?’ Bill was walking around with George’s bottle of cabernet.

  George’s twins, Aaron and Bradley, were wearing matching khaki pants and blue Oxford shirts, as if to make what was already difficult even harder. Julia and Hannah huddled together on the floor, clutching their cell phones, pretending not to look at the boys, while George explained the whereabouts of the twins’ mother, Tina, who usually spent Christmas day with her mother, her brother, Fred, and his husband. But the man Tina was dating had invited her to spend Christmas with him at an inn in Dorset, Vermont, while for the first time the grandmother had elected to go to Fred’s house, in the South End. Wanted something smaller this year, she said. The boys had chosen to stay with George.

  ‘In Animal House,’ he said, smiling, and the boys guffawed obligingly.

  He was sitting back on the sofa as he explained all this, in his brown corduroy jacket and navy turtleneck, one arm stretched along the top of the cushions, a cowboy boot propped on one knee. Leaning over to pour wine into George’s glass, Bill felt fussy and butlerish in his striped Christmas tie. I look like a stiff, he thought.

  ‘Uncle Fred is macrobiotic.’ Bradley Wechsler was scooping a handful of Goldfish from a bowl on the coffee table. He stretched out his legs, disturbing Binx, who had finally settled under the coffee table after running around the room, barking maniacally every time the doorbell rang. Bill had offered to put Binx in his crate, but everyone said to let him stay.

  ‘And his husband is allergic to wheat,’ added Aaron. ‘They’re making quinoa for Christmas dinner. And stewed pumpkin.’

  Matthew Melman rolled his popped eyes and pretended to be choking to death.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Bill, reminded that he should be assisting Margaret in the kitchen. ‘No, no, we’re fine,’ he added, as several people asked if they could help.

  Margaret was a good but anxious cook, never able to hide the labor involved when she made dinner for company. She was determined to do it ‘right’, spending hours in the kitchen stirring gravy and pinching pie crusts made from scratch, tensely consulting her recipe books. He’d been surprised when she bought most of tonight’s dinner from Whole Foods, already prepared, down to the pre-cut slices of roast turkey; except for the mashed potatoes, which she was making from a box of organic potato flakes. ‘I don’t have the energy,’ she’d said. But then yesterday she’d gone back and bought a fresh organic ham, saying that if they were going to do Christmas they might as well really do Christmas and that meant ham. It put her in an even worse mood when he reminded her that almost everyone they were inviting to dinner was Jewish.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t need any help?’ Naomi asked, touching his sleeve as he passed her chair on his way to the kitchen. ‘Please just let me know if I can help.’

  In the kitchen, Margaret’s back was to him; she was hovering by the stove, a dishtowel in her hands. The savory fragrance of baked ham lit the air, reminding Bill of Christmases when he was a child: the bustle and anticipation in the days before, the almost painful joy when he awoke that morning, then the sight of his father in his plaid flannel bathrobe, his wide pink face smiling at the bottom of the stairs, calling out, ‘Looks like we’ve had a visitor!’

  ‘How could you,’ Margaret said, turning around, her face livid above her black dress and pearls. ‘How could you invite him?’

  ‘I thought you’d be glad.’

  ‘Glad! Are you crazy? He’s a complete ass.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He held up both palms. ‘I thought you liked his book. I was trying,’ he added in a hurt voice that he realized sounded self-pitying, ‘to do something nice for you. You always say I don’t think about you. Well, I was thinking about you.’

  She shook her head and reached for her glass of wine on the counter. When she put it back down, she said grimly, ‘How do you know him, anyway?’

  ‘I met him in Walgreens. We started talking about baseball and then got on to gyms. I’ve got to do something about my back. It’s been killing me.’

  She looked at him for a long moment as if she were having trouble believing what she was seeing. ‘You know what, I am so incredibly tired.’ She turned back to the stove. ‘Tonight has pushed me right over the edge.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘Of course I’m sorry you’re tired.’

  ‘Something’s burning,’ she said to the stove.

  When Bill returned to the living room the conversation was once again revolving around dogs and recent editorials in the Gazette. He added another log to the fire. The wind had picked up outside; everyone could hear it sob and moan as it rushed around the house.

  ‘Very unfortunate, Hedy,’ Stan Melman was saying in a lenient voice. ‘But a poisoned dog is not an example of general inhumanity.’

  ‘Five dogs,’ said Dr Doom.

  ‘What we need,’ said Naomi, ‘is a real clue.’

  ‘A clue, Mom?’ sneered Matthew. ‘What are you, Sherlock Holmes?’

  Bill saw Stan put a hand on Naomi’s knee.

  Three weeks ago, a Littlefield police officer discovered Matthew passed out behind the wheel of his mother’s minivan on Brooks Street at two in the morning, an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps on the seat beside him; the officer also discovered Matthew had only a Learner’s Permit. This incident had been written up in the ‘Crime Watch’ column of the Gazette and was therefore known to everyone in the room. Naomi had told Margaret he was having separation issues.

  ‘A clue,’ repeated Matthew sulkily.

  ‘I just think it’s so sad,’ sighed Hannah Melman, smoothing her dark ponytail.

  She was keeping her chin low and her eyes very wide as she sat on the carpet, gazing up at Aaron and Bradley Wechsler with her lips parted. ‘The glare’, Bill had overheard Hannah and Julia call this pose last weekend when Hannah was sleeping over. They were discussing ‘the glare’ in Julia’s bathroom as they hung over the sink to peer into the mirror when he happened to pass by. Something to do with supermodels. He tried to imagine Hannah as a supermodel. More likely than Julia, but too much nose. What he knew of supermodels came from leafing through Victoria’s Secret catalogues that arrived at the house. Lately he’d been monitoring himself for a reaction. Legs, breasts. Nothing. Like looking at wax fruit.

  Nice kid, though. At least she kept her hair out of her face.

  When he glanced away from Hannah, he realized that Clarice Watkins was looking at him. He gave her a tentative smile.

  ‘Hannah,’ said Naomi, ‘are your braces bothering you?’

  ‘No,’ said Hannah glacially.

  ‘Then close your mouth, please.’

  ‘What about the Middle Easterners?’ Dr Doom spoke up from her armchair by the fire. ‘Don’t forget about the Middle Easterners.’

  ‘What about the Middle Easterners?’ Stan Melman was stroking his beard.

  ‘Marv always says you cannot discount the Middle East. Do you know, there is a young Muslim man I see sometimes on Brooks Street when I take my early walk. Very angry-looking and never says hello. Looks like he’d like to blow something up.’

  ‘Ahmed.’ Clarice Watkins startled everyone; it sounded as if she had just said ‘amen’. But it was a Pakistani law student to whom she was referring, an employee at the Forge Café who came in to bake doughnuts every morning. She explained that she frequently breakfasted at the Forge, where they had become acquainted. He was interested in torts. Ahmed Bhopali.

  ‘I believe he’s Hindu,’ she added
, smiling.

  ‘Towel heads.’ Smirking, Matthew took a handful of Goldfish and began tossing them into his mouth, one by one, missing several times. Behind him an icicle slipped from the tree and tinkled onto the floor. In her armchair Clarice Watkins stirred, her smile widening.

  ‘Is Pakistan part of the Middle East?’ asked Hannah.

  Last week, after Bill had asked twice at dinner about her day at school, Julia revealed that Hannah had been a contestant in the middle school geography bee, but was eliminated when she did not know that the Wabash River divided Indiana from Illinois.

  ‘I wouldn’t have known that, either,’ Bill said, to show Julia he was paying attention, but she’d looked at him like he’d admitted to shaving with a carrot peeler.

  Why was no gesture he made the right gesture? Lately everything he did seemed clumsy, ungainly, as if he were trying to play the piano wearing oven mitts or sprint in a lead apron. The wrong presents, the wrong invitations, the wrong comments. He’d been convinced his problem was Margaret, that she was depressing, that he didn’t feel anything for her, except guilt, and that he’d feel more with someone else, someone younger, sexier; but he was starting to wonder if the problem was something else, something inert and insensible about him.

  I feel like a stiff, he repeated to himself.

  ‘Why would Middle Easterners want to poison Boris?’ George was asking.

  ‘Religious differences.’ Dr Doom was now gazing at the fire. Her wizened face held the ancient look of someone who has not slept through the night in decades and her dark little eyes glittered in the firelight. ‘You think the world is secular because that is how we are in this town. As Marv says, we are living in a bubble.’ Her accent made it sound as if she’d said bauble.

  Could I actually be dead, thought Bill, and not know it? Wasn’t there a movie about a guy like that? Just how wrong about life was it possible to be?

  Once more the chimney moaned. Aaron and Bradley Wechsler went back to staring at their iPhones as the Melmans began asking George about his days teaching high school. Did he miss it? (No.) Had he found the kids to be unusually cynical? (Yes.) In Naomi’s opinion, cynicism was an appropriate deflective technique among adolescents in a culture that sexualized childhood. Little girls dressing like Victoria’s Secret models. What did Dr Watkins think? Dr Watkins said something about the idiographic character of a sociocultural reality.

  ‘Childhood today,’ said Naomi, ‘is being blitzed.’

  ‘We’re all being blitzed,’ said George.

  The Christmas tree had become pungent with the warmth of the fire, filling the room with a deep clean forest scent, but now as Bill breathed it in he noticed another smell, slipped in underneath, something foul, a smell he recognized, though he could not say what it was. He shuddered, his whole body gone cold.

  A log broke on the fire, erupting sparks. Under the coffee table, Binx thumped his tail.

  Dr Doom raised her wine glass. ‘I say limit the computer time and make them all play outside.’

  ‘Like that would work,’ said Matthew, rolling his eyes again.

  ‘Such children,’ she said.

  13.

  ‘Dinner is served,’ called Margaret, emerging from the kitchen into the hallway, feeling wan and overheated in her black dress, her apron dotted with wet potato flakes. Everyone stood up at once and crowded toward the dining room, exclaiming at the table, laid with a white linen cloth, white linen napkins, her wedding china and her mother’s silver. White tapers burned in four silver candlesticks, shining against the merlot-colored walls.

  On the table sat wide bowls of green beans and Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes, a tureen of gravy for the turkey slices, and a heaping plate of roasted red beets. Every few places she’d set a bottle of red or white wine, in a ring of green holly. Bill disappeared into the kitchen and came out holding the ham aloft on a white china platter, making an awkward show of staggering under it, pretending to collapse, though he was very pale and for a moment Margaret wondered if he might not be kidding. As a festive gesture, harkening back to her grandmother’s holiday recipes from Betty Crocker, she had decked the ham with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries, secured by toothpicks, which she saw now had the effect of making the ham look as if it were covered in tiny archery targets. But Stan Melman clapped and said it was a work of art.

  Bill began carving the ham at the head of the table, asking people to pass up their plates; for some minutes everyone became absorbed in handing around bowls and baskets of rolls and the butter dish, while under the table skulked Binx, sniffing at their ankles. Everyone asked for a slice of ham except Hannah Melman, who said that she did not eat ‘flesh’.

  ‘A toast to the cook!’ called out George, raising his glass to Margaret.

  She would not look at him.

  ‘And a toast to the holidays,’ said Bill in a hesitant voice, still very pale as he hung over the pink ham at his end of the table. He kept his glass raised. ‘I’d also like to take this moment to toast my father. First Christmas without him.’ They all murmured and raised their glasses again. Bill coughed. ‘And here’s to goodwill and fellowship.’ Margaret noticed he was perspiring above his red and green tie. There was something cadaverous about him tonight; his collar looked too big for him. He’d lost weight in the last months, she saw with a pang.

  ‘I don’t know that I feel much goodwill these days,’ Naomi said when the toast was concluded. ‘Not with someone out there carrying around a bag of poisoned hamburger meat.’

  ‘Poor Boris,’ said Hannah.

  ‘How is Emily?’ asked Margaret. George kept looking at her, under cover of passing plates and bowls; deliberately she avoided glancing in his direction. ‘I haven’t seen her since it happened.’ Last night when she’d taken Binx for a walk she’d swung her flashlight and caught a shaggy mat of long trailing fur by the syringa in the front yard. Binx had growled at the bush but nothing was there. That was often how it was. They were most visible when she knew they were there but was afraid to look.

  Naomi said, ‘Apparently her little boy is a mess.’

  How is it, thought Margaret, that our afflictions become other people’s dinner table conversations? ‘I’m so sorry to hear it,’ she said. ‘Julia is a mother’s helper for him sometimes. Aren’t you, Julia? Have you noticed anything?’

  ‘No,’ said Julia.

  ‘I’ve thought he was troubled before this, frankly.’ Naomi paused again. ‘Well, I don’t like to talk about other people’s children.’

  ‘You’ve already said he was a mess,’ noted Hedy.

  Julia volunteered that Nicholas did scream a lot.

  ‘Everything bothers him. Sensory Integration Disorder, that’s my opinion.’ Naomi leaned back in her chair. ‘But Emily won’t get him tested. Doesn’t believe in slapping diagnoses on a child.’

  ‘I must have Sensory Integration Disorder,’ Margaret told Stan as he refilled her wine glass. ‘Everything bothers me, too.’

  ‘Any thinking person –’ George smiled at her before she could look away – ‘has Sensory Integration Disorder these days.’

  She had not spoken to him since that night in her driveway. They had emailed back and forth, but then he’d stood her up when they arranged to meet at the Forge for coffee, where she had decided to tell him what she had seen that night in his car. Of all the people she knew, she figured George was the most likely to take her seriously, if only because it was his dog she had seen, and kept seeing, along now with the rest of them. She’d tried to tell Bill, but he thought he knew what she was talking about, which was worse than not being understood at all. But George might understand. Even now she was aware of wanting to ask him to look outside, just beyond the dining-room windows, at a massing by the hedge that could easily be mistaken for shadows on the snow. Sometimes she saw just one, but there were hundreds of them now, gray legions, small and large, some of them mangy and thin, patches of fur hanging loose, hides crawling with fleas and worms; some
with ropes around their necks; some with legs crushed and trailing behind them; some still just puppies, fat bellies dragging along the ground. All of them with enormous baleful eyes. It was all the dogs of Littlefield, she had started to think, every dog that had ever been starved or beaten, run over, abandoned by the road, tied to a tree and stoned, torn apart in staged dog fights, drowned as a puppy in a sack. They’d crept back, crossing the years like miles, scenting their way home across an impossible distance, one by one, to gather under the oak trees in her backyard, in the softly falling snow, to stare up at her windows and wait for her to look out and see them.

  George might not believe her, but he would be interested. That’s what she had thought, at least, when she emailed him and asked him to meet her at the Forge. For him it would be a story, it would make that kind of sense. He would want details, what they looked like and what it felt like whenever she saw them – like a tremendous irritation, she would tell him, like the air is filled with bees, a repulsive feeling, intolerable and yet she found she could bear it.

  In fact, she had started to crave it. Often now she got up in the middle of the night and went down to the living room to look out of the window. Sometimes she opened the kitchen door and stepped out onto the patio in her nightgown, shivering in the frigid glassy air. It was shocking, exhilarating, to be so afraid – and yet it was not quite fear, either, what she felt, more like a brightly polished dread, black and cold, fitted exactly for the base of her belly. For whole minutes she stood looking out at her stone waterfall, silhouetted against the night sky. I know you’re there. I haven’t forgotten about you.

  She wasn’t afraid of them; but she was afraid she was going mad.

  George’s interest would be consoling, no matter what he thought of her; if she could tell it as a story, the dogs she was seeing, a ghost story, then it might be contained. That’s what she told herself as she sat waiting for him in a booth at the back of the café that afternoon, sipping a glass of ice water; she also relived, for the countless time, the few minutes when his mouth was against hers, tongue probing, stubbly chin scouring her face. She played with packets of sugar, stacking them like miniature sandbags, trying not to watch the café door.