The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  ‘Why don’t you two take Binx into the yard?’ his mother called from her study down the hall. ‘It’s so nice outside.’

  From the living-room windows, Julia could see white sunlight on the slanting roof across the street, interrupted by the shadow of a chimney like a gigantic rectangular black Lego. Beyond were green treetops and the flat blue sky.

  ‘No,’ said Nicholas.

  Binx farted again.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Julia. She leaned over and whispered, ‘We’ll go to Siberia.’

  Nicholas sighed. ‘Okay.’

  Julia snapped Binx’s leash to his collar, then let Nicholas hold the leash. They went into the kitchen, each pausing to grab a handful of chocolate-covered peanuts from a yellow plastic bag left open on the counter while Binx stood watching them. They ate the chocolate-covered peanuts one at a time, trying to toss them into their mouths; Julia insisted they pick up the ones that fell onto the floor. ‘Chocolate is bad for dogs,’ she told Nicholas. ‘It can give them a heart attack.’ She was gratified to see him crouch down and pick up each chocolate-covered peanut. ‘No fair,’ Hannah had said when Julia told her Nicholas and his mother sometimes ate ice cream for dinner; at least, their kitchen sink was often full of white china bowls holding puddles of congealed pink ice cream. According to Hannah, Mrs Saltonstall’s idea of junk food was home-made tapioca pudding.

  ‘Looks like snot,’ said Hannah. ‘No wonder those kids act so deranged.’

  When people asked Nicholas’s mother how she was doing, she said, ‘Life is fine in Siberia.’ She had said this to Julia’s mother two weeks ago after giving Julia a ride home, Nicholas sitting in his car seat in the back. Julia’s mother had been in the driveway with Dr Watkins, chatting and watering pots of geraniums. She put down the garden hose and came to the car to talk through the driver’s window.

  ‘How are you, Emily? How are you holding up?’

  ‘Life is fine in Siberia.’

  ‘Well, it’s been pretty cold here, too,’ said Julia’s mother, though this was not true. It was only May but twice they’d turned on the air conditioning.

  Last week Nicholas had told Julia Siberia was in his backyard. He pointed it out now when they opened the kitchen door: between the birdbath and the swings sat a folding metal lawn chair surrounded by cigarette butts and two empty wine bottles; beneath the chair was splayed a swollen paperback book that had been left out in the rain.

  Julia squatted down to look at the soggy cover. A picture of a horse, black and scribbly, like a drawing she could have done in elementary school, and beyond the horse a scribbly snow-covered stable. Stories. She leafed to the first one, careful not to tear the damp pages.

  ‘ “To whom shall I tell my grief?” ’ she read aloud.

  ‘Drop it!’ cried Nicholas, yanking on Binx’s leash. But he was only digging at an anthill.

  ‘So what do you want to do?’ Julia asked him, letting the book fall back onto the grass.

  He shrugged. The downstairs windows were open and they could hear his mother talking in a low, clogged-sounding voice, though not what she was saying.

  ‘She’s speaking Russian,’ said Nicholas. ‘Probably to my grandmother.’

  ‘Is your grandmother Russian?’

  ‘No. She lives in New Jersey. Look at how fast I am.’ Nicholas ran back and forth across the yard, yanking Binx along with him.

  ‘Wow,’ said Julia. ‘That’s fast.’

  They decided to walk into the village with Binx. Julia wasn’t sure she and Nicholas were allowed to walk to the village, but she didn’t want to ask Mrs Orlov while she was on the phone. Anyway, it was only two blocks. ‘Hey, what’s up?’ Julia would say if she saw someone she knew sitting on the bench in front of the Dairy Barn. ‘This is Nicholas. I’m his babysitter.’ She opened the latch on the gate.

  Mica glittered in the pebbles at the edges of people’s yards and for half a block a big orange butterfly floated above its own shadow down the sidewalk ahead of them. Julia insisted on taking Nicholas’s hand when they crossed an intersection, and she held Binx’s leash. It was kind of fun being out with Nicholas, pointing to the pebbles and the butterfly. But as soon as they reached the corner of Brooks Street and turned right at the post office to head into the village, Binx started pulling on his leash and making loud gagging noises. Two people coming out of the post office stepped back in alarm.

  ‘Shhh,’ said Julia. ‘Cut it out.’

  Binx lunged ahead, dragging them past the post office toward the Dairy Barn, hacking and gagging, toenails scratching the sidewalk; Julia no longer wanted to see anyone from school. She suggested that they go home and finish Nicholas’s Lego helicopter.

  ‘Naah,’ said Nicholas, letting go of her hand. ‘Naah, naaah.’

  Something had gotten into Nicholas. Maybe it was the balmy breeze or the sun bouncing off passing car windshields to snatches of radio music. Maybe it was the smell of garlic and vinegar coming from the open door of the Number One Noodle House across the street. He began to run in zigzags on the sidewalk, flapping his hands and nearly colliding with people walking down Brooks Street. He ran past the Dairy Barn, past the Forge Café and the Bake Shoppe, while Julia yelled at him to come back, but he kept zigzagging and flapping. Fortunately, everyone on the sidewalk thought he was cute.

  ‘Are you an airplane, little boy?’ asked an old lady in a straw hat and wraparound sunglasses outside of Walgreens. She had long crowded teeth.

  ‘Help! Help!’ he shrieked.

  Julia groaned aloud. Last week when Nicholas was having a tantrum after one of his Lego towers collapsed, she’d told him the story of thinking she saw a puppy out on the ice of the Silsbee Pond, and trying to save it and then falling through the ice and having to be saved herself by a fireman in a yellow rubber raft. The story seemed to get longer and more improbable the more often she told it. Nicholas made her repeat it three times. Finally, to avoid telling the story a fourth time, she found the YouTube video on his mother’s computer while she was lying down in her bedroom. ‘Help! Help!’ she could be heard shouting, her voice like a wisp of smoke. Suddenly the camera view jostled up toward the sky; when it came back down there was a hole in the ice where she had been standing.

  ‘Where’d you go?’ Nicholas kept asking, eyes big and deer-like. He wouldn’t believe her when she said she didn’t really remember, though this in fact was true.

  ‘Someplace cold,’ she said at last.

  ‘But you came back.’

  ‘Of course I did. You see me here, don’t you?’

  ‘Help! Help!’ he kept repeating now. It was his new favorite saying.

  ‘Help! Help!’ Nicholas cried again at the old lady in front of Walgreens.

  ‘Sorry,’ Julia told her, just as Nicholas darted away down the sidewalk. At that same moment Binx wrapped his leash around a streetlight. By the time Julia had pulled the dog free, Nicholas was out of sight.

  In the woods of Baldwin Park, five or six yards off the trail, Matthew Melman sat on a rock smoking a joint and swatting at a mosquito buzzing around his head. The mosquito was making it hard for him to concentrate on the rock. He was trying to figure out the rock’s exact color. Recently he’d been trying to categorize things other people never noticed as part of his blog: The Importance of Not Giving a Fuck about What’s Important.

  The rock was full of other rocks, various colors of gray. Steel gray. Lead gray. Gunmetal gray? Could he see something as gunmetal gray if he had never seen a real gun? Trippy question.

  He tried to imagine what his mother would say if he pointed a gun at her.

  You’re having separation issues.

  After another toke he swatted at the mosquito again, wondering if the mosquito might be his actual buzz. Also a trippy question. Trippy questions, he’d decided, were the only questions worth asking. At the end of ninth-grade English, Mr Wechsler had given him an old copy of On the Road and a Xeroxed copy of ‘Howl’.

  ‘Time to start driving yo
ur brain, kid,’ he’d said, ‘before somebody else does it for you.’

  Matthew was flattered at having been singled out by Mr Wechsler, whom he admired for occasionally using profanity in class, but also afraid he’d been insulted. He hadn’t read either the book or the poem until last winter, when he’d seen Mr Wechsler at the Downings’ freakish Christmas party, and went home and found them in a backpack stuffed under his bed.

  Immediately he’d recognized himself as Sal Paradise with a touch of Ginsberg. Unshaven, untamed, a poet-blogger vagabond. Sort of like Mr Wechsler. That’s when he’d started growing a beard. For a while he smoked in the icy garden shed behind his house, surrounded by bicycles, rakes, hoses, the lawnmower, a small plastic red tank of gasoline, also the Nautilus machine his mother never used and had finally banished from the house because it made her feel guilty. (‘And God knows,’ she’d said, ‘I have enough of that.’) But one afternoon when his mother was nagging him to clean up his room, he slammed out of the house and rode his bike to the park to uncork his head. After leaning his bike against a tree, he walked into the snowy woods, taking the trail to the left and then plunging off into the trees, looking for a good place to light up a joint. That’s when he discovered the rock, rising up like a huge knee, in a little clearing by itself. The Philosopher’s Stone, he decided to call it. For stoned philosophers.

  After that he went to the woods as often as he could, reserving the garden shed for rainy afternoons. He kept matches, rolling papers and a lid of pot in the pocket of his denim jacket at all times, enjoying the outlaw thrill of sauntering through the halls at school with concealed narcotics. Getting high – even thinking about getting high – gave him a sense of raffish travel, of hasty departures and dusty sunset arrivals, which made up for the burnt taste in his mouth afterward and the irritable feeling that nothing good was ever going to happen to him.

  It wasn’t his fault he had not gotten into any of the colleges he’d applied to. It was even kind of a distinction. Unlike the douchebags in his class, he had not lied on his college applications about spending spring break building outhouses in Costa Rica; he hadn’t claimed that being a camp counselor for two months at the Jewish Community Center had taught him the values of responsibility and caring for others. Under ‘extracurricular activities’, he’d listed ‘Police interrogations’ and ‘Driver’s Ed’.

  I am a wastrel, he wrote in his application essay, which he had refused to allow his mother to proofread. I believe in the value of blowing it, of fucking off, of rejecting the phantasmal capitalist scurry and 21st-century techno-cultural Moloch mind traps. I am awed by all that is out there that I don’t want to do. The number of things I don’t want to do is so huge that I don’t have a clue of what I don’t want to do.

  Secretly, he had believed his essay, lifted straight from his blog, would strike admissions panels as so brutally honest and profound that he would be accepted everywhere. It was a shock when rejections began to arrive. He felt betrayed and humiliated for trusting college websites, which had advised him to be himself and claimed that admissions officers valued originality over grades and SAT scores. Moronic colleges. Totally unserious. All people did in college was get drunk and fall out of dorm windows. But on a cold wet day in April, huddled on the Nautilus machine in the dark garden shed amid the smell of mildew and gasoline, he had wept over his final rejection, from the University of Chicago.

  When at last he left the garden shed, his mother had been waiting at the kitchen door. At the sight of her long, anxious face, his eyes filled again. He wanted to run across the yard, throw his arms around her, bury his face in her shoulder, have her stroke his back and tell him again that there was a college for everyone and that somehow (she would call someone) it would all work out.

  ‘Well, I guess you’ll have to get a job and apply again next year,’ his mother had said instead, when he handed her the rejection letter.

  What kind of a mother says that?

  This morning she told him Radio Shack was accepting job applications. Also that it was time to shave; he was starting to look like an Islamist militant.

  ‘And honey,’ she’d said, ‘enough smoking dope. It’s immature.’

  Shooting was too good for her.

  Dragging Binx away from a dropped ice-cream cone, Julia ran toward the Walgreens parking lot, calling and calling for Nicholas to come back, seeing his little red shirt bobbing far ahead of her on the sidewalk, vanishing, then reappearing. Twice Binx wound his leash around a parking meter. Something had gotten into him, too. He kept planting his feet mulishly on the sidewalk and growling; she had to jerk hard on the leash to make him move. Several people stopped her to ask if something was the matter, and because they were adults, she tried to explain, but it took too long, so she had to apologize and continue running, hauling Binx along with her.

  Somewhere beyond Walgreens she lost sight of Nicholas’s little red shirt. She ran down Brooks Street toward the elementary school. Maybe Nicholas had run to school to play in the playground. She ran past the elementary school. The playground was empty. Beyond the playground, the soccer field was empty. In another half a block she was running along the weedy sidewalk above the park’s bowl-like meadow.

  The joint had burned down to a roach and was singeing his fingertips. As he tossed it to the ground he felt his mind disconnect from his body and float with a gentle whine over his left shoulder. ‘I have nothing to offer anybody,’ he thought somberly, ‘except my own confusion.’

  Forgetting that this was not an original statement, and envying Sal Paradise, who probably didn’t have a mother, he watched himself lie back on the rock, holding a last lungful of smoke. He watched himself gaze up at the shifting leaves and sky, his face going slack as a breeze lulled his cheek.

  Hush, said the breeze.

  Someone was crying. Slowly he exhaled the smoke from his lungs and watched it spiral into the sky. From a great distance, it came to him that what he was hearing was a real cry. High and hopeless, like air escaping a balloon. His own unuttered howl. Recorded by the universe and played back to him.

  ‘Nicholas,’ she screamed.

  No one was in the park. Mothers didn’t let children play on the grass anymore; most of them wouldn’t even walk through with strollers. But Nicholas probably only remembered the park as fun. Where kids played games after school. Red Rover. Hide and Go Seek. That’s what he was probably doing right now. Hiding behind a bush or behind that old tree in the meadow, waiting to pop out and yell, ‘Help! Help!’

  Nicholas was so clearly before her in his red T-shirt that she felt herself grab his small sweaty hand, heard herself say in a furious relieved voice like her mother’s, I was so worried. Don’t make me worry like that. But as she started to sprint down the slope into the meadow, she tripped over Binx’s leash.

  Down she went, Binx yelping with her. Julia banged her knee on a rock, got a grass stain on the elbow of her new shirt. By the time she looked up again, the meadow stretched emptily, vast, indifferent, sprinkled with white clover. In the collective gardens, chicken-wire fences sagged in the afternoon sun; the handle of a shovel gleamed silver, stuck in a heap of black compost.

  ‘Mama,’ she whimpered, holding her throbbing knee. Beside her on the grass, Binx whined, licking a paw. Then he sat up alertly and sniffed the breeze.

  Nothing moved but the tops of trees at the dark mouth of the woods.

  She staggered up, clutching the leash as if it were the end of a rope, and limped down the rest of the slope and past the collective gardens. When she reached the meadow she began to run in the direction of the creek and the footbridge, calling, ‘Nicholas, Nicholas,’ while Binx forged ahead, big shoulder muscles working, tugging and twisting on the leash, until the leash lifted, as if by its own accord, right out of Julia’s hand. He streaked across the meadow. A moment later she saw him spring toward the creek, hang suspended in the air for a black split second, before he splashed, with an oozy gulp, into the mud; the next minute he w
as swarming up the bank on the other side and then, as if sucked into the woods, he was gone.

  Matthew stared down at the figure before him. An elf or a troll in bright red and yellow. Some kind of Technicolor woodland creature. He understood that it was a vision, granted to him by a celestial force aligned with his brain waves, and also that it must be addressed.

  ‘Hey, dude,’ he said finally, ‘what the fuck are you doing here?’

  In response the creature opened its mouth and gave a piercing wail.

  Instantly it morphed into a kid Matthew recognized from day camp last summer at the Jewish Community Center. A pale snively little kid, in saggy orange swim trunks, a kid who peed in the pool and kept announcing it, making all the other kids squeal and demand to get out.

  ‘Dude,’ he said, scrambling down off the rock. ‘Dude. Shut up, okay?’

  To his amazement, the kid closed his mouth and lifted his small tear-stained face to gaze up at him. Matthew tried to think of what he should say next; he was so thirsty his tongue felt like a gym sock.

  ‘So, like, where’s your mom?’

  Mistake. The kid’s peaky face crumpled; once again his mouth went square. For three full seconds there was an immense and absolute silence and then he howled again. A long, terrified, inconsolable howl that went on and on, getting higher and sharper, louder and more desperate, ululating like a siren. The howl, Matthew realized. Like something cosmic, it infused the whole woods, making branches sway and twigs snap.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Matthew, crouching down and grabbing the kid’s shoulder. ‘Whoa, whoa.’

  He kept repeating whoa, whoa, squeezing the kid’s shoulder until finally he stopped howling and began gulping instead, long shuddery gulps, dragging an arm across his leaky nose. Jesus Christ, Matthew thought, surprised to find himself shaking. What a lot of noise one little kid could make, and what an outrageous, unbearable noise – like shrapnel in his brain. Thank God he was just whining now, but as Matthew leaned against the rock to catch his breath, a shadow flickered through the trees. And from no more than twenty yards away came an answering growl.