The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

What agonies people put themselves through, thought Bill, feeling himself nod and squint at George’s wife, who was nodding and squinting back at him. It was almost criminal. George sat with his forearms resting on the table, hands clasped, staring down at his wrists as if they were shackled together. Bill felt a spurt of fury. Look at this guy, with his stubble and his squat bossy wife. Who the hell did he think he was? He’d like to cut off both of his sleeves and stuff them down his throat. The next instant he felt only pity. How foolish it all was, how unnecessary and unwise, to go on nodding and squinting, three of them with ice in their guts – and the fourth, he could see by her glance at George’s bowed head and the way her smile froze, just now getting the drift.

  ‘Well, have a nice dinner,’ said Margaret.

  The next moment she was opening the Tavern’s thick oak door, both hands on the heavy iron latch; there was a margin of golden light, a lively breath of spring air, and she was gone.

  He’d had to return to their table alone to pay for the beers, barely touched, apologize to the waitress. When he passed George and his wife they were both staring out of the window, and by the time he finally made it to the sidewalk, Margaret had vanished.

  ‘The point of mayflies,’ he said to Julia in the kitchen, ‘is to be part of the food chain.’

  ‘Gross.’

  ‘Well, mayflies don’t see it that way.’

  ‘How do you know? I think it’s sad when something dies, no matter what it is.’

  From the pantry came what sounded like a long, flat sigh.

  ‘I don’t agree. Mayflies are different. Think about it. For them every minute is as long as a year. That guy I just threw away was probably three centuries old in mayfly years. Empires had crumbled. He’d survived death two dozen times, fathered a thousand children. Seen mind-blowing sights. Flowers, bird baths, lawnmowers.’

  She looked at him soberly. ‘I still think it’s sad.’

  ‘Sad doesn’t really apply to bugs. Anyway, it was his time to go.’ He finished slicing the bread and put the knife down. ‘And he died a natural death. By a blender. What else could a guy want?’

  He was aware of trying to entertain, to be diverting. Aware, also, that the effort most likely showed.

  ‘Who’s Dr Vogel?’ she’d asked a couple of nights ago, materializing in the kitchen doorway after they thought she’d gone to bed.

  Margaret explained that Dr Vogel was a therapist, someone ‘we’re seeing to help us figure some things out’.

  ‘Okay,’ Julia had said. ‘Whatever.’ They waited for her to ask more questions. But she faded away from the doorway, her expression bland, tolerant.

  She had been through so much this year. Bullying at school. Not enough friends. That awful accident on the ice. Babysitting that boy and losing him in the woods. Losing Binx. And now, soon to be her worst memory of all: Julia, honey, come sit down, Mom and Dad have something to tell you …

  Okay. Whatever.

  Across the counter she sat watching him, drinking her milk. Calmly she set the glass down. Picked up her paper napkin, wiped her mouth.

  ‘What’s for dinner again?’

  Whatever it was, she’d eat it. She wouldn’t complain. For a moment he braced himself against the counter with both hands, unable to breathe. Because there it was, his terrible fear, that Julia had lost every illusion, all her questions had been answered, and that somehow he and Margaret had done this to her, taught her far too early the saddest adult lesson of all: that so much of life was just something to get through.

  22.

  In the green and beige auditorium of Duncklee Middle School, boys and girls rushed up and down the aisles as if something were chasing them. Boys in white shirts, black bow ties and black pants; girls in black dresses, their hair neatly braided or held back with a black headband. No one sitting down, everyone talking, while from the stage Mrs Dibler, the chorus director, clapped her long, narrow hands and looked down her big nose. ‘Chil-dren! Qui-et!’ No one listened. She stood tugging at the bodice of her sleeveless green dress, arm flesh jiggling, bra straps showing, while Julia Downing’s mother, at the piano (with sleeves), played a few chords from ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’, which they were supposed to be rehearsing one last time.

  Some children ran through the swinging doors and down the long school corridors, footsteps echoing, to peer giddily into empty classrooms. Outside the school windows, light seemed to be shining up from the ground, hitting the white dust on the windowpanes. ‘Boo!’ someone squealed, leaping out from behind a door, and then they were all squealing, rampaging back into the corridor.

  Soon the seats of the auditorium would fill with parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, even some teachers (Ms Manookian had been spotted in the lobby, with Mr Anderman!), while they, the chorus, waited backstage. There would be a final furious shushing from Mrs Dibler and this time they would all obey – grave with importance now – and even listen as she reminded them to keep their place in line, to walk quietly, with dignity, onto the stage. This is a per-for-mance! Smiles! No fidgeting! And they would look at her solemnly, also with contempt, because of course it was a performance. What else had they been practicing for all these weeks and months?

  And then it really was time.

  One by one they filed onto the stage. The lights dimmed overhead. Onstage the lights came up, right into their eyes. Dazzled, they managed to stay in line, to make their way to their appointed spots, row after row, on four levels of metal risers, listening to their shoes clang hollowly, their stomachs hollow, too, and the stage suddenly like the interior of a great seashell, while beyond its shining wooden lip waited a dark sea of hushed faces.

  There was a tremendous pause, a vast insuck of breath.

  Then Mrs Downing struck the first notes of ‘Let the Earth Resound’ and in perfect unison they opened their mouths to sing.

  These concerts were always so lovely, everyone agreed afterward, milling in the lobby by the two sets of double glass doors, which someone had thoughtfully propped open to let in the evening air. Amazing, isn’t it, still light at eight o’clock! Tables had been set up by the Parent Teacher Organization, laden with plates of cookies and brownies on white paper tablecloths with plastic cups for the bottles of pink lemonade. The children – so sweet – singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘La Bamba’ – they were good, too – but how quickly they were growing up. It was kind of heartbreaking. One minute they were in kindergarten, drawing rainbows, astonished by the butterfly garden, by yellow chicks in an incubator, by everything, and the next, in middle school, shouting words on the bus that would make a rap star cringe. And yet they sang like angels. Soft cheeks, clear bright eyes – with that look, perhaps not of wonder anymore, but at least not of overmuch concern. Fixed ahead on something that no adult could see, something that went on and on, past the low horizon.

  Having eaten all the cookies and brownies, the children dashed in and out of the crowd in the lobby – bow ties askew, braids coming undone – while their parents watched them fondly and talked among themselves, comparing summer vacation plans or sleep-away camps in Maine (do kids really need a Claymation studio? What happened to archery?), gazing out through the open glass doors to the school lawn and the parking lot. There was the usual mention, too, of whatever had been in the news: congressmen forced to resign for assaulting staffers, high schools installing metal detectors, new untreatable viruses.

  Yet whatever they were discussing, what the parents really said to each other was: This moment will never come again. The setting sun will never catch just like so in the branches of that birch tree, planted in memory of that boy on the plane, or gleam exactly like this along the needles of the white pines by the parking lot, or turn those cirrus clouds that color of pink above the flagpole, the air will never again feel this soft and still.

  Our children, our children. Oh, how can it be? – the earth is turning on its axis; we will all be left behind.

  ‘A really nice concert,’ everyone s
aid to Margaret, who truly had done a remarkable job of accompanying those kids, even when they speeded up the tempo in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘It’s a Grand Night for Singing’. At the end of the performance, Margaret was called up on stage and given a bouquet of orange gerberas and yellow sunflowers in a beribboned cellophane sheath, presented by one of the children, in gratitude for ‘saving the show’, as Mrs Dibler put it, by filling in for the lost accompanist. And she had agreed to accompany the chorus next year! Bill and Julia clapped energetically at this presentation, as did everyone seated around them. Clarice Watkins and Hedy Fischman were one row ahead; they had come together – Hedy said she never missed a chance to hear children sing, claimed it cleared her sinuses – and next to them, Naomi and Stan Melman. Matthew was there in a ripped black T-shirt, satanic and mortified, slouched in a seat beside his mother, his mustache slightly thicker than when Bill had seen him last, holding a video camera.

  But the real star of the concert was Hannah Melman. She’d had a solo during ‘Seasons of Love’ from Rent. Bill was astounded by the depth and complexity of her voice. A contralto. He’d always thought of Hannah as a silly kid who was obsessed with supermodels; but as she began to sing that night, pert freckly Hannah and her miniskirt faded away and a sixty-year-old black woman stepped forward, a woman who’d spent her life cleaning rooms in cheap motels off a Mississippi highway, humming church songs as she dragged a mop across cracked bathroom tiles. A woman who’d known love, loss. Mostly loss. Tears came into his eyes. Was suffering always there, ready to leap into any voice, no matter how unlikely?

  ‘Wow,’ he’d said to Julia when Hannah was done.

  She frowned at him as he kept clapping. Naomi was blowing her nose and Stan had his arm around her. Even Matthew’s mouth was ajar. Bill glanced over at Clarice Watkins in her violet turban to see if she had registered this phenomenon, but she was staring straight ahead and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ Margaret was saying now in the lobby, looking flushed. ‘It was fun.’

  ‘You were really good, Mom,’ said Julia shyly.

  ‘Wasn’t Hannah amazing? Such range!’

  ‘Won-der-ful performance,’ said the chorus director, tapping Margaret’s arm as she passed by. ‘Though the children were a lit-tle out of control. I don’t know if you’ve met my husband, Eric.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Margaret, as she was introduced to a small man in a blue suit. He had a dark bony face and a dark goatee and at the sight of her he drew back his lips in a rabid smile.

  ‘Pleased to meetcha. Great show.’ Then he staggered away after his wife.

  ‘What’s with that guy?’ said Bill.

  Margaret shook her head.

  It really had been a good show. Margaret had sat up straight on the piano bench in her turquoise dress, eyes so blue, slender and graceful, face serious, focused, alight, unhaunted, nodding every so often when the children managed a particularly high note. It was probably wrong to wish she would keep playing ‘Seasons of Love’ instead of Schumann, but maybe this concert would encourage her to mix up her repertoire.

  As he watched Margaret receive congratulations from children and their parents, smiling and cradling her bouquet of flowers, it came to Bill for the first time that maybe their problems were just problems, even if they were unresolvable. They had been married a long time. This summer, they would go back to Wellfleet (unless they did not) as they had for two weeks every summer, to the same gray-shingled cottage with dark green shutters and the driveway of crushed oyster shells. They would swim and walk on the beach. He and Julia would play Hearts, sitting on the sandy braided rug while Margaret read novels on the brown sofa that sagged in the middle. They would go into town and order fish and chips for dinner on the pier and afterward drive to the ocean and walk on the beach there, listening to the waves, the breeze against their faces mild and full of salt, each pebble throwing a long singular shadow onto the sand. And he would look out at the ceaseless swelling sea and know that whatever it was that was missing was going to stay that way.

  But then Julia would ask for ice cream or Margaret would say something funny. The cottage was full of earwigs, but he was used to that now.

  ‘So what’s next?’ he cried, suddenly exultant. ‘Ice cream, anyone?’

  No one was interested. It was almost nine on a school night and everyone was bent on getting home. Tomorrow was another day. In a few minutes the parking lot had all but emptied, and the Downings’ car was joining a stream of headlights disappearing down Rutherford Road under a navy-blue sky crowded with stars.

  23.

  Such a hot morning. Only ten o’clock but already sweltering. Even at dawn, when Margaret had sat barefoot in her nightgown on the kitchen steps with a cup of coffee, watching the oak crowns turn from gray mountains to green leaves and the pool go from black to mauve, heat had been gathering, almost visibly, a solid muscular presence, and the breeze brushing against her face had felt like fur.

  ‘What do you want?’ she had whispered aloud.

  Now Naomi and Hedy were with her on the patio by the pool, drinking iced coffee and fanning themselves with their hands. Hedy’s little dog, Kismet, was sitting on her lap, though it was too hot for a dog in your lap, but try telling that to the dog. Naomi had stopped by to pick up Hannah, who had spent the night with Julia, and Hedy, hearing voices next door, had walked over to see who was visiting Margaret.

  ‘Is it too early for wine?’ asked Naomi.

  Sunlight sparkled on the surface of the pool and the scent of chlorine mixed with the dense sweet musk of Margaret’s roses in bloom by the back door. They were talking about the ‘case’, as everyone called it, which had at last been cracked. According to a front-page story in the Gazette that morning – Naomi had brought over a copy and was reading aloud – the police had been right all along: someone had been trying to poison coyotes. Acting on a tip last week, the police interviewed a pest-control supplier in Mattapan who produced sales records showing that a ten-ounce package of arsenic had been sold the previous September to an Eric Dibler, of Littlefield, Massachusetts.

  It was the environmentalist who had spoken at the town hall meeting last fall; Margaret recognized his name, and also pointed out that he was the chorus director’s husband. When confronted by the police, Dibler confessed. He claimed the coyote population was out of control; since coyotes had no natural predators in the New England suburbs (‘Other than the Massachusetts Turnpike,’ interjected Naomi), he was attempting ‘to complete the food chain and restore a natural order’. The dogs, he was also quoted as saying, were ‘collateral damage’. He remained unrepentant about the dogs. They had no natural predators either. Charges had been filed. He had been fined two thousand dollars by the ASPCA. A civil lawsuit was also being considered.

  ‘Well, thank God,’ said Naomi.

  Five dogs poisoned in all, Hedy noted, tapping her walking stick against the patio flagstones, making a monotonous calculative sound. Margaret interrupted to wonder at the strangeness of Eric Dibler being married to the middle school chorus director. An unsettling coincidence, Naomi agreed, adding that children in a middle school chorus had plenty of natural predators. But such a relief that the perpetrator had finally been caught; now they could rest easy, knowing that someone would be held accountable for what had happened to those dogs. Because it could have been anyone – friends, neighbors, all of them were suspect.

  ‘Which really wasn’t fair,’ said Naomi.

  It had been awful, hadn’t it? For months they’d all been looking over their shoulders, the whole village, thinking something prowled in every shadow.

  Margaret sighed and reached over to pet Kismet.

  Hedy was still tapping her walking stick.

  ‘Five dogs,’ she repeated. ‘Four of them died at the park, yes. But what about the sheep dog?’

  ‘Boris?’ said Naomi.

  Boris had not been poisoned in the park. He was not collateral damage. He died on the si
dewalk in front of the Dairy Barn, tied to a parking meter. Who could explain that? And the ugly graffiti, the outlines of which still clung to stone steps and storefronts?

  A breeze rippled across the brilliant pool and scintillated into the trees; Margaret put a hand to her eyes as everyone fell to discussing theories about the graffiti. Hedy said the young Pakistani who had worked at the Forge was a candidate. Always seemed angry and why else return to Pakistan unless the police were on to him? Naomi confessed that in a dark moment it had crossed her mind that Matthew might be responsible for the graffiti, though of course that was nuts, he was a good boy, just going through a difficult period, fancied himself an anarchist (what teenage boy didn’t?), but now that he’d started working at Radio Shack his mood had improved; he got good employee benefits, by the way. Also, he was shaving every morning. Frankly, her suspicions centered on Wayne, the Happy Paws dog walker, who’d always struck her as unstable. Economic resentment could have affected him: she’d spotted him at the Forge, reading Marx. The gardeners were not off the hook, either. But whoever it was – could it have been more than one person? A copycat, even? – he’d got what he wanted. Attention. Revenge. General unrest.

  And yet, they all agreed, whatever the graffiti vandal had wanted, still there remained the question of Boris, a dog deliberately poisoned on a weekday afternoon a few days before Thanksgiving, outside an ice-cream parlor on a busy sidewalk.

  As the sun rose higher the pool grew more dazzling, so that even when they looked away sunspots blinded them. They talked on with their hands shielding their eyes, Naomi offering various explanations and Hedy dismissing them, and as she listened to this discussion Margaret dropped her gaze to sprigs of wild thyme sprouting greenly between the patio flagstones and slowly realized that nothing they said mattered. It did not matter that the village was suddenly full of clean-shaven young men, or that last month’s Clean Up Littlefield Day had been a success, with a record number of volunteers, every scrap of litter in the park picked up, new wood chips for the elementary school playground laid down and white boundary lines redrawn for the soccer field. It did not matter that a new petition for an off-leash park had once more been put forward, or that the aldermen were once again considering options and a trial period and preparing for a vote, or that a counter-petition was being filed. All that longing for rightness in the world, from every side of every issue, did not offset one cold fact: someone had liked the idea of poisoning dogs and had decided to try it. Not out of any conviction – even a wrong-headed conviction – but simply to see what it felt like to kill something that someone else loved.