The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  ‘It was an accident,’ said Naomi.

  ‘But if someone did it on purpose?’

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘A monster,’ said Emily.

  The dogs began barking at a squirrel in the tree. Out in the soccer field, the woman’s striped caftan rippled as she walked toward the blazing stand of aluminum bleachers and then slowly passed out of sight.

  4.

  The towering clouds from earlier that morning were gone and the sky was a brilliant vacant blue above the park as Margaret walked Binx across the footbridge. After arriving late on purpose to avoid Naomi, to whom she’d confided too much on the phone the night before, Margaret had then felt ridiculous standing alone in the meadow and decided to take a short walk in the woods. Binx couldn’t get into trouble if she kept him on his leash, and anyway Bill had convinced her that whatever had happened to that poor dog yesterday must have been an accident. Coyotes, he thought, were the answer. If it was poison at all, someone had been trying to poison the coyotes.

  The woods of Baldwin Park were said to be full of coyotes. Occasionally they materialized at the edges of people’s backyards during evening barbecues, dark and bony and somehow accusing, hovering behind rhododendrons and swing sets. Whenever someone’s cat disappeared, posters would be thumb-tacked to telephone poles with a grainy photocopied picture: Have you seen me? Deer also lived in the woods and flocks of wild turkeys that sometimes bobbled down Brooks Street, like an official delegation with their dark feathers and bald-looking heads, and someone last winter saw a black bear, though the bear turned out to be Mrs Beale, head of the Baldwin Park Garden Collective, examining the chicken-wire fencing in her old mink coat. But the coyotes were what people minded, and not just because of the cats. It was their howling, demonic and miserable, and their eyes that shone yellow if your headlights caught them at night and how they seemed to appear and disappear right as you were looking at them. They were said to be multiplying. People were afraid one day they might snatch a child, or maul a jogger, and periodically letters were printed in the Gazette proposing ways to get rid of them.

  Today the woods seemed quiet and unremarkable, wide leaves sifting overhead as Margaret crossed the footbridge and turned to where the woods curved past the soccer field. Three geese flew overhead honking, wings spread like boomerangs.

  A man’s voice said, ‘Hi.’

  It was George Wechsler, in a red baseball cap, standing in the shade by the clump of sumac where yesterday she had discovered his dog.

  The animal control officer must have described for George the exact location where the dog had been discovered. Yes, look – a strip of yellow caution tape was tied to a sumac branch. Feldman. That was the dog’s name.

  ‘You’re George, aren’t you?’

  She introduced herself as the person who had called him yesterday and said how sorry she was. They established that they had met once or twice at the dog park, where Margaret and Binx had only recently become regulars and where George no longer came very often.

  He tipped up the bill of his baseball cap. His face was puffy, but perhaps that was how it always looked. He was holding something in his other hand.

  ‘I don’t want to bother you,’ she said, after apologizing again. ‘I was just walking by.’

  ‘Visiting the scene of the crime?’

  He was shorter than she was. Green T-shirt, tight enough to emphasize his biceps, denim pants, cowboy boots. There was a stolid pugnacity about him, an exaggerated maleness enhanced by the burnish of dark stubble on his cheeks and a way of sticking out his chin when he spoke. His voice was peculiar: harsh, sand-papery, bordering on derisive.

  Binx was sitting at her feet panting, his pink tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said again.

  ‘What do you have to be sorry about?’ George crossed his arms. He was holding a brown paper bag, patchy with grease. When he saw her looking at the bag, he opened it and pulled out an enormous blood-streaked bone.

  ‘Beef shank. I got it at the meat counter at Whole Foods.’

  ‘Were you planning to bury it?’ she asked politely.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell I was planning.’ He stared at the bone for several moments. Then he made a disgusted noise and tossed it under the sumac bush.

  To restrain Binx from lunging after the bone, Margaret began walking backward toward the trail that led into the woods. George followed, asking businesslike questions about how exactly the dog had been positioned when she found him and whether she had noticed anything nearby, a container of some kind, any evidence that he might have eaten something.

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  They arrived at the opening to the trail. Actually, two trails, one heading right and one left. She stopped, thinking that George would say goodbye and head back to the meadow, but he took a step or two into the woods, then turned to look at her. ‘Going this way?’

  They took the trail to the right and for several minutes they walked along in silence, Binx as usual pulling hard at his leash, forging ahead and gagging.

  ‘You can’t let him off?’ George said finally.

  ‘I’m afraid he’ll run away.’

  But she bent down and unclipped the leash from Binx’s collar. Off he went, bounding down the trail ahead of them. Amber light filtered through the trees and from somewhere a bird cried out. How cool the woods were after the heat of the meadow; she felt herself appreciate the leafy privacy and the subversive sense of being, for a few minutes, where no one would look for her or expect her to be. In another minute they would turn around and the day would flow back into itself.

  They walked on, George trudging along in silence. He walked heavily, with his fists cocked backwards; she wondered if he got into fights easily – or if he only wanted to look like someone who got into fights easily.

  ‘So,’ she said at last, ‘this probably isn’t the best time to mention it, but my book club is planning to read your novel. And we were hoping maybe you’d come talk to us? Maybe about how you get your ideas and what you’re working on now?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, hardly moving his jaw. ‘Be glad to.’

  Binx had returned to amble beside them.

  ‘It’s so amazing, what you do, making stuff out of nothing.’ She was embarrassed to find herself blushing. ‘Sort of like being a wizard.’

  George gave a snort and kept staring straight ahead, stumping along in his cowboy boots. They had come to a narrow part of the trail, where the trees grew closer together and the underbrush was a tangle of saplings struggling through briar and creeper. A dead tree had fallen across the path; they had to take turns stepping over it.

  ‘So what do you do?’

  She pushed aside a whip-like branch and held it for George. ‘Me?’

  ‘Husband? Kids? Job?’

  ‘I used to be a teacher before I had a family. Then, you know, I took time off, and then it’s hard to get back in once you’ve been out for a while.’

  She listened to the squeak of her leather sandals as they walked along the trail, heading back now to the meadow. The breeze had stopped and the leaves were still. From deep within the woods came a low insect vibration.

  ‘My husband keeps telling me to develop some outside interests.’

  He was walking behind her now, twigs cracking and popping under his boots. In her imagination, she continued to talk about Bill, hearing even the timbre of her voice – detached, unguarded, pitched at a reasonable middle register – describing in detail their marriage counseling: Bill saying that he loved her but that something was missing, and that for now they were following Dr Vogel’s advice to be honest but kind to each other; in six months they would see where that landed them. It was the uncertainty of everything she was finding so terrifying. Bill wasn’t a big talker, lately he hardly talked at all, so she found herself reverberating to every change of mood, every shift in tone. Any disturbance affected her. It had gotten habitual. She cou
ldn’t stop herself, even when she wasn’t with Bill. It was like being a human tuning fork.

  ‘He suggested tennis,’ she said. ‘Or squash.’

  ‘Sounds exhausting,’ said George.

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Margaret.

  But he did. When she asked if he had a family he revealed that his wife had left him last spring. ‘For two months,’ he said, ‘I had a heart attack every morning.’

  Margaret stopped walking, so abruptly, in fact, that George almost walked into her. She had been staring at the ground, but now out of the corner of her eye glimpsed something large and white flickering through the trees.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What was what?’ said George in his peculiar harsh voice.

  ‘I thought I saw something.’

  George squinted and then turned to look at her, his hands at the back of his belt, hitching up his denim pants.

  She smiled apologetically and said she was very sorry to hear about his wife, waiting for him to say more about his separation, but he only made a small, open-palmed ‘after you’ gesture with one hand.

  As they resumed walking she thought how surprising it was that he had confided something so personal to a near stranger and again imagined herself confiding in him, being as frank as he had just been. Well, for Bill it’s mostly about sex, she would say coolly. He says he doesn’t feel anything. He says he feels dead. His father died in March and, according to our couples therapist, death makes men think about sex. He probably wishes he could be with someone younger. That’s what I’m afraid of, anyway. But I’m trying to give him some space, I want to help him go through whatever he needs to go through.

  What a remarkable person you are, George would say to her.

  Once more she found herself blushing and called for Binx. He came trotting back to the trail to stand by her legs while she fastened the leash back onto his collar. ‘A miracle,’ she said. ‘He never comes when I call.’ The trail was now wide enough that George could walk next to her, Binx trotting ahead.

  ‘He’s kind of an anarchist,’ she said.

  ‘All dogs are anarchists,’ George said, ‘at heart.’

  ‘Well, some dogs hide it better than others.’

  George laughed and said it was a miracle that any dog ever listened to human beings, given that dogs were the ones with big teeth. Then he reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder.

  The trail was again stippled by sunlight, a complicated pattern that shifted with the tree branches. She felt the warmth of George’s hand against her bare skin, a mild but insistent pressure. And then it was gone; the shade of the woods drew back and together they walked out into the ordinary humming light of day.

  5.

  The morning after her walk in the woods with George Wechsler, Margaret looked out of her kitchen window to see the door to the Fischmans’ carriage house propped open with a battered-looking blue canvas suitcase. On the front stoop were woven baskets of varying size – each filled with books or colored scarves or embroidered pillows alight with tiny mirrors – along with a glossy jade plant in a red glazed pot.

  Every fall for the past decade the Fischmans had rented their furnished carriage house to a visiting professor at Warren College, a mile to the south, an easy walk from Rutherford Road. Mulberry-colored and gabled, a smaller version of the Fischmans’ house, the carriage house sat at the end of their cobbled driveway separated from the Downings’ driveway by a privet hedge, though a gap in the hedge allowed for foot traffic between the two driveways. The carriage house had once been divided into two home offices – both Fischmans were psychoanalysts; she was Israeli, Polish originally – but since their retirement they’d put in a kitchen and an upstairs bedroom. Rental income was nothing to sneeze at, and they liked the idea of having someone to call on in an emergency, especially since Marv’s stroke, which left him with a palsied hand and slurred speech. Generally their tenants had not mixed much with the neighborhood. Last year’s tenant was a tall gaunt man from Brussels with grayish teeth who wore dark suits, even on weekends, and never opened his window blinds; his subject was the Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. Not exactly a guy to invite over to watch the Super Bowl, Bill had said to Margaret.

  That afternoon she and Julia walked across the driveway with a paper plate of chocolate chip cookies, as they always did whenever a new person moved into the carriage house. Even the man from Brussels got a plate of cookies. Julia had not wanted to go and had to be persuaded.

  ‘It’s neighborly,’ said Margaret.

  ‘People don’t do that stuff anymore.’

  ‘Of course they do.’

  ‘No,’ said Julia. ‘Only you do.’

  A small plump black woman met them at the door wearing a green turban, feathery pink mules and a peach-colored silk robe embroidered with dragons. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. She smiled broadly, revealing large front teeth with a gap between them, and introduced herself in a supple gravelly voice as Clarice. Then she thanked them for the cookies and said that they’d have to excuse her, as she was just about to have her bath, thanked them again and shut the door. Margaret and Julia walked back through the hedge.

  ‘Well,’ Margaret said as they reached their back steps. ‘She seems interesting. I feel like I’ve met her before.’

  ‘She’s black,’ noted Julia.

  ‘African-American.’

  But Julia wanted to know what if she wasn’t: what if she wasn’t American or African? What she should be called then?

  Margaret opened the back door to the kitchen. ‘I suppose you’d say person of color.’

  ‘But who says that?’ Julia loitered in the doorway, voice rising. ‘Who says, “Hey, guess what, today I met a person of color”?’

  ‘Let’s talk about this inside,’ said her mother.

  The Downings had since learned that Dr Clarice Watkins was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Hedy Fischman said she wasn’t sure but she believed Dr Watkins might be a friend of the Obamas. She’d told Hedy she was from Hyde Park, where the Obamas used to live, and mentioned that her mother also lived in Hyde Park. Hedy was slightly hard of hearing, a difficulty compounded by her tendency to talk over other people during conversations, so Margaret thought it was possible that Dr Watkins had said ‘Mama’, not Obama. What Hedy knew for certain was that Dr Watkins was this year’s Talbot Scholar at Warren College, where she was scheduled to deliver a series of lectures on something, Hedy couldn’t remember what.

  Bill wondered aloud if they might invite Dr Watkins to dinner one evening. It would be interesting, he said, to meet someone who knew the Obamas.

  ‘She might know the Obamas. It’s not clear. She wears a turban.’

  ‘Is she Muslim?’

  Margaret didn’t know; she thought inviting Dr Watkins to dinner was a nice idea but worried that an invitation so soon after her arrival might be perceived as too friendly, as if they were trying to ingratiate themselves. Also they had never invited Hedy and Marv Fischman to dinner. Bill found conversations with Hedy in particular to be heavy weather. ‘Always analyzing everything.’ Her field had been trauma therapy. Dr Doom, he sometimes called her.

  The Fischmans would have to be included in any dinner invitation that involved their new tenant. And with Marv’s trouble walking, and barely understandable now –

  ‘Forget it,’ said Bill.

  They were having this discussion as they loaded the dishwasher after dinner. As she was pulling out the box of detergent powder from below the sink, Margaret mentioned that Dr Vogel had sent an email message that afternoon saying that she was going on vacation but would return on October 10th, and she could see Margaret and Bill for a counseling session the following Monday at ten thirty a.m.

  ‘I’ll be at work,’ said Bill. ‘Can’t she see us in the evening?’

  ‘That’s her only free hour all week.’ Margaret shook detergent into the wash and pre-wash compartments of the dishwasher. Dr Vogel had not been abl
e to find a regular time for their sessions, but offered them cancellation slots. She had been recommended by Naomi Melman, who said they were fortunate to be able to see Dr Vogel at all. Often couples stayed on her waiting list for months. Sometimes they were already divorced before she could see them.

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Bill was checking his iPhone calendar. ‘I’ve got a meeting with Roche that day at ten thirty.’

  ‘I think this is pretty important.’

  ‘I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just saying it’s inconvenient.’

  Margaret kept shaking out detergent, which spilled across the door of the dishwasher.

  ‘Fine,’ said Bill. ‘Ten thirty is fine.’

  ‘I’ll confirm the appointment, then.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Bill started the dishwasher and began wiping down the granite counters while Margaret finished rinsing a pot in the sink. Binx lay at her feet, head between his paws, scolded earlier for licking the plates in the dishwasher while it was being loaded. In the bowl on the windowsill, one of the two goldfish was lurking at the base of their crenellated ceramic castle. Its crisp-looking gills opened and closed; otherwise it wasn’t moving.

  ‘One of the goldfish looks sick.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mike or Ike.’

  ‘Better tell Julia. She can get the grave ready.’

  ‘Oh, stop it.’

  ‘You stop it,’ he said, tossing the dishtowel he’d been using onto the counter.

  Margaret heard him head for the hallway and then go up the stairs. Well, there it is, she thought, looking at the dishtowel.

  Lights were on inside the carriage house next door, glowing through gauzy saffron-colored curtains that had recently been hung. On the carriage house’s back porch, visible above the darkening hedge from the kitchen window, sat two peeling white wicker rocking chairs, one with a new orange African-print cushion. The porch overlooked a simple garden: a patch of grass, a grandmotherly bed of white begonias, a few striped hostas and two leathery laurel bushes in a wash of pachysandra ending in a gray stockade fence.