One Good Dog

by Susan Wilson

  Adam folds the pink note. Veronica. “He’s your kid.” The sound of a slamming door.

  Adam feels a tiny squeezing of his heart muscles. Not pain, not angina. Something else. Tension. The tension that makes him the tiger he is in the boardroom. Adam closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them and rereads the note. Your sister called. That is all that is written on the paper. No number. No address. No name. As if he knew them already.

  Certainly this is Sophie’s misunderstanding, but what if it’s not? What if, in some bizarre circumstance, some unimaginable turn of events, his sister has come back? If so, what does she expect? A tearful reunion? What does she want? Money? That makes some sense, and he makes a mental note to call his lawyer as soon as he can break free from the day’s high-pressured activity. He opens the slip once more.

  Your sister called. The shaky ground on which he has built his life trembles.

  “Sophie.” The name spoken in a flat tone, devoid of warmth, as if addressing a dog. A dog that is being disobedient. A dog that needs training.

  “Be right there, Mr. March.” Adam can see Sophie framed in the open office door as she bends over her computer, tiny dimples forming in the backs of her knees where her slightly too-tight, slightly too-short skirt slides upward in defiance of his dress code. Ties for the men and appropriate office wear for the women. Adam March does not tolerate Ally McBeal wear in his office. Sophie’s ample backside wavers from side to side as she taps the keyboard with a response to whatever it is she’s finding so amusing at his expense. His expensive time.

  Suddenly, his mouth is dry and he is very thirsty. As he reaches for the carafe on his credenza, Adam suddenly feels his blood pressure drop, and with it a swooping dizziness, a sense of being outside of his own head. He touches the edge of his desk for solid contact, but his hands feel disembodied, attached to his wrists by threads. The momentary dizziness stops as his blood pressure begins scaling up, but not the sense of plummeting.

  Outside of his office, Sophie laughs. Each note of her musical trill strikes him as increasingly taunting. Adam’s thoughts are circling wildly, his razor-sharp thinking suddenly clouded with anxiety. He’s got to get back on track; he has important phone calls to make. He doesn’t have time for distractions. He doesn’t have time to puzzle out what this means. Time for a sister.

  Adam crushes the note and tosses it into the receptacle beneath his desk.

  His sister, thinking to just walk back in, to pick up a relationship she abandoned when he was a little kid? Leaving him to be passed from one foster home to another? To jeopardize everything he’s spent his whole adult life building?

  Adam retrieves the note and tears the sheet into halves, quarters, and eighths. Adam March has no sister. He has a business to run.

  “Sophie.” Adam says her name again as if it is a dead word, a word that is meaningless, invented. “Sophie.” Harder on the second syllable. SoPHIE. Not imploring. Threatening.

  The girl stands with her back to him, bending over her computer keyboard, her whole posture mocking his authority.

  “Sophie.” His voice gone from authoritative mezzo forte to forte, and still the girl doesn’t come to him.

  Still bent over the keyboard, Sophie raises one hand and waves back at Adam, a casual, dismissive salute, acknowledging his voice but postponing his wishes. Putting him off. Like Sterling puts him off. Time and again, when she stands in front of him in their bedroom, unabashedly naked, slowly lotioning herself, spraying the fine mist of her signature perfume into the air and walking through it, readying herself for whatever social event they are scheduled to attend or host. Untouchable. Her surgically enhanced body nearly unattractive in its rock-hard contours and artificially enhanced breasts, but invoking lust in him anyway. Lust that Sterling allows only afterward.

  Waving him away like Ariel does, diminishing his importance in front of her teenage friends.

  Sophie’s dismissive hand lowers to the keyboard, the importance of her electronic friend subsuming the importance of him. She shifts, the dimples behind her left knee disappearing and the ones on her right deepening, little mocking eyes.

  Too much has been invested in this day. This day’s anticipated outcome. Too much of Adam’s time, effort, reputation, and future is wrapped up in his almost eighteen months of careful analysis, planning, coercing of colleagues to see that he is right, that this takeover is the right thing to do. Too much of his life has been spent in building up to this moment; maybe his whole life has been lived in preparation for this glorious day. With today’s launch, he will step into his rightful place as CEO designee, no longer lying in wait to take over Louis Wannamaker’s position. The years of building upon the weak foundation of his boyhood, his years of achievement, will come to fruition as heir apparent.

  Veronica. He called out her name, then and for years after she slammed through the back door.

  And Sophie is seriously challenging his authority. She needs reminding. She needs to remember herself and her place in this corporate pack.

  “Don’t you talk back to me, young lady.”

  Your sister called. What idiot believed some raving madwoman?

  Adam’s mouth is bone-dry; his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. His pulse is pounding in his right temple, a curiously painful thumping that seems audible, as if he can listen to the rising of his blood pressure. He is out of breath. Behind him, the morning light casts a yellow square onto his massive black desk, his shadow like a keyhole in the center. He presses his knuckles against his leather blotter. A thin line of ragged pain arcs between his eyes for a single audible pulse beat. Adam presses his knuckles down harder, presses himself against the edge of the black desk, rocks a little to gain momentum, and pushes off. Coming around the wide desk, he knocks the regulation vase of fresh flowers askew; the foot of the fluted glass vase is suspended slightly over the edge, its balance held by the weight of the arrangement. A lily petal loosens and falls to the floor. Adam’s shoe crushes it into the carpet, a pink stain like roadkill against the macadam-colored weave.

  Even as he reaches the doorway of his office, Adam is amazed at just how angry he is. It is as if the anger is boiling up from some deeper region of himself than he knew he had, that it is transforming him, physically wrenching his bones into another shape, his skin into another species. Adam has known anger; he’s shouted at his truculent daughter, at underlings, and even, rarely, at Sterling. But every time he raises his voice, he is reminded of his father, of his father’s last words to his escaping sister. His father’s voice is the only sound in his head right now. “Don’t defy me, young lady.”

  “Sophie.” A croaking whisper, as if the anger has him by the throat, squeezing his breath out. The pulse in his temple pounds, and for an instant Adam thinks he is going to faint.

  “Fuck you, old man.”

  Sophie Anderson is riveted to her computer screen, reading through her e-mails, laughing at jokes forwarded from her pal in Consumer Affairs. She stands up only as she feels Adam’s breath on her neck. Then his hand on her shoulder as he wrenches her around to slap her full in the face.

  Later, those who witnessed the event would claim they didn’t know who was attacking Sophie, that they all thought some crazed madman had gotten by security. It took four middle managers and two security guards to wrestle Adam to the floor. Like a beast, he howled. Corporate legend would tag Adam March forever as the Jekyll and Hyde of Dynamic Industries. A man primed for battle in the world of corporate take-no-prisoners management style had slipped his reason, like a steel bear trap sprung accidentally by the touch of a rabbit. Adam March lost his shit, as they said in cafeterias and cocktail parties for years to come. The high-and-mighty top dog was wrestled into submission and never seen again. But his legend, his incomprehensible act of wild self-destruction, lived on.

  Chapter Three

  I should explain a little about myself to you. A little bio. A thumbnail—or in my case, a dewclaw—description. I’m a little over th
ree years old, still young enough to have to vie for position, old enough to go against only the best. I have good teeth, set in a strong jaw. One of my ears is sheered off at the bottom; the other hangs in a three-quarter break, and I keep it tight against my skull whenever I greet. My tail is as straight as a stick and I almost never let it rise above my back like some happy-go-lucky retriever. It’s a divining rod of my intentions, a whip, a warning. Depending on my circumstances, I’m forty-five or fifty pounds. When I’m on the street, I might shrink to a mere thirty unless I suss out the best Dumpsters and get there ahead of my vermin brethren. I don’t know what color I am; it’s an unimportant characteristic among my kind. What is important is that my anal glands describe my authority, my education, and my living arrangements to any who encounter me—where I’ve been and where I’m going.

  My urine marks a wide territory. I have no testicles. The first time I was nabbed, off they went. I’ll come to that part of my history directly, but I will say that by that time I was fully masculine, and I have not given up my boyish ways except for the fulfillment of my genetic destiny. I can do it, but I’m shooting blanks.

  From birth, my manifest destiny, as arranged by the young men who kept my parents in cages in a cellar, was to fight. My size and sex determined that I received the best of care from those who had no affection for the animals holed up in the inner-city cellar. I got fed. I got to wear heavy chains around my shoulders to bulk up my body into a mass of rock-solid muscle. I got strong enough that two of these callow young men, boys, pups of their species, had to hold me back. I rarely saw daylight. I was a creature of the night, shuttled from one cellar to another in the darkness, an ill-fitting muzzle all that was between me and their hands. I don’t recall ever being touched by them in a nonbusiness way. All jerks and pulls and pushes; the end of a stick, the flat of a board. Had either of those two young men ever dared unmuzzle me and pat my head, I would have licked his hand. They were afraid of me, of what they had created.

  As I say, I was born in an inner-city cellar. My parents, unusually, were both on-site, so I got to know them both. So many of my kind are not so lucky. My mom was a full-blood pit bull—whatever that may mean in the lexicon of swaggering young men—descended from a long line of dogs whose survival depended on their prowess in the fight arena. None of them particularly angry, but all able to be incited to destruction; all highly competitive when pitted, no pun intended, against an adversary. Like the gladiators of old, our adversaries aren’t of our own choosing, but chosen for us by the men who employ us. Fighting is our livelihood. Our predetermined career. A job. The hours aren’t bad, and if you’re good at your job, you get to live another day and do it again.

  Mom, whom they called “Bitch-dog,” was scarred along her lips, even to where there was a half-moon of missing flesh exposing her upper side teeth. Long retired from the pit, she’d become a breeding machine. Her dugs hung limp and wobbly; even after the authorities removed her from the cellar, her teats would never retract to their earlier tightness.

  Now, we don’t identify one another by the breedist notions of those who cause our creation, but everybody knows that our different shapes and sizes, smells, and tail carriage help us to identify ourselves to one another. So, for convenience sake, I will say Dad was a blend of several types of “breeds” that have power and stamina; Dad was a mix of pit bull and rottweiler or boxer, maybe a little old-fashioned bulldog. Dad’s rottie parts gave him his height and bulk. His pit bull parts thinned out his back end but gave him a Bluto disproportion in his front end. He was a tough one in the ring, knew his game well, and he never gave ground. They called him “Fitty,” after some rapper they admired. It seemed to me, even as a youngster, that calling a gladiator like Dad “Fitty” was a bit silly. Although Dad and I were neighborhood champs, our boys were not contenders on the real dogfight circuit; thus were able to pass mixed breeds like Fitty and me off on their equally amateurish friends.

  Naming conventions have ever puzzled us. If we don’t come when called, it’s likely that the appellation assigned to us is unacceptable. In my life I’ve been called many things, some of them not polite. We know one another by the names shouted at us, but more intimately by our scents. I think of my mother not as “Bitch-dog,” but by the warm scent of her particular skin, her particular odor nursing my less fortunate littermates. I was the big one. I was the one on the top teat. My lesser sibs perished in the boys’ brutal effort at selective breeding, tossed like so many field mice into the training cage.

  On the street, my friends, and I’ve had many, are untethered by spoken names. I can visit them, even if they are out of sight, by their markers. Ah, there’s the tough little one. I see that the bitch who mates with big dogs has been hanging around the alley. Maybe I’ll wait for her. A further snuffle and I realize that she is now pregnant yet again. I see her in my mind’s eye, her teats swelling and her self-satisfied tongue lolling as she seeks out a safe haven for her nest. We think in pictures.

  I picture the cellar in which I was born, comforted by the rich, warm scent of my mother’s skin and hair; curious at my first whiff of blood, the sweetish scent of it coming to me beyond the partition that separated us from the makeshift ring; not knowing what it was, but equating the smell of it with the sounds that came to me, the sounds of combat. My senses prepared me for my own experience, so that when I first saw blood, first engaged in a fight, it was as familiar to me as if I had studied the textbook.

  When it was time to put aside childish things, I left my mother’s kennel and moved into isolation. I believe I may have howled on that first solitary night, but I was quickly quieted with a smack. Ever since, I have ducked my head at the sight of a fast-moving hand. My assailant tossed in a hard rubber ring, which I proceeded to gnaw, ingesting the slurry and vomiting in the night before I finally slept.

  I picture the heavy chains that were looped over my head and onto my shoulders as I was paraded in the mean streets by the boys. They gave me a strong dog look, and I confess I might have swaggered a bit. I wasn’t fettered by the chains; I was proud of them. Around my neck a perfect uniform of tackle suited to controlling an uncontrollable animal. A collar that when jerked pressed prongs of metal into my thick neck. A leather collar fitted out with pointed studs was my dress uniform, the one I got to wear on formal occasions, like when the boys took me out to show off to their crew.

  By the time I had reached my full size, the boys had begun my training in earnest.

  Though I most resemble my mother—longish body, muzzle like a shoe box, whiplike tail, I am big like Dad. The rottie parts are pretty thinned out, so I’ll never weigh in at ninety pounds like those bruisers, but I’m in the heavyweight category for my sport. Fifty pounds, all muscle and bone and spit.

  How do we know what to do the minute we’re dropped into a pit? We don’t. The first time, all we know is that our men expect something from us. Their sweat tells us that they are challenging one another; their voices are sharp, encouraging, cajoling, berating, fierce. In a few moments, we know what to do. We know what they want. We pick up on their agitation; we get into the trash talking. We engage. And, like those old-time gladiators, we know that defeat is not an option. This is what our men want. This is our job.

  From the first time my boys put me in the ring, I understood what was expected of me. I fought out of fear. I’m not ashamed to say that. If you didn’t fear getting your nose bitten off, you were as crazy as those boys. Be the aggressor and you might not get hurt, or hurt as much. I’ll say something else: I didn’t always hate it. When you’re a little hungry, isolated, when you never get to meet your fellows in any sort of comradely way, your noses never touching the communicating part, only recognizing one another through the scents left on the fence posts, well, you get a little testy. It was my only outlet. I was pretty good at it.

  I am and always will be a beast, a man-designed bag of sinew, bone, muscle, and teeth. My ancestors thought it was a good alliance between our kind and
man, never dreaming that their physical shapes and proclivities would be so determined by another creature. I am made bestial by the job I was trained to do. Many of my species have lost that bestiality, replacing a heritage of scavenging around the firepit with an attachment to some human who will dote on them.

  I never knew about that until the day my boys brought in a mutt from off the street, clean, toenails well clipped, uncollared, but a clearly attached Canis domesticus. This happened every now and then. When they’d run out of runts, the boys would bring in involuntary recruits for us to spar with. These draftees were not meant to be real challengers; they were generally short on muscle and low in stamina, often soft from good living. These naïve fellows arrive shamelessly tail-wagging, thinking they’ve found a new friend, and the next minute some tough-skinned, pale-eyed contender bites into their cheerfully upraised necks.

  This one told me his story during the hours we had caged in the cellar of the house, his cage placed close enough to mine that we could talk so quietly that our voices didn’t provoke either of the boys to shout down “Shaddup.” His scent, even without my being able to sniff around his communicating area, was replete with good food and human touching. He told me that he had a person who took care of his every need, gently, even offering him treats for every silly thing he did. His job was not to roll around in a pit, but to walk without pulling on the leash. No, he didn’t wear a collar like mine. His, which the boys removed, was of soft leather, two metal disks declaring who he was and to whom he belonged tinkling merrily from it. He missed the sound; he wasn’t sure he could sleep well, not hearing the gentle ding of his tags as they touched while he circled for sleep. They and the collar were the badge of his service. And of them, he was quite proud. I was appalled. The idea of such submission sent an involuntary shiver along my back and I shook hard to rid myself of it. But I was curious, maybe even a little jealous.