One Good Dog

by Susan Wilson

  Adam takes Ishmael’s hand, a little surprised at its soft warmth. After hours of handling hot implements, Ishmael’s hand actually feels feverish.

  “March.” Adam steps over the fixed bench and sits down to his plate of lunch.

  Rafe, opposite him, gestures to the other man of the foursome, an overweight white man with psoriasis covering half of his face. He might be fifty or sixty—it’s hard to tell with the disfiguring scales crawling up the side of his face. “This here’s Mike.”

  “Hello, Mike.” Adam picks up his fork but is pretty sure he won’t be able to eat.

  “Adam here is our new CSI.”

  Adam throws Rafe a puzzled look.

  “Community service investigator.” He throws his head back and laughs. “Get it? You gonna investigate how the other half live.” Rafe chuckles himself into control and starts eating.

  Adam flushes with embarrassment. He hasn’t expected that his enforced volunteerism would be common knowledge. Where were confidentiality laws when you needed them?

  Ishmael entertains them as they eat with a constant stream of chat and jokes, as if hours of asking the same question have warmed him up for the main act. Mike shovels the food into his mouth, gets up, and takes his plate into the kitchen without a word. Big Bob joins them from upstairs, sits down at Mike’s vacant spot, tipping the table a little under his weight. “How’d it go, first day?”

  “I guess you’ll have to ask my boss.” Adam has moved the beef around on his plate, nibbled a forkful of potato, which has just a hint of garlic, and a mushroom, which, he’s surprised to find, actually is a shitake.

  “He’ll do. Just has to give up his prissy ways.” Rafe scrapes the last of the gravy onto his fork and runs a paper napkin across his mouth. “Damn good, if I do say so myself. Adam, you best get it right now that I’m the best there is, was, and will be in the world of industrial-size cookin’.”

  Adam politely cuts a piece of beef and puts it into his mouth. Although it’s cold by this time, the flavor is good and the meat is tender. A note of some unidentifiable seasoning moves it out of ordinary and into quite nice. Adam eats the rest of it.

  Big Bob raps a little drumbeat against the tabletop. “Okay, then. Carry on.” As soon as he lifts his weight from the bench, the table relaxes and Adam feels like he and Ishmael are about to tip over. Mike has reappeared with a push broom and is tracing a pattern onto the fake wood back and forth, back and forth, working his way from the far end toward their table. The three men get up and Ishmael fetches a cloth to wipe it down again.

  “You can go.” Rafe places his huge thin-fingered hand once again on Adam’s shoulder. “It gets better.”

  Adam strips off his white jacket, now dotted with new gravy stains, and jams it into the laundry bin.

  Outside, there is a parking ticket under his windshield wiper and a pigeon has crapped on the windshield of his Lexus.

  Chapter Eleven

  Adam awakens sweating, despite the window open to the freshening fall day. His pulse ticks in his ears, the remnant of nightmare fright. Despite every effort to provide himself with a good night’s sleep via Messrs. Walker or Dewar, Adam fights every night with an array of dubious images. If he dreamed of Sophie or Sterling or buildings falling down, that would make sense. Instead, he dreams of city streets and being late. Of not being able to hear what’s being said to him. Of not knowing where he is. Cryptic dream messages, or dreams with no meaning.

  He wishes he could get away from waking before dawn. It’s been months since he’s had to be at work at seven-thirty; months since he’s thought to go for a run. He has plenty of “me time” now, too much to fill the hours. His job at the center occupies him during the easy part of the day. The mornings and the nights are his burden.

  His headhunter isn’t returning his phone calls. He hasn’t scrounged up any interviews and is apparently sick of having to say so. Adam thinks that consulting is an option. Hang out his shingle, get some business cards, and advise companies on strategic planning or how to plan a takeover. His headhunter hasn’t been encouraging there, either, but what stops Adam is the work of pulling it together, of putting the effort into an action plan; inertia enfolds him in its cottony warmth. He flips on daytime television.

  Dr. Stein hasn’t much to say about it, either. He wants Adam to keep a journal, record his feelings. Feelings. Shit. What exactly does the good shrink think Adam might be feeling? Abandoned? Under siege? Mistreated?

  Adam takes his place at the window. Just past eight-thirty, the early-morning rush has faded into the workaday flow of traffic, both in the street and on the sidewalks. The dry cleaner is busy. No matter what the economy, people still need their “dry clean only” items cared for. The newsagent’s place is active twice a day, early morning and at five o’clock.

  Adam rarely sees anyone going into the tropical fish shop; those that do tend toward the little old lady or the ten-year-old picking out his first fish. He’s avoided the shop owner since their uncomfortable discovery of a common history. He still watches her wash the window, but he’s no longer interested in pleasantries.

  The Fort Street Center, whether he likes it or not, has become the centerpiece of Adam’s day. It is the only thing, five days a week, that gets him out of the house, and most days it provides the only nourishment he gets. He’s forgotten all about the made-to-order Norwegian granola he used to require. Cheese crackers and coffee from the newsagent in the morning, scotch at night.

  Adam pulls away from the window, his palm print fading as his sweat evaporates, a smear of fingerprints at eye level. One of his foster mothers had been a bear on the subject of fingerprints. Adam had spent his eighth and ninth years living in dread of making a mark on polished surfaces or glass. Mrs. Markowitz would have whupped his behind to see the fan of prints marring his curtainless picture window.

  He’d had seven in all, seven sets of foster parents from the time he was five and a half, an average of thirteen months with each. The last, the Potters, had kept him the longest, all the way through his last two years at St. Joseph’s. The day he turned eighteen, he was emancipated, suddenly outside the protection and purview of the state, magically independent. Even though he’d longed for that moment, the sudden reality of it, three days before his high school graduation, had shocked him with its finality. “You can stay, but we’ll have to ask for board.” Mrs. Potter, a rake-thin woman just beyond middle age, with enough beds to make something of a living taking in foster kids, needed the bed and needed him out. Nothing personal, just practical. Today you are a man.

  They were reluctant at first, as they told him over and over, to take on an unadoptable teenage boy, but his social worker had convinced them to take a chance. What that meant was that he ate more than the others, which practically wiped out his state subsidy, and that they were on top of him about his behavior, always suspicious that he was upstairs smoking dope or hanging out with street gangs, plotting mayhem. That he could have been doing those things but wasn’t was no consolation to them.

  The Potters were too busy with four other kids, always much younger, all cycling through the foster system, and all into adoptions or reclamation by rehabilitated parents, to pay much attention to his education. They lacked the energy or imagination to prod him into doing his homework. They were just happy never to be robbed or caught in the imagined cross fire of their foster boy’s shootout with a rival gang. Adam despised them, and once the door was shut, he never contacted them again.

  His college essay, a self-indulgent treatise on life in the Commonwealth’s foster system, had earned him a ticket out of that system. A partial scholarship to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst had given him a place to go. An unexpected interest and acuity in finance and economics opened up Adam’s world from the narrow confines of the blue-collar, conservative, clannish environment he had lived in up until then. Working nearly full-time as a bus driver for the Pioneer Valley Transit system had financed his schooling and stoked his de
termination never to go back to Dorchester. He had escaped by virtue of his brains, and by those same virtues, Adam would rise to the top. He would forget his past and forge a future that was unlimited. He didn’t entertain himself with visions of returning to one or another of his foster parents with a disdainful “I told you so.” It never occured to him. He put his past behind him and never looked back.

  Adam made it into Harvard Business School. Three-quarters of the way through his M.B.A. program, he’d been recruited by his first major corporation. Done with the M.B.A., already two rungs up the corporate ladder, and enjoying the first fruits of high pay and glorious benefits, he’d met Sterling. Here was a nymph from another world—no, not another world, a creature of the world Adam intended to inhabit. Her father, the blue-blooded economist guru of the decade, Herbert Carruthers, was the guest speaker at a corporate retreat, and Adam had sat at the edge of his seat to soak in everything the great man could offer. When his boss took him over to introduce him to Carruthers, Sterling stood beside her father with a calm detachment. She was used to young sycophants wanting to touch the hem of his garment.

  “You must be very proud of your dad,” Adam whispered to Sterling as he waited to be introduced. “Such an inspiration.”

  Sterling had looked at him with the hauteur he would fall in love with. A look that said, Yeah, so what? Tell me something I don’t know.

  “Going around with him to these retreats must be a great way to meet eligible men like me.” He smiled the toothy smile of his peers. At least his genetics had provided good teeth, despite a spotty dental regimen. Her lips slowly slid into a smile, revealing her own perfect teeth. She was so naturally beautiful then. Tall, slim, her blond hair artfully tossed. She could have had any one of a dozen Park Avenue-raised young men as her choice, but she’d chosen Adam. His glossed-over history mattered less to her than the fact of his wunderkind trajectory. Her father approved of him because of that glossedover history, liked the idea of a self-made son-in-law. If Adam had cut down the number of foster homes, had implied a decent upbringing grounded in hard work, instead of telling the truth, it was only because the truth had no bearing on who he’d become. No one wanted to hear about the loneliness, the rootless existence of a boyhood spent without a home to call his own. A charity case.

  Of Veronica, of their father, he said nothing. They did not exist. They had no hand in the making of Adam March.

  Adam hadn’t thought a lot about those days until the foundation stone of his reinvention had been uncovered. Dr. Stein keeps picking at him, wanting him to come to some understanding of his feelings. He prods at Adam to admit some insecurities, to admit weakness. To understand why he has “anger issues.”

  Adam sits forward on the low chair, resting his elbows on his knees, hands folded and beneath his chin. “In business, in life, it’s he who has the most arrows in his quiver who gets ahead—by any means. Sometimes that looks like anger.”

  “Why was it so important to get ahead?” The shrink fashions air quotes around the words get ahead.

  “It’s what people do,” says Adam. “It’s how the world works. Even you, Doctor, planned at some point in your life to do something to get ahead. To achieve, to make your mark. To end up somewhere better than where you started. It takes a tough man to do that.” Adam sits back, his chin tipped a little forward, pugnacious.

  “We’re talking about you, Adam, not me.” The doctor closes his notebook. “And Adam, until you come to grips with the fact that you have anger issues, abandonment issues, you are not going to heal.”

  “Heal from what? A lousy childhood? Angry about that? I’m way beyond that. I’m no longer that kid, that punk whose father would show up once a year, take me out to McDonald’s, and say nothing about why he couldn’t raise me himself. But I knew what it was called. Voluntary surrender. Voluntary.” Adam stops himself. The phantom pain pulses in his rib cage. He hears his own breath as it sounds when he wakes before dawn from a nightmare. “It was better when he stopped coming at all.” Adam laughs, a little burst of air, mirthless. “I used to pack my stuff in a paper bag on the day I knew he was coming. Just in case he was going to keep me. When I was nine or ten, I sat on the stoop, paper bag beside me like some kind of loyal dog, and waited. And waited. And at some point, my foster mother—can’t remember which one—made me come in. Never said a word about why he didn’t show. Made me put all my stuff back in the drawer. I think that’s when I realized I didn’t want to go with him anyway. Why should I? I didn’t need him; I could make my own way in the world.”

  “Are you sure that isn’t what you tell yourself now?”

  The tiny buzzer indicating their hour is up goes off and the psychiatrist slaps his knees with his yellow pad. “See you next week.”

  Adam blushes a little, having to ask Stein to cut their sessions down by half an hour. He can’t afford a full hour anymore. Dynamic took his health benefits when they fired him and he can’t afford the COBRA payments now that Sterling has decided that Ariel needs to have intensive SAT tutoring, with a full professor from Lesley College.

  “Against my better judgment, but all right. Thirty minutes twice a week.”

  Adam is too embarrassed to ask if the psychiatrist offers a sliding scale. Who would believe a man in a thousand-dollar suit would qualify for it?

  He’s seen him a half dozen times before. Standing on the corner, empty paper coffee cup out. “I just needa cuppa coffee, mister. Can you spare some change?” He’s dressed in greasy army pants and a faded army jacket with a bold green empty place where a name badge must have been when the jacket first saw service. Regardless of the weather, the panhandler wears a black wool watch cap, pulled low over straggly gray hair leaking out like seaweed. His cheeks are hollowed out, his eyes bleary above pouches of flesh tinged gray. It seems to Adam that any time he’s on the downtown streets, people like this one have their grimy hands outstretched, their jagged teeth hidden, their obsequious begging not compelling, but annoying. This one he sees whenever he comes out of his shrink’s building, stationed like a sentry at the corner in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts. Adam wonders why the authorities don’t just throw him in jail. He’s one of the pushy ones, probably crazy. “My dog’s hungry.” That’s his particular refrain. There’s a big ugly mutt with him. In the summer, the dog sat in the shade of the buildings as if smarter than his owner. When Adam came across the pair in the winter, they huddled on a cement dust-colored quilt, leaning together against the wind that blew through the canyons of the city, the bum’s hand with the ubiquitous Starbucks cup out thrust. The dog, a lantern-jawed pit bull type, sat, but its weepy red eyes followed Adam as he walked by.

  Sure enough, pushing through the revolving door as he leaves his shrink’s building today, Adam sees the panhandler and his dog at his favorite post. But he’s no longer the bum with the dog; by now, Adam knows that the men call him “Jupe,” short for Jupiter. The last thing he wants is to be forced to drop a coin in the man’s outstretched hand just because he drops mashed potatoes on his plate a couple of times a week. They do not know each other. He does not want even the slightest acknowledgment of acquaintance to pass between them. Adam wears his Armani suit, his “I mean business” Cole Haan shoes. His red silk tie beams authority. He is not the man who wears the McDonald’s cap and shovels food out from a steam table. Adam spins around the revolving door one more time, launching himself out in the other direction.

  Chapter Twelve

  By the third day of my release from captivity, I was a hurtin’ puppy. The part of the wound that I couldn’t reach with my tongue was swollen and oozing. I was feverish, off my game, and not even hungry. I was in deep trouble for a creature on the street. My reflexes were shot, my nose runny. That’s why, when the men came, I put up very little fight.

  As docile as a lamb, I went off in the white van, my street adventure over. I cast a longing look at my nest under the back stairs of what turned out to be a tattoo parlor. I suspected that one of the artist
s inside, who’d come outside for a cigarette or a toke, had spotted me through the metal stair treads and dropped a dime. My sort don’t evoke the “Oooh, I found a puppy. Can I keep him?” reaction from people. So the men showed up in their big white van, blocking off one end of the short, narrow alley with it and filling the other end with themselves. It was only prudent to acquiesce.

  Maybe I was just a creature of the cage after all. It was cool and comfortable; the docs fixed up the wound, gently poked me with antibiotic-filled IVs until I felt like a new dog. They clipped my toenails and gave me a lovely bath. They also castrated me, but I wasn’t initially aware of that, as they did it while they were repairing the chest wound, and I was already knocked out. I ate their food and licked their hands. I’m no dope. The friendly dog gets the best deal.

  My kind are notoriously hard to place. Our ferocious reputations and notorious applications preclude us from easy adoptions. No little old lady looking for a companion is likely to choose a pit bull, not even a crossbred like myself. First, we look strong. Second, we look fierce. Third, we ain’t all that attractive. Leave the fluffies to them. Then there are the young men who wander in, looking for a manly dog. Forget it. The authorities weren’t born yesterday. No used fighters for sale here. That leaves the younger couples willing to take on a dog with a bad rep and a PR problem. Not all that many of them out there, and a lot more of us.