One Good Dog

by Susan Wilson

  “We ain’t allowed to say, but if I was to make a guess, I’d say that he’s one of those brilliant guys whose mind kinda lets loose on ’im. Used to be some kinda professor at MIT or one of them colleges. Rocket science. That’s why they call him ‘Jupiter.’”

  “I figured him for a vet.”

  “Nah. Got those clothes outta the Army Navy Store. Lotsa guys wear ’em so they don’t get hassled. No, he’s a professor. You get him talkin’ about the stars and you get an earful.”

  “You think he’s out there?”

  “I hope not. Freezin’ to death ain’t pretty.”

  “You think he’s not coming in because of his dog?”

  “Could be.”

  “Why would anyone sacrifice warmth and food for a dog?”

  “Like them Katrina people refusin’ to get rescued ’cause they wouldn’t let ’em take their pets. That’s devotion, man.”

  “That’s madness.”

  “Maybe.” Ishmael ladles out the last of today’s soup and nods to Adam to remove the pot.

  “I hope he gets in.”

  “Me, too.”

  Outside, the wind has picked up speed, making a steady high-pitched whistle against the corner of the building. Zephyrs spin down the deserted street. The lights blink, fade, regain strength, and Adam wonders about Gina and her tropical fish.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The snowstorm had lapsed into stillness by the wee hours of the next day. At full light, I awakened from a running dream and found men standing in front of our culvert. I don’t know why none of us heard or scented them. However, the snow packed all around the entrance to our makeshift den announced our presence in the space beneath the road loud and clear to them; they didn’t need noses or ears to find us. Those happy Labs had come and gone and come back, all the time leaving big sloppy footprints that just screamed, In here! I should have told them to beat it when I had the chance.

  My first instinct, as with the others, was to book it. We turned to the other open end, but these were professionals, and we were trapped, men at both ends, standing in their big boots, poles and lines in their hands, even a dart gun.

  The Labs came out, goofy and relieved to see men in charge. I hoped that maybe having recovered the missing pair, the authorities might cut the rest of us a little slack. Not so.

  The wiry bitch made a run for it, feinting and ducking between long legs up to the knees in snow. The snow was her undoing; she couldn’t run on top of it, and she sank, yapping her disgruntlement. A hand scooped her up and boxed her effortlessly, the yapping muted but not over.

  I looked at my mentor. His boxy head was lowered, his grinning mouth open and his teeth showing. He didn’t growl, but his lips quivered with warning. I suddenly realized that he was making a mistake. My single incarceration had taught me to play nice. He’d been inside before. He was legal; his tag said so. But for him, incarceration now, with his person missing, was unthinkable. His bold attachment to one man, a man more like us than like his own species, had prejudiced my mentor.

  How will I find him? He won’t know where I am. My mentor let out a thin whine, a plaintive, weak sound. Aware suddenly of his unseemly show of weakness, my mentor looped the whine into a full-bore growl. Hackles up, teeth bared. Take no prisoners.

  They took us instead.

  It was okay for me. It was the same shelter where I’d been for my rehab. The food was good, the inside warm and dry. Not exactly a spa, but not a bad place to spend a couple of days out of the weather. I didn’t plan to stay long.

  I tried to tell my mentor this, but he didn’t get it. He was panicked, and nothing I said seemed to make him any more at ease. He just kept growling.

  It was his undoing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adam pushes past some of the men squatting in the narrow first-floor hallway of the center; they’re full, warm, and reluctant to leave, even though the storm is long over. The snowplows have leveled the ruts in the street, and the sunlight is blinding as it reflects off the pristine drifts. Mike is shoveling the sidewalk in front of the center.

  Most of the men had bunked in the dormitory-style bedrooms upstairs; some did not, sleeping crouched against the walls instead, always on the half alert, as if not in the sanctuary of the Fort Street Center, but still out in the mean streets of the city. Adam has been at the center all night, partly because there was no way he was going to fight his way back over that same treacherous six blocks in the bitter, if now snowless, wind, and no way he could get a cab to come fetch him. Even though Rafe and Ishmael happily bedded down in the small office space designated STAFF Adam could not bring himself to flop puppylike among his coworkers on sleeping bags of debatable cleanliness. Big Bob, too, stayed up all night, he and Adam dozing in the chairs in Big Bob’s office, their catnaps punctuated by Bob’s hourly phone calls to police and other shelters in search of Jupiter.

  It’s been nearly twenty-four hours since Adam arrived at the center, windblown and frozen. By nine o’clock, he’s served morning coffee and doughnuts, courtesy of the local doughnut shop, and he hopes that Big Bob will give him the nod to make his way home now that the streets are plowed and the sidewalks are slowly being shoveled. He’s a god-dammed volunteer; he is required to put in only twenty hours a week, and he’s put in twenty in one day.

  “Do me a favor?” Big Bob covers the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “Sure.” Adam feels a sinking in his belly. A favor. Two words that, no matter what his position in life, have always had the power to make his mind race with quick reasons to decline. “Shoot.”

  “Go down to Memorial and see if Jupiter’s there.” Big Bob’s thinning yellow hair sticks straight up, his meaty hands dragging it back and forth like greasy wheat sheaves in a breeze. His pale blue eyes are bloodshot.

  “I’d really like to head home.” The last thing Adam wants is to go to the local hospital and look for an indigent who’s probably frozen to death in an alley due to bad judgment.

  “It’s on your way.” Big Bob’s voice isn’t unlike his own voice in a previous life—assertive, attention-getting, and brooking no argument.

  “How will I know he’s there? They aren’t going to let me wander the halls. There are rules.”

  “You talk to Pam Stone; she’s the head nurse on six. That’s where he’ll be if he ended up there. She’ll help.”

  “Can’t you just call her and ask her if he’s there?”

  Big Bob pushes up out of his chair, resting the flat of his hands on his desk. Adam thinks of the Incredible Hulk. “She can’t say. HIPAA.”

  “So I waltz in, asking for a crazy guy in a watch cap who’s possibly raving about voices from outer space, and they point me in the right direction?”

  “March, we don’t use that word here. And he might be unconscious, unable to be identified. A John Doe.”

  “Or dead.”

  Big Bob sits heavily in his much-abused chair, reverting back to pre-Hulk condition. “Or dead. Check the morgue.”

  After the garish cheerfulness of the lobby, the sixth-floor medical ward is an abrupt plunge back into the fifties. Lodged in the oldest wing of the city hospital, it is also the only floor untouched by renovation. It smells precisely like a hospital—a hospital caring for indigents and the poor. It’s an odor similar to that of the center: Lysol and unwashed clothing stuffed in plastic bags. The overhead lighting casts a greenish glow on the cracked linoleum. A handrail is mounted at hip level on a beige wall, with not so much as a single fake watercolor to break up the monotony. A lone wheelchair is the only traffic in the hallway, and Adam slips by its occupant without looking at him.

  “I’m looking for Nurse Stone.” Adam finds the only upright person on the floor to ask, a young volunteer with a resolutely cheerful smile on her stricken face, her braces glinting in the greenish light.

  “She’s in with a patient.”

  “I’ll wait.” There are no chairs nearby, so Adam rests an elbow on the counter of the n
urses’ station, his cheek against his fist. The slight hum coming from the overhead fixtures seems to have a Doppler effect as he feels himself drifting off. Loud and soft, loud and soft. Drifting on the open ocean of exhaustion, Adam struggles to keep his eyes open.

  “Can I help you?”

  Startled awake, Adam is embarrassed to feel a slight moistness at the corner of his mouth. A tall middle-aged woman stands in front of him, her hot-pink scrubs a flash of color in the beige hallway. “I’m looking for a man. One of our …” Adam hesitates. What’s the word Big Bob uses to refer to their people? “One of our guests at the Fort Street Center. He didn’t show up during the storm. He’s got some mental problems, and Bob Carmondy thought he might be here.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Damn Big Bob. He never said what the guy’s real name was.

  “I’m not sure. They call him Jupiter.”

  Pamela Stone tightens her crossed arms across her hot-pink midsection. Adam looks down, unable to meet her disapproving glare. She wears soft rubber Crocs on her feet, also hot-pink. “You know that I can’t tell you who is a patient here?”

  “Yes, of course I do. But Bob suggested that you still might be able to help. We just want to know that he’s okay.”

  “If you were to wander down the hall and notice that a friend is here, there’s nothing I can do about that. And you happened to be next of kin …”

  “But I’m—”

  Pam Stone holds up a staying finger, nearly touching Adam’s lips with it. “I never heard you say that you weren’t. I have to assume that you are.”

  Adam leans close to her ear. “I don’t even know the guy’s real name.” Then he’s embarrassed, thinking of his unbrushed teeth, his own unwashed state.

  “Abernathy. Charles Abernathy.” Pam Stone walks away from Adam in a rush of furious pink.

  Okay, job done. He’s here. I can go home. Adam pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, thinking he’ll call Big Bob, and then a taxi.

  “No cell phone use here? Interferes with the machines?” The teenage candy striper with the big braces waggles a finger at him, then frowns. “I hate that rule.”

  Shoving the phone back into his jacket, Adam heads down the hallway toward the elevator bank; a big window at the end of the corridor filters the winter light through a wire-mesh guard, the bright spoke of light making Adam squint. He goes past four wheelchair-wide doorways, each of which opens into occupied patient rooms. The light in his eyes causes him to look away and into the rooms, but the arrangement of beds prevents him from seeing their occupants. The fourth door opens into a larger room, arranged with three beds. Propped at a thirty-five-degree angle in the hospital bed closest to the window, and therefore more visible to the hallway, is the thin form of Jupiter. At least Adam thinks it’s Jupiter. This guy is clean-shaven and his hat is gone. The hair against the pillow is yellowish and streaked with gray; it’s long, but combed back, as if someone had groomed him. A rush of panic leavens Adam’s belly and he can’t decide whether to make a run for it or go in to pay a call on a man he doesn’t know except from across the steam-table divide.

  Jupiter—Charles Abernathy—spots him.

  There is an exquisite moment when Adam might be able to keep moving, to pretend that he hasn’t seen the man. He can keep going, squinting into the sun at the end of the hall, blinded. He can call Big Bob and go home. Favor fulfilled.

  But Jupiter smiles—a reflexive grin on seeing a familiar face. Even from the distance of a room’s width, he knows Adam, and, as if panhandling in the street, he calls to him, “Hey, buddy!” Fuck.

  Suddenly, his parka weighs a ton. Adam unzips it and shrugs it off, then walks into the room, where he stands at the foot of the bed. “How are you doing?” He smiles like a Welcome Wagon lady, all teeth, no substance.

  “A little embarrassed. Sometimes I think I can go without my medications, but each and every time I’m proven wrong. They’re going to send me back to the mental hospital to get adjusted.” Jupiter fingers air quotes around the word adjusted. “But I need to ask you a big favor.” It’s almost as if Jupiter has been expecting him.

  Two favors in one day. Adam grits his teeth and smiles. “I’ll see if I can help.”

  “My dog.” Jupiter’s pale blue eyes begin to leak tears. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  “No, I need to know he’s fine. I need to know where he is. He’s probably in the pound.”

  “You’ve got tags on him; they’ll keep him.”

  “They’re old. And they came off another dog. I just have them so that I don’t get hassled.”

  “Well, even so, don’t worry about him. You need to worry only about yourself.”

  Jupiter begins to cry in earnest. “I can’t stop worrying, and if I worry, I can’t pay attention to my doctors.” Suddenly, Jupiter throws himself into a sitting position. “I’m getting out of here. Hand me my pants.”

  “No. No. Stay put.” Shit, now he’s going to be responsible for the guy going AWOL, or AMA, or whatever it is when you leave a hospital before you’re discharged.

  “I can’t. Benny is my life.” Jupiter is weeping loudly, inconsolable. He swings skinny legs over the edge of the bed. The leads that snake beneath the thin fabric of his johnny pull tight against the monitor that records his vitals. A buzzer goes off down the hall.

  “Okay, okay. Simmer down. I’ll go. I’ll go.” Adam wants him back in the bed. The sight of those skinny legs with the topography of lumpy veins and knobby knees is too much intimacy. It’s easier to say he’ll go than to fight with the guy and get that pink nurse down on him. “Hush, just relax. I’ll go to the pound.”

  “You will? Promise?” The tears stop and a snaggletoothed smile erupts.

  “You get back in bed and I’ll check.”

  Jupe does what’s asked and Adam makes a run for the elevator.

  “Just hang on to him till I get out. It won’t be long. I promise. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  The elevator door closes off the sound of Jupiter’s happy, grateful shouting.

  Chapter Twenty

  I’m telling you. Shut up. What was that song? When the student becomes the master? I’d had it with my mentor. How had I ever thought this whining, yapping, cowering, fear-aggressive punk was worthy of my adulation, God knows. I kept telling him to play it straight. Not to snap every time one of the people came along to feed him. How dumb animal is that? But he kept it up. His separation from his man was more than he could take. Frankly, I just didn’t get it. I know that many of our kind pair-bond with humans, but the slavish devotion beyond the unknown days of their separation seemed a bit much. We’re dogs; we aren’t supposed to remember much beyond regimented training. Move on.

  I, on the other paw, played it like Olivier on the boards. I loooove people. Smooochie smoochie. Yes, kiss my ugly chewed-up nose. Give me a home where the kibble pours free and squeaky toys abound. I fully expected that a reprise of my past performance would win me another easily escapable home. Of course, I’d wait until spring. No more winters on the street. What I hadn’t counted on was the lack of interested adopters in February. Seems like everyone wants a spring puppy or isn’t considering the daily walk while the temperature is in the thirties and the wind chill makes it feel like an arctic blast. People really only want dogs in the summer. I languished.

  The staff were kind, and my prestreet life had enured me to a caged existence, but I was bored. By now I was used to coming and going as I pleased, tooling around my staked-out territory, greeting the neighbors, checking out the Dumpsters. Outside of the daily leash walk up and down the block and being fed twice a day, I didn’t have much to keep me occupied. I slept. Which is good fun, but really I wanted to see some old friends, and once my mentor vanished into the door at the end of the hall, from whence no one returns, I had no one around who knew me from my street days.

  It was enough to make a grown dog yawn.

  Chap
ter Twenty-one

  If Adam thought the hospital reeked, the animal shelter trumps that revulsion with the additional pungency of animal pee. Even in the sparkling clean and bright reception room of the city’s animal shelter—the term pound, he has learned, is politically incorrect—Adam can smell the lingering odor of overexcited parolees.

  “I’m here to find a guy’s dog. He’s in the hospital.” Adam has waited three days before beginning to hunt for Jupiter’s dog. Leaving the hospital, Adam had headed straight home and slept the rest of the day. Waking only long enough to eat a bowl of cereal, he’d gone right back to sleep, the first night in months he neither medicated himself with scotch nor dreamed. When the cab pulled up in front of his building, Adam had paid the man off and trotted across the street to the A to Z Tropical Fish and Pet Supply. The door was locked, but he could see the bluish green glow of the aquarium lights. Gina must have weathered the storm and gone home, he thought.

  The next two days, Adam had been too busy with appointments, lawyers, psychiatrist, and laundry even to look up the location of the city animal shelter.

  “When did he lose his dog?” Yet another in-charge woman in pastel scrubs.

  “I don’t know, during the storm maybe.” He tells this to the youngish woman with yanked-back hair, purple scrubs, and matching Crocs. Does everyone in the quasi-medical profession wear these weird shoes? How can anyone tell the nurses from the aides or the vets from the receptionists these days?

  “What kind of dog is it?”

  Adam thinks back on encountering Jupe and the dog on the street, or Jupe and the dog waiting on the stoop. “Shorthaired, dark-colored.” Adam has paid so little attention to Jupe’s dog that it’s like trying to remember a detail from someone else’s life. “I think he has white on him. About yea high.” Adam sketches a line at his knees. “Its name is Benny.”

  “Terrier?”