The Right Side

by Spencer Quinn

  LeAnne opened the bathroom door. The dog, waiting directly on the other side, brushed past her and lowered her head into the toilet. Then came lapping sounds, although “lapping” was much too gentle to describe what was going on, namely a frantic slurping up of every drop of water in the toilet basin. All done drinking, the dog turned toward LeAnne, water dripping off her chin, and barked another of those low barks.

  “Time to go home?” LeAnne said. “Is that it?”

  She got dressed and opened the front door again, took a step toward the outside. The dog beat her to it, squeezing through first but hardly knocking into her at all, which LeAnne couldn’t have done much about, the squeezing through happening on her blind side.

  “Okay,” LeAnne said. “We’re out. Where’s home? Go home.”

  The dog sat.

  “What do you want? A great big thank you or some shit like that?”

  No reaction.

  “What am I doing?” LeAnne said, continuing silently: Talking to a dog? Like I’m expecting conversation? She raised her voice. “Go! Scat!” LeAnne made backhanded waving gestures. The dog sat.

  LeAnne turned and started up the white crushed-stone path toward the office. The dog was at her side immediately, again to her right, meaning LeAnne had to twist around to see her. LeAnne tried ignoring the dog. She walked through the light rain; it felt good on her face.

  She—more like they, because the dog was still glued to her side—came to the office. LeAnne turned to the dog. “Stay. Or sit. Both. Sit and stay. Just don’t fucking move, all right?”

  The dog remained standing, possibly even standing with a certain rigidity. LeAnne opened the office door, felt the dog instantly squeezing by her and entering first.

  The short round woman—Dot? Dolly?—looked up from behind her desk and smiled a big smile, a genuine kind indicating happy surprise.

  “I didn’t know you had a dog! Hi there, beautiful. What’s her name?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I don’t have a dog,” LeAnne said. “I’ve never had a dog. It’s—she’s a stray, just showed up. No tags, no collar.”

  “Well, well.” The woman opened a drawer and rose. “I may have a little something you’ll like, beautiful.” She took a dog biscuit from the drawer and came closer. “Got some Rottweiler in you, huh? And maybe a pinch of Malinois, plus an X factor or two. Want to sit for Mama Dot?”

  The dog did not sit, by this time no surprise to LeAnne. Dot looked a bit surprised but in no way discouraged. She knew dogs; that was pretty clear. She raised the biscuit and waved it around a bit. “Got your attention now? Sit.”

  The dog did not sit but growled instead and shifted slightly, bumping right up against LeAnne.

  “My goodness,” said Dot, taking a backward step. “We don’t mean that, do we?”

  Hair rose on the back of the dog’s neck and she growled again.

  Dot turned to LeAnne and frowned, her grandmotherly face changing into something closer to judgmental aunt. “What’s bothering her?”

  “I have no idea,” LeAnne said. “I don’t know anything about dogs—but you seem to.”

  Dot’s frown lines deepened, and for the first time her gaze went to the bad side of LeAnne’s face. “It just so happens I’ve had dogs all my life. In fact, I’m still grieving poor Dottalita.” She nodded toward a framed photo of a dog hanging on the wall, about the size of Lew, but fluffy.

  “Uh, sorry,” LeAnne said. “When did she . . .”

  “Cross the rainbow bridge? Six years ago come June. The second.”

  LeAnne wondered if dog lovers shared some special form of insanity. Meanwhile, this nameless dog seemed to be pressing harder against her. LeAnne pressed back, trying to push the dog away. That didn’t work. And for the first time in their relationship—slated to end very soon—the dog was wagging her tail.

  “You don’t recognize her, do you?” LeAnne said.

  “Never laid eyes on her.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “About what?” Dot said.

  “This dog. Should we just let her go? Maybe she’ll head for home, wherever home is.”

  “Maybe. But suppose someone drove out from Seattle and just dumped her from a car? Happens all the time.”

  “How about calling the police?”

  “They’d just take her to the shelter.”

  “Where is it?”

  Dot pointed up the road, toward Canada. “Two miles, thataway.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Your call, I guess,” said Dot. “But you might want to factor in that it’s not a no-kill shelter.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning if someone doesn’t take her after a set amount of time, it’s curtains.”

  “How long a set period of time?”

  “Seven days, as I recall.”

  “Christ,” said LeAnne. She didn’t want to think about this problem, or this dog. If anything, she wanted to think about . . . well, herself, supposing she had to think at all. She glanced at the goddamn dog, which, if human, would probably be of the opinion that she was owed big time for last night’s lifesaving performance, when in fact she’d fucked up everything. The truth was it hadn’t been so easy for LeAnne to do what she’d done, and she wasn’t sure she could do it again, probably not anytime soon.

  “Maybe she’ll get lucky,” LeAnne said.

  “At the shelter?” said Dot.

  “Yeah.”

  “This dog?” Dot shook her head. “Cute puppies are what get lucky at the shelter. What you have here is not a cute puppy.”

  “I don’t have anything here. She’s not mine. Why don’t you take her?”

  “Me?” said Dot.

  “You’ve had dogs all your life—you said so yourself.”

  “But I told you—I’m still grieving.”

  “I don’t get the connection.”

  “Because you’re clearly not a dog person.”

  “I admitted that,” LeAnne said.

  Perhaps she’d raised her voice. In any case, Dot took another step back. With our voices alone we could drive Dot right through the wall, this fucking dog and I.

  “Any dog person,” Dot said, “knows that it’s a huge mistake to welcome in a new one before the end of the grieving process.”

  “And when would that be?” LeAnne said. “Six years seems like a long time.”

  “Come June. The second. And since when, no offense, do you get the right to set the limit on who feels what?” Maybe Dot saw some changed expression on LeAnne’s face at that moment. She added, “I don’t mean you, personally. I mean anyone.”

  So no one had a right to set limits on another’s feelings? That was all too complicated for LeAnne this particular morning, or maybe at any time in her life, even before her head got messed up, inside and out. All she knew was that she didn’t really want to fight with this woman, was not in the mood for fighting at all. Although that could change.

  “All right, no reason you have to step up,” LeAnne said. “I’ll take her to the shelter, check it out.”

  “Your call.”

  “You said that already. And I specifically said check it out, no more than that.”

  Dot gave her a long look. Her expression changed back from judgmental aunt to grandmotherly. “Thank you for your service.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your military service.”

  “I get it,” LeAnne said. “But why now?”

  “I’m just glad we have tough people like you defending our country, that’s all.”

  LeAnne felt her face going red; she turned away to hide any show like that. “Come on,” she told the dog in a voice that sounded harsh and impatient and mean, even in her own ears. And why the fuck not? Why shouldn’t she be harsh and impatient and mean? It didn’t seem to bother the dog, who followed at once, managing with a half-bound to once again beat LeAnne through the doorway, immediately maneuvering around to her blind side.

  “Wh
at the hell is wrong with you?”

  The dog pressed up against her as they headed back down the path, way too hard to be anything but aggressive.

  “Don’t you even know where the fuck you’re going? To the slaughter.” LeAnne suddenly remembered the long-ago AP English class with Ms. Spears: Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea. She felt sick to her stomach and might have vomited there and then, but she had nothing left to vomit.

  LeAnne opened the rear door of the Honda and was about to say, “Get in,” but before she could the dog leaped past her onto the backseat, where she scrambled immediately into a sitting position, facing front and alert.

  “Expecting something? Or you just like cars? Or what?”

  LeAnne drove out of Shady Grove and turned right on the main highway. She’d driven maybe a couple of hundred feet when with no warning the dog bolted over from the back and into the shotgun seat, again quickly sitting up straight, eyes on the road. The sudden movement startled LeAnne, and she came close to taking a good shot with her elbow or even her fist. But something stopped her.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said, which was stupid and unnecessary, this being their last drive.

  Five minutes later they came to the shelter. Can-Am Animal Care and Control read the sign on the front of the building, a peeling-painted structure about the size of a two-car garage, with a flat roof extending over one side to cover an adjoining caged area. LeAnne got out of the car. Two dogs lay on their sides in the cage, not close together. Their eyes were on her, but they didn’t bark or get up.

  LeAnne opened the passenger door. “Let’s go.”

  The dog remained motionless, sitting tall, eyes straight ahead.

  “Ride’s over. We’re done.”

  No response. LeAnne tapped the roof of the car.

  “Move it.”

  The dog did not move. Meanwhile, the door to Can-Am Animal Care and Control opened with a high-pitched squeak of hinges that aroused the background ache in LeAnne’s head, not gone after all. The noisemaker was a bearded man in stained overalls, lighting a cigarette. He tossed away the match and noticed her.

  “Help you?” he said.

  LeAnne was not in the mood for bearded men. “I’ve got a stray.”

  The man took a deep drag on his cigarette, let the smoke curl slowly from his nostrils. He checked out the dog through LeAnne’s windshield. “Bring it in.”

  “It’s a she,” LeAnne said. And then to the dog. “Out. Now.” She used her command voice, the one that scared the shit out of new recruits. The dog did not react at all.

  “The balky type, huh?” said the man, coming closer. His beard was the untrimmed kind, nicotine-stained in places.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” LeAnne said. “I don’t know anything about this dog—or any dog.” The man was giving her a squint-eyed look, like he doubted her word, so LeAnne added, “She just turned up last night—no collar, no tags.”

  The man said: “What the hell happened to you?”

  “What did you say?”

  The man motioned with his bearded chin. “Like, your face. You in a car wreck or something?”

  This man, that remark, the beard—all of it together started to uncap something in LeAnne that could only act in ways that were once and for all. She wheeled on the man—her height, broader, but also paunchy and out of shape—and focused on his neck, totally unprotected, with a prominent Adam’s apple ripe for crushing, stiffened her hands, and—

  And that was when the dog rose and sort of ambled out of the car, moving around LeAnne and standing on her blind side, facing the man. For some reason, this development knocked LeAnne off the track she was barreling down, and she got that inner cap back in place.

  “What happened to me is none of your goddamn business,” she said.

  LeAnne knew a lot of tough men, so many that maybe she’d forgotten they weren’t all like that. In fact, most were probably like this guy, who now looked alarmed, raised both hands in surrender position, cigarette ash falling on his pouter pigeon chest, and said, “Whoa! Sorry—no offense.”

  LeAnne laughed in his face. The sound of her laughter—or possibly something else, or simply nothing—made the dog start growling. LeAnne turned on her. “Shut up.”

  The dog went silent at once.

  The man, who’d retreated a step or two, said, “Look, lady, I gotta be honest with you. Nobody’s gonna take a dog like yours.”

  “She’s not mine. How many times do—”

  “A dog like this one, excuse me. We can keep her here for five days, but—”

  “Five? I heard seven.”

  “All right, seven, for all the difference it’ll make.”

  “Aren’t there farms around here, ranches?” LeAnne said. “She could guard, herd sheep, that kind of thing.”

  The man shook his head. “Takes a trained animal to do that. This ain’t a trained animal, never will be. We’re not lookin’ at a puppy here. What’s more, I’d say she got herself a little twisted inside, probably from coming up rough.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He made that chin-pointing motion again, this time at the dog. “Check out the tail.”

  LeAnne looked at the dog’s tail. Thick but not long, as she’d noticed already, although too long to be called stubby. At the moment the dog had it raised high, the first time LeAnne had seen it that way. “What about it?” she said.

  “Tail like that’s not natural.”

  “You mean it’s been cropped?”

  “Some folks do crop the tail, but on account of what you might call esthetic preference. This ain’t that.”

  “I don’t get it.” And don’t fucking point with your chin one more goddamn time.

  But he did. “A cropped tail is way shorter. This is more like somebody got pissed off and swung an ax. See how ragged the end is? Cropping’s more surgical.” He shot a very quick glance at LeAnne’s face, looked away.

  “Someone cut off her tail with an ax?”

  “Or an act of that nature. It happens, and not only out here in the country, neither.”

  By now the dog had stopped growling and just stood there. She might have been in a trance. “What about we just let her go?” LeAnne said.

  “How would that work, exactly?”

  LeAnne shrugged. “I drive off. You go back inside.”

  “No can do,” the man said. “Speakin’ just for me. I get paid to do a job, do it right. You do what you have to do.”

  “She stays here,” LeAnne said.

  “Gotcha,” said the man. He ground the cigarette under his boot heel, rubbed his hands together. “First things first, let’s see if she’s got a chip in her—chances about one in a thousand, I’d say.” He took a device the size of a TV remote from an overalls pocket and approached the dog. The dog went stiff, muscles bunching in her back, and bared her teeth; the incisors seemed shockingly long to LeAnne.

  “Probably reacting to scanning sounds we can’t hear,” the man said, taking another step. “Not gonna hurt you, big girl.”

  The dog snarled.

  “Maybe she’ll let you do it,” the man said.

  “Why?”

  “Can’t hurt to try.”

  “Can’t hurt you.”

  “Heh heh.” The man handed her the scanner. “Run it over her back.”

  LeAnne moved in with the scanner. The dog stopped snarling, stopped showing her teeth. LeAnne ran it back and forth.

  “No dice, like I thought,” the man said. “Let’s go inside, get her in the cage, take care of the paperwork. She’ll follow you.”

  LeAnne and the man headed toward the shelter door. The dog did not follow.

  “Hey,” LeAnne called to her. “Come on.”

  The dog sat.

  “Wait here,” the man said. He went inside, came out with a long metal pole that had a knob at one end and a cable loop at the other. A strange-looking thing until LeAnne realized that “no
ose” was more accurate than “loop.” The man approached the dog indirectly, like he was headed someplace else, and then with surprising speed spun around and thrust the pole forward, sliding the noose around the dog’s neck. The dog jerked back right away, but the man did something with the knob on his end of the pole and the noose tightened.

  The dog hated that—the first clear emotion LeAnne had seen in those shiny-coal eyes. She twisted around, tried to run, tried to attack the man, tried to pull herself free—and almost did, actually dragging him partway across the parking lot. He stumbled, lost his balance, fell to one knee but did not lose the pole. From down on the ground he yanked on it with what looked like all his strength, a vicious expression now on his hairy face, an expression that had nothing to do with a professional on the job. The dog let out a sound LeAnne had never heard before, a sort of howl with the power of a roar. The man twisted the pole hard to one side and the cable sank into the dog’s neck, choking the sound down to one miserable last yelp.

  The next thing LeAnne knew she had the man by the shoulders. She shook him so hard his head snapped back, and screamed, “Stop!” over and over at the top of her lungs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Is this your dog? was in big letters at the top of the flyer Dot printed up. Then came a photo of the dog, and under that Dot had written, Large black female mix, no tags. Found in Bellville, east side. Call—and following a bit of a dispute, Dot had added her own number.

  “Why not yours?” she’d said.

  “Don’t have a phone,” LeAnne had told her.