Search Party

by Valerie Trueblood

  Downward Dog

  DOOLEY had to keep the session with Vo and Jackson short because it was midmorning and he had to get back out in the halls before classes changed. He was in a new life. He was off the force; he was doing security. Working with the young, as his social worker put it. He was the owner of a new dog, a big dog, when for his wife’s sake he had always had little dogs.

  At the pound they had said the dog was as friendly as any animal they had on board, but this was the last extension of his stay and on the weekend he would be put down. Because frankly people didn’t want a dog that big unless it was a purebred. Keeping a heavy paw on his knot of rawhide, the dog had smiled at Dooley.

  When Dooley hauled a kid in by the shirt and sat him down, the dog’s head stayed on his paws and his eyes stayed on Dooley. Always. These two faced the desk, with the dog at their feet on a blue mat that had been Dooley’s wife’s yoga mat. “Dog bother you?” he said, because maybe half the kids were scared of a dog.

  “What’s his name?” It was the Vietnamese kid, Vo, who asked, which surprised him since Jackson was the one in real trouble, the one he was aiming at.

  “Bruno,” he said. “Great Pyrenees plus Malamute.” In the tiny room the words had the sweep of a map, but it would be lost on these two, Vo and Jackson. The dog took up so much room in the office both boys had to sit sideways. Before Dooley came on board there had been no office. This was a supply closet with a stenciled sign on the door, SECURITY OFFICER. The sign was the principal’s doing. She had given him the go-ahead for the dog. “It’s your deal,” she said. “It’s Dooley’s deal,” she told the office staff.

  She knew he had beaten up a guy in an arrest. She had the report on her desk; the school district did a background check, even on a cop. He had been exonerated but they had made him do anger management and see a social worker at his own expense and he had quit. Quit the force. He was in a new life.

  On the desk he had a jar of pepperoni sticks. Sometimes he offered one, but the kids didn’t take them so he ate them himself. “They’re worried about their breath,” the principal told him. He tipped the chair back so far laughing he cracked his head on the wall. On an empty shelf he had placed his wife’s Mr. Coffee. A few of them drank coffee if it had sugar and creamer, though there were drawbacks: a kid had thrown a full cup at the wall. Kid who liked the dog. Hot coffee had splashed on the dog and the dog had done nothing more than shake his ears and thump his tail. So Dooley had fought down the urge to put a real scare into the kid. He had made him swab down the wall and eight shelves with the dust of sixty school years on them. While the kid was doing it Dooley talked. He couldn’t believe he was repeating stuff from anger management.

  Both his sons were on the force by the time of his administrative leave and they had stood by him. But he could tell they weren’t sure about him any more, and their wives weren’t, and their mother wasn’t there any more to explain him to them and to himself. All he had was the dog.

  If gangs were involved, he wouldn’t find out from Vo. The Asians kept quiet. Vo was a little guy, but Jackson—tall as he was he should have been playing JV—was the one with the eye swollen shut. He should have been able to fight; he was the one with the scars and the record at fifteen. Both of them were going out—automatic three days for fighting in the halls—but Jackson was heading for juvie or worse even though he was the loser in this and his previous fight on school grounds.

  “Are you surprised? You raised kids.” That was the principal’s response to any comment he might make about what went on. It seemed to him now that his wife must have done most of the raising of their boys. He couldn’t say he liked the kids in the halls and johns and parking lots of this particular school. Maybe he didn’t like kids. “That isn’t what matters,” his social worker said. She was a girl some years younger than his sons. She used the same voice with him, a kind of purr, that the female wardens used to soothe a nut case.

  But if not that, what? What mattered?

  When Dooley said “OK, Bruno,” the dog would lumber up, wave his tail. Until then he just lay there. Vo had faced forward but Jackson still had his long legs pointed at the door and his eyes on the dog. Vo saw that, and let his fingers drop to the top of the dog’s head and give it a casual but showy caress. The dog shifted on the mat, Jackson shrank back in his chair. Vo’s phone went off.

  “OK, Mr. Grant Vo. You put this on your little screen you got there and send it to yourself: ‘Think jail.’ You read that. You come in here again, I’ll be unhappy.” Dooley knew not to make a real threat. The bulk of him was the threat, the uniform, even one he paid for and ironed himself. “I’ll be unhappy, you’ll be unhappy. Now go see Mrs. G. in her office and then go see how they like you at home.” He waved Vo out.

  “Not you, Mr. Temp Jackson. See your name’s Temple. Momma named you Temple.” He smiled a smile he knew was mean. The dog was smiling a real dog-smile at Jackson.

  Slowly, through stiff lips, Jackson said to the dog, “Don’t you get near me.”

  “He’s friendly,” Dooley said. “Most of the time.” A bit of a scare wouldn’t hurt this kid. “OK, Bruno.” The dog got up.

  “Don’t get near me!”

  Jackson jumped up, reached down the front of his sweats and pulled out a gun. It was so small in his palm that for an instant Dooley thought it was a cell phone. A make Dooley didn’t even recognize, though he recognized the moment. A moment both fast and slow, well known to him in dreams. What he did was what he did in dreams: he waited. He wished his sons were there to see him so composed. He waited to die.

  The boy shot the dog. All this took three seconds. The dog just stood there. Then he sank into the position Dooley’s wife, when she was doing her cancer yoga, had taught Dooley was Downward Dog. Then he rolled over like he was just going to show his belly to be scratched. On the floor he panted with a tongue-out smile.

  Dooley had his own weapon in his hand. At anger management they had a woman up there telling you anger was grief and you had to list everything bad that ever happened to you. Hours of that. Nobody defended anger or said you’d better have some so you could die for your buddies on the force or your dog.

  But the boy Jackson had more going on than Dooley or anybody screaming in the outer office knew about, because what he did in the next second was point the gun at his own head. And that was when Dooley did the job the girl social worker had pretended all along to think was his. Arguments came to his tongue. He talked the kid out of putting a bullet in his own head.

  The dog bled all over the mat but he lived too. He dragged a foreleg but he was a young dog with a trusting nature and he was going to go on for years doing his part of the job.

  The Llamas

  ANN told her friends she was nowhere. What was ahead? She didn’t love her boyfriend. He accused her of not liking him but he thought the love part could survive that. He didn’t like her, either, even though they maintained a truce over their differing views of the world. Ann’s had always been that where the world was not cruel, it was treacherous, even though many advantages surrounded and secured her, including a job several rungs above his in the same company. His view was that the world didn’t matter if you were having a good time.

  When Casey Clare’s brother died, Ann had to attend the funeral because she was Casey’s boss. She felt the obligation even though Casey had been her assistant for only a few months. Todd, her boyfriend, said the obligations she felt were imaginary half the time and they did nothing but add random pressure to her crowded life. Her friends said the same thing. They didn’t press the point that she often shirked these responsibilities after getting herself into a state about them. But she had said she would go to Casey’s brother’s funeral, and she did.

  As an assistant—Ann had known it within a week of hiring her—Casey was not working out. She could spend half a morning being reassured and primed by Ann to get down to jobs that weren’t all that complicated or taxing. Every day, she presented herself anew with
her blunt inquiries into Ann’s affairs, and then a rundown of things seen and done between close of business the day before and the reopening of the office doors.

  Ann had to sit turned away from her computer at an awkward angle, looking up at Casey with an expression of commiseration, gradually picturing how it would be to lean over the in-basket and slap the girl into action. Girl—Casey was thirty-three, two years older than Ann. But her big smiling face and her packed lunch and her blouses a little too tight, as if she had just grown those breasts, made Ann think of an overgrown schoolgirl turned loose in the workplace and fending for herself. Or not entirely for herself: Casey did have a large family, a whole phone book of relatives advising, making demands, dropping in with food, all comically devoted to each other. Not to mention the dozens from her church who prayed at the unconscious brother’s bedside.

  He was in the University Hospital. Every day, Casey urged Ann to visit him, as if the problem Ann had was simply getting up the nerve. Casey said, “Yeah, why not this Sunday? Just stop by, come up to the floor. After you get done with the vigil.” She knew Ann attended the Green Lake peace vigil—not that far from the hospital—any Sunday that she could make it. She had done that since before the beginning of the war in Iraq.

  “Come on,” Todd said. “Let’s get out of town.”

  “The vigil is all I do and I have to do it or I’ll go crazy.”

  “That’s crazy,” he said. He didn’t go out of town without her; he didn’t have the focus to plan a trip and get in the car all by himself and stay with it, and she didn’t say it but that was why he wasn’t getting anywhere in his job.

  The peace vigil: that was no problem for Casey. God wasn’t on either side; how could he be? Almost every day, Casey had a question about God for Ann, and not trying to smoke her out as an atheist, either, but simply assuming that the matter of what God would think or do would interest anybody. “I mean, you wonder,” Casey would say. September 11, war, and the accident that had befallen Randy—an angel to all who knew him, a fireman, minding his own business and raising llamas. “You wonder how these things can happen.” Ann would agree, clicking her nails on the keyboard as she appeared to give thought to the conundrum. Eventually Casey would go sighing back to her desk, where she would pick up the phone and call whoever was sitting with Randy in the ICU. She herself began and ended each day with a visit to the hospital where he had been lying in a coma since before she started working for Ann.

  “I admire that about her,” Ann said to Todd, who was telling her that if she couldn’t face firing Casey she ought to get her transferred out of the office right that minute, before she wormed her way in any further. Ann thought about that and because it raised the question of exactly where, at work, her obligations lay, she said, “I think she’ll get down to work when her brother gets out of the hospital.” But the day after they had that talk, Randy Clare sank deeper and died of his injuries.

  HALF the people who had arrived from the funeral were standing in the rain, mud oozing into their shoes. They were smoking, drinking wine from plastic cups, and watching two llamas.

  They had trooped out of the house where the wake was going on—or not wake, reception, or whatever the church the Clares belonged to called such a gathering—off the sagging porch and down the path, really a pair of ruts, to see Randy’s much-loved pets. Two wet animals as tall as camels stood by the fence. One of them, head high, had apparently walked as far forward on its front legs as the back legs, stationary in the mud, would allow. The other stood with its four feet—pads with toenails were not hooves, were they?—close together. That one was almost tipping over, like a tied bouquet. Then the stretched-out one raised a delicate bony leg and then another, and stepped a few paces away from its mate—if it was a mate—and the mate sprang loose and planted its feet on a wider base in the mud.

  Ann said, “Does it seem to you like they’re posing?” All the while a soaking rain fell on their thick, wormy-looking coats and on the long faces both supercilious and gentle. One of the women said, “Those poor things aren’t rainproof like sheep, did you know that?” and people answered her, as they had not answered Ann. Some of them knew that piece of information and some didn’t.

  The eyes of the llamas were glazed and gentle. But the heads were poised atop those haughty necks. A face came vaguely to mind, someone looking around with a sad hauteur. Who? An actor. Somebody gay.

  The woman, an older woman with a smoker’s voice, knew something about llamas, though no one, she said, could hold a candle to Randy Clare on the subject. Randy had explained to her, as he would to anyone with an interest, the spitting behavior of llamas. Llamas spat when they were annoyed and what they spat was chewed grass, a kind of grass slop brought up from the gut and carrying the smell of that region.

  “See the pile of dung over there? That’s their bathroom. They all use it. They don’t just go any old place.”

  A wet dog trotted up and crouched, head down, licking its lips and yawning with eagerness as it peered under the fence. Ann thought it might suddenly slip under and give chase, but it did not.

  Even so, the two heads of the llamas swung around and the big dark wet eyes rested on the dog and then moved back to the group at the fence. Certainly there was some emotion there, in those eyes. Did the llamas know they were bereaved?

  “All right,” Casey said. “You’ve seen ’em. Bootsy and Baby. His darlings, except for Baby isn’t so darling. Let’s get back inside and get dry and get drunk.”

  They waded back to the house. Nobody said anything about caked shoes and muddy pant legs, though the women fussed with their dripping, flat hair. They piled their wet raincoats onto a top-loading freezer in a room off the kitchen just big enough to hold it and leave space to pass through the back door. “Deer meat?” Ann asked Casey, indicating the freezer, proud of herself for recalling that Casey and her brothers hunted deer. “No way, not now,” Casey said, closing herself into a tiny bathroom off the kitchen. “Donna’s catering stuff,” she yelled from inside. One of the sisters had her own business; she had done the rolled meats and the trays of vegetables and dips in the dining room, and the laurel leaves on the tablecloth, which were actually sober and pretty, Ann thought, with white candles at either end.

  Around Casey’s desk, and at the copier too, the sagas of her sister Donna’s business could be heard any day: the crushed cake boxes, the tiny refrigerators some people made her manage with, the cucumbers leaching dye from beets.

  At the table sat the not-very-old mother, wearing big tinted glasses. Three of her grown children had lived in this small house with her. Two now. Why didn’t they leave home? “You’re all together, that says so much about your family,” Ann said to Casey through the bathroom wall, hearing the sugary tone in her own voice.

  “There were seven of us.” Casey came out waving her hands behind her and saying, “Don’t go in there just yet.” Her eyes were extraordinarily red; they looked the way Ann’s had long ago, in college, on weekends when she smoked too much weed. It occurred to her that this might be what Casey had been doing in the bathroom. “Rocky and I are the last ones, and who knows when we’ll get kicked out.”

  “Watch yourself,” the mother called out from her chair in the dining room, pointing with the cigarette, taking a deep draw, and coughing with her mouth closed.

  Casey grabbed a framed photograph from among the cakes and pies on the shelf of the cut-away window to the kitchen, and held it out to Ann. “This is him. Randy.” The picture was of a very young man with a florid, heavy, smiling face. He had the fireman’s neat mustache.

  Half the city fire department was in the house. They had all driven to and from the cemetery in a caravan with little flags flying from their windows, though Randy had not died in the line of duty but in a freak crash on a secondary road in the eastern part of the state, where he had gone in his truck to pick up a variety of hay the llamas liked to eat.

  The firemen all seemed to belong to the same church t
he Clares did or to be familiar with its terms. “Prayer partner.” Ann heard that one twice as she moved from one spot to another with her wine. She was on her third full cup. “Randy Clare. Casey Clare,” Todd had said. “Shouldn’t they be Catholics?”

  The rambling service, with its speakers standing up for the mike to be passed their way and its sudden calls to prayer, had had an air of unfinality to it, like a wedding where the vows had been written by the bride and groom when they had had a few too many. In the huge, carpeted sanctuary, light poured through skylights onto a botanical garden. The music for the funeral was piped in, but sound equipment hung from the ceiling, along with banners and American flags, and the plants rose in tiers to a bandstand with keyboards and a drum set.

  Years ago, Casey told her, the founder of the church had gone around the state preaching against war. That was in the eighties, when there was no war going on. He was a young man and he was preaching against nuclear war. Being attacked on our own soil had washed all that stuff out the window. This afternoon in the hot, crowded house Anne had heard several restatements of this position, from people steaming, as she was, in their damp clothes. The firemen seemed to scent her politics—whatever her politics actually were.

  She poured herself more wine. There was ample wine. The massed bottles were positively Irish. Ann’s own heritage was Irish. That was why she had to be careful, as Todd would have reminded her if he had been there.

  As far as she could tell, there was no one in the crowd with whom to be ironic. She had to answer, “I’m sorry,” when a broad-chested man blocked her way and said, “Casey tells me that’s your car with the NO WAR sign. Well, I sure wish there was no war, too. And not only that, ma’am, you’re gonna need a winch to get you out, where you parked.” She had felt the car settle into mud. There had seemed nowhere else, by the time she got there. She gave a shamed, appeasing laugh. Fortunately Casey appeared and said, “Sam, you leave her alone. That’s my boss.”