by Alix Ohlin
Gayle stood up, dizzy, heart going madly, dripping in her clothes. She pulled her skirt down over her thighs. Behind Erica and Max, Hank stood by the glass doors with another drink in his hand, watching.
“Are you okay? Are you okay?” Erica was saying to her son, and Gayle couldn't hear what, if anything, he was answering. Erica looked at her over his head. “What the hell were you thinking? I can't leave you alone with him for five minutes? Were you trying to kill him? What the hell is your problem?” She burst into tears and hugged Max again, her two-colored hair mingling and dampening with his wet blond strands.
Gayle rubbed her arms. Her legs were shaking. There were streaks on her biceps where the kid's fingernails had broken her skin. “I was trying to help,” she said, and looked at Hank, but he said nothing.
“I don't know why you even had to come,” Erica said, sobs thickening her voice. “What do you even want?”
If this were a sales deal, Gayle thought, she would have the perfect answer to that question; she would be able to calm Erica down; she would know exactly what to say to close. But it wasn't, and she didn't. She stood there wet and shivering and silent. The kid was turned away from her, his body hidden by the towel that fell to his feet. She only knew that, though she had been misunderstood, she was bound to come back. It was just the way things were, and it was never going to leave her, this craving she had for blood.
In Trouble with the Dutchman
I'm more of a cat person, really—I prefer a warm purr on the lap to the bouncing, slap-happy kisses of dogs. But when my husband, Phil, brought Blister home from the park, I have to admit that I fell in love with him just as deeply, as swooningly and childishly, as he did. Phil'd been out jogging, which he did every weekend (although I knew, from having accidentally driven past him once, that he jogged five blocks to the park, walked to a bench, and sat down for a while before jogging back), when Blister came up, prancing, and licked his ankle. Blister was a small dog, knee-high, with short black hair that shone like an oil slick in the Saturday afternoon sun. He was wearing a red collar with a round tag that bore his name. After petting him a little, Phil looked around for the owner, who was nowhere to be found, and after a further while he brought him home to me, when the previously mentioned falling in love happened and there was a lot of petting and fetching and wagging and speculating about his name, which seemed to suit him perfectly in some strange way, and there was also, I'll be honest, some baby-talking to the dog, and after looking for posters and ads in the paper we took him to the pound, and since no one claimed him in fourteen days, Blister was ours.
We don't have kids. Phil doesn't want them, and I kind of do but not badly enough to push; but with Blister we made a family. Phil works days, as an actuary, and I work the night shift in the clean room of a computer-chip manufacturer, so we cross paths at home like the proverbial ships in the proverbial night. Before Blister, we were often so tired that we'd just sit on the couch, not talking, watching an hour of shared television before heading off in our separate directions. After Blister, we'd venture out into the neighborhood, to the park or along the weedy industrial lots behind the shopping center, where Blister could run off leash, investigating trash, spills, and the accidental wildlife that thrives along the unkempt edges of suburbia. We'd talk, Phil and I, not about anything major—just our days, people who were annoying us at work, that kind of thing—and although I hadn't realized that our marriage was in any danger, I could feel cracks being mended, a kind of basement-level fortification, and I knew that the dog was saving us.
Even in the freezing winters we walked Blister, or he walked us, even in ice storms when his paws slipped comically over the glittering carapaces of lawns, even in black afternoons after the end of daylight savings. The dog walk was our together time. And then, in March, Phil got his promotion and started working longer hours. The money was welcome but the hours were difficult; for one thing, I had to walk Blister alone, by myself, in the afternoon. When Phil finally got home, Blister would greet him in a frenzy, curling up beside him on the couch, his black chin on Phil's thigh; but I only heard about these things, because by then I was already gone.
At work I wear a bunny suit, helmet to booties, the entire thing, and have to move slowly, so as not to disturb the complex air-filtration system, and I don't talk much, either. I use a scanner to examine chips for defects. People say it must be hard working nights, the same tasks each shift, in silence. This, however, is not the case. It is an atmosphere of almost one-hundred-percent calm. I move through the shift in a trance, my mind in total focus, my body swathed and clean. The chips are made out of a square wafer and then cut out into circles, and the chemicals on them produce gorgeous and geometric patterns of pink and blue. When a chip comes under the scanner and I look at it—carefully, carefully—it reminds me of a jewel sparkling in a store window. It shows me that human beings can make something perfect and beautiful. I love what I do, and don't want to give it up, not even to be at home in the evenings on the couch with Blister and Phil.
So I started walking Blister by myself. I took him to the park, where he fell briefly in love with a Jack Russell named Zelda, and became fast friends with a lumbering Rottweiler named Chekhov. I teased him that he had a weakness for the literary types. Without Phil, the industrial avenues behind the shopping center seemed ominous and lonely, so I avoided those and paraded him around the neighborhood instead. In the dark late afternoons, with a prancing, curious black dog by your side, you can see straight into people's houses and lives: families arguing around dinner tables, children staring gape-mouthed at television sets, couples getting drunk by candlelight. During those walks the world seemed to me pitiful and exposed, lacking in some critical defenses. I tried explaining this to Phil a few times, at breakfast, but he was tired and hurried, gulping down cereal while trying not to spill milk on his tie, and I never felt he understood exactly what I was talking about, although I'm sure, I really am, that he tried.
March goes in like a lamb and out like a lion, or the other way around, but this particular March was roaring and hostile from start to finish. We'd been hit by the worst kind of weather: hours of snow one day, and then it would warm up and turn sleety, with ice storms that caused power outages and car accidents. Being outside made my skin feel raw and itchy, the air like a thousand pricking needles. My walks with Blister got shorter, and he'd stare at me reproachfully as we turned toward home. I found a new route, a short loop through an apartment complex whose height cut the wind a little, and I'd let him poke around its small yard while I huddled beneath a fire escape. This is where we were when it happened. I've gone over it a million times in my head since then, thinking of how I might have prevented it, but my memory never varies: the rush of wind; the muffled sounds of traffic through my wool hat; the appearance, as if from nowhere, of another dog.
I'm no expert on breeds, but I know what a pit-bull mix looks like. I hate those big, strong snouts of theirs, which remind me of a dinosaur's jaws, made for chomping other forms of life. This dog and Blister stood nose to nose, immobile, tails straight to the sky. I had Blister on the long, retractable leash, but was afraid to tug because I didn't know what the other dog would do if he moved. Everything was terribly quiet.
Then, from the shadows at the edge of the apartment complex, a man materialized in a red Gore-Tex jacket, his face hidden by the hood. “Sweetpea,” he called in a singsong voice. “Come here, Sweetpea.”
If I could have searched in my mind for the most unlikely name on earth for this dog, Sweetpea would probably have been the one I chose. This dog was staring at Blister as if contemplating which limb he was going to tear off first, but Blister was holding his ground. I was standing there paralyzed, which I will regret for the rest of my life.
When Sweetpea lunged, the leash lurched and took me with it, like a fisherman at the mercy of a monstrous fish. I heard snarling and a howl like a baby's, ghostly and keening, and then a sick crunch of teeth meeting flesh, and I saw the
red of the Gore-Tex jacket, and both names, Blister and Sweetpea, were being yelled repeatedly, then something tripped me and I landed on the ground, the breath was knocked out of me, like it hadn't been since I was a little kid, all the air pushed from my lungs, the atmosphere of the world collapsing. The dogs were fighting, snapping at each other's throats.
“Sweetpea! Sweetpea!”
He finally got control of his dog and put it, still snarling, on a leash. Blister was lying on the ground. I breathed in, painfully, and crawled over to him. When I put my hand on his fur, it came away wet with blood. I said his name over and over, like a prayer, and his tail flapped lazily like it did when he was half-asleep. I turned to the guy in the red Gore-Tex and screamed, “Help me!” at the top of my lungs.
“I'll get my car,” he said. He took off running with the dog and I stayed there with Blister, watching him breathe, willing him to keep breathing. It seemed like hours later when a car pulled up and Sweetpea's owner got out. He carried Blister to the backseat of the car and said, “Tell me where you want to go.”
At the animal hospital they took Blister away and made me stay in the waiting room. I was crying—hysterically, I'll admit—and couldn't stop. I was also trembling and shaking. I didn't care who saw. Self-control was not a thing to be considered. The guy in the red Gore-Tex took off his coat and folded it carefully on the plastic seat beside him, and I hated him for that, for taking so much care with a goddamn coat after his dog tore mine to pieces.
“You should've had your dog on a leash,” I finally said between sobs, and had to repeat it several times to make myself understood. We were surrounded by photos on the walls and photos on magazine covers: all images of healthy, glossy dogs and cats, and they hit me like reproach.
“She got out,” is all he said. His singsong voice was actually an accent—Haitian, I guessed. He was in his forties, and neatly dressed in a blue shirt and chinos; he had high cheekbones and a trace of a beard and a compact, athletic build. “She belongs to my niece. I am sorry.”
“You'd better be fucking sorry,” is what I had to say to that.
He nodded. Then he leaned forward, his hands clasped over the knees of his neatly creased chinos. “You are bleeding,” he said.
“It's from the dog. It's from Blister.”
“No, I think it's from you.”
There was a dark splotch on my pants, below my knee. He knelt down in front of me, without asking, and quickly unlaced my boot and rolled up my corduroys and there it was: a rip in the fabric of my calf, jagged and bloody. My white sock was red. He touched his fingers to my leg and I swatted him away.
“Your dog bit me! Your fucking dog bit me, too!”
“She belongs to my niece,” he said, still kneeling in front of me.
I started to wail. “I'm going to be late for work,” I said.
His name was Jean-Michel and he came from Port-au-Prince. He worked in a hotel downtown, nights, like me. He'd come here five years earlier and lived with his brother, who was a doctor, and his brother's wife and their daughter, who was nine years old. The niece, Mireille, was beautiful and intelligent, but she was growing up wild. Her parents both worked and were very busy, and they did nothing to discipline her, and instead they bought her too many gifts, including new clothes all the time, earrings, CDs, and the dog. Jean-Michel told me all this in the waiting room at the animal hospital while my bloody calf throbbed and dripped onto the floor. His voice was low and melodic, and he seemed to think that he could soothe me with it, and he was right. I sat there listening to him while they worked on Blister, and I said nothing. Every once in a while I blew my nose into the cuff of my sweatshirt.
I interrupted him once, to ask him to call Phil and my supervisor at work. He took a notepad out of his pocket, wrote down the numbers, nodded, then did it. When he came back I said, “Thanks,” and he shook his head and said, “No. Nothing to thank.”
A veterinary assistant, looking all of nineteen, her hair in two long braids, came out and examined my leg. “Ooh, that's gotta smart,” she said, bending down. Her braids flapped around my ankles.
“Blister,” I said, “how is he?”
“You should get that looked at as soon as possible.”
I was in no mood for advice.
“If you aren't here to talk to me about Blister,” I told her, “get your fucking braids away from my leg.” I rolled down my pant leg over the bite.
Jean-Michel smiled weakly at her. “She's very upset,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later Phil came in, his nose red, his eyes wild, and said, “What in the hell happened?” and when Jean-Michel started to explain, Phil looked at him as if he couldn't understand a word he was saying, as if he were speaking a language that was eerily similar to English yet not English, and Jean-Michel trailed off into silence.
“Phil,” I said, “go find out about Blister.”
He barged past the reception desk into the hospital room and was gone for a long ten minutes. During this time Jean-Michel wrote down his name, address, and phone number, tucked the piece of paper into the pocket of my coat, and left me alone with the glossy photographs of healthy cats and dogs. When Phil came back he was crying, so I thought the worst, but he took my head in his hands and told me that Blister was torn up, that Blister was bloody and weak, but that Blister was going to be fine.
At home Blister recovered quickly. He had to wear that lampshade on his head for a few days, kept knocking into things without understanding why, and Phil and I had some good laughs about that, but he didn't seem to mind. I recovered, too. They couldn't give me stitches because dogs' mouths are septic, so I had a hole in my calf that reminded me of a tin can ripped open using an improper tool; it hurt like hell before it got better. Phil contacted the animal-control officer, who went to Jean-Michel's house next to the apartment complex and examined Sweetpea. When a dog breaks out of a fenced area and attacks a person, the officer told us, it's designated a dangerous dog. The owner must put up collateral against the possibility of the dog ever attacking anybody else, and if it does, the dog will die. This information was relayed with a certain amount of relish. The owner, he added, must also take out quite a lot of expensive insurance. And at his behest Jean-Michel's brother, the doctor, sent us a check to cover my medical expenses and Blister's.
March turned to April, though the weather didn't get any better. One day I was home alone with Blister—the walking wounded, as Phil called us—when the doorbell rang and Jean-Michel stood there on the front porch in that stupid red Gore-Tex jacket. I let him in, he took off his boots, and then we sat down in the living room.
“So,” he said, his voice still low and melodic. “You are all right. I was concerned.”
“I'm okay.”
“Ellen,” he said. “Is it all right if I call you Ellen?”
“Call me whatever you want,” I said. “I don't care.”
“I've come here today, Ellen, to tell you that we are going to contest the dangerous-dog designation. My family, we cannot afford it. The collateral, the insurance. It is too much.”
Blister came into the room and lay down at his feet. Jean-Michel reached down, stroking the dog's head while looking at his healing wounds, his buffed nails long and elegant. The palms of his hands were a much lighter color than the backs, and I found myself staring at the two colors as he gestured.
“What am I supposed to say?” I asked him.
“You will be called to trial,” he said. “To testify about what happened. I wanted to ask you something, because I have a feeling about you. I can tell that in your heart you are a kind woman, Ellen. I wanted to ask you to be kind. At the trial, be kind.”
“Be kind?” I said. Nobody had ever asked me such a thing before. I had never thought of myself as being kind, or unkind, either. The issue had never crossed my mind.
Jean-Michel's eyes were dark, dark brown. As I looked at him a strange thing happened. I fell a bit in love with him then, in that one look; it was simple and im
mediate, like walking through a doorway. I was so attracted to him, in fact, that I could hardly breathe; but I also wanted to know everything about him, what every day of his life was like from his childhood in Haiti to his nights at the hotel. I'd been married to Phil for six years and nothing like this had happened before—crushes, yes, an occasional passing attraction to someone else's husband at a summer barbecue after too much beer. But not this: a moment when you felt like your whole life could change.
I stood up. “I'll think about it,” I said.
After he left, I lay down on the living room carpet and looked into Blister's eyes. Since the attack we'd had a special bond, and he tended to stick close to me almost all the time, as if he were still looking for the protection I had not, at the crucial instant, been able to offer.
“What am I going to do, Blister?” I asked him. “I'm in trouble with the Dutchman again.”
Blister wagged his tail, once, and gave me no answer, which was understandable. Being in trouble with the Dutchman was my own personal code, one I shared with no one, not even Genevieve, my closest friend at work. I'd met the Dutchman just before Phil and I got engaged. I was in school for the summer session, and he was in one of my classes. I called him the Dutchman as a joke—he'd been born in this country, the same as I was— because his hair was so blond, his cheeks so round and red, that he looked like a grown-up version of that kid with his finger in the dike. His name was Albert, and when he sat down next to me in class, my whole skin registered his presence. I could feel when he was looking at me and when he wasn't, and at breaks, in the hallway, we talked and made jokes about the professor and the whole time were really talking about something else, we were talking about each other. Class met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and for me it was as if the rest of the week didn't exist. I wasn't even alive on those days. But when I saw Albert I was. He knew I had a boyfriend, but he could also tell how I felt, and so he was confused, and bided his time. And I was this close to cheating on Phil. I mean my body was already cheating. It had already made the decision to be attracted to someone else, and the rest of me was only postponing the inevitable.