Name Games

by Michael Craft

  Pierce chortled. “When computers came home from the office.”

  The gravel parking lot in front of Star-Spangled Video was filled with big amorphous puddles from the overnight rain, reflecting the gray sky. Trucks and vans outnumbered the cars there, most with out-of-state plates. Whatever the drivers were doing inside the pink barn, it struck me as an odd amusement to occupy a dreary morning. But then, to each his own.

  Nearing the parking lot, I slowed the car, telling Pierce, “I wonder who they are. Mostly men, I presume. Some gay. They don’t seem to mind being seen here—their cars are in full view of the road.”

  “Most of them,” Pierce reminded me, “are from out of town. They wouldn’t know a soul here.”

  As he said this, a trucker revved his engine and backed his rig away from the building. I stopped at the roadside, watching him shift into low gear while pulling out of the lot. As the truck passed in front of us, I noticed the profile of another car parked near the pink barn. It had been there all along with the others, but obscured by the truck’s trailer. It caught my eye now because it was nearly identical to my own, a Bavarian V-8, looking brand-new—there were still tape marks on the window where the price sticker had been removed. The sedan was a deep emerald green; my own, black.

  It caught Pierce’s attention too. He quipped, “Don’t get nervous, Mark. I’ll bet it’s out-of-state. You still take top honors for the slickest wheels in Dumont.” He stroked my dashboard as if patting the flank of a thoroughbred.

  I asked through a laugh, “Was I that obvious?”

  “You were bug-eyed.”

  Driving onto the road again and cruising past the parking lot, I glanced over for another look at the green car and, seeing it from the rear, noticed that Pierce’s bet was wrong—it was tagged with Wisconsin plates. Though tempted to point this out to him, I let it pass, as it would only reinforce the impression that I was overly fond of my own car and its exclusivity. Pierce was embroiled, after all, in a murder investigation, and my flustering about some stranger’s car invading my turf amounted to nothing more than petty one-upsmanship. Chiding myself for wasting mental energy on such a niggling nonissue, I drove away in silence.

  As the porn shops grew smaller in my mirror, expansive farmland dominated the view ahead, stretching to the horizon, where the delicate ribbon of the four-lane interstate met the two-lane blacktop on which we traveled. Pierce said, “Bruno told us the dog was hit near the first farm on the right. It’s just ahead, the Norris place.”

  Set well back from the fields, on a side road, was the house. Behind it was the barn and a scattering of smaller buildings. And there, in the midst of a soy field along the road where we drove, was a rusty old windmill, missing a blade or two. Though it hadn’t pumped water in decades, the Norrises apparently felt that it made a quaint landmark—either that, or they figured that someday a good storm would knock it over, saving them the bother of dismantling it.

  I pulled off the road where it passed nearest the windmill, along the ditch where Bruno said the dog had been thrown. Without speaking, Pierce and I both got out of the car. The rain had stopped, but a damp wind still blew, and we both reflexively huddled into our trench coats, raising their collars. I walked a few yards ahead, scanning the ditch; Pierce moved in the opposite direction.

  “There it is,” he said flatly, and I joined him, peering down the steep embankment of weeds along the roadside.

  The dog (I thought it was a dog, but only because a dog was the object of our search—it certainly didn’t look like a dog, or any other animal, for that matter) was curled in the water that trickled along the bottom of the ditch. The overnight rain and two days of death and insects had transformed the stricken creature into a black, bloated ball of a thing that looked like a wad of tar. I was perfectly satisfied that Bruno had been truthful, that he’d witnessed the poor dog’s misfortune, and I was ready to leave. To my dismay, though, Pierce began sidestepping his way down the embankment, preparing to get a closer look. With difficulty, he barely maintained his balance, as his office shoes were not designed to grip the grassy, wet incline. Stumbling to the bottom, he straddled the stream of rainwater and waddled to the dog. Crouching clumsily in his greatcoat, he lifted the dog’s head. As he did this, I suddenly saw the dog’s form emerge from the carcass I had thought shapeless. I also saw that the dog wore a chain around its neck.

  “It’s Rambo,” said Pierce, “the Norrises’ shepherd.” Standing, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his hands. To my great relief, he started climbing up to the road—I’d feared he might want to move the dead animal. Needless to say, I didn’t want it in my car, not even in the trunk, not even if covered with a makeshift shroud, which we didn’t have. As if reading my mind, Pierce explained, “The county road crew will dispose of it eventually, but I’d better tell the Norrises—I’m sure they’re worried. The kids’ll be sick about this.”

  I was a bit queasy myself. I could well imagine the kids’ mounting dread—they’d doubtless been out here searching for Rambo, and they’d probably glanced right over the bloated corpse, not recognizing it, concluding that their dog had run away from home, had left them. Extending my arm, gripping Pierce’s hand to help hoist him onto the road’s shoulder, I felt a visceral surge of melancholy, a reaction I had not expected. After all, we’d driven out here for the specific purpose of finding a dead dog, and we found it—mission accomplished. It wasn’t my dog. I’d never known the dog in life, I’d never met its owners, and I’d never much cared for German shepherds anyway, thinking them mean. And yet, here lay Rambo, a farm dog, a family pet, stricken in his feral prime (was I romanticizing this?) by a car, a machine, the handiwork of man. Yes, I was romanticizing poor Rambo’s demise.

  Pierce stomped his feet, trying to clean his shoes on the bumpy surface of the wet asphalt. His eyes were still aimed into the ditch, and he seemed lost in thought, as I was. He asked, “Did you ever have a dog, Mark?”

  I shook my head. “No. Cats. How about you?”

  “Oh sure, I had a dog. Well, my folks had one, a cocker spaniel—a popular breed when I was growing up. They named him Checkers. Original, huh?”

  I shared his soft laughter. I wasn’t old enough to remember Nixon’s television speech in the early fifties, but my mother had found it a source of endless amusement for years to come. I finally saw clips of the “Checkers speech” during the final days of the Watergate scandal, when the networks scrambled to patch together swan-song videos documenting the background of the nation’s first failed presidency.

  “Later,” said Pierce, “after Checkers died, while I was in high school, I got a dog of my own. Just a mutt from the pound, but he was sure great.” Pleasant memories showed on Pierce’s face, taking the form of a boyish grin.

  “What was his name?”

  “I called him Squire—it sounded sort of lordly, like Prince or Duke, but those names were so common, and I wanted something special.” With his hands, he framed the name in the air, as if reading it in lights. “Squire.”

  As he spoke of his younger years in Dumont, a thought occurred to me: Had Doug Pierce and Ward Lord grown up together? I had no idea how old Grace Lord’s nephew would now be, but there was a chance that he and Pierce were contemporaries. Maybe they’d tossed Frisbees to their dogs together. I was tempted to ask about this, but the question would surely have struck Pierce as a non sequitur. Further, he would wonder what interest I had in Ward, which I was at a loss to explain. So I simply asked, “How long did you have Squire?”

  He sighed. “Only a couple of years. My parents sort of ‘inherited’ him when I went away to college, and by the time I’d finished police training, they’d all gotten used to each other—in fact, they’d grown old together. So when I moved back to town and got a place of my own, Squire stayed home with Mom and Dad. He lived another four or five years, and when he died, it was rough on all of us. Afterwards, none of us breathed a word about getting another pet.”

  There wasn�
��t much traffic that morning, and only a few cars drove past us from either direction as we spoke, some slowing as they approached, motivated by either caution or curiosity. But there was nothing to see—two men in trench coats talking on the roadside.

  I asked Pierce, “How did you, uh…dispose of Squire?”

  Frankly, this conversation had gotten weird, but Pierce wasn’t troubled by it. He answered, “Buried him in the backyard, no big deal.” Then he turned the tables. “Tell me about your cats.”

  I really hadn’t thought about them in years, but my childhood pets still lived just beneath the threshold of memory, spurring recollections that may have been only imagined: awakening to the soft nuzzling of my ear, or recoiling from the snap of static electricity that arced from a wet nose-kiss on a dry winter night, or picking stray strands of fur from my lips after napping together one afternoon. Though these impressions were vivid, they were not, I knew, the sort of boy-and-his-dog anecdotes that Pierce could relate to. A dog’s master often regards the animal as his best friend, a loyal guard and servant. Not so with cats, of course—the term master doesn’t even apply. No, cats are simply a presence in their owners’ lives—a magnificent, sculptural, regal, sometimes haughty presence that deigns to share a home and be kept. Dog people just don’t get it.

  So I told Pierce, “My dad died when I was three, and Mom worked. With me in school, there was no one around the house during the day, so having a dog just wouldn’t have been practical.” In truth, neither Mom nor I had ever felt inclined to get a dog, but for Pierce’s sake, I decided to give him the impression that we’d settled for “second best.” It was simpler.

  I continued, “Since cats are relatively easy to care for, that’s what we got. The first was a stray that showed up while I was in grade school—I was seven or eight. We took him in, and I named him Charlie. God knows why—it just seemed to fit.”

  “Charlie the cat.” Pierce laughed. “That was in Illinois, right?”

  “Yes.” I reminded him, “Mom, who was a Quatrain, moved from Dumont to Illinois about the time she married Dad. They settled in the suburbs north of Chicago, and I grew up in a gray house with white trim on a quiet street named Oakland Avenue. Those were peaceful times, and it was a peaceful place, not unlike Dumont.”

  “What happened to him?” Pierce clarified, “I mean Charlie.”

  Moving toward the car—there was no reason to remain standing there on the roadside—I told him, “Charlie was always getting battered up in cat fights, then he’d stay in the house for a while, licking his wounds, literally. But one night, something got the best of him, probably a dog.” Saying this, I realized that I’d doubtless hit upon the reason I’d never found dogs alluring, but I also realized that it was a comment Pierce might not appreciate, so I quickly added, “Or it may have been a big raccoon. In any event, I found Charlie in the yard one morning, and it was awful. Mom stayed home from work to help me bury him.”

  “That’s rough,” said Pierce, extending his sympathies thirty-some years after the central tragedy of my youth.

  I nodded. We were by now both buckled into the car, so I turned the key in the ignition. “It’s funny, Doug. When Dad died, I was too young to understand what was happening, and his funeral, from my child’s perspective, was ‘sanitized’ and essentially meaningless. But a few years later, when that cat died and I dug a hole and buried him—boy—then I understood the meaning of life and death.”

  As we pulled onto the road, Pierce asked, “You got another cat?”

  “A while later, yes. A big orange tabby. I named him Willy. Again, no reason, no namesake. He lived with us for years. Funny, though”—a disturbing thought occurred to me as I brought the car up to highway speed—“I can’t quite remember what happened to him. He almost always went outdoors overnight. I guess he just didn’t come home one morning.”

  “That’s a terrible feeling—not knowing,” Pierce commiserated.

  In his line of work, Pierce often consoled distressed families in the midst of calamities far more weighty than lost pets. It was kind of him to judge my uncertain recollections worthy of his sympathies. It was the same kindness that had prompted his concern for the feelings of the Norris children, who still wondered what had become of their German shepherd. As we approached the crossroad leading to the farmhouse, I asked, “Did you want to stop to tell the Norrises about Rambo?”

  “I need to check in at the department. I’ll call them from there.”

  So I passed through the intersection, heading back toward town, and our conversation lapsed. I still entertained thoughts of Charlie and Willy, and chances are, Pierce continued to ponder Checkers and Squire.

  These musings of more innocent times were interrupted when we passed the porn shops, specifically the blushing-pink barn that housed Star-Spangled Video. What drew my attention was not the building itself, not its lurid signage, but rather an empty space in the parking lot—the fuzzy edge of a dry rectangle was still visible on the wet gravel. The Bavarian V-8, my car’s green twin, was gone.

  It had not passed us while we searched the ditch (I’d surely have noticed it), which meant that it had not headed out of town, toward the interstate. Instead, it must have driven into Dumont. I’d never seen another car like mine in the area. Whose was it?

  “I just had a thought,” said Pierce.

  “Me too.” I assumed that he had also noticed the missing green car.

  But he continued, “Bruno’s story. Obviously, he saw the dog get hit, but I wonder if he really saw a Jeep do it through his rearview mirror. Somehow, that part of the story had the ring of fabrication. Maybe he hit the dog himself.” Pierce pondered this a moment before allowing, “But then, Bruno may be an excellent driver. I’ve never seen him behind the wheel.”

  “I have,” I assured Pierce.

  Then I added, “Poor Rambo.”

  Late that morning, in the conference area of my outer office at the Register, I sat with the paper’s managing editor, Lucille Haring, and features editor, Glee Savage, planning our coverage of Carrol Cantrell’s murder investigation. Glee would not normally be involved with such a story, but she had, after all, first covered Carrol’s visit to Dumont, so she was now our staff authority on the victim. What’s more, it was impossible to separate the murder story from that of the soon-to-open miniatures convention, which fell squarely within Glee’s domain. All three of us took the attitude that traditional roles didn’t matter as much as our ability to report news, so we didn’t bother fretting over job descriptions. We were a team.

  “I thought I’d develop a sidebar,” said Glee, adjusting her half-frame glasses while skimming her notes, “profiling some of the other artisans who’ll exhibit at the convention. These are the gentlemen visited by Bruno in Milwaukee over the weekend. I ought to be able to reach most of them by phone before they arrive—maybe they can shed more light on the rivalry.”

  “That sounds good,” said Lucy, scratching out an item on her list. Shifting toward me in her chair, she crossed the legs of her twill pantsuit and asked, “Can I assume we’ll keep the story on page one till there’s an arrest?”

  “For now, sure. If Bruno can’t come up with any proof that he was in Milwaukee at the time of the murder Sunday morning—or if Pierce comes up with evidence that he wasn’t—we should see an arrest fairly soon. Otherwise, there’s no way of telling how long this could drag on.”

  Listening to this, Glee had been sucking the tip of her pen, troubled. She asked both Lucy and me, “Is Bruno the only active suspect? He’s kind of a flake, and we’ve seen him vent a vindictive streak, but my gut tells me he didn’t do it.”

  Lucy answered, “We’re following Cantrell’s probate proceedings in California to see if they reveal any interests that could have motivated murder. And here in Dumont, we’re still waiting for the coroner’s report, which ought to be cut-and-dried. Barring any surprises on those two fronts, everything points to Bruno.”

  “Unless,” I reminded her,
“his alibi checks out.”

  “Duly noted,” Lucy assured me.

  “What’s troublesome about this case…,” I began to tell both of them, but I was distracted by a figure crossing the newsroom toward the glass wall of my office.

  Following my glance, Glee told me, “You seem to have a visitor, Mark. Miss Exner, I believe.”

  “Oh?” said Lucy, sounding uncharacteristically chipper. Sitting with her back to the newsroom, she spun her short shock of red hair, looking over her shoulder to confirm the arrival of my Chicago lawyer friend, Roxanne Exner. Both Glee and Lucy knew Roxanne from her frequent visits to Dumont during the past year, but Lucy had first met Roxanne earlier, in Chicago, while Lucy and I were still at the Journal. Lucy had snapped to attention at the mention of Roxanne’s name because she still carried something of a torch for the woman. On the summer night when they had first crossed paths at a cocktail party hosted by Neil and me at our loft in the city, Roxanne had just cropped her hair into a mannish bob that left Lucy breathless. What Lucy didn’t know, though, was that Roxanne had done this only as a temporary concession to Carl Creighton, her lover, who had acquired a new convertible. The misunderstanding was quickly corrected, but not until after Lucy had made a move on Roxanne. Though unsettled by the experience, Roxanne—always self-assured—had dismissed the incident as the unfortunate aftermath of a bad haircut, deciding on the spot to grow back her tresses. Less confident women might thereafter have eschewed Lucy, but not Roxanne. She seemed to take perverse pride in the knowledge that she was attractive to women as well as to men. All this only served to convince Lucy that there was still hope.