When the cop gets out of his car, Keith hunkers down on the bench. He was suspended yesterday, and technically he’s not required to be in school. Still, he hasn’t informed his mother of the suspension, so he figures he’s guilty of something. The cop has a mean scar across his forehead and black hair that reaches over the collar of his jacket. He looks like he could pick you up and toss you, a long way. Plus he has that dog, just the turn of a car handle away. They didn’t have cops like this back in Great Neck, where Keith grew up. You never saw a pickup with a gun rack attached, or dead turtles in the street. As Keith watches, the cop approaches the high school boys; before he can reach them the boys take off through a grove of cabbage palms, leaving their Frisbee behind. The cop picks up the Frisbee, then goes back to his car to let his dog out. The dog circles around the cop’s legs, banging its body against him, until the cop lets the Frisbee fly. Then the dog takes off like black lightning, scaring the red-crowned parrots in the palms until they scream and take flight. Beneath a cloud of birds, Keith grabs for his bike, then hops on and races out of the park, toward West Main. He’s sick to his stomach from his last cigarette, but he’s also completely charged. This was almost dangerous. The cop could have turned and spied him; the dog might have attacked. You can get addicted to trouble if you’re not careful. You can feel like you’re flying, when all you’re doing is pedaling through the Florida heat. Instead of heading straight home, Keith turns into the driveway of the Burger King, where he isn’t allowed to stop before supper. As he walks inside, he reaches in his pants pocket for the money he stole out of a classmate’s locker just yesterday. It’s there, every cent of it, and Keith feels a wicked surge of elation. Sooner or later, he’s going to get caught.
Julian Cash slouches down behind the wheel of the patrol car as he passes by the Burger King. Through the plate-glass window, he can see the little truant from the park devouring a burger and fries. Julian has seen dozens of these hotshots, boys who pretend to be fearless and dare somebody to prove them wrong. Julian himself isn’t scared of much, but he avoids the Burger King. He doesn’t care what anyone says, he knows the truth about the gumbo-limbo tree that grows at the edge of the parking lot. On the night of his seventeenth birthday he crashed into it, and twenty years later he still has the scar to remind him. The plain truth is, he would rather confront a psychopath hopped up on drugs than be forced to pull up to the Burger King’s drive-in window.
Twenty years ago the Burger King didn’t exist, and in its place was a stretch of gumbo-limbos. Julian used to park there with Janey Bass until dawn, then drive her home and watch as she climbed up the drain pipe to her bedroom window. Back then, there were still islands in the marshes around Verity, although some of them weren’t any bigger than half a mile across, home to little more than cottonmouths and foxes. The town expanded slowly, embracing the marshes with a Winn Dixie and a Mobil station, and now all the islands are connected to each other by roadways that funnel over the creeks and into the Interstate. There aren’t any more coral snakes in the branches of the mangroves and you can get USA Today and The New York Times as well as the Verity Sun Herald over at the general store, and at Chuck and Karl’s diner they now serve croissants along with their hickory-flavored coffee. The first time Julian was apprehended, two weeks after his seventeenth birthday, he was standing outside Chuck and Karl’s, waiting to be caught. He had a bowie knife hidden in his left boot and a hundred and fifty dollars in quarters, which would have seemed suspicious even if all the parking meters on West Main hadn’t just been smashed open with an axe. It was May of course, and the temperature hadn’t fallen below one hundred for days, and before June came around, Julian would be apprehended five more times, although he was never officially charged with anything. Those were the days when the Verity police force was made up of two men, and one of them was a Cash through marriage, not that he, or any of the Cashes, had spoken to Julian since the night of the accident.
They sent him away, to the Boys’ School of Correction in Tallahassee, and that was where he first got interested in dogs. There was a hundred-and-twenty-pound blood-hound named Big Boy whose job it was to track down anyone courageous or stupid enough to scale the barbed-wire fence. Big Boy stank, and his ears were infected, but appearances didn’t mean much to Julian. His own mother had fainted the first time she saw Julian and she gave him away that very night. As a little boy he was so ugly that tree frogs would go limp with fear in the palm of his hand. So Big Boy’s red eyes and fleas didn’t put Julian off in the least. He stole pieces of meat from the dining hall and started hanging around the kennel after lights out. It didn’t take long for Julian to discover that if you looked a dog straight in the eye and thought real hard, you could get him to come to you and lie at your feet without ever having to say one word. By the end of the year, just before Julian got his high school equivalency, the director of the school got rid of Big Boy. They could hold the sweat-stained shirts of escaped boys under the dog’s nose for as long as they wanted, but Big Boy would just calmly set off and track down Julian Cash every time.
In all his years of working with dogs, at the army base in Hartford Beach, and now with the Verity police, Julian has come to believe that there are two kinds of dogs that go bad. The kind that go bad slowly, whether from inbreeding or being beaten it didn’t much matter. And the other ones, good dogs who suddenly turned on a night when there was a full moon, hauling themselves up from the living room rug and a peaceful sleep, to jump through a window or attack a child for no apparent reason. Julian Cash attributes this to a short circuit in the brain, and that is why he no longer believes in crimes of passion. When men snapped it wasn’t passion, it was only a short circuit, just like that well-behaved dog who was after a ball one minute, an arm and a leg the next. The fact that this sort of behavior is so much rarer in dogs than in people, who seem to snap like crazy, especially during the month of May, makes no difference to the nine other men and women on the Verity police force. Not one of them will approach Julian if his dogs aren’t leashed, yet these officers will break up a bar fight without thinking twice. They’ll stop a speeder on a deserted back road when they know damn well there could easily be a weapon in the glove compartment. They don’t seem to understand that it’s possible to know exactly who a dog is by looking it in the eye for fifteen seconds. This is not, and never will be, possible with a man.
Twenty years ago, when Julian drove through the hot Florida night in his Oldsmobile, he truly believed it was possible to reach up and steal the stars right out of the sky. Now he doesn’t even see the stars anymore. He doesn’t look up. The nature of his job as a tracker forces him to look down, and that’s why he can recognize the footprint of an armadillo in the dust. He can hear a caterpillar chewing sweet bay leaves. Since he sees no reason for neighbors, he lives out in what little is left of the marshes, past Miss Giles’s place, in an old cabin some people say belonged to Charles Verity. A kennel runs along the far side of the cabin, built with the strongest chain link available, and this is where Julian leaves the big dog, Arrow, since his reaction to people is much more extreme than Julian’s. Julian usually has the other dog, Loretta, with him, even when he isn’t on duty. When he stops for supper, he picks up something for Loretta as well, often from the Pizza Hut. Julian believes in rewarding his dogs, even if this means tomato sauce on the upholstery of his cruiser. This is not the way dogs were handled in the army. On the base in Hartford Beach, small riding crops were used on dogs that refused to perform, and the lieutenant was proud to claim there wasn’t a dog born he couldn’t train to attack in two weeks. It gives Julian great pleasure to know he’s never once used force on a dog, and he’s been asked several times to instruct the K9 corps at the base.
In all things, Julian knows, what you need is patience and time, although some talents can’t be taught. Loretta is a great tracker, much better than Big Boy ever was. In seconds flat, she can search out a bundle of marijuana hidden in a packed suitcase, even if it’s been locke
d securely inside a car trunk. Last summer, when the mosquitoes were so thick you could hardly breathe and the heat sent you reeling, she found a lost hiker over near Lake Okeechobee long after the state troopers had given up hope. With her record, Julian figures she deserves a slice of pizza now and then; hell, he would buy her a Diet Coke if that’s what she wanted. It’s his other dog, Arrow, who’s the difficult one. He would have been put down two years ago if Julian had not seen him pacing the yard behind the animal hospital on the day he took Loretta to the vet for her rabies shot.
Arrow’s owner had bought him right after her divorce, for protection and company, from a religious order that raised dogs and had greedily allowed the breeding of a bitch known to be vicious. The result was Arrow, a hundred-pound monster who was so out of control his owner could no longer walk him down the street. When Julian stood by the fence, Arrow charged him, on his hind legs, biting at the chain link, standing as tall as a man. That afternoon, Julian took him home. The vet sedated Arrow and helped lift him into the backseat of the patrol car, and when the dog awoke, trapped in Julian’s kennel, he went crazy. Julian had to wear heavy leather gloves just to set his dish of food inside the kennel gate. It took six weeks before Julian could trust Arrow not to attack when his back was turned, and even now the dog can’t be off his lead around people. There are times when he startles for no apparent reason other than the sound of the wind or a shift in air pressure. That may be why he took naturally to his specialized training. He sees not what is there but what isn’t, and that’s what makes him the best air dog in the state, with a sense of smell so fine he can gauge the slightest difference in the air around him. There isn’t a park ranger or state trooper who hasn’t heard about Arrow. They call him the dog from hell, and some rangers insist he be muzzled while tracking.
The officers at the Verity police station don’t like Arrow, and they don’t like his owner much, either. Julian knows what they say about him down at the station house: that he can’t find anything right with human beings or anything wrong with dogs, that he encourages the merlins who nest in the sweet bays and bald cypresses on his property to frighten visitors away, that he’s never once sat down for so much as a cup of coffee with any of his fellow officers. Well, if people want to complain, let them; let them get down on all fours and shimmy through the sea grape and poisonwood and see how they like sand up their noses and fire ants stinging their feet. Let them just try to make their way through the strangler figs and the saw grass. Chances are, not one of them would ever find a baby sleeping in the reeds.
Bethany Lee, who had never heard of Verity before she drove into town, left New York last October. She didn’t think about what she was doing, so she didn’t begin to panic until she was in southern New Jersey. The full moon had washed the turnpike with silver light, and then, quite suddenly, a drenching rain began to fall. In the trunk of Bethany’s Saab there was a suitcase, and inside the suitcase she had twenty thousand dollars in cash and three necklaces—two strands of diamonds and a string of gold and sapphires. Bethany’s hands shook as she tried to keep the car steady; each time a truck passed her, a tidal wave of rain slapped against the Saab. Her baby, Rachel, who was then seven months old, was asleep in her car seat, warmly dressed in pink pajamas with feet, unaware that the rain was so hard windshield wipers could do nothing to improve visibility.
Six hours earlier, Bethany had set off to take Rachel to the park, but on this day she drove right on past. Rachel had let out a cry of delight when she saw the slide and the swings, but Bethany ignored the tightness in her own throat and stepped down harder on the gas. If she was lucky, the housekeeper wouldn’t worry and phone the police when she arrived to find the doors locked and no one at home. If she was unlucky, as she had been for quite some time, her husband already knew she was gone.
She probably should have pulled over that night, but she kept going at a slow crawl, never more than thirty miles an hour, until she reached Delaware. She parked down the street from the Wilmington Greyhound station and when Rachel woke up, fussing, her diaper wet, Bethany climbed over into the backseat, told the baby what a good girl she was, and quickly changed her. Then she hoisted Rachel on her shoulder, grabbed the diaper bag, and went out to the trunk for her suitcase. She left the Saab where it was, keys in the ignition.
They washed up in the ladies’ room at the bus station, got some breakfast from the snack bar, including a glass of milk to fill Rachel’s bottle, then waited for the eleven-o’ clock bus to Atlanta. By then, Bethany had not slept for two nights, and she barely had the nerve to ask for her bus ticket. In the past four months she had spent thirty thousand dollars on lawyers, and it had not done her a bit of good. If she had just taken off at the start, she would have had fifty thousand in her suitcase instead of twenty, but she had never made a real decision until the day she drove past the park. She’d had faith in her lawyer. She believed him when he insisted she’d easily win custody, but somehow it hadn’t worked out that way, and it took months for Bethany to realize she’d been tricked. It turned out that the house in Great Neck belonged not to her and Randy but to his family’s business. Even the Saab belonged to Randy’s family. And now they had decided the baby was theirs, too.
Bethany had been a freshman at Oberlin when she met Randy. His sister, Lynne, was her roommate, and she’d warned Bethany that her brother was the handsomest man she would ever meet. He had dozens of old sweethearts from high school and college pestering him, but when he saw Bethany he fell in love instantly. He told her it was because she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and in fact she looked more like him than his own sister, with the same dark hair and clear olive skin. But after a while Bethany came to believe that he wanted her so badly because he had never in his life met a girl quite so naive. She was perfect, if not for him, for his family. His parents picked their house and their furniture and their cars, and they thought Bethany was the sweetest thing they’d ever seen. It didn’t seem to matter so much that Randy was rarely home. Bethany didn’t question him when he worked late or on weekends. He managed, that way, to be both married, which his parents insisted upon, and single, which was the way he liked it. And the truth was, he seemed more relieved than upset when Bethany began to talk about a separation during her pregnancy.
He moved out five weeks after the baby was born, and he might have been happy to be a weekend father if his parents hadn’t put pressure on him. Rachel was their grandchild, their first and only, and they were willing to pay any amount to a lawyer who could win her. Randy’s parents, and even his sister, had testified against Bethany, and her medical records had been subpoenaed from the times when she was depressed, especially right after the baby was born and the marriage was already dead and she began taking Elavil. Right before God and her lawyer and everyone, she was ripped apart until she herself was almost convinced her child would be better off without her. While they waited for the court’s final decree, Bethany had to let Rachel go off to visit her father every weekend. There had been strong words between them by then, and Randy said he couldn’t bear to see Bethany face to face. Instead, his parents sent a driver. Every Friday night Bethany had to stand and do nothing while Rachel screamed and the driver forced her into her car seat. Often, Bethany had to turn away. She just couldn’t bear to see her baby cry, and afterward she’d be sick to her stomach; she’d have the dry heaves for hours.
It might have continued that way Friday after Friday, until the final decree, and Bethany might never have driven through that horrible storm in New Jersey, if she hadn’t turned at the instant when Rachel was flailing her arms and screaming and seen the exasperated driver slap the baby’s face. And still, Bethany was so paralyzed she didn’t run to the car and grab her daughter. She stood there, in shock, beside the automatic sprinklers that came on each day at dusk, too horrified to weep. The next morning, Bethany went to the bank to make her first withdrawal, and she went every day that week, until the one joint account Randy had not closed was all but d
rained. On the following Friday she refused to answer the door when the driver came for Rachel. She turned off all the lights and sat on the kitchen floor, holding Rachel and rocking back and forth while the driver rang the bell for what seemed like forever. An hour after the driver left, the phone started ringing. Bethany ignored it. She fixed Rachel a bottle and put her to sleep in her own big bed, with pillows all around her so she wouldn’t roll off. Finally the phone stopped ringing and Bethany’s heart no longer felt like it was going to burst. She actually thought it was over and went to get herself a bowl of cornflakes and milk, but at a little after nine Randy’s car pulled into the driveway. Bethany sat on the couch, watching the door shake as he knocked, harder and harder, and when it stopped she thought, for a moment, that he had given up. She had forgotten he still had a key, although he couldn’t do much more than reach his arm halfway inside, since the safety chain had been fastened.
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