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If Purgatory had formal parlors for the waiting multitudes, they might be as ordered and cheerless as this room.
“Crippled Mazie,” Janet repeated. “Four months later, he …” She glanced down at her daughter. “Four months later, Mazie died.”
Having begun to close the front door, Brian hesitated. He left it half open to the mild September night.
“Where is your dog?” Amy asked.
“In the kitchen.” Janet put a hand to her swollen lip and spoke between her fingers. “With him.”
The child was too old to be sucking her thumb with such devotion, but this habit of the crib disturbed Brian less than did the character of her stare. A purple shade of blue, her eyes were wide with expectation and appeared to be bruised by experience.
The air thickened, as it does under thunderheads and a pending deluge.
“Which way to the kitchen?” Amy asked.
Janet led them through an archway into a hall flanked by dark rooms like flooded grottoes. Her daughter glided at her side, as firmly attached as a remora to a larger fish.
The hall was shadowy except at the far end, where a thin wedge of light stabbed in from a room beyond.
The shadows seemed to ebb and flow and ebb again, but this phantom movement was only Brian’s strong pulse, his vision throbbing in time with his laboring heart.
At the midpoint of the hallway, a boy leaned with his forehead against a wall, his hands fisted at his temples. He was perhaps six years old.
From him came the thinnest sound of misery, like air escaping, molecule by molecule, from the pinched neck of a balloon.
Janet said, “It’ll be okay, Jimmy,” but when she put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he wrenched away from her.
Trailed by her daughter, she proceeded to the end of the hall and pushed the door open, and the stiletto of light became a broad-sword.
Entering the kitchen behind the two women and the girl, Brian could almost have believed that the source of the light was the golden retriever sitting alertly in the corner between the cooktop and the refrigerator. The dog seemed to shine.
She was neither pure blond nor the coppery hue of some retrievers, but clothed in many shades of gold, and radiant. Her undercoat was thick, her chest deep, her head beautifully formed.
More compelling than the dog’s appearance were her posture and attitude. She sat erect, head lifted, alertness signified by a slight raising of her pendant ears and by the ceaseless subtle flare-and-quiver of her nostrils.
She didn’t turn her head, but she shifted her eyes toward Amy and Brian—and at once refocused on Carl.
The man of the house was at the moment something less than a man. Or perhaps he was only what any man eventually might become when guided by no hand but his own.
When sober, he probably had a neighborly face or at least one of those faces that, seen by the thousands in city streets, is a bland mask of benign indifference, with lips compressed and eyes fixed on a distant nothing.
Now, as he stood beside the kitchen table, his face was full of character, though of the wrong kind. His eyes were watery with drink and blood, and he looked out from under a lowered brow, like a bull that sees on every side the challenge of a red cape. His jaw hung slack. His lips were cracked, perhaps from the chronic dehydration that afflicts an alcoholic.
Carl Brockman turned his gaze on Brian. In those eyes shone not the mindless aggression of a man made stupid by drink, but instead the malevolent glee of a chained brute who had been liberated by it.
To his wife, in a voice thick with bitterness, he said, “What’ve you done?”
“Nothing, Carl. I just called them about the dog.”
His face was a snarl of knotted threats. “You must want some.”
Janet shook her head.
“You must really want some, Jan. You do this, you know it’s gonna get you only one thing.”
As though embarrassed by the evidence of her submissiveness, Janet covered her bleeding mouth with one hand.
Crouching, Amy called to the dog. “Here, cutie. Come here, girl.”
On the table stood a bottle of tequila, a glass, a salt shaker in the shape of a white Scottish terrier, and a plate holding slices of a fresh lime.
Raising his right hand from his side and high above his head, Carl revealed a tire iron. He gripped it by the pry end.
When he slammed the tool down hard upon the table, slices of lime leaped from the plate. The bottle of tequila wobbled, and the ice rattled in the glass.
Janet cringed, the little girl stoppled a cry with her thumb, Brian winced and tensed, but Amy just continued to coax the retriever to come to her. The dog was neither startled nor made fearful by the crash of iron on wood.
With a backhand swing of the tool, Carl swept everything off the table. At the farther end of the kitchen, tequila splashed, glass shattered, and the ceramic Scottie scattered salt across the floor.
“Get out,” Carl demanded. “Get out of my house.”
Amy said, “The dog’s a problem. You don’t need a problem dog. We’ll take her off your hands.”
“Who the hell are you, anyway? She’s my dog. She’s not yours. I know how to handle the bitch.”
The table was not between them and Carl. If he lurched forward and swung the tire iron, they might be able to dodge a blow only if the tequila made him slow and clumsy.
The guy didn’t look slow and clumsy. He seemed to be a bullet in the barrel, and any wrong move they made or wrong word they spoke might be the firing pin that sent him hurtling toward them.
Turning his malevolent gaze upon his wife, Carl repeated, “I know how to handle the bitch.”
“All I did,” Janet said meekly, “was give the poor thing a bath.”
“She didn’t need a bath.”
Pleading her case but careful not to argue it, Janet said, “Carl, honey, she was filthy, her coat was all matted.”
“She’s a dog, you stupid skank. She belongs in the yard.”
“I know. You’re right. You don’t want her in the house. But I was just, I was afraid, you know, afraid she’d get those sores like she did before.”
Her conciliatory tone inflamed his anger instead of quenching it. “Nickie’s my dog. I bought her. I own her. She’s mine.” He pointed the tire iron at his wife. “I know what’s mine, and I keep what’s mine. Nobody tells me what to do with anything that’s mine.”
At the start of Carl’s rant, Amy rose from a crouch and stood staring at him, rigid and still and moon-eyed.
Brian saw something strange in her face, an expression he could not name. She was transfixed but not by fear.
Pointing the tire iron at Amy now, instead of at his wife, Carl said, “What are you staring at? What’re you even doing here, you dumb bitch? I told you Get out.”
Brian put both hands on a dinette chair. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but with it, he might be able to block the tire iron.
“Sir, I’ll pay you for the dog,” Amy said.
“You deaf?”
“I’ll buy her.”
“Not for sale.”
“A thousand dollars.”
“She’s mine.”
“Fifteen hundred.”
Familiar with Amy’s finances, Brian said, “Amy?”
Carl transferred the tire iron from his right hand to his left. He flexed his free hand as if he had been gripping the tool with such ferocity that his fingers had cramped.
To Brian, he said, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m her architect.”
“Fifteen hundred,” Amy repeated.
Although the kitchen was not too warm, Carl’s face glistened with a thin film of greasy perspiration. His undershirt was damp. This was a drunkard’s sweat, the body struggling to purge toxins.
“I don’t need your money.”
“Yes, sir, I know. But you don’t need the dog, either. She’s not the only dog in the world. Seventeen hundred.”
“What’re you—crazy?”
“Yeah. I am. But it’s a good crazy. Like, I’m not a suicide bomber or anything.”
“Suicide bomber?”
“I don’t have bodies buried in my backyard. Well, only one, but it’s a canary in a shoe box.”
“Somethin’s wrong with you,” Carl said thickly.
“His name was Leroy. I didn’t want a canary, especially not one named Leroy. A friend died, Leroy had nowhere to go, he had nothing but his shabby little cage, so I took him in, and he lived with me, and then I buried him, though I didn’t bury him until he was dead because, like I said, I’m not that kind of crazy.”
Under his brow, Carl’s eyes were deep wells with foul water glistening darkly at the bottom. “Don’t mock me.”
“I wouldn’t, sir. I can’t. I was pretty much raised by nuns. I don’t mock, don’t take God’s name in vain, don’t wear patent-leather shoes with a skirt, and I have such an enlarged guilt gland that it weighs as much as my brain. Eighteen hundred.”
As Carl transferred the tire iron from his left hand to his right, he turned it end for end, now gripping it by the lug socket. He pointed the pry end, the sharp end, at Amy, but said nothing.
Brian didn’t know if the wife-beater’s silence was a good sign or a bad one. More than once, he’d seen Amy talk an angry dog out of a snarl, into a belly rub; but he would have bet his last dollar that Carl wasn’t going to lie on his back and put all four in the air.
“Two thousand,” Amy said. “That’s as much as I have. I can’t go any higher.”
Carl took a step toward her.
“Back off,” Brian warned, raising the dinette chair as if he were a lion tamer, although a lion tamer would also have had a whip.
To Brian, Amy said, “Take it easy, Frank Lloyd Wright. This gentle man and me, we’re building some trust here.”
Carl extended his right arm, resting the tip of the pry bar in the recess between her collarbones, the blade against her throat.
As though unaware that the point of a deadly weapon was poised to puncture her esophagus, Amy said, “So—two thousand. You’re a tough negotiator, sir. I won’t be eating filet mignon for a while. That’s okay. I’m more a hamburger kind of girl, anyway.”
The wife-beater was a chimera now, only part angry bull, part coiled serpent. His gaze was sharp with sinister calculation, and although his tongue was not forked, it slipped between his lips to test the air.
Amy said, “I knew this guy, he almost choked to death on a chunk of steak. The Heimlich maneuver wouldn’t dislodge it, so a doctor cut his throat open there in the restaurant, fished the blockage out.”
As still as stone, the dog remained alert, and Brian wondered if he should take his lead from her. If the bottled violence in Carl was about to be uncorked, surely Nickie would sense it first.
“This woman at a nearby table,” Amy continued, “she was so horrified, she passed out facedown in her lobster bisque. I don’t think you can drown in a bowl of lobster bisque, it might even be good for the complexion, but I lifted her head out of it anyway.”
Carl licked his cracked lips. “You must think I’m stupid.”
“You might be ignorant,” Amy said. “I don’t know you well enough to say. But I’m totally sure you’re not stupid.”
Brian realized he was grinding his teeth.
“You give me a check for two thousand,” Carl said, “you’ll stop payment on it ten minutes after you’re out the door with the dog.”
“I don’t intend to give you a check.” From an inside jacket pocket, she withdrew a wad of folded hundred-dollar bills held together by a blue-and-yellow butterfly barrette. “I’ll pay cash.”
Brian was no longer grinding his teeth. His mouth had fallen open.
Lowering the tire iron to his side, Carl said, “Something’s for sure wrong with you.”
She pocketed the barrette, fanned the hundred-dollar bills, and said, “Deal?”
He put the weapon on the table, took the money, and counted it with the deliberateness of a man whose memory of math has been bleached pale by tequila.
Relieved, Brian put down the dinette chair.
Moving to the dog, Amy fished a red collar and a rolled-up leash from another pocket. She clipped the leash to the collar and put the collar on the dog. “Nice doing business with you, sir.”
While Carl was conducting a second count of the two thousand, Amy tugged gently on the leash. The dog rose at once and padded out of the kitchen, at her side.
With her little girl in tow, Janet followed Amy and Nickie into the hallway, and Brian went after them, glancing back because he half expected Carl to find his rage again and pick up the tire iron.
Jimmy, the keening boy, was silent now. He had moved from the hallway to the living room, where he stood at a window in the posture of a prisoner at his cell bars.
