A Multitude of Sins (11 page)

I reached and tried to take the belt loop off, but when I did he bared his teeth and snapped and nearly caught the end of my thumb with his little white incisor. I decided just to forget the whole effort and to go about putting up my signs alone.

I stapled up all the signs in no time—at the laundromat on Barracks Street, in the gay deli, outside the French patisserie, inside the coffee shop and the adult news on Decatur. I caught all the telephone poles in a four-block area. On several of the poles and all the message boards I saw that others had lost pets, too, mostly cats.
Hiroki’s Lost. We’re utterly disconsolate. Can you help? Call Jamie or Hiram at
… Or,
We miss our Mittens. Please call us or give her a good home. Please!
In every instance as I made the rounds I stood a moment and read the other notices to see if anyone had reported a lost puppy. But (and I was surprised) no one had.

On a short, disreputable block across from the French Market, a section that includes a seedy commercial strip (sex shops, T-shirt emporiums and a slice-of-pizza outlet), I saw a group of the young people Sallie had accused of abandoning our puppy. They were, as she’d remembered, sitting in an empty store’s doorway, dressed in heavy, ragged black clothes and thick-soled boots with various chains attached and studded wristlets, all of them—two boys and two girls—pierced, and tattooed with Maltese crosses and dripping knife blades and swastikas, all dirty and utterly pointless but abundantly surly and apparently willing to be violent. These young people had a small black dog tied with a white cotton cord to one of the boys’ heavy boots. They were drinking beer and smoking but otherwise just sitting, not even talking, simply looking malignantly at the street or at nothing in particular.

I felt there was little to fear, so I stopped in front of them and asked if they or anyone they knew had lost a white-and-black puppy with simple markings in the last day, because I’d found one. The one boy who seemed to be the oldest and was large and unshaven with brightly dyed purple and green hair
cut into a flattop—he was the one who had the dog leashed to his boot—this boy looked up at me without obvious expression. He turned then to one of the immensely dirty-looking, fleshy, pale-skinned girls crouched farther back in the grimy door stoop, smoking (this girl had a crude cross tattooed into her forehead like Charles Manson is supposed to have) and asked, “Have you lost a little white-and-black puppy with simple markings, Samantha. I don’t think so. Have you? I don’t remember you having one today.” The boy had an unexpectedly youthful-sounding, nasally midwestern accent, the kind I’d been hearing in St. Louis that week, although it had been high-priced attorneys who were speaking it. I know little enough about young people, but it occurred to me that this boy was possibly one of these lawyers’ children, someone whose likeness you’d see on a milk carton or a website devoted to runaways.

“Ah, no,” the girl said, then suddenly spewed out laughter.

The big, purple-haired boy looked up at me and produced a disdainful smile. His eyes were the darkest, steeliest blue, impenetrable and intelligent.

“What are you doing sitting here?” I wanted to say to him. “I know you left your dog at my house. You should take it back. You should all go home now.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the boy said, mocking me, “but I don’t believe we’ll be able to help you in your important search.” He smirked around at his three friends.

I started to go. Then I stopped and handed him a paper sign and said, “Well, if you hear about a puppy missing anywhere.”

He said something as he took it. I don’t know what it was, or what he did with the sign when I was gone, because I didn’t look back.

That evening Sallie came home exhausted. We sat at the dining room table and drank a glass of wine. I told her I’d put up my signs all around, and she said she’d seen one and it looked fine. Then for a while she cried quietly because of disturbing
things she’d seen and heard at the AIDS hospice that afternoon, and because of various attitudes—typical New Orleans attitudes, she thought—voiced by some of the marathon organizers, which seemed callous and constituted right things done for wrong reasons, all of which made the world seem—to her, at least—an evil place. I have sometimes thought she might’ve been happier if we had chosen to have children or, failing that, if we’d settled someplace other than New Orleans, someplace less parochial and exclusive, a city like St. Louis, in the wide Middlewest—where you can be less personally involved in things but still be useful. New Orleans is a small town in so many ways. And we are not from here.

I didn’t mention what the puppy had done to the ligustrums, or the kids I’d confronted at the French Market, or her description of them having been absolutely correct. Instead I talked about my work on the Brownlow-Maisonette appeal, and about what good colleagues all the St. Louis attorneys had turned out to be, how much they’d made me feel at home in their understated, low-key offices and how this relationship would bear important fruit in our presentation before the Eighth Circuit. I talked some about the definition of negligence as it is applied to common carriers, and about the unexpected, latter-day reshapings of general tort law paradigms in the years since the Nixon appointments. And then Sallie said she wanted to take a nap before dinner, and went upstairs obviously discouraged from her day and from crying.

Sallie suffers, and has as long as I’ve known her, from what she calls her war dreams—violent, careering, antic, destructive Technicolor nightmares without plots or coherent scenarios, just sudden drop-offs into deepest sleep accompanied by images of dismembered bodies flying around and explosions and brilliant flashes and soldiers of unknown armies being hurtled through trap doors and hanged or thrust out through bomb bays into empty screaming space. These are terrible things I don’t even like to hear about and that would scare the wits out of anyone. She usually
awakes from these dreams slightly worn down, but not especially spiritually disturbed. And for this reason I believe her to be constitutionally very strong. Once I convinced her to go lie down on Dr. Merle Mackey’s well-known couch for a few weeks, and let him try to get to the bottom of all the mayhem. Which she willingly did. Though after a month and a half Merle told her—and told me privately at the tennis club—that Sallie was as mentally and morally sturdy as a race horse, and that some things occurred for no demonstrable reason, no matter how Dr. Freud had viewed it. And in Sallie’s case, her dreams (which have always been intermittent) were just the baroque background music of how she resides on the earth and didn’t represent, as far as he could observe, repressed memories of parental abuse or some kind of private disaster she didn’t want to confront in daylight. “Weirdness is part of the human condition, Bob,” Merle said. “It’s thriving all around us. You’ve probably got some taint of it. Aren’t you from up in Mississippi?” “I am,” I said. “Then I wouldn’t want to get
you
on my couch. We might be there forever.” Merle smirked like somebody’s presumptuous butler. “No, we don’t need to go into that,” I said. “No, sir,” Merle said, “we really don’t.” Then he pulled a big smile, and that was the end of it.

After Sallie was asleep I stood at the French doors again. It was nearly dark, and the tiny white lights she had strung up like holiday decorations in the cherry laurel had come on by their timer and delivered the garden into an almost Christmas-y lumination and loveliness. Dusk can be a magical time in the French Quarter—the sky so bright blue, the streets lush and shadowy. The puppy had come back to the middle of the garden and lain with his sharp little snout settled on his spotted front paws. I couldn’t see his little feral eyes, but I knew they were trained on me, where I stood watching him, with the yellow chandelier light behind me. He still wore my woven leather belt looped around his neck like a leash. He seemed as peaceful and as heedless as he was likely ever to be. I had set out some Vienna sausages in a plastic saucer, and beside it a red plastic mixing bowl full of
water—both where I knew he’d find them. I assumed he had eaten and drifted off to sleep before emerging, now that it was evening, to remind me he was still here, and possibly to express a growing sense of ease with his new surroundings. I was tempted to think what a strange, unpredictable experience it was to be him, so new to life and without essential defenses, and in command of little. But I stopped this thought for obvious reasons. And I realized, as I stood there, that my feelings about the puppy had already become slightly altered. Perhaps it was Sallie’s Swedish tough-mindedness influencing me; or perhaps it was the puppy’s seemingly untamable nature; or possibly it was all those other signs on all the other message boards and stapled to telephone poles which seemed to state in a cheerful but hopeless way that fate was ineluctable, and character, personality, will, even untamable nature were only its accidental by-products. I looked out at the little low, diminishing white shadow motionless against the darkening bricks, and I thought: all right, yes, this is where you are now, and this is what I’m doing to help you. In all likelihood it doesn’t really matter if someone calls, or if someone comes and takes you home and you live a long and happy life. What matters is simply a choice we make, a choice governed by time and opportunity and how well we persuade ourselves to go on until some other powerful force overtakes us. (We always hope it will be a positive and wholesome force, though it may not be.) No doubt this is another view one comes to accept as a lawyer—particularly one who enters events late in the process, as I do. I was, however, glad Sallie wasn’t there to know about these thoughts, since it would only have made her think the world was a heartless place, which it really is not.

The next morning I was on the TWA flight back to St. Louis. Though later the evening before, someone had called to ask if the lost puppy I’d advertised had been inoculated for various dangerous diseases. I had to admit I had no idea, since it wore no collar. It
seemed
healthy enough, I told the person.
(The sudden barking spasms and the spontaneous peeing didn’t seem important.) The caller was clearly an elderly black woman—she spoke with a deep Creole accent and referred to me once or twice as “baby,” but otherwise she didn’t identify herself. She did say, however, that the puppy would be more likely to attract a family if it had its shots and had been certified healthy by a veterinarian. Then she told me about a private agency uptown that specialized in finding homes for dogs with elderly and shut-in persons, and I dutifully wrote down the agency’s name—“Pet Pals.” In our overly lengthy talk she went on to say that the gesture of having the puppy examined and inoculated with a rabies shot would testify to the good will required to care for the animal and increase its likelihood of being deemed suitable. After a while I came to think this old lady was probably completely loony and kept herself busy dialing numbers she saw on signs at the laundromat, and yakking for hours about lost kittens, macramé classes, and Suzuki piano lessons, things she wouldn’t remember the next day. Probably she was one of our neighbors, though there aren’t that many black ladies in the French Quarter anymore. Still, I told her I’d look into her suggestion and appreciated her thoughtfulness. When I innocently asked her her name, she uttered a surprising profanity and hung up.

“I’ll do it,” Sallie said the next morning as I was putting fresh shirts into my two-suiter, making ready for the airport and the flight back to St. Louis. “I have some time today. I can’t let all this marathon anxiety take over my life.” She was watching out the upstairs window down to the garden again. I’m not sure what I’d intended to happen to the puppy. I suppose I hoped he’d be claimed by someone. Yet he was still in the garden. We hadn’t discussed a plan of action, though I had mentioned the Pet Pal agency.

“Poor little pitiful,” Sallie said in a voice of dread. She took a seat on the bed beside my suitcase, let her hands droop between her knees, and stared at the floor. “I went out there
and tried to play with it this morning, I want you to know this,” she said. “It was while you were in the shower. But it doesn’t know
how
to play. It just barked and peed and then snapped at me in a pretty hateful way. I guess it was probably funny to whoever had him that he acts that way. It’s a crime, really.” She seemed sad about it. I thought of the sinister blue-eyed, black-coated boy crouched in the fetid doorway across from the French Market with his new little dog and his three acolytes. They seemed like residents of one of Sallie’s war dreams.

“The Pet Pal people will probably fix things right up,” I said, tying my tie at the bathroom mirror. It was still unseasonably chilly in St. Louis, and I had on my wool suit, though in New Orleans it was already summery.

“If they
don’t
fix things up, and if no one calls,” Sallie said gravely, “then you have to take him to the shelter when you come back. Can we agree about that? I saw what he did to the plants. They can be replaced. But he’s really not our problem.” She turned and looked at me on the opposite side of our bed, whereon her long-departed Swedish grandmother had spent her first marriage night long ago. The expression on Sallie’s round face was somber but decidedly settled. She was willing to try to care about the puppy because it suited how she felt that particular day, and because I was going away and she knew it would make me feel better if she tried. It is an admirable human trait, and how undoubtedly most good deeds occur—because you have the occasion, and there’s no overpowering reason to do something else. But I was aware she didn’t really care what happened to the puppy.

“That’s exactly fine,” I said, and smiled at her. “I’m hoping for a good outcome. I’m grateful to you for taking him.”

“Do you remember when we went to Robert Frost’s cabin,” Sallie said.

“Yes, I do.” And surely I did.

“Well, when you come back from Missouri, I’d like us to go to Robert Frost’s cabin again.” She smiled at me shyly.

“I think I can do that,” I said, closing my suitcase. “Sounds great.”