Fear Nothing (11 page)

His cries grew as thin as the whistle-hiss of a glassblower shaping a vase over a flame, so soft that they did not even disturb the nearest of our neighbors, yet there was such wretchedness in the sound that I was shaken by it. With those cries he shaped a misery darker than the darkest glass and stranger in form than anything a blower could blow.

He was uninjured and did not appear to be ill. For all I could tell, the sight of the stars themselves was the thing that filled him with torment. Yet if the vision of dogs is as poor as we are taught, they can’t see the stars well or at all. And why should stars cause Orson such anguish, anyway, or the night that was no deeper than other nights before it? Nevertheless, he gazed skyward and made tortured sounds and didn’t respond to my reassuring voice.

When I put a hand on his head and stroked his back, I felt hard shudders passing through him. He sprang to his feet and padded away, only to turn and stare at me from a distance, and I swear that for a while he hated me. He loved me as always; he was still my dog, after all, and could not escape loving me; but at the same time, he hated me intensely. In the warm July air, I could virtually feel the cold hatred radiating off him. He paced the yard, alternately staring at me—holding my gaze as only he among all dogs is able to hold it—and looking at the sky, now stiff and shaking with rage, now weak and mewling with what seemed despair.

When I’d told Bobby Halloway about this, he’d said that dogs are incapable of hating anyone or of feeling anything as complex as genuine despair, that their emotional lives are as simple as their intellectual lives. When I insisted on my interpretation, Bobby had said, “Listen, Snow, if you’re going to keep coming here to bore my ass off with this New Age crap, why don’t you just buy a shotgun and blow my brains out? That would be more merciful than the excruciatingly slow death you’re dealing out now, bludgeoning me with your tedious little stories and your moronic philosophies. There are limits to human endurance, Saint Francis—even to mine.”

I know what I know, however, and I know Orson hated me that July night, hated me and loved me. And I know that something in the sky tormented him and filled him with despair: the stars, the blackness, or perhaps something he imagined.

Can dogs imagine? Why not?

I know they dream. I’ve watched them sleep, seen their legs kick as they chase dream rabbits, heard them sigh and whimper, heard them growl at dream adversaries.

Orson’s hatred that night did not make me fear him, but I feared
for
him. I knew his problem was not distemper or any physical ailment that might have made him dangerous to me, but was instead a malady of the soul.

Bobby raves brilliantly at the mention of souls in animals and splutters ultimately into a tremendously entertaining incoherence. I could sell tickets. I prefer to open a bottle of beer, lean back, and have the whole show to myself.

Anyway, throughout that long night, I sat in the yard, keeping Orson company even though he might not have wanted it. He glowered at me, remarked upon the vaulted sky with razor-thin cries, shuddered uncontrollably, circled the yard, circled and circled until near dawn, when at last he came to me, exhausted, and put his head in my lap and did not hate me anymore.

Just before sunrise, I went upstairs to my room, ready for bed hours earlier than usual, and Orson came with me. Most of the time, when he chooses to sleep to my schedule, he curls near my feet, but on this occasion he lay on his side with his back to me, and until he slept, I stroked his burly head and smoothed his fine black coat.

I myself slept not at all that day. I lay thinking about the hot summer morning beyond the blinded windows. The sky like an inverted blue porcelain bowl with birds in flight around its rim. Birds of the day, which I had seen only in pictures. And bees and butterflies. And shadows ink-pure and knife-sharp at the edges as they never can be in the night. Sweet sleep couldn’t pour into me because I was filled to the brim with bitter yearning.

Now, nearly three years later, as I opened the kitchen door and stepped onto the back porch, I hoped that Orson wasn’t in a despondent mood. This night, we had no time for therapy either for him or for me.

My bicycle was on the porch. I walked it down the steps and rolled it toward the busy dog.

In the southwest corner of the yard, he had dug half a dozen holes of various diameters and depths, and I had to be careful not to twist an ankle in one of them. Across that quadrant of the lawn were scattered ragged clumps of uprooted grass and clods of earth torn loose by his claws.

“Orson?”

He did not respond. He didn’t even pause in his frenzied digging.

Giving him a wide berth to avoid the spray of dirt that fanned out behind his excavating forepaws, I went around the current hole to face him.

“Hey, pal,” I said.

The dog kept his head down, his snout in the ground, sniffing inquisitively as he dug.

The breeze had died, and the full moon hung like a child’s lost balloon in the highest branches of the melaleucas.

Overhead, nighthawks dived and soared and barrel-looped, crying
peent-peent-peent
as they harvested flying ants and early-spring moths from the air.

Watching Orson at work, I said, “Found any good bones lately?”

He stopped digging but still didn’t acknowledge me. Urgently he sniffed the raw earth, the scent of which rose even to me.

“Who let you out here?”

Sasha might have brought him outside to toilet, but I was sure that she would have returned him to the house afterward.

“Sasha?” I asked nevertheless.

If Sasha were the one who had left him loose to wreak havoc on the landscaping, Orson was not going to rat on her. He wouldn’t meet my eyes lest I read the truth in them.

Abandoning the hole he had just dug, he returned to a previous pit, sniffed it, and set to work again, seeking communion with dogs in China.

Maybe he knew that Dad was dead. Animals know things, as Sasha had noted earlier. Maybe this industrious digging was Orson’s way of working off the nervous energy of grief.

I lowered my bicycle to the grass and hunkered down in front of the burrowing fiend. I gripped his collar and gently forced him to pay attention to me.

“What’s wrong with you?”

His eyes had in them the darkness of the ravaged soil, not the brighter glimmering darkness of the starry sky. They were deep and unreadable.

“I’ve got places to go, pal,” I told him. “I want you to come with me.”

He whined and twisted his head to look at the devastation all around him, as though to say that he was loath to leave this great work unfinished.

“Come morning, I’m going to stay at Sasha’s place, and I don’t want to leave you here alone.”

His ears pricked, although not at the mention of Sasha’s name or at anything I had said. He wrenched his powerful body around in my grip to look toward the house.

When I let go of his collar, he raced across the yard but then stopped well short of the back porch. He stood at attention, head raised high, utterly still, alert.

“What is it, fella?” I whispered.

From a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, even with the breeze dead and the night hushed, I could barely hear his low growl.

On my way out of the house, I had dialed the switches all the way off, leaving lightless rooms behind me. Blackness still filled the place, and I could see no ghostly face pressed to any of the panes.

Orson sensed someone, however, because he began to back away from the house. Suddenly he spun around with the agility of a cat and raced toward me.

I raised my bike off its side, onto its wheels.

Tail low but not tucked between his legs, ears flattened against his head, Orson shot past me to the back gate.

Trusting in the reliability of canine senses, I joined the dog at the gate without delay. The property is surrounded by a silvered cedar fence as tall as I am, and the gate is cedar, too. The gravity latch was cold under my fingers. Quietly I slipped it open and silently cursed the squeaking hinges.

Beyond the gate is a hard-packed dirt footpath bordered by houses on one side and by a narrow grove of old red-gum eucalyptuses on the other. As we pushed through the gate, I half expected someone to be waiting for us, but the path was deserted.

To the south, beyond the eucalyptus grove, lies a golf course and then the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club. At this hour on a Friday night, viewed between the trunks of the tall trees, the golf course was as black and rolling as the sea, and the glittering amber windows of the distant inn were like the portals on a magnificent cruise ship forever bound for far Tahiti.

To the left, the footpath led uphill toward the heart of town, ultimately terminating in the graveyard adjacent to St. Bernadette’s, the Catholic church. To the right, it led downhill toward the flats, the harbor, and the Pacific.

I shifted gears and cycled uphill, toward the graveyard, with the eucalyptus perfume reminding me of the light at a crematorium window and of a beautiful young mother lying dead upon a mortician’s gurney, but with good Orson trotting alongside my bike and with the faint strains of dance music filtering across the golf course from the inn, and with a baby crying in one of our neighbors’ houses to my left, but with the weight of the Glock pistol in my pocket and with nighthawks overhead snapping insects in their sharp beaks: the living and the dead all together in the trap of land and sky.

11

I wanted to talk to Angela Ferryman, because her message on my answering machine had seemed to promise revelations. I was in the mood for revelations.

First, however, I had to call Sasha, who was waiting to hear about my father.

I stopped in St. Bernadette’s cemetery, one of my favorite places, a harbor of darkness in one of the more brightly lighted precincts of town. The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns, supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns, and the quiet space below is laid out in aisles similar to those in any library; the gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those who have been blotted from the pages of life, who may be forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.

Orson wandered, though not far from me, sniffing the spoor of the squirrels that, by day, gathered acorns off the graves. He was not a hunter tracking prey but a scholar satisfying his curiosity.

From my belt, I unclipped my cellular phone, switched it on, and keyed in Sasha Goodall’s mobile number. She answered on the second ring.

“Dad’s gone,” I said, meaning more than she could know.

Earlier, in anticipation of Dad’s death, Sasha had expressed her sorrow. Now her voice tightened slightly with grief so well controlled that only I could have heard it: “Did he…did he go easy at the end?”

“No pain.”

“Was he conscious?”

“Yeah. We had a chance to say good-bye.”

Fear nothing.

Sasha said, “Life stinks.”

“It’s just the rules,” I said. “To get in the game, we have to agree to stop playing someday.”

“It still stinks. Are you at the hospital?”

“No. Out and about. Rambling. Working off some energy. Where’re you?”

“In the Explorer. Going to Pinkie’s Diner to grab breakfast and work on my notes for the show.” She would be on the air in three and a half hours. “Or I could get takeout, and we could go eat somewhere together.”

“I’m not really hungry,” I said truthfully. “I’ll see you later though.”

“When?”

“You go home from work in the morning, I’ll be there. I mean, if that’s okay.”

“That’s perfect. Love you, Snowman.”

“Love you,” I replied.

“That’s our little mantra.”

“It’s our truth.”

I pushed
end
on the keypad, switched off the phone, and clipped it to my belt again.

When I cycled out of the cemetery, my four-legged companion followed but somewhat reluctantly at first. His head was full of squirrel mysteries.

I made my way to Angela Ferryman’s house as far as possible by alleyways where I was not likely to encounter much traffic and on streets with widely spaced lampposts. When I had no choice but to pass under clusters of streetlamps, I pedaled hard.

Faithfully, Orson matched his pace to mine. He seemed happier than he had been earlier, now that he could trot at my side, blacker than any nightshadow that I could cast.

We encountered only four vehicles. Each time, I squinted and looked away from the headlights.

Angela lived on a high street in a charming Spanish bungalow that sheltered under magnolia trees not yet in bloom. No lights were on in the front rooms.

An unlocked side gate admitted me to an arbor-covered passage. The walls and arched ceiling of the arbor were entwined with star jasmine. In summer, sprays of the tiny five-petaled white flowers would be clustered so abundantly that the lattice would seem to be draped with multiple layers of lace. Even this early in the year, the hunter-green foliage was enlivened by those pinwheel-like blooms.

While I breathed deeply of the jasmine fragrance, savoring it, Orson sneezed twice.

I wheeled my bike out of the arbor and around to the back of the bungalow, where I leaned it against one of the redwood posts that supported the patio cover.

“Be vigilant,” I told Orson. “Be big. Be bad.”

He chuffed as though he understood his assignment. Maybe he
did
understand, no matter what Bobby Halloway and the Rationality Police would say.

Beyond the kitchen windows and the translucent curtains was a slow pulse of candlelight.

The door featured four small panes of glass. I rapped softly on one of them.

Angela Ferryman drew aside the curtain. Her quick nervous eyes pecked at me—and then at the patio beyond me to confirm that I had come alone.

With a conspiratorial demeanor, she ushered me inside, locking the door behind us. She adjusted the curtain until she was convinced that no gap existed through which anyone could peer in at us.

Though the kitchen was pleasantly warm, Angela was wearing not only a gray sweat suit but also a navy-blue wool cardigan over the sweats. The cable-knit cardigan might have belonged to her late husband; it hung to her knees, and the shoulder seams were halfway to her elbows. The sleeves had been rolled so often that the resultant cuffs were as thick as great iron manacles.

In this bulk of clothing, Angela appeared thinner and more diminutive than ever. Evidently she remained chilly; she was virtually colorless, shivering.

She hugged me. As always it was a fierce, sharp-boned,
strong
hug, though I sensed in her an uncharacteristic fatigue.

She sat at the polished-pine table and invited me to take the chair opposite hers.

I took off my cap and considered removing my jacket as well. The kitchen was too warm. The pistol was in my pocket, however, and I was afraid it might fall out on the floor or knock against the chair as I pulled my arms from the coat sleeves. I didn’t want to alarm Angela, and she was sure to be frightened by the gun.

In the center of the table were three votive candles in little ruby-red glass containers. Arteries of shimmering red light crawled across the polished pine.

A bottle of apricot brandy also stood on the table. Angela had provided me with a cordial glass, and I half filled it.

Her
glass was full to the brim. This wasn’t her first serving, either.

She held the glass in both hands, as if taking warmth from it, and when she raised it with both hands to her lips, she looked more waiflike than ever. In spite of her gauntness, she could have passed for thirty-five, nearly fifteen years younger than her true age. At this moment, in fact, she seemed almost childlike.

“From the time I was a little girl, all I ever really wanted to be was a nurse.”

“And you’re the best,” I said sincerely.

She licked apricot brandy from her lips and stared into her glass. “My mother had rheumatoid arthritis. It progressed more quickly than usual. So fast. By the time I was six, she was in leg braces and using crutches. Shortly after my twelfth birthday, she was bedridden. She died when I was sixteen.”

I could say nothing meaningful or helpful about that. No one could have. Any words, no matter how sincerely meant, would have tasted as false as vinegar is bitter.

Sure enough, she had something important to tell me, but she needed time to marshal all the words into orderly ranks and march them across the table at me. Because whatever she had to tell me—it scared her. Her fear was visible: brittle in her bones and waxy in her skin.

Slowly working her way to her true subject, she said, “I liked to bring my mother things when she couldn’t get them easily herself. A glass of iced tea. A sandwich. Her medicine. A pillow for her chair. Anything. Later, it was a bedpan. And toward the end, fresh sheets when she was incontinent. I never minded that, either. She always smiled at me when I brought her things, smoothed my hair with her poor swollen hands. I couldn’t heal her, or make it possible for her to run again or dance, couldn’t relieve her pain or her fear, but I could
attend
her, make her comfortable, monitor her condition—and doing those things was more important to me than…than anything.”

The apricot brandy was too sweet to be called brandy but not as sweet as I had expected. Indeed, it was potent. No amount of it could make me forget my parents, however, or Angela her mother.

“All I ever wanted to be was a nurse,” she repeated. “And for a long time it was satisfying work. Scary and sad, too, when we lost a patient, but mostly rewarding.” When she looked up from the brandy, her eyes were pried wide open by a memory. “God, I was so scared when you had appendicitis. I thought I was going to lose my little Chris.”

“I was nineteen. Not too little.”

“Honey, I’ve been your visiting nurse since you were diagnosed when you were a toddler. You’ll always be a little boy to me.”

I smiled. “I love you, too, Angela.”

Sometimes I forget that the directness with which I express my best emotions is unusual, that it can startle people and—as in this case—move them more deeply than I expect.

Her eyes clouded with tears. To repress them, she bit her lip, but then she resorted to the apricot brandy.

Nine years ago, I’d had one of those cases of appendicitis in which the symptoms do not manifest until the condition is acute. After breakfast, I suffered mild indigestion. Before lunch, I was vomiting, red-faced, and gushing sweat. Stomach pain twisted me into the curled posture of a shrimp in the boiling oil of a deep fryer.

My life was put at risk because of the delay caused by the need for extraordinary preparations at Mercy Hospital. The surgeon was not, of course, amenable to the idea of cutting open my abdomen and conducting the procedure in a dark—or even dimly lighted—operating room. Yet protracted exposure to the bright lights of the surgery was certain to result in a severe burn to any skin not protected from the glare, risking melanoma but also inhibiting the healing of the incision. Covering everything below the point of incision—from my groin to my toes—was easy: a triple layer of cotton sheeting pinned to prevent it from slipping aside. Additional sheeting was used to improvise complex tenting over my head and upper body, designed to protect me from the light but also to allow the anesthesiologist to slip under from time to time, with a penlight, to take my blood pressure and my temperature, to adjust the gas mask, and to ensure that the electrodes from the electrocardiograph remained securely in place on my chest and wrists to permit continued monitoring of my heart. Their standard procedure required that my abdomen be draped except for a window of exposed skin at the site of the surgery, but in my case this rectangular window had to be reduced to the narrowest possible slit. With self-retaining retractors to keep the incision open and judicial use of tape to shield the skin to the very lip of the cut, they dared to slice me. My guts could take all the light that my doctors wanted to pour into them—but by the time they got that far, my appendix had burst. In spite of a meticulous cleanup, peritonitis ensued; an abscess developed and was swiftly followed by septic shock, requiring a second surgical procedure two days later.

After I recovered from septic shock and was no longer in danger of imminent death, I lived for months with the expectation that what I had endured might trigger one of the neurological problems related to XP. Generally these conditions develop after a burn or following long-term cumulative exposure to light—or for reasons not understood—but sometimes they apparently can be engendered by severe physical trauma or shock. Tremors of the head or the hands. Hearing loss. Slurred speech. Even mental impairment. I waited for the first signs of a progressive, irreversible neurological disorder—but they never came.

William Dean Howells, the great poet, wrote that death is at the bottom of everyone’s cup. But there is still some sweet tea in mine.

And apricot brandy.

After taking another thick sip from her cordial glass, Angela said, “All I ever wanted was to be a nurse, but look at me now.”

She wanted me to ask, and so I did: “What do you mean?”

Gazing at captive flames through a curve of ruby glass, she said, “Nursing is about life. I’m about death now.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but I waited.

“I’ve done terrible things,” she said.

“I’m sure you haven’t.”

“I’ve seen others do terrible things, and I haven’t tried to stop them. The guilt’s the same.”

“Could you have stopped them if you’d tried?”

She thought about that awhile. “No,” she said, but she looked no less troubled.

“No one can carry the whole world on her shoulders.”

“Some of us better try,” she said.

I gave her time. The brandy was fine.

She said, “If I’m going to tell you, it has to be now. I don’t have much time. I’m becoming.”

“Becoming?”

“I feel it. I don’t know who I’ll be a month from now, or six months. Someone I won’t like to be. Someone who terrifies me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.”

“How can I help?” I asked.

“No one can help. Not you. Not me. Not God.” Having shifted her gaze from the votive candles to the golden liquid in her glass, she spoke quietly but fiercely: “We’re screwing it up, Chris, like we always do, but this is bigger than we’ve ever screwed up before. Because of pride, arrogance, envy…we’re losing it, all of it. Oh, God, we’re losing it, and already there’s no way to turn back, to undo what’s been done.”

Although her voice was not slurred, I suspected that she had drunk more than one previous glass of apricot brandy. I tried to take comfort in the thought that drink had led her to exaggerate, that whatever looming catastrophe she perceived was not a hurricane but only a squall magnified by mild inebriation.