Authors: Mark Nykanen
Leroy turned out to be neither. Leroy turned out to be comatose. This worried her. The vet said the pills would make him “woozy,” and suggested giving him an extra one for the flight. This was not woozy, this was dead weight, one hundred twenty-five pounds worth.
She stood up and eyed the skycap. He looked capable.
“I do need your help.”
“With that?” He pointed to the lump of black-and-tan fur.
“Yes, with the
dog
.” A surge of impatience unsteadied her.
“This is gonna cost you.”
She ground her teeth and did all she could to modulate her voice. “How much?”
Not that she had any choice. Although only a few feet separated the supine Leroy from the open door of the dog carrier, without some help the gap might as well be the Grand Canyon.
“We’ll do it on a sliding scale,” the skycap said. “Ten bucks if it’s easy. A whole bunch more if he bites.”
“He’s not going to bite. He’s drugged.”
The skycap appraised the dog. “Gonna take both of us, one on the head and one on the butt.”
“Fine. Which end do
you
want?”
“I don’t want the head,” he said quickly.
“Then I guess you get the butt end.”
“Ain’t it my life.”
He climbed in from the driver’s side and started pushing as Lauren pulled. Leroy moaned again, and this time one of his hind legs kicked out. The startled skycap scuttled back out the door.
Lauren asked him to come around the car. “I think we can do it from here now.”
She was holding Leroy’s head and shoulders; they felt like they weighed a lot more than the forty-pound bag of chow she’d bought him last week.
“Hey, Burt, get your sweet self over here,” the skycap shouted.
Lauren saw a box-shaped man ambling over.
“What you got here, a dead one?” he said.
“We got what you might call one very passed-out puppy,” said skycap number one.
“Then let’s wake his sleepy self up,” Burt said.
“
You
wake him up. Personally, I want him doing the Z’s.”
“Yeah, okay. What’s his name?”
“Leroy,” Lauren said.
“Leroy? I’ve known a few Leroys. Nasty boys. Hey, Leroy,” Burt said to the dog, “you living up to your name? Having yourself a good time?”
“He’s fixed,” Lauren said, feeling more than a touch testy. “Look, are you going to help us?”
“Sure-sure,” Burt said. “Here, give me his head. Take yourself a breather. Kenny, you can get his butt. You look like you could use some loving. Go on. We gonna do this on three.”
On three they did do it, shoveled the sleeping one right into the carrier, which Kenny, skycap number one, snapped shut in a hurry before turning to Lauren.
“You got anything else?”
“Yeah,” Burt laughed, “she’s got herself an ocelot in the front seat.”
“I just have a carry-on,” Lauren said.
When she didn’t reach for her wallet, Kenny’s smile disappeared faster than free food in a Chinese restaurant.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Hold on.” She dug out a twenty. “Can you split this?”
“Can Siegfried and Roy make one of those big white pussycats go bye-bye?” said the latecomer Burt, filching it from her hand so fast that his buddy didn’t stand a chance. But just as smoothly he peeled off a ten spot for him from a roll as big as Lauren’s fist, and slapped the top of the carrier with his broad hand.
“See you, Leroy.”
For Leroy, the flight to Salt Lake City proved restorative, although he still weaved a little as Lauren walked him out to the rental car.
She herded him into the backseat while a skycap loaded the carrier into the trunk.
Moab was about a five-hour drive, which meant a six o’clock arrival time. Perfect, because she had a dinner date with Ry.
She and Leroy left the city behind quickly, though its borders did appear to be expanding; everywhere she looked she spotted new subdivisions going up. They rose along the freeway like port towns along a river.
Leroy sat forward and placed both paws on the front seat.
“How are you, boy?”
She reached back and scratched his ear. He licked her hand, as he had her leg when they’d first met in the Angeles National Forest. It was an endearment that still made her squirm.
“Ready to do some searching?”
He yawned, and in the rearview mirror she saw his aptly named canines gleaming in the dark cavern of his mouth. What a mutt.
Finding a motel that would allow a dog turned out to be extremely trying. Perhaps it was
this
dog. One manager offered a “maybe,” and another said, “It kind of depends”; but both had refused when they spotted Leroy looming over the front seat.
“But he’s really very nice,” she protested to the second one.
“Try the Green Glow Inn downtown,” he snorted. “They’ll take anything.”
The Green Glow Inn looked like it had sprung up during the uranium fever that had swept through Moab in the fifties, and had fallen into disrepair ever since. The color of the neon sign that rose along the length of the second floor seemed like a reasonable enough facsimile of radium, but the lobby window had a five-foot crack that had been taped so long the glue had crystallized and the edges had curled up.
She found the lobby itself as beaten in appearance as the rug runner that led to the front desk. Behind it hunched a white-whiskered man with shrunken features and no discernible interest whatsoever in her presence, or in the business it could possibly represent. He was reading a hardcover book, and might just as well have hung a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on his pointy beak of a nose.
“Hi,” she said, trying to sound perky, but perky wasn’t in her weary repertoire today.
After turning a page, he scowled and said, “What do you want?”
“A room?” she said hesitantly.
“Sign here.” He thrust a yellowed form at her, along with a pencil that had been chewed down to a nub. Lovely.
“Do you take dogs?”
“Do I take dogs?” he repeated theatrically. “Does this look like a place that has any choice in the matter? What is it anyway?” He turned his rheumy eyes on her for the first time. “You look like the Pekingese type to me.”
“Kind of.”
“I thought so. Cash or charge?”
“Charge.” She handed him her American Express.
“Don’t take it. When you stay at the Green Glow Inn in Moab, Utah,” he mimicked the old commercial, “you better have Visa, or you’re outa luck, lady.”
“I’ve got Visa.”
“I’ve got a room for you and your pooch.”
To his credit, he laughed when she walked in with Leroy. Then he said, “I like you, lady. I like your style. What’s his name?”
“Leroy.”
“He looks like a Leroy. I’m Al, by the way. Al Jenkins.”
She waved as she started up the steps. They creaked like an iron wheel all the way to the second floor. No one ever ran out on a bill in this place, she thought.
The room appeared refreshingly clean and large. While it wasn’t exactly Four Seasons plush, it did have a double bed and bath, which included, much to her delight, an extra long tub. The last time she’d checked into a hotel like this was in Flagstaff, Arizona, another old downtown building, where Zane Grey was reputed to have written one of his westerns during a three-week stay. She and Chad had proceeded to ring the springs on the old bed for a good half hour before heading out for the evening. When they’d stepped into the hall, they’d found three geezers perched on an ancient divan, a smiling smirking conspiracy. She’d turned every shade of red in the spectrum of embarrassment.
“Okay,” she clapped her hands. Leroy looked up. “What do you say we take you for a walk, and then go get Ry?”
The huge hound wagged his stump.
Ry’s digs were much more upscale than the Green Glow Inn. He was staying on the newly minted motel strip.
HEATED POOL, CABLE, JACUZZI TUB
, crowed the marquee.
She called him from the lobby phone. He appeared moments later bearing a smile, open arms, and a hug that turned into as much of a kiss as either one of them apparently wished to display in public.
They ended up at a Thai restaurant with outdoor seating, a blessing to Leroy who’d spent the day cramped in a dog carrier, or in the backseat of cars.
“He’s a creep,” Ry said when Lauren asked about Stassler.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“I should never have worried about him canceling. He wants the publicity as much as any politician I’ve ever met. And right from the start he had his own agenda, which included finding out if the book was going to be all about him, or if I was going to include ‘lesser lights.’ His words.”
“You’re right, he really is a creep.”
“Then he wanted to know who these ‘lesser lights’ were, and when I told him he went off on how each of you,” Ry smiled reassuringly at her, “didn’t deserve my attention, or the ‘benefits’—can you believe it?—of any association with him.”
“Okay, cut to the chase. What did he say about me?”
Ry waved his hand as if the words of such a well-regarded sculptor were of little consequence.
“I want to know, Ry. Tell me.”
“It hardly bears repeating, but if you really want to hear it he said that you’ve received a lot of attention because you’re a woman in a man’s field, and because you had challenged the ‘hierarchal importance of bronze.’” Ry used his fingers to indicate the quotation marks.
“Which he would see as heresy.”
“Yes, I think it’s safe to say that that definitely offends him.”
Ry reached across the table and took her hand. “Lauren, he’s so obnoxious that I wouldn’t even bother with him, but to do this book without including him would be like writing a survey of contemporary literature and ignoring someone like Norman Mailer just because you don’t like his persona.”
“Except Mailer is good. Mailer wrote
The Executioner’s Song
—”
“And Stassler has done the
Family Planning
series. He’s very good too.”
Arguable, but Lauren was in no mood to press the point. Instead, she asked him what else Stassler had said.
“About you?”
“About me. And the others.”
“He said you were a product of political correctness, and that as soon as it went out of fashion, your work would be forgotten.”
“I never knew I was in fashion.”
Ry laughed. “You should take it as a compliment. He got himself more worked up about you than the other three combined.”
“But they’re all men.”
“True.”
“Maybe it’s not me at all. Maybe he hates women.”
“He certainly doesn’t have any of them out there. That’s another thing about him, he’s living in the middle of nowhere. He’s got a big house, a big beautiful barn, and that foundry, and he’s all by himself. Not even a dog, or a cat, not that I could see. Hundreds of acres, and no sign of any other living thing. If it seemed strange to me, I got to think it must have seemed really strange to Kerry.”
“What did he say when you asked about her?”
“I didn’t have to. He brought her up. And I’ll tell you, he sounded really worried about her. He said he called the sheriff as soon as he realized she was missing.”
“So you didn’t pick up any strange vibes?”
“Sure, lots of them, but not about Kerry. He said the sheriff came right out, and he let them look wherever they wanted.”
“How decent of him.”
Ry shrugged. “He hates the publicity he’s getting, reporters calling all hours of the day and night, and flying over his foundry. I think that’s at least part of the reason he’s going ahead with these interviews. The book’s the kind of attention he wants. He said he really liked Kerry, by the way. He thought her work showed a lot of promise.”
Lauren nodded, and only now noticed his hand on hers, so preoccupied had she been with the subject of Ashley Stassler. Ry’s hand was soft, not at all like a sculptor’s. She felt self-conscious about her calluses; more so when he peeled her rough fingers open and kissed her bumpy palm.
“I’ve missed you.” His brown eyes held hers until she squeezed his hand and looked away, unbearably uncomfortable and not knowing why.
“You going back out there tomorrow?”
“No, not tomorrow. He said to come back on Thursday. I guess he’s planning to put me to work.”
“Did he say on what?”
“No, and I didn’t ask.”
“Better be careful,” she turned to him, “those hands of yours might get a blister.”
“A blister!” He held them up in mock horror. “Never. These are the hands of a reporter. Soft, like baby’s butt,” he said with a silly Russian accent.
“I’ve noticed,” but she had to force the words as much as the smile that budded briefly on her face, and she realized that she was in no mood to flirt with the man she’d been longing to see for weeks. For this, and for so much more, she cursed Ashley Stassler in silence.
They drove into downtown Moab and parked, then strolled past several lampposts with Kerry’s picture on them, as well as a dozen or so bicycles until they found an ice cream shop. It didn’t take long; ice cream shops were as common in Utah as espresso stands were in Portland.
Lauren got a pistachio cone, Ry a mango frozen yogurt, and Leroy got to check out a standard poodle with a big red bow rising from a puff of white hair on the top of her bony head. Much to Lauren’s shock, he promptly tried to hump her.
She pulled him off, but the poodle’s owner wasn’t mollified by Lauren’s urgent apology. The woman acted as if her precious dog had been mugged in a park.
“He’s fixed,” Lauren said, lest the woman think anything truly untoward could have transpired.
But she was already hurrying Fifi away, although her dog, its red bow all cockeyed from Leroy’s frisky overture, might have had other ideas (and perhaps a taste for rough trade) because she kept stopping to glance back at her roguish suitor.
“I thought deballing him would put a stop to that,” Lauren appealed to Ry.
He cast a dubious eye on her hound. “I think we’re talking habit here, probably reinforced by lots of positive feedback over the years. I’ll bet he keeps trying to do that till the day he dies.”
Leroy looked up with what Lauren could describe only as a leer, as if to confirm what his brother male had just said.