Authors: Mark Nykanen
The road turned to dirt before it crossed a concrete bridge that looked as old as the city itself, and she wondered as she listened to her footfalls how it had managed to survive all the earthquakes.
Now the dirt road, no wider than an automobile, curved right, and she began to run uphill. To her left the buff-colored walls grew taller, steeper, until she came to a washout where the road had been devoured by a mudslide several years ago. She picked her way over the rocky surface before stepping up her pace again on the smoother dirt.
Her breath quickened as the grade increased, and the sun came alive on her head and back. Three miles up, three miles down. Take about an hour. She was no speedster, knew she’d never win a race; but she’d been lucky enough to have been born with thin genes, and she wanted to stay trim. Despite her pretty blue eyes and the lovely softness of her face, she considered her legs and back and bottom to be her finest physical features. Plenty of men agreed, judging by all the nods and smiles and hellos she received from the runners and mountain bikers who overtook her on the trail.
Today she ran alone; she’d started too late for trail traffic. The mountain biker who’d squeezed through the gate had long ago disappeared.
In about twenty minutes she’d reach the national forest fire station, her customary turn around point. She planned to take in the station’s broad view of the valley before starting back down.
Shadows blanketed her as she ran along a steep face, and the sudden rush of cool air reminded her that May still had its moments, even in southern California. The road switched back sharply under towering power lines, and as she came around a blind corner she almost ran right into a huge rottweiler.
The dog growled as she stumbled to the side, kicking up dust with her running shoes, never taking her eyes off the beast. Then she froze. She’d run into rattlesnakes, scuttled around them and kept on running, but the rottweiler filled her with fear. Where the hell was its owner? That’s all she wanted to know.
She wished she could have shooed the dog away with the confidence of other runners who never seemed concerned about the hounds on the trail. But the rottweiler scared her witless. Muzzle like the mouth of a cannon. Probably just as dangerous. People were getting mauled to death by these things. She’d wait for the owner, they couldn’t be too far off. They’d undoubtably wave, call the dog, and
maybe
apologize.
Even small dogs could give her a good fright. When she was five she’d been bitten by a cocker spaniel, of all things, a cute cuddly toy store sort of dog that had almost ripped out her left eye, which would have been a tragedy, given her life’s trajectory. She’d taken six stitches right below the eyebrow, and if she looked closely she could still make out the narrow ridge of hard skin.
Now she faced a black-and-tan beast that weighed more than she did. At least the growling had stopped, but the dog was clearly in no rush to leave. Where
was
his owner?
Definitely a male, too; with his long balls hanging down he looked like the Bad Bad Leroy Brown of doggiedom.
Then she saw that he didn’t have a collar. Not again.
Goddamn
them! She was furious enough to be profane. Another asshole had dropped off his dog in the national forest instead of taking him down to the shelter. She’d bet anything on it. They’d had problems with this in the neighborhood. Canines wandering out of the hills starving, thirsty, homeless, and hopeless. She’d called Animal Control a few times herself. Where were they now, when she really needed them?
He started licking the sweat streaming down her leg, and panting heavily. She backed away in disgust. He reminded her of certain other males she’d known, some even less appealing. Then it dawned on her that he might need water.
Oh crap, he was doing it again! His tongue felt
so
gross.
“No!” she shouted, surprising herself, surprised even more when he stopped licking her and stiffened.
Emboldened, she said, “Sit!” and lo and behold the beast sat.
For the first time in minutes, she caught her breath.
She pulled out her water bottle and took a quick drink. He cocked his head when he saw this, as supplicating a gesture as she had ever seen in an animal.
How the devil was she going to give him water? She looked around for a rock with a concave surface. Nothing, and the soil would soak it up in a second.
Would she piss him off royally if she squirted a stream in his face?
No way would she risk that. Then she thought about cupping her hand and filling it with water, shuddering over the prospect of that tongue again.
He continued to stare at her.
“Okay-okay.” She squeezed the bottle, and her palm filled.
He dove right into her hand, a head as large as her own. His tongue felt like some huge slimy sea creature, and it never stopped squirming until she’d emptied the bottle.
He gazed at her and shook his dark stump of a tail. She looked around again. As far as she could see the trail was as empty as the sky above.
“Come on,” she said, begrudging him her aborted run. “Let’s go.”
• • •
He was a perfect gentleman, settling on the patio outside her studio after inhaling a large stainless steel mixing bowl full of water, but turning his nose up at the organic Oatios she’d put out for him. Panting, panting, panting. She figured he was too hot to eat.
Huge. Absolutely huge, and she tried to calculate how much it would cost to feed him. That simply, he’d found a new master. The decision proved no more dramatic than her realization that she could surely afford to keep him, and that she didn’t fear him. The practical considerations, such as Chad’s reaction to having him here at the studio, and where the dog would stay during her extended trips to Portland, had not presented themselves yet.
“I’m taking a shower,” she said to him firmly. “I’ll be right back.”
What are you worried about, she asked herself as she stepped inside. That he’ll leave? Not likely. Leroy looked like the kind of guy who hung around for the duration. She’d known a few of his human counterparts. The last thing you needed to worry about was their leaving.
She closed the studio door, not about to trust him near the fragile vessels, and washed herself thoroughly, concentrating on the hand and leg that had been smothered by his tongue.
As she toweled off, she heard that growl again, but louder. It sounded like thunder, and someone—it must be Chad. Oh-no—was saying, “Easy boy.
Easy
.” But the growl was growing murderous. The beast, she now realized, hadn’t really growled at her at all.
She raced out to the patio and found Chad, ashen-faced and frozen against the wall with Leroy’s teeth fully bared, his muzzle wrinkled and fierce.
“Watch it, Lauren,” Chad said shakily. “Don’t come any closer.”
“No!” she shouted loudly. Leroy glanced at her and stopped growling.
“Leroy, come here. Now!”
“Leroy?” Chad said.
The dog ambled over to her, Bad Bad Leroy Brown style, a gait that betrayed nothing but raw confidence.
“Sit,” she commanded, starting to revel in her authority. The animal tucked his bottom between his hind legs.
“Good boy,” she whispered. Leroy’s stumpy tail swished back and forth like a metronome.
She looked over and noticed that one of Chad’s body parts was also moving, though far less rhythmically: his cheek was twitching like the tail of a startled cat.
“I just found him,” she protested.
“Your good buddy,
Leroy?
You just found him. Where? At some gang-bangers picnic?”
“Out there.” She pointed to the forest. “He was all alone.”
“I can’t imagine why. He’s such
good
company.”
“He was nice to me.”
“Well, that’s all that counts.”
“He was thirsty. He could’ve died out there.”
“He could have killed you.”
“No, you mean you were afraid he was going to kill
you.
He does fine with me. I like him. He’s big, he’s strong, he’s handsome, and he’s smart. And he listens to me.” The perfect guy, she thought, but she restrained herself from adding this.
“Do you know that along with pit bulls, they’re responsible for fifty percent of all the dog bites in the country each year?”
Chad was always doing that, coming up with some statistic to try to prove some point that she’d never agree with anyway.
“Does that include bites by police dogs?” That would surely up the ante.
“I don’t know,” Chad said honestly.
“Look, if he’d wanted to he could have had us both for lunch. He’s nice.”
“Nice!” Chad shouted. “He pinned me up against the goddamn wall,” he said as he took two angry steps toward her.
Bad move. Leroy, who would forevermore be called “that shithead” by Chad, stood up and issued a growl so chilling that Lauren thought he was going to slaughter her ex-boyfriend on the spot.
“I think,” she said in her most delicate voice, “that he doesn’t like you shouting at me.”
Though nervous herself, she reached down and petted Leroy’s aircraft carrier head, and without realizing it reinforced his already strongly protective instincts. Chad swallowed with difficulty, and she noticed for the first time how unpleasant his Adam’s apple appeared when it bobbed.
Leroy turned out to be a marvelous companion. He stuck by her side when she went for a run and didn’t bother anyone, though his intimidating appearance kept most strangers at bay. Surprisingly, he was positively charming with the children they’d encountered at the apartment complex, suffering their awkward and sometimes heavy-handed pats with at worst indifference.
He just wasn’t crazy about one particular big person, which made bringing him to the studio problematic. They’d tried having Chad feed him, but that didn’t make a dent in the dog’s deportment; Chad still caught a growl if he snapped at Lauren, which did have a salutary, if superficial, effect on his behavior. Chad’s that is.
By the end of that first week, though, the tension in the house reached the point where it came as no surprise to Lauren when Chad said, “I don’t want that shithead around here anymore.” He said this with the unmistakable undercurrent of ownership, the unspoken
I own this place, and don’t you forget it
.
“Oh Chad, sit down, you’re making him nervous,” she joked.
Once he might have laughed at that line. They might have laughed together, and their laughter would have been another sign of their love. When had they stopped laughing? Lauren wasn’t sure, but she knew that Chad used to be a funny guy, and had laughed so easily at her antics that he made her feel funny too; but they hadn’t shared those lighter moments in months, and the dry spell didn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.
“I don’t give a shit if I’m making him nervous,” Chad said in a voice so mellifluous that unless you spoke human you’d never have known he was angry (in a single week, Leroy had trained him well). “He’s big, he smells, and I don’t want him hanging around.”
“He does
not
smell.” Lauren considered herself especially sensitive to odors, and Leroy most definitely did not have a bad one. “And besides, how would you know if he smells. You never get close to him.”
“Is that a criticism? Is that a
criticism?
” Chad’s voice rose, and Leroy growled as if bored—
not this again.
“You’re kidding me, right? You’re not actually suggesting that I should get close to that … that
thing
.”
“It’s not about Leroy, is it?” She could as well have said, It’s about
you
, Chad, just as it’s always been about you: what you want, what you need, what you desire. But Chad flipped it around, as he always had.
“You got that right. It’s not about the damn dog, it’s about you! You’ve been incredibly distant for a long time now.”
“Distant? What the hell did you expect? We broke up, remember? You didn’t want to get married, remember?”
“That’s all you wanted to do,
get married,”
he said in a snide voice. “We needed breathing room. We needed—”
“Breathing room! We had enough breathing room to launch the America’s Cup. We had—”
“We needed to let our relationship grow.”
“Grow!” She yanked on her hair so hard that she honestly feared she’d uprooted two thick fistfuls. “Did I really hear you say that we needed to let our relationship grow? It had
years
to grow. It grew so much it turned into a jungle, and then it started choking on itself.”
“Yeah, and this is making me want to gag. I needed some breathing room and all you cared about was getting married.”
“Fine. Breathe. Hyperventilate for all I care.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Neither is the fact that I wanted to get married, and you treated it like the plague. I’m not going to apologize for that. I loved you.”
“You
loved
me? What? You don’t love me anymore?”
“I’m trying to get my life on track, okay? Maybe I should move my studio.” What a headache, though.
“Maybe you should!”
Lauren drove Leroy back to her apartment, still fuming over Chad. What the devil did he expect? Sure there was a gulf between them, but did he think they were just going to go back to the same old same old? Still, she hadn’t recognized how wide that gulf had grown until she’d met Ry, in the way an old sea captain might think about land only after passing an alluring isle.
Ry had been the one to back off that last night on the porch, saying that if she wasn’t sure about inviting him in, then he should leave.
“You’re right,” she’d conceded. “I’m not sure at all. But I think you’re wonderful.”
He’d taken her hand, stood her up, and kissed her so passionately that she’d actually started to swoon. She could still remember the feel of his back as she clutched it greedily.
Then he’d left with a quick good-bye, and all they’d done since was exchange email: his follow-up questions, her answers; no reference by either one of them to their dinner, their date, much less their desire.
She’d also received an email from Kerry. The girl was on the road to Stassler’s place in Moab. In no hurry, it seemed. She’d already spent a day mountain biking in the Columbia River Gorge, and planned to take another one to ride in Sun Valley.