The Dogs of Littlefield (12 page)

More people stopped to stare.

Then Boris vomited onto Emily's black coat and quit breathing. The young Indian man who had summoned them laid Boris out and tried to perform chest compressions, his heels rising out of the scuffed backs of his brown loafers; he had, George saw, a hole in one of his black socks. At last the young man straightened up, scowling, brushing at the knees of his thin gray trousers, on which two wet oblongs had appeared. No one remembered to thank him, and by the time George thought of it, the young man was gone.

Ashen-faced, Emily once more gathered the limp dog into her lap and sat on the sidewalk smoothing his long tangled fur in the lightly falling snow, while Nicholas knelt beside her in his yellow boots and red fireman's hat, clinging to her black coat with his small white hands, his voice high and insistent as he asked, again and again, if this was an emergency.

S
now was falling again, and although it
was midmorning it looked like late afternoon. Already the roofs of Littlefield wore snowy bonnets, fringed by icicles, and in the village berms of snow rose halfway up the poles of parking meters, and it was only the eighth of December.

Inside Duncklee Middle School, seventh-graders in Ms. Manookian's social studies class watched the snow fall prettily outside their classroom windows, speculating on whether school would be called off for tomorrow. The storm was expected to continue into the evening, with accumulations up to nine inches.

“It's always snowing these days,” said a child at the windows.

“Just like a snow globe,” said somebody else, for the second time.

The children enjoyed imagining another snow day and thinking about the video games they would play and the possibility of sledding; yet even they began to worry about the roads, having heard their parents complain about dreadful conditions, and to wonder about the weight of snow on rooftops and how much more snow their own roofs could bear before there was danger of collapse. For children the threat of peril is exciting, particularly when it comes to natural disasters; but the children of Littlefield had seen so much snow in the past few weeks that they had begun to fear something was out of balance in the universe. Then again, it was dark this time of year, the days getting shorter and shorter, which naturally made everyone a little uneasy.

— —

Julia Downing was sitting in
her newly assigned seat in the fourth row, looking over her homework in B Block. She liked to start every class by checking to make sure her homework was arranged neatly in her folders, which she had labeled with her label maker. Each morning she woke up half an hour before her parents to arrange her folders, brush her hair, and change her mind several times about the outfit she had laid out the night before. If there were a few minutes left before breakfast, she wrote in her journal, in which she kept a popularity record of the seventh grade. The top ten list shifted every day. As of last night, Amelia Epstein was top girl and Anthony Rabb was top boy. Julia reckoned her own numerical placement at seventythree.

While waiting for class to start, she took out her half-completed “Survey of Littlefield,” Ms. Manookian's assignment for Friday. Writing a survey of Littlefield did not strike Julia as the kind of social studies project that would prepare her for high school and college. Shouldn't they be studying important places, like Philadelphia? Ms. Manookian was new this year and probably didn't know she was supposed to be teaching them things that actually mattered.

If you were a historian surveying Littlefield today,
read the assignment sheet,
what would you notice and record for future generations?

Julia frowned at the lined paper she had just taken out of her folder.

Littlefield: The Present

23 banks, 7 nail salons, 12 hair salons, 3 electrolysis salons, 4 test preparation services, 9 jewelry stores, 6 dog groomers, 3 drugstores, 17 dentists, 7 orthodontists, 1,146 psychotherapists, 679 psychiatrists, 1 bagel shop, 1 bakery, 6 coffee shops, 2 Chinese restaurants, 3 pizza parlors, 1 ice cream parlor, 1 party supplies shop, 4 liquor stores, 4 yoga studios, 1 Chinese Baptist church, 1 Catholic church, 1 Episcopal church, 3 synagogues.

“I grant you poetic license,” Ms. Manookian had said in class last week when she assigned the survey. “Go wild!”

Hannah said that Ms. Manookian was a man, poetic license or not. Julia's mother, who overheard this remark while she was driving the soccer car pool right before Halloween, said that there was nothing wrong with being transgendered. Hannah said, “I didn't say there
was,
” then stared out of the window for the rest of the car ride home while Julia's mother went on about the importance of recognizing the truth about yourself, and then started talking about a book she'd just read about a blind boy who wanted to be a professional baseball player. Julia rolled her eyes at Hannah and mouthed
what a loser,
but Hannah ignored her. Hannah was still mad that Julia's mother had nixed the skirt part of their supermodels costume, though Julia had secretly been relieved. Her legs looked too skinny in skirts.

Julia guessed she was doing the assignment incorrectly because she had not gone wild but instead looked through the business pages of the telephone book.

As she considered the problem of going wild she thought of Freckles the cat, now missing from Littlefield forever.
1 park,
she added to her list in pencil.
1 woods, with coyotes, skunks & bears.
She was fairly sure there weren't any bears in the woods, but her pencil eraser was almost gone, and made smudges when she used it, and anyway poetic license, she reminded herself.

A few nights ago she'd heard her parents talking in their bedroom after they thought she'd gone to bed. It wasn't that she was eavesdropping, just sometimes she liked to sit on the hall carpet with her back against their door when she couldn't sleep. She and Hannah had once watched a scary movie about children who discovered their parents were dead and had been replaced by androids, programmed to say they weren't androids when questioned; but whenever the children weren't there, the android parents went silent and stood around like statues. Feeling the vibrations of her parents' voices through their bedroom door was like an old lullaby. Her mother said, “I saw one in the Fischmans' backyard and again one night when—”

Julia's father said something. Then her mother said in a low voice, “There's more and more of them.”

Now in class Julia added an insert sign before the word “coyotes” and wrote “a lot of” above it.

Standing at the blackboard, Ms. Manookian began B Block by saying she was going to read aloud from the
Globe
's “This Day in History” column, which she sometimes did to take up class time and give kids a chance to settle down and spit out their gum and hide their cell phones in their laps. She also sometimes read editorials from the
Gazette;
last week she read one about the dog that got poisoned right before Thanksgiving. “Woof, woof,” said Albert Chang when Ms. Manookian was done reading, and half the boys started barking. “It's not funny,” Hannah yelled at them. “What if it had been
your
dog?” Hannah was popular, so the boys stopped barking. If Julia had said the same thing they would have been howling.

Today Julia figured Ms. Manookian was reading the
Globe
to impress Mr. Anderman, the principal, who was observing the class along with the black lady who was living in the Fischmans' carriage house, whom Ms. Manookian had introduced, embarrassingly, as “the esteemed Dr. Watkins from Chicago.” Dr. Watkins had smiled and waved from her chair at the back of the classroom. She was wearing a green turban and an orange dress. Mr. Anderman sat beside her in his red bow tie and tweedy jacket, with his arms crossed, under a world map and a poster of Gandhi tacked to the white cinder-block wall.

Parents must have been complaining again about Ms. Manookian being disorganized. Last week they were supposed to be learning about taxation without representation. Instead Ms. Manookian told a long story about when she was a child and her mother took quarters from her piggy bank to help pay for Sunday night ice cream, but Ms. Manookian never got to choose the flavor. Then Brian Hobika raised his hand and wanted to know what flavor of ice cream Ms. Manookian's mother chose, which led to a discussion about the best ice cream flavors and why parents tend to like disgusting flavors like pistachio while kids like regular flavors like chocolate chip and cookie dough. It got kind of interesting, actually. But still, they were supposed to be talking about the American Revolution.

“ ‘Today is December eighth,' ” Ms. Manookian read aloud from the front of the classroom. “ ‘The 342nd day of the year.' ”

Albert Chang began flipping a pen back and forth on his desk. Ms. Manookian looked at him over the tops of her pink paisley reading glasses. Then she resumed reading.

“ ‘On this day in 1776, General George Washington's army crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, in retreat from the British.

“ ‘In 1863, President Lincoln announced his plan for the reconstruction of the South.

“ ‘In 1941, the United States entered World War Two, as Congress declared war on Japan, a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.' ”

She paused again, this time for dramatic effect.

“ ‘In 1982, a man demanding an end to nuclear weapons held the Washington Monument hostage, threatening to blow it up with explosives he claimed were inside a van. After a ten-hour standoff, Norman D. Mayer was shot to death by police. It turned out there were no explosives.' ”

Ms. Manookian flashed her big white teeth. Julia groaned silently. A teachable moment had appeared. Ms. Manookian would now ask them a bunch of questions (showing off for Mr. Anderman) to try to get them to connect George Washington crossing the Delaware in the wrong direction with Norman D. Mayer holding the Washington Monument hostage. Then a lesson plan would magically emerge. It would look as if Ms. Manookian had known all along that George Washington and Norman D. Mayer had done something on the same day and had been waiting for Tuesday, December 8, to present this coincidence to the class, when Julia would bet a hundred bucks that Ms. Manookian hadn't thought of it until five minutes ago.

Outside the classroom window hung heavy swags of telephone wires, exposed-looking now that the leaves were gone.

“So, class,” said Ms. Manookian in her gargly voice, “what's interesting about this day in history?”

Nothing.

“Did anyone notice that
several
important Americans are listed today?” Ms. Manookian looked fixedly out at the class. “Can anyone tell me who they were?”

“Lincoln,” shouted Brian Hobika from his front-row desk.

Julia saw Mr. Anderman uncross his arms and reach up to adjust his aviator glasses.

Brian had to sit in the front row because he had Issues. He was wearing his T-shirt inside out and backwards again, the tag in front. He had dark circles under his eyes. Hannah's mother had told Julia's mother that Brian's parents insisted that Brian did not need Ritalin, that he was only enthusiastic.

“Lincoln, Lincoln,” he chanted now, bouncing in his chair.

“Brian, please raise your hand and wait for me to call on you. Yes, President Lincoln was one. Who else, can anybody tell me?”

Hannah raised her hand from two rows in front of Julia. Ms. Manookian had moved their seats because they talked too much—or Hannah talked too much—when they sat together.

“George Washington. Our first president.”

“Very good. Thank you, Hannah.”

Hannah straightened the notebook on her desk. Julia wished she had a BB gun to shoot into the back of Hannah's ear. Hannah always thought she knew everything. Hannah was the one chosen to be in the geography bee last week. Hannah got to have an iPhone, while Julia's mother said iPhones for children were silly. Hannah was the star of the middle school chorus and got to have first pick of which boy in their grade was “hers” and of course chose Anthony Rabb. Now she had decided to be a vegetarian and kept saying her lunch was more nutritious and better for the planet. Hannah was number seven on the top ten list. Brian wasn't even in the top two hundred.

Mr. Anderman was leaning forward, elbows on the desk of his desk chair, chin propped on his fists. Beside him, Dr. Watkins was smiling at Ms. Manookian and taking notes on a pad.

Ms. Manookian smiled back. “But there was one
more
American mentioned, right at the very end of the passage I just read.”

The class stared at her blankly.

“Norman D. Mayer? Who tried to hold the Washington Monument hostage? Can
anyone
think of a connection between George Washington and Norman D. Mayer?”