The Dogs of Littlefield (15 page)

“Oh, for God's sake,” she said.

“Are you
sure
you don't need any help?” Naomi asked, touching his sleeve as he passed her chair on his way to the kitchen. “Please just let me know if I can help.”

In the kitchen, Margaret's back was to him; she was hovering by the stove, a dish towel in her hands. The savory fragrance of baked ham lit the air, reminding Bill of Christmases when he was a child: the bustle and anticipation in the days before, the almost painful joy when he awoke that morning, the sight of his father in his plaid flannel bathrobe, his wide pink face smiling at the bottom of the stairs, as he called out, “Looks like we've had a visitor!”

“How could you?” Margaret said, turning around, her face livid above her black dress and pearls. “How could you invite
him
?”

“I thought you'd be glad.”

“Glad! Are you crazy? He's a complete ass.”

“Sorry.” He held up both palms. “I thought you liked his book. I was
trying,
” he added in a hurt voice that he realized sounded self-pitying, “to do something nice for you. You always say I don't think about you. Well, I was thinking about you.”

She shook her head and reached for her glass of wine on the counter. When she put it back down, she said grimly, “How do you know him, anyway?”

“I met him in Walgreens. We started talking about baseball and then got on to gyms. I've got to do something about my back. It's been killing me.”

Margaret looked at him for a long moment as if she were having trouble believing what she was seeing. At last she said, “You know what, I am so incredibly tired.” She turned back to the stove. “Tonight has pushed me right over the edge.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“No, you're not.”

“Of course I'm sorry you're tired.”

“Something's burning,” she said to the stove.

— —

When Bill returned to the
living room the conversation was once again revolving around dogs and recent editorials in the
Gazette
. He added another log to the fire. The wind had picked up outside; everyone could hear it sob and moan as it rushed around the house.

“Very unfortunate, Hedy,” Stan Melman was saying in a lenient voice. “But a poisoned dog is not an example of general inhumanity.”

“Five dogs.”

“What we need,” said Naomi, “is a real clue.”

“A
clue,
Mom?” sneered Matthew. “What are you, Sherlock Holmes?”

Bill saw Stan put a hand on Naomi's knee.

Three weeks ago, a Littlefield police officer had discovered Matthew passed out behind the wheel of his mother's minivan on Brooks Street at two in the morning, an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps on the seat beside him; the officer also discovered Matthew only had a learner's permit. This incident had been written up in the “Crime Watch” column of the
Gazette
and was therefore known to everyone in the room. Naomi had told Margaret he was having separation issues.

“A
clue,
” repeated Matthew sulkily.

“I just think it's so sad,” sighed Hannah Melman, smoothing her dark ponytail.

She was keeping her chin low and her eyes very wide as she sat on the carpet, gazing up at Aaron and Bradley Wechsler with her lips parted. “The glare,” Bill had overheard Hannah and Julia call this pose last weekend when Hannah was sleeping over. They were discussing “the glare” in Julia's bathroom as they hung over the sink to peer into the mirror when he happened to pass by. Something to do with supermodels. He tried to imagine Hannah as a supermodel. More likely than Julia, but too much nose. What he knew of supermodels came from leafing through Victoria's Secret catalogs that arrived at the house. Lately he'd been monitoring himself for a reaction. Legs, breasts. Nothing. Like looking at wax fruit.

Nice kid, though. At least she kept her hair out of her face.

When he glanced away from Hannah, he realized that Clarice Watkins was looking at him. He gave her a tentative smile.

“Hannah,” said Naomi, “are your braces bothering you?”

“No,” said Hannah glacially.

“Then close your mouth, please.”

“What about the Middle Easterners?” Dr. Doom spoke up from her armchair by the fire. “Don't forget about the Middle Easterners.”

“What
about
the Middle Easterners?” Stan Melman was stroking his beard.

“Marv always says you cannot discount the Middle East. Do you know, there is a young Muslim man I see sometimes on Brooks Street when I take my early walk. Very angry-looking and never says hello. Looks like he'd like to blow something up.”

“Ahmed.” Clarice Watkins startled everyone; it sounded as if she had just said “amen.” But it was a Pakistani law student to whom she was referring, an employee at the Forge Café who came in to bake doughnuts every morning. She explained that she frequently breakfasted at the Forge, where they had become acquainted. He was interested in torts. Ahmed Bhopali.

“I believe he's Hindu,” she added, smiling.

“Towel heads.” Smirking, Matthew took a handful of Goldfish and began tossing them into his mouth, one by one, missing several times. Behind him an icicle slipped from the tree and tinkled onto the floor. In her armchair Clarice Watkins stirred, her smile widening.

“Is Pakistan part of the Middle East?” asked Hannah.

Last week, after Bill had asked twice at dinner about her day at school, Julia revealed that Hannah had been a contestant in the middle school geography bee but was eliminated when she did not know that the Wabash River divided Indiana from Illinois.

“I wouldn't have known that, either,” Bill had said, to show Julia he was paying attention, but she'd looked at him like he'd admitted to shaving with a carrot peeler.

Why was no gesture he made the right gesture? Lately everything he did seemed ungainly. The wrong presents, the wrong invitations, the wrong comments. He'd been convinced his problem was Margaret, that she was depressing, that he didn't feel anything for her, except guilt, and that he'd feel more with someone else, someone younger, sexier. But now he was starting to wonder if the problem was something inert and insensible about him.

I feel like a stiff, he repeated to himself.

“Why would Middle Easterners want to poison Boris?” George was asking.

“Religious differences.” Dr. Doom was now gazing at the fire. Her wizened face held the ancient look of someone who has not slept through the night in decades, and her dark little eyes glittered in the firelight. “You think the world is secular because that is how we are in this town. As Marv says, we are living in a bubble.” Her accent made it sound as if she'd said “bauble.”

Could I actually be dead, thought Bill, and not know it? Wasn't there a movie about a guy like that? Just how wrong about life was it possible to be?

Once more the chimney moaned. Aaron and Bradley Wechsler went back to staring at their iPhones as the Melmans began asking George about his days teaching high school. Did he miss it? (No.) Had he found the kids to be unusually cynical? (Yes.) In Naomi's opinion, cynicism was an appropriate deflective technique among adolescents in a culture that sexualized childhood. Little girls dressing like Victoria's Secret models. What did Dr. Watkins think? Dr. Watkins said something about the idiographic character of a sociocultural reality.

“Childhood today,” said Naomi, “is being blitzed.”

“We're all being blitzed,” said George.

The Christmas tree had become pungent with the warmth of the fire, filling the room with a deep, clean forest scent, but now as Bill breathed it in he noticed another smell, slipped in underneath, something foul, a smell he recognized, though he could not say what it was. He shivered, his whole body gone cold.

A log broke on the fire, erupting sparks. Under the coffee table, Binx thumped his tail.

Dr. Doom raised her wineglass. “I say limit the computer time and make them all play outside.”

“Like that would work,” said Matthew, rolling his eyes again.

“Such children,” she said.

D
inner is served,” called Margaret, emerging from
the kitchen into the hallway, feeling wan and overheated in her black dress, her apron dotted with wet potato flakes. Everyone stood up at once and crowded toward the dining room, exclaiming at the table, laid with a white linen cloth, white linen napkins, her wedding china, and her mother's silver. White tapers burned in four silver candlesticks, shining against the merlot-colored walls.

On the table sat wide bowls of green beans and Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes, a tureen of gravy for the turkey slices, and a heaping plate of roasted red beets. Every few places she'd set a bottle of red or white wine in a ring of green holly. Bill disappeared into the kitchen and came out holding the ham aloft on a white china platter, making an awkward show of staggering under it, pretending to collapse, though he was very pale and for a moment Margaret wondered if he might not be kidding. As a festive gesture, harkening back to her grandmother's holiday recipes from Betty Crocker, she had decked the ham with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries, secured by toothpicks, which she saw now had the effect of making the ham look as if it were covered in tiny archery targets. But Stan Melman clapped and said it was a work of art.

Bill began carving the ham at the head of the table, asking people to pass up their plates; for some minutes everyone became absorbed in handing around bowls and baskets of rolls and the butter dish, while under the table skulked Binx, sniffing at their ankles. Everyone asked for a slice of ham except Hannah Melman, who said that she did not eat “flesh.”

“A toast to the cook!” called out George, raising his glass to Margaret.

She would not look at him.

“And a toast to the holidays,” said Bill in a hesitant voice, still very pale as he hung over the pink ham at his end of the table. He kept his glass raised. “I'd also like to take this moment to toast my father. First Christmas without him.” They all murmured and raised their glasses again. Bill coughed. “And here's to goodwill and fellowship.”

Margaret noticed he was perspiring above his red and green tie. There was something cadaverous about him tonight; his collar looked too big for him. He'd lost weight in the last months, she saw with a pang.

“I don't know that I feel much goodwill these days,” Naomi said when the toast was concluded. “Not with someone out there carrying around a bag of poisoned hamburger meat.”

“
Poor
Boris,” said Hannah.

“How is Emily?” asked Margaret. George kept looking at her, under cover of passing plates and bowls; deliberately she avoided glancing in his direction. “I haven't seen her since it happened.” Last night when she'd taken Binx for a walk she'd swung her flashlight and caught a shaggy mat of long trailing fur by the syringa in the front yard. Binx had growled at the bush, but nothing was there. That was often how it was. They were most visible when she knew they were there but was afraid to look.

Naomi said, “Apparently her little boy is a mess.”

“I'm so sorry to hear it,” said Margaret. “Julia is a mother's helper for him sometimes. Aren't you, Julia? Have you noticed anything?”

“No,” said Julia.

“I've thought he was troubled before this, frankly.” Naomi paused again. “Well, I don't like to talk about other people's children.”

“You've already said he was a mess,” noted Hedy.

Julia volunteered that Nicholas did scream a lot.

“Everything bothers him. Sensory processing disorder, that's my opinion.” Naomi leaned back in her chair. “But Emily won't get him tested. Doesn't believe in slapping diagnoses on a child.”

“I must have sensory processing disorder,” Margaret told Stan as he refilled her wineglass. “Everything bothers me, too.”

“Any thinking person”—George smiled at her before she could look away—“has sensory processing disorder these days.”

She had not spoken to him since that night in her driveway. They had e-mailed back and forth, but then he'd stood her up when they arranged to meet for coffee at the Forge, where she had decided to tell him what she had seen that night in his car. Of all the people she knew, she figured George was the most likely to take her seriously, if only because it was his dog she had seen, and kept seeing, along now with the rest of them. She'd tried to tell Bill, but he thought he knew what she was talking about, which was worse than not being understood at all.

But George might understand. Even now she was aware of wanting to ask him to look outside, just beyond the dining room windows, at a massing by the hedge that could easily be mistaken for shadows on the snow. Sometimes she saw just one, but there were hundreds of them now, gray legions, small and large. It was all the dogs of Littlefield, she had started to think, every dog that had ever been starved or beaten, run over, abandoned by the road, tied to a tree and stoned, drowned as a puppy in a sack. They'd crept back, crossing the years like miles, scenting their way home across an impossible distance, one by one, to gather under the oak trees in her backyard, in the softly falling snow, to stare up at her windows and wait for her to look out and see them.