Why They Run the Way They Do (8 page)

“I'm not cleaning it up,” I said.

“I'll get it,” she said. And she did.

Would it have made any difference, what I did or didn't do that day, to the rest of her life? Would it have made any difference, what I did or didn't do that day, to the rest of mine?

Story goes she went from seclusion to another hospital, and then another. I sent her a letter and she sent me a postcard back and the writing was shaky. But then things got better for her. She went home, and was there for a few months and started thinking about going back to college. Story goes she even packed her bags. It was the end of summer and she was all registered for classes. Then one morning her mother came into her room and she wasn't there and they went looking for her. They must have known right away, as soon as they saw she was gone, what had happened. Story goes they found her in a field. On her back or on her side, I don't know.

Once she told me about a guy she knew at that other hospital who had found a yellow construction hard hat, left behind in a redone bathroom. The guy put on the hard hat and walked out into the unit and went up to a nurse he didn't know and asked where the exit was. The nurse showed him to the door, entered the code, and let him out. The guy walked about a mile until he got to a gas station. He went inside and bought a sandwich, and then he sat on the curb in front of the gas station with his feet in a puddle and ate the sandwich. Then he walked back to the hospital and went up the stairs to the unit and rang the buzzer, because he didn't really have anywhere else to go. He just wanted to see if he could get away with it. And he could. Because under the right circumstances, Madeline said, even a crap disguise could be your ticket out. She said this was one of those things you might need to remember.

And so I have.

More often than not it
happens like so: in the middle of the night I'm woken up by a car door slamming out front. Usually the car's idling and there's a little bit of radio playing and sometimes there's a whistle or tongue click or scuffle. Not often words. People come alone mostly, and people who do what they're doing aren't the kind of people who'd have words for a dog, though every so often someone'll say a “sorry” or a “see ya” before getting back into the car and driving away. When I can tell they're good and gone I pull out of bed and, unless it's winter, open up the front door in my nightie and bare feet and usually the dog's standing about where it was dropped, wagging its tail and looking up the road after the car, not getting the picture entirely, and I rattle my jar of Milk-Bones and nine times out of ten the mutt'll turn and run right up to me, and I let it stay in the house until morning, so it don't have to go meet all the others out back in the kennel in the middle of the night. They're barking by now, of course—they bark all the time, once one starts they all gotta be heard—but the sound is as familiar to me as crickets or trucks on the highway, so I hardly hear it anymore.

I've found families for somewhere near four hundred homeless dogs across the state of New Hampshire. For twenty-five years I answered the phone for Dr. Brick, the town vet, but when Doc retired I looked around and saw I was fifty-two and had lots of days left and no clear way to fill them. I was still living in the house I'd grown up in, the mortgage long since settled. And I had a little money saved, so I didn't need a job that would pay much, if anything. I'd seen lots of hard-luck dogs in my years with Dr. Brick, strays brought in by folks who'd found but couldn't keep them, healthy, good dogs taken down (sometimes by me, in the back of my station wagon) to the shelter where I knew damn well they'd be gassed in a matter of weeks. So it seemed like maybe this was a way I could fill those days.

I've been at it nearly a decade now, so a lot of people know I do what I do, and if all a person wants is a regular old dog—not one to show or train for some job or another—they might call me instead of going to a pet store or a puppy mill. Then what I do is I go out to the person's house, check things over to make sure they've got the right kind of space and the right reasons to be looking for a dog—that they're not the type to lose interest or change their minds after a week or two, landing the dog right back where it started—and then once they've signed the papers I let them come out to my place and take their pick from the lot. For the picking, the dogs line up against the kennel fence, slapping tails and nosing through the holes. A few hang back, some shy, others seeming not to care, scratching at a flea or stretching out in the sunshine, like they don't give a damn who wants them and never did.

Twenty dollars is all I ask as payment, enough to buy a couple more bags of the store-brand food for the ones left behind. Some people give me more. One time a lady from Hanover wrote me a check for five hundred dollars. She said I was doing the lord's work. I thought to myself that maybe the lord had more important things to worry about than a kennel full of slobbering dogs, but I wasn't about to say so, standing there with her check in my hand. The truth was, I didn't really know why I did what I did, and I didn't see any reason to spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. It was just the way it was.

I've gotten through a lot by not overthinking things, by being able to keep certain matters out of my mind. You busy yourself with living, however it is you choose to busy yourself—dogs or kids or broken cars or numbers in a book—and you might well forget that after a year of anticipation your father decided not to move the family to Florida after all, or that the man you almost married had a change of heart at the last minute and traded you in for another. My sister, who lives down in Boston, thinks all the time about everything and as a result takes a half dozen pills every morning. Last year I watched her suffer every detail of her daughter's wedding and I thought:
you can have it
. And so when I felt that thing while I was soaping in the shower, that thing like an acorn, I just put it right out of my mind. I went on tending to my dogs and making home visits and doing what I do and I went so far as to cancel my yearly checkup with Dr. Lands because I knew once I had that paper gown on there would be no more not thinking about it. And one day in October, when I was starting to feel a little weak walking from the house to the kennel and the acorn wasn't an acorn anymore but a walnut, I drove up to the top of my dirt drive and swung shut the rusty iron gate and put a sign on the bars that said CLOSED—DO NOT DROP DOGS. Because I had twenty-seven dogs in the kennel and I had to find homes for all of them before I was dead.

It was a week or so later, around about Halloween, that I got a call from a man named Jerry who said he'd read about my kennel in his local newspaper and wanted to get one of my dogs. A big dog, he said.

“Not tall and bony,” he said over the telephone. “Stocky. Fat if you have one. Do you?”

“Sure,” I said. “I got all kinds.” They were barking out back as we spoke.

“I'd like to see them immediately.” He talked swift and clipped like a military man, everything an order. “I'll be there at three o'clock.”

I hesitated, but not for more than a breath or two. I needed to place the dogs in a hurry, sure, but I had to stick to the rules. What did the dogs care about a little lump? All they wanted was somebody who'd take them and keep them. So I told this Jerry I would have to make a home visit first, and if he passed then he could come out and take his pick.

“I'll bring references,” he said. “There's no need for—”

“This is the way it works,” I said. “No home visit, no dog.”

He didn't say anything for a minute, but I could tell he was still there. I could practically hear the spokes in his head creaking through the telephone line. Then he said, “Just you? Nobody else?”

“There is nobody else,” I said.

And so he gave me directions to his house, up in Cornish, about forty miles from my town. We set a time for the following morning.

One day last year I did a home visit in New London and I was walking through the house and I saw an old man sitting in an easy chair and I knew right off he was dead. His hands were droopy in his lap in a way only dead hands droop. So I said to the woman walking me around—she wanted a little dog, one that would sit on her lap while she did the crossword—I said, “Ma'am is that man okay?” even though I knew full well he wasn't, but didn't know quite how to say it. And she said, “Oh, Daddy always takes his nap around this time,” and instead of telling her that her father was dead as a doornail I just said “oh, all right.” And I guess a little while after I left she must have figured it out. I don't know what exactly happened because she never did call me about getting a little dog.

Lying in bed that night before I went out to Jerry's, I started thinking of that old man and his droopy hands. I tried to imagine the way my body would relax when I went, in which direction my head would nod, where my eyes might be fixed before somebody had a chance to shut them. When my mother died, down at the hospital in Manchester, frail as a leaf, she gave a little gasp of surprise right before the end. I wondered if anything would surprise me, if I would think something different than I'd thought before.

Then I pushed all that garbage out of my mind and went to sleep.

There was a gate at Jerry's driveway, with a little box like at Wendy's. I poked the button and a crackly woman came on and I told her who I was and she sighed and said, “Come on up.” And the gate swung open and I pulled through. And right then an idea started coming to me that these were people who could take three or four of my dogs. There must have been ten acres of grass and trees from what I could see and every bit of it fenced. The house was just shy of a mansion, two stories with tall windows and long white steps leading to a front porch that was empty but big enough to hold twenty rocking chairs. I parked my car at the foot of those stairs and saw Jerry was waiting for me up on the porch. He was older than he'd sounded on the phone. He looked eighty, though he also looked like he'd be okay with a few big dogs, tall and spry and with those muscled forearms you always find yourself looking at a moment too long. He had a head full of gray hair that was going in a hundred directions and a rectangle chin. There was no sign of the woman who'd sighed into the box.