known dogs
I broke into a lurching, crabwise run, pounding the sidewalk with my red crutch. I’m sure it would have appeared ludicrous to an onlooker, but no one was paying any attention to me. Monica Goldstein was kneeling in the middle of the street beside her dog, which lay in front of the Hummer’s high, boxy grille. Her face was white above her forest-green uniform, from which a sash of badges and medals hung. The end of this sash was soaking in a spreading pool of Gandalf’s blood. Mrs. Fevereau half-jumped and half-fell from the Hummer’s ridiculously high driver’s seat. Ava Goldstein came running from the front door of the Goldstein house, crying her daughter’s name. Mrs. Goldstein’s blouse was half-buttoned and her feet were bare.
“Don’t touch him, honey, don’t touch him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She was still holding her cigarette and she puffed nervously at it. “He could bite.”
Monica paid no attention. She touched Gandalf’s side. The dog screamed again when she did — it
Mrs. Fevereau reached out for the girl, then changed her mind. She took two steps back, leaned against the high side of her ridiculous yellow mode of transport, and looked up at the sky.
Mrs. Goldstein knelt beside her daughter. “Honey, oh honey please don’t?”
Gandalf began to howl. He lay in the street, in a pool of his spreading blood, howling. And now I could also remember the sound the crane had made. Not the
“Get her inside, Ava,” I said. “Get her in the house.”
Mrs. Goldstein got her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and urged her up. “Come on, honey. Come inside.”
“Not without
“Go in and call the vet,” I told her. “Say Gandalf’s been hit by a car. Say he has to come right away. I’ll stay with him.”
Monica looked at me with eyes that were more than shocked. They were crazy. I had no trouble holding her gaze, though; I’d seen it often enough in my own mirror. “Do you promise? Big swear? Mother’s name?”
“Big swear, mother’s name,” I said. “Go on, Monica.”
She went, casting one more look back and uttering one more bereft wail before starting up the steps to her house. I knelt beside Gandalf, holding onto the Hummer’s fender and going down as I always did, painfully and listing severely to the left, trying to keep my right knee from bending any more than it absolutely had to. Still, I voiced my own little cry of pain, and I wondered if I’d be able to get up again without help. It might not be forthcoming from Mrs. Fevereau; she walked over to the lefthand side of the street with her legs stiff and wide apart, then bent at the waist as if bowing to royalty, and vomited in the gutter. She held the hand with the cigarette in it off to one side as she did it.
I turned my attention to Gandalf. He had been struck in the hindquarters. His spine was crushed. Blood and shit oozed sluggishly from between his broken rear legs. His eyes turned up to me and in them I saw a horrible expression of hope. His tongue crept out and licked my inner left wrist. His tongue was dry as carpet, and cold. Gandalf was going to die, but maybe not soon enough. Monica would come out again soon, and I didn’t want him alive to lick her wrist when she did.
I understood what I had to do. There was no one to see me do it. Monica and her mother were inside. Mrs. Fevereau’s back was still turned. If others on this little stub of a street had come to their windows (or out on their lawns), the Hummer blocked their view of me sitting beside the dog with my bad right leg awkwardly outstretched. I had a few moments, but only a few, and if I stopped to consider, my chance would be lost.
So I took Gandalf’s upper body in my good arm and without a pause I’m back at the Sutton Avenue site, where The Freemantle Company is getting ready to build a forty-story bank building. I’m in my pickup truck. Pat Green’s on the radio, singing “Wave on Wave.” I suddenly realize the crane’s too loud even though I haven’t heard any backup beeper and when I look to my right the world in that window is gone. The world on that side has been replaced by yellow. Black letters float there: LINK-BELT. They’re swelling. I spin the Ram’s wheel to the left, all the way to the stop, knowing I’m already too late as the scream of crumpling metal starts, drowning out the song on the radio and shrinking the inside of the cab right to left because the crane’s invading my space,
I held Gandalf against me and thought
Now I’m in sitting in the chum, sitting in the fucking
I held Gandalf against my chest as I once held my infant daughters and thought,
I held Gandalf and thought of how it felt to be crushed alive as the cab of your truck ate the air around you and the breath left your body and the blood blew out of your nose and mouth and those snapping sounds as consciousness fled, those were the bones breaking inside your own body: your ribs, your arm, your hip, your leg, your cheek, your fucking skull.
I held Monica’s dog and thought, in a kind of miserable triumph:
For a moment I was in a darkness shot with that red, and I held Gandalf’s neck in the crook of my left arm, which was now doing the work of two and very strong. I flexed that arm as hard as I could, flexed the way I did when I was doing my curls with the ten-pound weight. Then I opened my eyes. Gandalf was silent, staring past my face and past the sky beyond.
“Edgar?” It was Hastings, the old guy who lived two houses up from the Goldsteins. There was an expression of dismay on his face. “You can let go now. That dog is dead.”
“Yes,” I said, relaxing my grip on Gandalf. “Would you help me get up?”
“I’m not sure I can,” Hastings said. “I’d be more apt to pull us both down.”
“Then go in and see the Goldsteins,” I said.