someone worse than Vince, and more cold-blooded than Janet’s own reptilian parents.
As Angelina and a male orderly closed in on the bed, calling the blind woman “Jennifer” and assuring her everything was going to be all right, Woofer leaped to the floor again and foiled them with another unanticipated move. Instead of making directly for the door to the corridor, he streaked into the adjoining bathroom, which was shared with the room next door, and from there scrambled into the hall.
Holding Danny’s hand in hers, Janet led the chase this time, not solely because she felt responsible for what had happened and was afraid that their dining privileges at Pacific View were on the verge of being canceled forever, but because she was eager to leave the shadowed, stuffy room and its mealy-skinned, eyeless resident.
This time the chase led into the main hall and from there into the public lounge.
Janet damned herself for ever letting the mutt into their lives. The worst thing wasn’t even the humiliation he’d brought them with this prank, but all of the attention he was drawing. She feared attention. Huddling down, keeping quiet, staying in the corners and shadows of life was the only way to reduce the amount of abuse you had to take. Besides, she wanted to remain virtually transparent to others at least until her dead husband had rested under Arizona sands for another year or two.
Woofer was too fast for them even though he kept his snout to the floor, sniffing every step of the way.
The evening receptionist in the lounge was a young Hispanic woman in a white uniform, hair in a pony tail secured by a red ribbon. Having risen from her desk to check out the source of the oncoming tumult, she assessed the situation and acted quickly. She stepped to the front door as Woofer flew into the lounge. She opened it, and let him shoot past her into the street.
Outside, breathless, Janet halted at the bottom of the front steps. The care home was east of the coast highway, on a sloped street lined with Indian laurels and bottlebrush trees. The mercury-vapor streetlamps shed a vaguely blue light. When a fluctuant breeze shivered branches, the pavement crawled with jittering leaf shadows.
Woofer was about forty feet away, dappled by the blue light, sniffing continuously at the sidewalk, shrubs, tree trunks, curb. He tested the night air most of all, apparently seeking an elusive scent. From the bottlebrush trees, the storm had knocked down scores of bristly red blooms which littered the pavement, like colonies of mutant sea anemones washed up by an apocalyptic tide. When the dog sniffed at these, he sneezed. His progress was halting and uncertain but steadily southward.
“Woofer!” Danny shouted.
The mutt turned and looked at them.
“Come back!” Danny pleaded.
Woofer hesitated. Then he twitched his head, snapped at the air, and continued after whatever phantom he was pursuing.
Fighting back tears, Danny said, “I thought he liked me.”
The boy’s words made Janet regret the unvoiced curses she had heaped upon the dog during the chase. She called after him, as well.
“He’ll come back,” she assured Danny.
“He’s not.”
“Maybe not now but later, maybe tomorrow or the day after, he’ll come home.”
The boy’s voice trembled with loss: “How can he come home when there’s no home to find us at?”
“There’s the car,” she said lamely.
She was more acutely aware than ever that a rusted old Dodge was a grievously inadequate home. Being able to provide no better for her son suddenly made her heart so heavy that it ached. She was troubled by fear, anger, frustration, and a desperation so intense that it made her nauseous.
“Dogs have sharper senses than we do,” she said. “He’ll track us down. He’ll track us down, all right.”
Black tree shadows stirred on the pavement, a vision of the dead leaves of autumns to come.
The dog reached the end of the block and turned the corner, moving out of sight.
“He’ll track us down,” she said, but did not believe.
Stink beetles. Wet tree bark. The lime odor of damp concrete. Roasting chicken in a people place nearby. Geraniums, jasmine, dead leaves. The moldy-sour scent of earthworms rutting in the rain-soaked dirt of flowerbeds. Interesting.
Most smells now are after-the-rain smells because rain cleans up the world and leaves its own tang afterwards. But even the hardest rain can’t wash away
He catches a whiff of cat fur, and freezes. He clenches his teeth at the scent, flares his nostrils. He tenses.
Funny about cats. He doesn’t hate them, really, but they’re so chasable, so hard to resist. Nothing’s more fun than a cat at its best, unless maybe a boy with a ball to throw and then something good to eat.
He’s almost ready to go after the cat, track it down, but then his snout burns with an old memory of claw scratches and a sore nose for days. He remembers the bad things about cats, how they can move so fast, slash you, then go straight up a wall or tree where you can’t go after them, and you sit below barking at them, your nose stinging and bleeding, feeling stupid, and the cat licks its fur and looks at you and then settles down to sleep, until finally you just have to go somewhere and bite on an old stick or snap a few lizards in two until you feel better.
Car fumes. Wet newspaper. Old shoe full of people foot smell.
Dead mouse. Interesting. Dead mouse rotting in the gutter. Eyes open. Tiny teeth bared. Interesting. Funny how dead things don’t move. Unless they’re dead long enough, and then they’re full of movement, but it’s still not them moving but things in them. Dead mouse, stiff tail sticking straight up in the air. Interesting.
Policeman-wolf-thing.
He snaps his head up and seeks the faint scent. Mostly this thing has a scent unlike any creature he’s ever met up with before, which is what makes it interesting. Partly it’s a human odor but only partly. It’s also a thing- that-will-kill-you odor, which you sometimes smell on people and on certain crazy-mean dogs bigger than you and on coyotes and on snakes that rattle. In fact it has more of a thing-that-will-kill-you stink than anything he’s ever run across before, which means he’s got to be careful. Mostly it has its own scent: like yet not like the sea on a cold night; like yet not like an iron fence on a hot day; like yet not like the dead and rotting mouse; like yet not like lightning, thunder, spiders, blood, and dark holes in the ground that are interesting but scary. Its faint scent is one fragile thread in the rich tapestry of night aromas, but he follows it.
PART TWO
Police Work and the Dog’s Life
Living in the modern age,
death for virtue is the wage.
So it seems in darker hours.
Evil wins, kindness cowers.
Ruled by violence and vice
We all stand upon thin ice.
Are we brave or are we mice,
here upon such thin, thin ice?
