“See you at ten.” Click.
Humans tend to go to sleep in their beds and stay there all night. It’s different with me and my kind. For example, I often start in Bernie’s bedroom, on the floor at the foot of the bed, and later move across the hall to Charlie’s old room, even though he’s hardly ever there, the bed stripped, and after that I like to lie with my back to the front door. The sounds and smells of the night leak in through the crack under the door. Security is part of my job.
On this particular night, my pal Iggy who lives next door got a little restless and did his yip-yip-yipping once or twice, and Mr. Parsons tried to shush him, and later a toilet flushed in their house. Our neighbor on the other side, old man Heydrich, went outside not long after that, and what was this? Whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk. He was sweeping the dirt from his part of the sidewalk onto ours? I barked, the low muffled kind of bark, not wanting to disturb Bernie. The whisk-whisk ing stopped, and old man Heydrich muttered something about curs, a new one on me. Then came the pad-pad-pad of his slippers, his door opening and closing, and quiet. I dropped down into dreamland. Did a car come down the street sometime later, moving slowly, pausing in front of our place, driving on? Maybe. Dreams can be so strong, and then you wake up and poof! It doesn’t work the other way. You always remember real life. Sort of. But forget all that.
Except if a car did go by, its engine was making a little ticking sound. Tick-tick-tick. That tick-tick-tick happened once with the Porsche, not the blown-up Porsche but the one that actually did go off a cliff. Bernie’d taken out the tools. You never wanted to see that.
“Knits up the raveled sleeve of care?” Bernie said the next morning. “I wish.”
Uh-oh. We were in the van, headed downtown, possibly on something work-related, and now was when the linen shirt episode comes up? Linen: a complete unknown to me at the time, specifically on a visit I paid to the laundry basket not long after Suzie gave Bernie a long-sleeved linen shirt for his birthday. I prefer Bernie’s Hawaiian shirts, of which he’s got lots, including the one with palm trees and martini glasses that he was wearing at the moment, but that had nothing to do with what happened. It was just the strange feel of linen, and when it comes to feeling things, well, you always do better with your tongue, no news there. And what’s close to the tongue? Teeth. So there you go.
But still, I felt bad. I moved across the bench seat, a little closer to Bernie. The van made one of those quick swerves across the lane that sometimes happens, not sure why. It’s not the smoothest ride in the world, but no complaints.
“Hey, you’re crowding me, buddy,” Bernie said.
I was? How had that happened? I shifted away, but not before giving Bernie’s face a quick lick, just showing him that everything was cool between us. Bernie’s great-looking, even if he wasn’t at his best today, dark patches under his eyes, and possibly a patch or two where he’d missed with the razor blade, although he’d clearly made a good try; there was still a dab of shaving cream on the side of his neck.
The downtown towers rose in the distance, their tops kind of merging with the copper-colored sky, a sight that always made me uneasy, hard to say why. We got off the freeway, drove past the college-a Frisbee soared by, went right into the window of a passing bus! I love college kids! — and parked at a meter in front of city hall, which I recognized from the two huge stone birds, very nasty looking, on either side of the tall arched doorway. Don’t get me started on birds. Bernie dug in his pocket for change, found none, but did come up with a cigarette, or part of one. He straightened it out, lit up, and said, “My lucky day.”
“This must be Chet,” said Mayor Trimble. “What a handsome dog!” The mayor turned out to be a round little guy with more than one chin, very big ears, and a string tie. In short, what wasn’t to like? “Happen to be in possession of some nice rawhide chews,” he said. “Can he have one?”
Bernie sighed, for no reason that I could come up with.
What a mayor did, exactly, was anybody’s guess, but one thing for sure: we had the best mayor around. Soon I was lying on the floor at Mayor Trimble’s side, working on a rawhide chew, tough and tasty, just the way I liked. The mayor introduced everybody-“’Course you already know Cal Luxton, head of security, and this is Vera Cobb, chief of staff.” Then came handshaking, hello hellos, and nobody took a single sniff of nobody, all very human, and everyone sat down.
Mayor Trimble rocked back in his chair. “Pleasure to have this opportunity to renew our friendship, Bernie.”
“Is that what we had?” Bernie said.
“Any mistakes were mine,” the mayor said. “Real or imagined. I should have patched things up long ago. Everything goes by so goddamn fast. Agreed?”
“That everything goes by fast?” Bernie said. “I won’t argue.”
“Bernie’s known for his sense of humor,” said Luxton, sitting in a shadowy corner of the room. Luxton was a thin dude with swept-back hair and the kind of long sideburns you sometimes see out here in the Valley, but not many other places, Bernie says. It’s a look, he also says, that goes with cowboy boots, which Luxton was wearing, and cowboy hats. Luxton had a big white one resting on his knee. A smell goes with hat wearing. I detected it now; not unpleasant.
“One of the most important senses going,” said the mayor. Then came a silence. The mayor looked around, maybe waiting for someone to chip in. No one did. He cleared his throat-I can do that, too, especially if a bone was caught in it-and checked a note on his desk. “Vera here tells me your great-great grandfather once owned all of Mesquite Canyon.”
Vera, sitting at the end of the same couch as Bernie-he was at the other end, but it wasn’t a big couch-said, “From where the airport is now all the way up to the Rio Seco railroad bridge.” She glanced at Bernie. Vera was blond, wore a dark suit, had her hair in a bun, always interesting to me. Human hair, big subject, maybe later.
Bernie glanced at Vera, eyes going to that bun almost immediately-Bernie and I are alike in lots of ways, don’t forget-and said, “Um.”
“Just think if your family had held on to that spread,” Luxton said.
“Kind of pointless,” Bernie said.
Which I didn’t quite get, because more than once, walking the canyon, Bernie has said almost that exact same thing to me: What if we still owned all of this, Chet? Rio Seco would have water in it-that’s for damn sure.
“No living in the past for you, huh, Bernie?” said the mayor. “We’re on the same page, us two.”
“Uh,” said Bernie, “I wouldn’t-”
The mayor smacked his hand on his desk, not hard. He had fat little hands, wore a nice big pinkie ring. One thing I’ve noticed about pinkie rings-they’re never pink. But Bernie says I can’t be trusted when it comes to colors, so don’t bet the ranch. “The future, Bernie. I’m all about the future of this beautiful city, and my guess is you are, too.”
“It won’t be so beautiful when the aquifer’s dry,” Bernie said.
The mayor smiled. He had one of those real big smiles you see sometimes, a smile too big for the face, if that makes any sense. “Truth to power,” he said. “Not afraid of that, are we, Vera? In fact, we encourage it. Fill Bernie in on the water commission.”
“I’m not sure we have time for that, mayor,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be getting on with the business at hand?”
The mayor’s smile faded, down to normal size and then nothing. “What would I do without you, Vera?”
Vera gazed at the mayor, her face showing nothing that I could see.
“Vera here’s a Stanford graduate,” the mayor said. “My opponent’s chief of staff went to North Valley CC. What does that tell you?”
“The Unabomber went to Harvard,” Bernie said.
The mayor’s smile started going upside down. Vera laughed. Maybe not the nicest-sounding laugh I’d ever heard, kind of loud and harsh, but human laughter? One of the best things there is. The meeting was going great. I gnawed on my chew strip and soon my mind was wandering pleasantly. That’s part of the fun of chew strips, maybe news to you.
“… water commission some other time,” the mayor was saying, or something like that. “What do you know about our Millennial Cultural Initiative, Bernie?”
“Zip.”
“Vera? Bring him up to speed.”
