Fear Nothing

on foot, either.

If a neighbor saw me running from the house just as it went up in flames, Chief Stevenson might decide to use that as an excuse to come looking for me. To shoot me down when I resisted arrest. Whether I resisted or not.

I swung onto my bike, balancing it by keeping one foot on the pavement, and looked back at the house. The wind trembled the leaves of the huge magnolia trees, and through the branches, I could see fire lapping at several of the downstairs and upstairs windows.

Full of grief and excitement, curiosity and dread, sorrow and dark wonder, I raced along the pavement, heading for a street with fewer lamps. Panting loudly, Orson sprinted at my side.

We had gone nearly a block when I heard the windows begin to explode at the Ferryman house, blown out by the fierce heat.

16

Stars between branches, leaf-filtered moonlight, giant oaks, a nurturing darkness, the peace of gravestones — and, for one of us, the eternally intriguing scent of hidden squirrels: We were back in the cemetery adjacent to St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church.

My bike was propped against a granite marker topped by the haloed head of a granite angel. I was sitting — sans halo — with my back against another stone that featured a cross at its summit.

Blocks away, sirens shrieked into sudden silence as fire-department vehicles arrived at the Ferryman residence.

I hadn’t cycled all the way to Bobby Halloway’s house, because I’d been hit by a persistent fit of coughing that hampered my ability to steer. Orson’s gait had grown wobbly, too, as he expelled the stubborn scent of the fire with a series of violent sneezes.

Now, in the company of a crowd too dead to be offended, I hawked up thick soot-flavored phlegm and spat it among the gnarled surface roots of the nearest oak, with the hope that I wasn’t killing this mighty tree that had survived two centuries of earthquakes, storms, fires, insects, disease, and — more recently — modern America’s passion for erecting a minimall with doughnut shop on every street corner. The taste in my mouth could not have been much different if I had been eating charcoal briquettes in a broth of starter fluid.

Having been in the burning house a shorter time than his more reckless master, Orson recovered faster than I. Before I was half done hawking and spitting, he was padding back and forth among the nearest tombstones, diligently sniffing out arboreal bushy-tailed rodents.

Between spells of hacking and expectorating, I talked to Orson if he was in sight, and sometimes he lifted his noble black head and pretended to listen, occasionally wagging his tail to encourage me, though often he was unable to tear his attention away from squirrel spoor.

“What the hell happened in that house?” I asked. “Who killed her, why were they playing games with me, what was the point of all that business with the dolls, why didn’t they just slit my throat and burn me with her?”

Orson shook his head, and I made a game of interpreting his response. He didn’t know. Shook his head in bafflement. Clueless. He was clueless. He didn’t know why they hadn’t slit my throat.

“I don’t think it was the Glock. I mean, there were more than one of them, at least two, probably three, so they could easily have overpowered me if they’d wanted. And though they slashed her throat, they must have been carrying guns of their own. I mean, these are serious bastards, vicious killers. They cut people’s eyes out for the fun of it. They wouldn’t be squeamish about carrying guns, so they wouldn’t be intimidated by the Glock.”

Orson cocked his head, considering the issue. Maybe it was the Glock. Maybe it wasn’t. Then again, maybe it was. Who knew? What’s a Glock, anyway? And what’s that smell? Such an amazing smell. Such a luxurious fragrance. Is that squirrel piss? Excuse me, Master Snow. Business. Business to attend to here.

“I don’t think they set the house afire to kill me. They didn’t really care whether they killed me or not. If they cared, they would have made a more direct effort to get me. They set the fire to cover up Angela’s murder. That was the reason, nothing more.”

Sniff, sniff, sniff-sniff-sniff: out with the remaining bad air of the burning house, in with the revitalizing scent of squirrel, out with the bad, in with the good.

“God, she was such a good person, so giving,” I said bitterly. “She didn’t deserve to die like that, to die at all.”

Orson paused in his sniffing but only briefly. Human suffering. Terrible. Terrible thing. Misery, death, despair. But nothing to be done. Nothing to be done about it. Just the way of the world, the nature of human existence. Terrible. Come smell the squirrels with me, Master Snow. You’ll feel better.

A lump rose in my throat, not poignant grief but something more prosaic, so I hacked with tubercular violence and finally planted a black oyster among the tree roots.

“If Sasha were here,” I said, “I wonder if right now I’d remind her so much of James Dean?”

My face felt greasy and tender. I wiped at it with a hand that also felt greasy.

Across the thin grass on the graves and across the polished surfaces of the granite markers, the moonshadows of wind-trembled leaves danced like cemetery fairies.

Even in this peculiar light, I could see that the palm of the hand I had put to my face was smeared with soot. “I must stink to high heaven.”

Immediately, Orson lost interest in the squirrel spoor and came eagerly to me. He sniffed vigorously at my shoes, along my legs, across my chest, finally sticking his snout under my jacket and into my armpit.

Sometimes I suspect that Orson not only understands more than we expect a dog to understand, but that he has a sense of humor and a talent for sarcasm.

Forcibly withdrawing his snout from my armpit, holding his head in both hands, I said, “You’re no rose yourself, pal. And what kind of guard dog are you, anyway? Maybe they were already in the house with Angela when I arrived, and she didn’t know it. But how come you didn’t bite them in the ass when they left the place? If they escaped by the kitchen door, they went right past you. Why didn’t I find a bunch of bad guys rolling around on the backyard, clutching their butts and howling in pain?”

Orson’s gaze held steady, his eyes deep. He was shocked by the question, the implied accusation. Shocked. He was a peaceful dog. A dog of peace, he was. A chaser of rubber balls, a licker of faces, a philosopher and boon companion. Besides, Master Snow, the job was to prevent villains from entering the house, not to prevent them from leaving. Good riddance to villains. Who wants them around, anyway? Villains and fleas. Good riddance.

As I sat nose-to-nose with Orson, staring into his eyes, a sense of the uncanny came over me — or perhaps it was a transient madness — and for a moment I imagined that I could read his true thoughts, which were markedly different from the dialogue that I invented for him. Different and unsettling.

I dropped my bracketing hands from his head, but he chose not to turn away from me or to lower his gaze.

I was unable to lower mine.

To express a word of this to Bobby Halloway would have been to elicit a recommendation of lobotomy: Nevertheless, I sensed that the dog feared for me. Pitied me because I was struggling so hard not to admit the true depth of my pain. Pitied me because I could not acknowledge how profoundly the prospect of being alone scared me. More than anything, however, he feared for me, as though he saw an oncoming juggernaut of which I was oblivious: a great white blazing wheel, as big as a mountain, that would grind me to dust and leave the dust burning in its wake.

“What, when, where?” I wondered.

Orson’s stare was intense. Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of tombs, weigher of the hearts of the dead, could not have stared more piercingly. This dog of mine was no Lassie, no carefree Disney pooch with strictly cute moves and an unlimited capacity for mischievous fun.

“Sometimes,” I told him, “you spook me.”