“Don’t I make ’em for you every morning?”
“Suddenly there was this scratching at the door. I believe we both heard it, didn’t we, Glady?”
“I heard it first, Ralph; you know I did. I heard it and I said, ‘What’s that scratching, Ralph?’ and you said, ‘What scratching?’ and then you heard it, too.”
“So I put the paper down, and I got up from the table and went to the door, right, Glady?”
I wondered if Ralph had ever done anything without asking “Glady” if he’d actually done it.
“When I opened it,” Ralph said, “Sassy bounded in and skittered round on the kitchen floor, then leaped up on me and nearly knocked me down. Slobbered all over my face and then turned round and started in on Glady.”
“I was so glad to see her that I let her,” Gladys said. And then she blushed. “Had to pinch myself to be sure I wasn’t dreaming.”
“How do you suppose she got here?” I asked.
“Walked, most likely,” Ralph said.
“Well,” Gladys said, “she could have run some, too.”
“Once all the face licking was over and she’d settled down some, I gave her water and leftovers,” Ralph said. “Sassy gobbled it down like there was no tomorrow.”
“Poor thing was starving to death,” Gladys said. “I told Ralph, I said, ‘You get out to the store right now and bring back some dog food.’ ”
“When I got back,” Ralph said, “she wolfed down three cans of Alpo fast as I could open them up and dish them out, didn’t she, Glady?”
“I told him, ‘Three cans is enough,’ ” Gladys said. “I told him, ‘Ralph, you’re gonna make that dog sick, you don’t stop feeding her.’ ”
“Would of ate more if I’d let her,” Ralph said.
“No call to make her sick,” Gladys said.
“Perhaps you’d like to stay for lunch, Mr. Mulligan?” Ralph said.
“Thank you, but no, I’ve got to get back.”
“Be no trouble at all,” Gladys said. “Got some olive-loaf sandwiches all made up.”
“No. Thank you.”
“So the next day,” Ralph said, picking up the story, “we got to talking about how amazing it was. The way Sassy tracked us all the way across the country like that, just like them dogs in the movies. Glady said we ought to call the TV, but I figured we should give it some thought.”
“
“Maybe so,” Ralph said, “but seems to me nobody’ll believe our story ’less they read it in the paper.”
“I thought Channel 10,” I said.
“What was that?” Ralph said.
“I thought you were thinking of calling Channel 10.”
“Well, sure,” Ralph said. “That’s the channel
“No it ain’t, Ralph. It’s on one of them cable channels.”
On the way out, I gave a wide birth to Sassy. I wasn’t all that eager to write about Ralph, Gladys, and their amazing animal, so I decided to stop at the health department on the way back to the paper, even though it wasn’t really on the way back.
11
I made it to the clinic forty minutes before closing and spent half an hour guessing what everyone else in the waiting room was there for.
The pimply redhead with the gnawed fingernails? She had unprotected sex with her lout of a boyfriend and was afraid she might be pregnant again. The bald guy with the bulbous honker? He wanted to be sure the city council president, who’d picked him up on karaoke night at the Dark Lady, hadn’t passed him AIDS along with the bar nuts. The middle-aged guy in the mirror across the room, the one with the tousled hair, the Dustin Pedroia T- shirt, and the hangdog expression? He hated needles but would have gone under the knife without anesthesia if it meant that the woman with the cartoon-mouse snicker would finally let him.…
The clerk was calling my name.
The phlebotomist spiked me three times before she struck a vein. The clerk reaffirmed that the lab was backed up.
“Be seven weeks before the results come back,” she said.
“This morning, on the phone, they said five.”
“Seven,” she said. “Look at this stack of blood test orders, most of ’em for HIV, which you say no way you got anyway. So what’s your rush?”
When a Rhode Islander needs something he can’t flat out steal, there are two ways to get it. Need a plumber’s license but can’t pass the state test? Want those fifty parking tickets fixed? Or maybe you’d just like a rush job on an HIV test. Chances are, in a state this small, you know somebody who can help. Maybe your uncle’s on the state plumbing board. Maybe you went to school with a police captain. Maybe the health department clerk is married to your cousin. No? Then you have the option of offering a small gratuity.
Graft, Rhode Island’s leading service industry, is widely misunderstood by citizens of states you can’t stroll across on your lunch break. Those of us who live here know that it comes in two varieties, good and bad, just like cholesterol. The bad kind enriches politicians and their greedy friends at taxpayers’ expense. The good kind supplements the wages of underpaid government workers, puts braces on their kids’ teeth, builds college funds. Good graft is fat free. It’s biodegradable. It dissolves red tape. Without the lubricant of graft and personal connections, not much would get done in Rhode Island, and nothing at all would happen on time.
Graft has been part of our heritage since the first colonial governor swapped favors with Captain Kidd. Call me old-fashioned. I took a twenty out of my wallet and slid it across the counter.
“Four weeks,” she said. “Have a nice day.”
* * *
By the time I got back to the office, Lomax had gone home for dinner. The night city editor, Judy Abbruzzi, occupied his chair.
“The dog story photos are great,” she said. “Couple of hicks smiling their asses off, big ugly dog slobbering all over them. Even you can’t screw this up enough to keep it off page one.”
“It’s not ready,” I said.
“You still got an hour to write,” she said.
“After I make a call.”
* * *
The police chief in Prineville, Oregon, had a peculiar notion about what it means to be a public servant. She was courteous, helpful, and never asked for a bribe. “Yeah, we got a John and Edna Stinson,” she said. “Got themselves a cabin out by the Deschutes River, about forty miles from town.”
“Any way I can get in touch with them tonight?”
“This an emergency?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Well, then, I don’t see how. They don’t have a telephone, and we’re short a man today so I can’t take a run out there for you.”
“Can I get a message to them?”
“They come into town about twice a month to stock up on groceries and pick up their mail. I suppose I can stick a note in their mailbox for you. It’s against federal law, of course. Mailboxes are supposed to be just for mail,
