Criminals (11 page)

“No. No.”

“It was in the canteen cup. Not one of those camel spiders. This was a little guy. But you could feel him going down.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah, I know, know what I mean?”

She turned to look at him. His face was white with a cap mark across the forehead.

“God. Oh, God, Garth.” Her voice was hoarse. “What are we going to do?” It was her high school voice, the tear-hoarse voice that came out of her when the girls were all calling him, showing up at his house, even friends of hers, and she had accused him of things he did and things he would never do, and made him mad, and, worse, made him hopeless, because his brother was gone and who did he have other than her, and then with her words muffled against him she would soothe him in the dim hallway of her house in the afternoon with no one home, where because it was his nature he would take over and lean her up against the wall with care, the way he leaned the bike, and lean against her, moving his weight into the kiss the way he knew how.

you would be good

T
he burglar was stoned when he cut his way in. It was snowing hard enough that he had the stuff in his eyelashes. Somewhere inside, where even if he scared her for a minute he could maybe get through to her, was his ex-girlfriend. The place had one of those doorbells with pipes on the wall like an organ, and he could hear the dim clangs. He kept pushing the button through ten pairs of them, but she didn't come to the door. He went back to the car, got the stuck trunk open and found his glass cutter. Above the lock of one of the big double-hung bay windows of the living room he etched a curve. He knew she was in there, she had to be, she was housesitting. He pushed in the half-moon of glass, unlocked the window, shoved it up, and threw his leg over the sill. Before he got the other leg in he had the sensation that told him a house was empty. He would get that, a quick shim in the gut that said, OK get in, do your thing, get out.

Then his left arm was tight in the jaws of a dog. Jesus. The dog. The burglar had been a high school athlete and still had his arm muscles, and he got hold of the collar and twisted.

The dog bulged its eyes, pawed, choked, and sagged to the floor, a big black dog with a dark lolling tongue. He couldn't remember the
breed but it was one of the biggest breeds, to go with the house. He knew the dog. That tongue.

She must have gone out for something. What time was it, anyway? Everything was quiet, as if it were early in the morning, but maybe it was the no-car quiet of snow. The dog lay flat out on its side. The window let in the smell of snow.

When left by itself the dog was supposed to be shut in the den, so it wouldn't dig its thick claws into various windowsills and slobber on the panes in its intense patrol for the family's return. They often forgot to shut it in and had to punish it when they returned. Erin always left it loose in the house and at those times, she said, it didn't claw the windowsills because she would be gone such a short time that its confidence would not desert it.

That's what she would do for a dog, reassure it, make its life easier. The rules didn't matter to her; she would let a dog up on the couch and into the bed. A small one like a pug she'd let up on a dining room chair, or hold on her lap while she ate. “Feel this,” she'd say. “Here, feel the tension. He's so tense he's shaking. A dog shouldn't have to feel that way. They shouldn't leave this little guy. He can't get over it.” A dog has ways to relieve tension, but if it is a good, trained dog, like the big one he had just choked to death, it is long past the callow relief of chewing furniture or leaving drops of urine where it alone will ever know they have dried in secret testimony to its anxiety and love. It must suffer unaided. She had taught him this.

He said, “Now he'll do this when they're here, get up on the table.”

She said, “No, he won't, he knows them. It's them he loves, poor thing.”

In the hall a scarf was dangling on the horn of a statue. These were the kind of people, world travelers, who would have in their front hall a wooden statue of a goat, bigger than the dog, a tall, thin goat with spiral horns, on a heavy base. Carved the way they do in Africa, so it spooked you more than a real one would have in a hallway.

She must have come early and gone back out for something because of the snow. She would have come in with her books and her ten days' worth of clothes, calling to the dog as it threw itself against
the door of the den, and fed treats from her baggie into its big mouth, and let it stand up and plant its big paws on her chest, wagging and whining and squatting to keep the weight on its hind legs so as not to hurt her.

But instead of this, as he was to learn, she was lying on an ER gurney. Snow—expected as a mutant few inches at this time of year—had moved in over the city in a rolling bag of gray and the bag had opened. There was a pileup on the freeway and somewhere toward the middle of it two semis had crushed a couple of cars between them. A dozen drivers had arrived in this ER. She was the only one in a coma.

A year before this, she had been taking care of the house and dog while the owners were in Europe. In the huge oven of the eight-burner range she had roasted a chicken for him. They had eaten it on the terrace overlooking the lake, with their own white mountains in the distance, while the owners would be specks on skis on the same white above some pass in Bavaria. Then they would come down and visit cathedrals; some of the great ones were near the slopes.

On the terrace she had talked to him about the fact that he and she had both been raised Catholic. The effect on her was different, because of the big Irish family of girls she came from, with their understanding that any household not Catholic was abnormal, if forgivably so, while from the start there was no way he was going to get the good out of Catholic school, no way he was not going to hate it, being not only a boy but the kind of kid, unsupervised at home, who got in trouble every day.

They had used the owners' china and wineglasses, but spread a tablecloth she brought from her apartment for the occasion, because when she lifted a cloth from the linen pantry and shook out its heavy folds, it had occurred to her that if the wine left a stain she would have to send it to the cleaners. She couldn't afford that and certainly he couldn't. His money went for things she knew about by then and was set against, things that were going to part them.

He looked to one side as he passed the dog, and when he was out in the snow he dragged the window down with a thud. He didn't take
anything. He wasn't going to anyway because that wasn't the point, the point was seeing her. He had to get out of there before she got back and found the dog. There was no buyer anyway for the kind of stuff in the house, all the silver crap, the dark carvings and creepy woven hangings, the carpets too big to move. These people took their cameras and laptops with them. What he really needed was cash. In this house there would be no cash. He got into his car and drove, doing twenty-five in the snow so he would look careful and not attract attention to an old car in that neighborhood. The snow was coming down hard.

In the late afternoon her sister Briah called him. For a second he thought her voice on his cell was Erin's. He interrupted. He could explain. Briah said, “I'm with Erin in the hospital.” She was calling him, she said, because she thought he would want to know. For a time he didn't really hear. A bubble formed in his mind, with scenes floating and intersecting like drops of oil. The thought he was having was that Erin must not have had a boyfriend since himself, since he was the one Briah was calling. After all, Erin had not had somebody waiting at the time, she had simply gotten rid of him. She was right to. He was going downhill.

He had gone about as far as he could get, and now he was coming back up and he wanted her to know. He had known she was going to housesit; he kept up with a girl who knew her at school.

Briah was saying they didn't know if Erin would live or die. “I've got her key,” she said between sobs. “I'm going over to feed the dog. I got in touch with those people. Their info's on her key. They're on a plane. I'm going before it gets so I can't make it on the hills.”

“It's already that way,” he said. “Got all-wheel drive? Or you won't make it now, down by the lake.” He surprised himself by saying he would take her. He didn't have all-wheel drive and his tires were bald, but he was a good driver.

“You know what?” Briah said. “They're up there in the sky looking for somebody to housesit. They have a list and they're going down it. A list. Somebody to take Erin's place. Erin! Erin! They didn't even ask if I'd feed the dog. They said he could wait.”

There was no doctor around and the ICU nurses wouldn't say, but when Briah went to the bathroom he asked them again and he could tell they believed Erin was in trouble. When Briah came back she had washed her face and had the key in her hand. The blue tag on it had Erin's looping g's and y's. He could hardly breathe. “This dog knows me,” Briah said. “He'll let us in.”

The dog is not dead. It's standing in the hall by the goat statue, with one big paw on the scarf it must have pulled off the horn. Again, it does not bark. At the sight of Briah, who goes in first, it begins to wag its tail slowly. To him it seems a little wobbly as it comes forward, sniffing first Briah and then him, his feet and legs, in a careful way. If it connects him to anything bad it doesn't show it. The big dogs aren't the bright ones, Erin has told him. Some of the little ones aren't either. Like people. But some are deeply wise. Those were her words.

He feels a jet of cold air pass his cheek, from the hole he cut in the window. Briah finds the dog food and fills the big dish, but the dog won't eat. It lies down heavily on a fine rug the people keep in the kitchen, a prayer rug, he knows from Erin. But when he sits down at the table it gets up and comes over and takes his forearm in its mouth. He sees that this is a form of greeting. The dog lets go and flops back on the prayer rug.

They let him out to pee in the snow and leave him loose in the house when they go back to the hospital. “He's a hospitable dog,” says Briah, crying again. “He'll be nice to the list person.”

She lets him sit with Erin by himself and he goes over everything again with her. How desperate he has been, how he has the prospect of a job thanks to his parole officer. He is off the drug and he thinks this time it's for good, his PO thinks so. All he had today was weed and not all that much of that. He still owes people money. He's volunteering at the encampment where he lived for a while after she kicked him out. Doing better than he was then. This hospital where she is lying, remember, is the place he once worked as an orderly, when they were both at the community college. When he met her. He is going to put in an application here today in case the other deal falls through.

He tells her how deep the snow is. How he wondered what she'd do when she saw him in the living room. The two of them in one room. How quiet everything was. No one was ever around in the daytime, in that neighborhood, except gardeners in the summer. How he talked to them back then and they were all illegals with more problems than he had.

How sorry he is—no way to say this, sorry needing a punishment, sorry beyond any look she could send his way to let him off, if she opened her sticky eyes. How he had been wasted, even on such a little, and forgotten the dog's name, forgotten the dog entirely, thought it was attacking him.

If she had been there, nothing like that would have happened. If she had gone out in the snow to start her car ten minutes sooner, or later, a minute sooner, three seconds later, this impossible crushing would not have happened.

He thought she was ignoring the doorbell. He had to talk to her. Would she have called 911? Knowing how he felt about her? No. No. She couldn't answer because she had a tube down her throat. He thought he could see her eyeballs flick under the lids.

When she died Briah stayed with him in the waiting room while the nurses were unhooking and arranging everything so that the two of them could go in and sit there for as long as they wished. Briah told him she would call him when her parents got there and they figured out the funeral. She was wiping her eyes on the hem of her shirt because the Kleenex box was empty, but he was breaking down, and she must have known about the problems he had when things got seriously bad, how he would go every time, no matter what he had promised, and find what would help him. She knew because she hugged him and told him not to despair. She got down by him on the floor where he was sitting and told him hospital floors were not clean and gave him a lot of advice. She had seen how he was in the kitchen with that dog. She said the thing that would help him now would be to get a dog. It was true she felt that way because she and her sisters were dog people, had grown up in a dog family, where it was believed that you should have two dogs because to leave one dog alone in the house
for longer than it took for Mass to be over was a cruelty born of ignorance, and now their parents were on a plane and who knows how they had managed the matter of the one old dog they had at home. Briah had dogs of her own, but Erin, like a priest who had forgone marriage, had taken other people's dogs as her obligation. Once you had a dog you had to stand up, you had to get up every day and feed it and take it out, you had to meet its eyes, you had to be its leader, it did not know you merely owned it, had found it somewhere, it thought it had found you, its leader, the confidence it felt would shock you, make you worthy, you would stand up, you would be good.

He could see that. He could see a big dog out with him somewhere in the open like a beach. No one else was there. It ran ahead low to the sand in a straight line until it was out of sight. “They always come back,” Erin said.