Gone to the Dogs (23 page)

I cruised past Steve’s clinic. Because of the holiday, the parking lot was empty except for Steve’s van. Cliff Bourque wasn’t crouched nearby, grenade in hand. I pulled the Bronco into a gas station, turned around, fought my way back into the traffic, and drove by again. This time, I scanned the wooded area opposite the clinic. In other words, I searched for Cliff Bourque in the place I’d first seen him. Stupid? I didn’t know where else to look. At any rate, if he’d been perched sniper-fashion high in the leafless branches of a Norway maple while he prepared to pick off Lee Miner, or even if he’d just been leaning against a tree trunk, I might not have spotted him. The traffic was even thicker and moving even faster than it had been on the day Cliff Bourque dashed through it to save Kimi. I did my best to look for Cliff, though. I did. But I didn’t see him.

After that, I followed my original plan, but almost as soon as we crossed into Arlington, I regretted the decision to take Route 2. A sand truck had prematurely dressed the highway with a layer of salty dirt that every speeding little foreign compact tossed in the face of my big, muscular Bronco. Each sweep of the wipers gave me only a moment’s vision of the road and steadily ground the grit into the windshield. As the snow thickened, I cursed Ford for the absence of rear wipers and damned every car manufacturer on earth for failing to contrive some device to rid me of the mud on the side windows. I could hear and sense that there were cars on all sides, but except for an occasional blink at the road ahead, I couldn’t see
them. Driving the Bronco northwest along Route 2, then northeast on 495, I felt like a kindly, sightless Newfoundland forced to run with a pack of Yorkshire terriers, destined to crush one.

Although I’d topped up the Bronco’s reservoir of window washer fluid before we left Cambridge, my steady pumping emptied it somewhere beyond Lowell. I was tempted to pull into the emergency lane and onto the verge of the highway to add fluid, but I was afraid of being clipped by a passing car. At the next exit, I pulled off 495 and stopped briefly in Tewksbury, where I got out to add wiper fluid and, while I was at it, to lock the hubs of the front wheels in case I hit an unplowed road and wanted to shift into four-wheel drive. As soon as I got back in, the snow that had accumulated on my hair during my two or three minutes in the storm began to melt in the good Ford heat. The car smelled of dogs and mud.

I got back on the highway, turned on the radio, and, over the noise of the defroster, listened to a couple of weather forecasts. Newcomers to this area typically pass through a stage of supposing that despite the presence of MIT and other local scientific institutions, Massachusetts has the world’s most incompetent meteorologists. We don’t, of course. What we have is unpredictable weather. Those of us who have been here a while treat weather forecasts the way an astrology skeptic treats horoscopes: When a prediction comes true, we’re astounded at the coincidence. Most of the time, though, a good, accurate weather report in eastern Massachusetts is one that limits itself to describing what it’s like out right now. According to the radio, the snow was coming down heavily, and we could expect between eight and twelve inches, possibly much more, unless, as could
well happen, the snow turned to rain or the storm blew out to sea.

We made it to Haverhill, left 495, and turned north without running over any of the internal combustion Yorkies. Lights shining from the windows of the small stores and businesses along the road created the cheerful illusion of prosperity. In the parking lot of a plumbing supply place, dozens of unsold Christmas trees trucked down from Maine or New Brunswick rested under strings of multicolored lights against a maze of makeshift wooden supports. Sloppy letters slapped in white paint on a plywood sign advertised the trees at half price. I had a sense of time running out.

At the turn to Charity’s, I shifted into four-wheel drive and followed the tire tracks through the snow along the unplowed road. Three or four cars passed in the opposite direction, and I had to pull far to the right to let them get by. A bright flood at Charity’s back door showed the nearby outbuildings and lit up the dusting of white on the wreaths and bows. I left the Bronco at the side of the road. From one of the runs attached to the ex-garage, a golden dog yapped sharply at me, and my hope rose, but when I’d taken a few steps, I could see that the dog was a yellow Lab, and a male at that.

The barking of the Lab and the other dogs brought Charity to the door. The house was very hot and smelled of roasting lamb. The kitchen table and counters had been cleared of the stacks of artful little dog clothes. Charity was wearing a red wool dress. She’d brushed her hair and applied a thick layer of crimson lipstick.

“Holly Winter,” I reminded her. “I picked up Groucho. I’m a friend of Hope’s?”

“I’m, uh, expecting her,” she said, “but with the snow …”

“I can only stay a second,” I said. “I should’ve called. It’s about a dog?”

She looked relieved. “I’ve got to warn you,” she said. “I’m almost full up. There’s one run empty, but there’s no room in the house. I’ve got a cousin coming, and she doesn’t like dogs. She’s afraid of them really, but she won’t say so, and if you do, she gets offended, so I have to keep them all outside when she’s here. Did you want—?”

“No,” I said. “It’s about … When I was here before, you had a dog in one of those runs right near the back door? A kind of yellow-gold female, something like a shepherd, shorthaired.”

“Lady,” Charity said. “Really, she should’ve been in here with me, but there was no room, which was why I was so glad when he finally came and got her. I was starting to think he was never going to show up.”

“But he did?” God damn.

“You probably passed him on your way in.”

“Just now?”

She nodded.

“When he brought her in,” I said. “Was that, uh … This may sound kind of strange, but did it happen to be in the middle of the night?”

She laughed. “I guess you’d call it night if you don’t have a lot of dogs that want their breakfast. I’d just got up.” She paused and added happily, “I’m up at five.”

“A kind of pale-looking guy,” I said quickly. “Midtwenties maybe?”

“You know him?” she said.

“I’ve been trying to catch up with him,” I said. “Thanks. I’d better get going.”

Barrelling down the road, past the dark machine shops toward the main drag, I tried to remember the cars that had been leaving when I arrived, but I’d been concentrating so hard on getting the Bronco out of their way that I hadn’t really noticed them. It seemed to me that if they’d been big 4 × 4’s like mine, I wouldn’t have yielded the road so courteously. In fact, I had the vague impression that they’d all been small cars like Lee Miner’s. When I’d seen it in Steve’s parking lot, I’d thought that Jackie, not Lee, must have picked it out. That bright red was her color and Willie’s, too, not Lee’s. Oh, yeah. The make and model. Well, look. Can you tell a Belgian Malinois from a Tervuren? A malamute from a Siberian husky? A Keeshond from a Norwegian elkhound? Well, can you? At a glance? If you show dogs, they probably don’t even look alike to you, but if not? Well, I don’t show cars. I could, you know—my home town, Owls Head, Maine, happens to be the home of a famous museum of transportation—but I don’t. The Miners’ car was small and red, and it wasn’t something distinctive like a Jaguar, a Corvette, a Saab, a Mercedes, or an old Morgan. Even so, I thought that I just might recognize it.

And I did. Only a few miles after I’d swung onto 495, I spotted a small red car ahead of me in the right-hand lane. On the way to a dog show, almost anyone could be driving a small red car with a bumper sticker asserting that happiness is a Scottish terrier, but on 495 on Christmas Eve? When Miner had just left Charity’s? So that part was easy.

The traffic heading south was lighter than what we’d hit on the way north. The plows hadn’t been by
for a while, but the Bronco was built more for snow than for grit, and I was finding the driving easier than I’d expected. I was feeling so elated, especially after I’d caught up with Miner, that instead of listening to the news, Christmas carols, or a talk show on the radio, I popped in a Hank Williams, Jr., tape and turned up the volume. Repeated fast-forwarding and reversing to play your favorite song over and over wrecks the whole tape, but I just had to hear Hank sing that sad, beautiful song, “Living Proof.”

Living proof.

I hate to find myself stuck behind a dawdler. It happens all the time in crowded obedience classes. You and your dog are striding along at a normal brisk pace, but the sluggish handler and lagging dog ahead slow you down to a dull creep. Don’t let them! Once your dog gets the idea that a normal pace is very slow, he’ll get bored, and a bored dog is a lagging dog. Speed up and pass!

But I wasn’t training a dog. If I passed Miner, I’d simply lose sight of him. Even so, it irked me to poke along at a maximum speed of forty miles an hour, and when I’m behind the wheel, I don’t irk easily. I’m so used to Boston drivers that it startles me to see someone stop at a red light. If the car in front of me signals for a right turn, I expect an abrupt left. Miner’s driving, though, was not only slow, but, even judged against my Boston standards, really rotten. The small red car would speed up to forty, drop to twenty, then leap forward, and it moved erratically between the right-hand lane and the breakdown lane, sometimes straddling the two. Whatever the make of the small red car, it was no Bronco, and Miner probably lacked the confidence-boosting sound of Hank Williams, Jr., too, but I was not in a charitable mood. I wanted that dog, and I didn’t like waiting.

As we left Lawrence and entered Andover, the storm changed. Instead of blowing, the snow fell evenly and heavily. In case Miner hit a car invisible to him in the thick snow, I dropped back. The little red car slowed to a steady twenty and began to hug the shoulder, then suddenly veered left and barely missed a car abandoned in the breakdown lane with no warning lights or flares. In spite of the near miss, Miner immediately pulled right again, and my confidence vanished.

“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. “This son of a bitch is looking for a place to stop.”

What I’d mistaken for nervous driving made sense. He needed a place to pull off the highway for a few seconds—it wouldn’t take him long to open a door and shove Mattie out—but, first, he wanted to shake that Bronco that had been on his tail since Haverhill. When I’d dropped back, maybe he’d lost patience or lost sight of me and started to scan the highway in earnest. Or was he simply watching for the intersection with 93 South?

In case the Bronco had been an unintended deterrent, I pulled ahead, and the red car resumed its weaving. At a minimum, I was making him nervous. But what if I made him so nervous that he crashed into another abandoned car? Or if I frightened him so badly that he pulled over and stopped? I could plow the Bronco right through his little car, but not without killing the dog. And if he let her loose? The traffic was lighter than it had been on the way north, but there were still plenty of cars and trucks on the highway, including, it suddenly seemed to me, a terrifying number of eighteen-wheelers, big rigs in the hands of tired truckers who wouldn’t let snow like this drag out their long hauls.

Just before the junction with 93, a huge moving van thundered by in the fast lane. My clammy hands gripped the wheel. Miner’s turn signal warned me that he was taking the exit for 93 South, and I followed. The traffic on 93 was heavier than it had been on 495, and the blizzard was blowing again, throwing great sheets of snow at my windshield. I kept playing the song over and over, and I began to sing along with Hank about living proof. Living, yes, but for how long? And if he let her loose on this wide highway in this heavy snow, could I do for Cliff Bourque what he’d done for me? From the cab of a speeding eighteen-wheeler, Mattie and I would be equally invisible in the snow until only a second before the impact hurtled us momentarily in the air, and we’d be dead before we crashed onto the highway. Rowdy and Kimi? After the accident, the cars and trucks for a mile back would smash together in deadly pileup, and the Bronco wouldn’t be spared. There were people in those cars and trucks. They barely crossed my mind. Is that a horrible admission? Maybe so.

I told the dogs that I loved them and then concentrated on harassing Lee Miner. I’d speed up and tailgate, drop back, then roar ahead until I almost hit him. I don’t know whether the tactic persuaded him to keep going. It may have had no influence at all. I suspect that it is what prompted him to take the Medford exit from 93, but it’s possible that he’d planned to follow the back route to Cambridge all along. In Medford Square, Miner punctiliously came to a stop at a red light. According to the rules of the road in Greater Boston, a driver in my position is entitled to lean on the horn until the offender ahead gets the message that he’s done something outlandish and either
barges forward or moves aside. Alternatively, it would have been perfectly normal for me to assume that his car had gone dead and to pass him on either the left or the right. In flagrant violation of common law, though, I pulled up behind him, pressed my foot on the brake, took my hands off the wheel, stretched my arms, closed my eyes, and sighed heavily. Even at Miner’s pace, we’d be in Cambridge in no time. So far as Miner knew, he was on call and had the clinic to himself, and Steve was in Owls Head, Maine. I knew better, of course. I knew better.

On Alewife Brook Parkway, about halfway between Medford Square and the intersection with Mass. Ave. at the Cambridge-Arlington line, Rowdy woke up. Like most malamutes, mine had always been excellent travelers. If you have to choose between malamutes and children as your companions on a long car trip, don’t hesitate. The dogs will sleep or look out the windows. They won’t keep insisting that they have to go to the bathroom or make you stop for ice cream and then drip it all over the car. They’ll never ask if you’re almost there. If your destination is familiar, they won’t have to ask; having taken an intelligent canine interest in the passing scenery, they’ll know. Five or ten minutes before you arrive, when the children would be jumping and screaming, the malamutes will perk up their ears, wag their tails, and, if they like your destination, issue some happy whinnies and woo-woos. In fact, Alaskan malamutes don’t just make the perfect traveling companions. They make the perfect … Well, never mind. Too much is made of that already.