I Thought You Were Dead (13 page)

But Stella wasn't listening — lightning lit the room. She silently counted, “One-a-Snausage, two-a-Snausage, three-a-Snausage …” When the thunder came, it came as a steady rumble that rattled her to the core. She looked at Paul but knew that there was nothing he could do about it. She tried to slow her breathing.

“You wanna come up on the couch?” Paul offered. “Come on up.”

She pushed her front end up and then paused, waiting for the feeling to come around in her hindquarters. Her front end was still strong enough that if she walked herself forward, the hind part usually followed. She placed a paw on the couch cushion and waited. Paul reached over and lifted her up onto the couch. She laid her head against his thigh. He tickled the skin on her belly. For a moment she forgot about the storm raging outside.

“This is really interesting,” Paul said, reading on. “This guy says that working dogs, breeds that either herd or guard sheep, are the most highly evolved of all the dog breeds. ‘Indeed, it is useful to understand the behavior of adult dogs in terms of wolf pup behavior.' It's called paedomorphism — ”

“Huh?” she said.

“— ‘Meaning the adult of one species retains the juvenile characteristics of another,' ” he read. “ ‘The adult dog barks, just as the wolf pup barks, but adult wolves don't bark. Wolf pups, like adult dogs, will stay put in one place and wait to be fed, whereas adult wolves will do neither. Pups, like dogs, have the ability to bond with other species, a behavior adult wolves quickly outgrow, relating upon maturation only to conspecifics, one reason they tend to make poor house pets even when they're
supposedly tame.' So when a border collie herds sheep, it says here, it will perform behaviors instinctively, doing things that are hardwired into its brain, because they're the same behaviors that wolves use to stalk and kill deer or elk. It's like dogs have been given incomplete genetic wolf instructions, because if they had the whole set of instructions, they'd kill and eat the sheep.”

“Well, look,” Stella said, lifting her leg when Paul scratched a particularly sensitive spot. “I'm sure this professor is a smart guy and all that, and he probably means well, but don't you find what he's saying to be just a bit … lobocentric?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it's always
wolf
this and
wolf
that,” she said. “Comparing us to wolves. I get tired of it. It's ludicrous.”

“How is it ludicrous?” Paul asked. “Wolves live in more complex societies than dogs do. Wolves fend for themselves in the wild. They can hunt down and kill an elk. Could you do that?”

“Why would I want to?”

“But
could
you?”

“You're missing the point, Paul,” Stella said. “I don't have to. The answer is literally under your nose and you can't even see it.”

“Meaning what?”

“Just that the implication is that dogs couldn't cut it as wolves. Like we're too stupid to hunt down elk or deer or whatever, like we're failed wolves.”

“More or less,” Paul said.

“Maybe I don't understand it,” Stella said, “but when you explained evolution to me, you said the fittest individuals breed more successfully than less fit individuals.”

“Right.”

“So whoever is fittest has the highest population.”

“Correct.”

“Well, then,” Stella said, “how many wolves would you say there are alive in the world today? Ballpark figure.”

“The article says a hundred fifty thousand.”

“Good,” she said. “It's a hundred fifty thousand. Now, how many dogs are there? In the whole world, how many? How many just in this country, how many dogs?”

“Well,” Paul said, “I'm not sure.”

“Sixty million, in this country alone,” Stella said. “So if there are, globally, say a hundred million dogs, a low estimate, and a hundred fifty thousand wolves, then who wins? Who's the fittest? Who's the most highly evolved? According to Darwin's own definition?”

“Dogs.”

“I rest my case,” she said. “What's it doing outside right now? It's raining. And where are the wolves? Out there in the rain. And where am I? In here, on the couch, warm and dry. I have food in my dish. I don't have to spend any of my time wondering where the next meal is coming from. So am I a failed wolf, or is a wolf a failed dog?”

“Well …”

“There's really no comparison. They're big and mean and they eat deer. Not impressed.”

Just then a brilliant flash of lightning lit the sky, the brightest so far. He covered Stella's ears with his hands, but the thunder followed immediately, a colossal, booming explosion that rocked the house to its very foundation, followed by several aftershocks, and it didn't matter that Paul's hands blocked some of the sound, because Stella felt the percussion in her very bones and perceived the sudden drop in air pressure following the thunder as a kind of suffocating vacuum. Her heart raced. She felt as if she couldn't breathe.

“God, I don't like this, Paul, please,” she said, “I can't take much more of this, I really can't …”

Then another flash, and an even louder thunderclap.

“There, there,” Paul said, stroking and soothing his dog as
best he could. “It's okay. It's all right. It's all over now. Just calm down …”

“Easy for you to say ‘calm down,' ” she said.

“Everything is okay,” he said, scratching her behind the ears and on the soft part of her belly. It felt to him as if she'd lost another pound or two. “I think you have one or two wolf genes left, or you wouldn't be afraid of thunder. Remember what you were just saying? You live indoors. You don't have to be afraid of thunder.”

“That's true, but thirty thousand years ago when we moved indoors with you, you were still living in caves. Caves can't catch fire. Houses burn down all the time.”

H
e was sore after the first time he ran, but the second time was easier than the first, and the third time was easier than the second. His goal was to run fifteen miles a week. His unspoken goal was to beat his brother in a race … someday. To keep track of his mileage, he ran on the Smith College Tartan Track, which was easier on his legs than running in the street. He made the foolish mistake, one day, of trying to time himself in a hundred-yard dash, a race he'd run in 10.5 seconds in high school. Allowing for age, atrophy, and disuse, he told himself he'd be satisfied if he could run it in under 20 seconds now. He tried to convince himself that his watch had somehow malfunctioned when he clocked himself at an appalling 38 seconds — either that or a hundred yards was longer than it used to be.

H
OWEVER MUCH HIS
muscles ached, he thought of his father and reminded himself that he was lucky he could move at all. Beverly had sent Paul an old photograph of himself and his father, taken after the two of them had finished a game of catch, the shadows of daylight savings time long at twilight, their faces painted orange by the fading sun's holy light, the two of them wearing matching Twins caps they'd bought at Metropolitan Stadium. Paul was struck by how young his father was in the picture, his strong shoulders and broad chest. If Harrold had
ever had a moment of self-doubt in his life, Paul was unaware of it. Looking at the picture, Paul tried to put himself in his father's shoes. He couldn't.

He decided, one day after a run, to try again with his father. He'd hoped for immediate results, instant gratification, but perhaps it would be more a marathon than a sprint. He'd seen Karen in a restaurant earlier, having lunch with her sister and her sister's kids, Molly and Kevin. The encounter had left him depressed. It was one thing to have an ex-wife; it was another to have ex-nieces and ex-nephews. Nobody'd warned him about that. He used to play Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land with them on the rug. Now they were strangers, or he was. He couldn't even say hello and left quickly before they saw him. It was more weird than tragic. If he couldn't alter his own sorry state, maybe he could alter somebody else's.

He needed to be patient. He was wary of saying anything too challenging.

He was of the theory that men invented sports to give them something to talk about other than their feelings. Women played sports, sure, but had they ever invented one? No need. He couldn't think of anything more likely to draw his father out. He pictured Harrold lying in bed, staring blankly at the computer screen. Was he confused? Scared? Angry? When Paul put himself in Harrold's shoes and tried to imagine what Harrold might be feeling, his best guess was that Harrold felt utterly and absolutely useless. “Useless” was not something Harrold was familiar with. Paul was aware that perhaps he was projecting his own interpretation. “Useless” was exactly how Paul had felt after his divorce. Worthless and of no value to anyone.

He allowed that perhaps he'd been using the wrong approach. The speech therapist had told Paul he should feel free to challenge his father and push him a little bit. He considered taking a more aggressive position, but how? Hectoring was out, ditto badgering, cajoling, or scolding. There was always whining, but that was hard to do online.

There was a long pause. Paul waited.

He felt oddly confessional. Why not? What was there to lose? The fact was, he'd always wanted to talk to his father about his failed marriage, not that there was anything anybody could have done. When he'd told his parents divorce was looming, they hadn't asked any questions, avoiding a touchy subject, no doubt. Paul had wondered how much they would understand anyway. His parents never fought about anything, though that didn't mean they agreed all the time. His mother held her opinions close and was infinitely amenable. It was a similar capacity for selflessness that had attracted him to Karen, her readiness to put others first. In the marriage, that “selflessness” evolved into an implacable resentfulness, an anger traceable (he'd theorized) to her position in her family birth order, the youngest of eight kids. Karen said she felt secondary, unimportant, convinced that his career meant more to him than she did, as did his friends, television, drinking, baseball, doughnuts, fishing … “I don't rank you — you do that to yourself,” he'd argued. How could someone not believe you loved them, when all you knew, in your own heart, maybe the only thing you were truly clear on, was that you loved them? More to the point, how could you argue somebody into loving you? It didn't work that way.

It wasn't exactly a conversation, more like venting to a captive audience. He'd worked as a bartender back in graduate school and had witnessed men pissing and moaning about women and marriage. It didn't seem like too much to ask, even though men of Paul's father's generation weren't expected to be expressive about their emotions. You didn't talk about hardships or problems, because talking wasn't going to change anything and just kept things alive that needed to go away.