One Good Dog (7 page)

Adam and his team justified what they were doing by promoting a corporate belief that such testing was necessary so that the eyeliner wouldn’t damage nerves, so that the mascara wouldn’t blind the user. What were a few bunnies compared to that? The bottom line decreed that the products developed by Dynamic for its line called Fraîche Crème, with its inexpensive, oftentimes imported ingredients, be marketed to the high-end users with a 200 percent markup. That didn’t allow for lawsuits or unhappy socialites scarred by chemical peels at their luxury spas. The NATE people had to be appeased, but not allowed to be a roadblock to profits.

And Adam March had made that happen and been awarded a rich promotion to corporate headquarters and the penultimate job in the company’s hierarchy. His glory days.

As Adam turns away from the window, he sees the stray dog dashing back down the street, the pole still following.

I really wasn’t panicked. Despite the four feet of aluminum pole dangling like a misplaced tail, I knew I wasn’t attached to some demon, but had slipped the grip of the man, who then raced after me, yelling invectives guaranteed to emphasize his mistake rather than my escape. Woo hoo. I was free. Free at last.

Thanks to our boys’ relentless training program, which involved a treadmill, I had a lot of stamina. The pole thwacked against immovable objects, ringing hollowly into the sensitive caverns of my ears, but other than that, I was whooping it up. Up the street and down, ducking into narrow alleys with the enticing scent of garbage emanating from Dumpsters soldiered behind restaurants, the ugly backside of sophistication. I knew that freedom was fragile, and that I’d better find a bolt-hole quickly. The men were hot on my trail, and the sight of a fifty-pound dog with a four-foot pole tagging along would certainly catch the attention of even the most oblivious of passersby.

I had to ditch the pole. Unfortunately, my physical limitations being what they are, it was pretty near impossible to get the noose from around my thick neck without opposable thumbs. I tried shaking, ducking, twisting, clawing, and whining. Nothing helped. I needed a friend. Now, this being neither fairy tale nor Disney, no one of my own species was a likely candidate. What’s a dog to do?

Being a dog, I sort of forgot about the problem as the amazing scents of the street wafted up to my nose. I began sniffing around, identifying others of my kind and following them on their travels. If females, I quivered. If males with balls, I growled and lifted my leg higher to cover their mark. As I made my way down one narrow alley, I inhaled the scents gathered between the buildings, snuffling in the olfactory stimuli. An experienced street dog would know that it’s madness to go down one of these easily blocked passages. But I was, at that time, not well schooled in the lessons of the street. But I was a lucky dog. At the far end of the alley, a form crouched against the wall. At its side, a dog. I meandered along, snuffling and marking, the pole dragging gently behind me on the rough pavement. The form, as I drew closer, smelled human, deliciously unflavored by the foul perfumed scents our boys splashed on themselves.

Here was a human in all his primitive, animal glory. Funky. His true identity was not masked by frequent washing. His dog, a smallish long-haired bitch, growled at me but didn’t really mean it. She was just letting me know that he was there and that she wouldn’t take kindly to interference. She gave up growling and stood and shook herself, and I saw a flash of metal dangling from a collar. I remembered the leash dog mourning the loss of his disks, but I still couldn’t quite
wrap my mind around their significance. Our kind don’t usually revere totems.

I shook myself in reply.
I mean no harm.
We greeted, and I could scent that she was well fed, despite the appearance of her person.

She sat and scratched behind her drooping ear, then stood and sniffed at my pole.
So, they had you and you got away. I know how to get out of those.

I sat and waited to hear how.

The bitch nudged her person awake. He started; then his head sank back to his chest. He was as furry as a bearded collie. Matted, too. She yipped. He opened his eyes and saw me.

“What have we got here?” His voice was like a load of kibble spilling onto the floor. Rough, interesting. “You bite?”

I walked away, just out of reach of a sitting man.

“I won’t hurt you.” He didn’t move from his crouched position against the warm brick wall.

His companion stalked over to me and sniffed my nose, her tail addressing my doubts.
Okay.
I moved a little closer.

“You want that thing off?”

I danced a little on my front feet, his voice was so calm and kibbley.
Maybe I do.

He didn’t do any of the things I would have expected of a man. He neither lashed out to grab the pole nor stood up to intimidate me. He just kept crouching against his wall and waited for me to decide. I caught the fumes of alcohol when he spoke, his breath more humanized than his skin. I glanced up at his eyes, hooded and hollow. He had no fire in him; he had no fear and no opinions. I moved closer, close enough that he put out one hand for me to sniff, palm flat, no threat.

I inhaled the smell of the city, all the scents that I had been snuffling down as I made my way clear of the men and their van; as I put distance between myself and the cellar where I had spent my life, all of these beautiful, evocative scents were on his hand, as if he’d scooped up whole handfuls of the air and brick and pavement and garbage that made up the world beyond my eyesight. That, plus the very interesting odor of fish chowder. I knew what the guy had had for lunch. Which made me realize I was inordinately hungry and thirsty.

Okay. Take it off.

The man carefully slid the noose from around my neck. Patted my head and slid the pole under a Dumpster without getting out of his crouch. He put his head down again and instantly went back to whatever state it was he’d been in before his companion woke him.

Thanks.
I lolled my tongue in gratitude.

No problem.
The bitch snuggled back down beside the man and curled her fluffy tail over her nose.

I sloped off in search of sustenance.

All I had to do was follow my nose. I found pizza crusts and an empty ice-cream cone, the dregs of melted ice cream within the cone adhering to my long tongue as I slid it into the conical wafer. Mmmm. Wandering along neighborhood streets, I came across improperly fitted trash can lids, flipped them off with barely a nudge. Within these cylindrical buffets, a host of treats, including, but not limited to, steak tips, french fries, an actual half chicken. And, best of all, a ham bone the likes of which my kind will commit murder to get.

Needless to say, I chucked it all up an hour later, but then I consumed that. Waste not, want not when you’re a dog on the street.

Water was a little harder to come by. There was the fountain in the park, but that meant getting too close to people. It hadn’t rained in a long time, so puddles were out of the question. A backyard hose with a drip helped. I lapped at it like a gerbil, then went off to find a safe place to bunk down. I wasn’t yet streetwise, but I had pretty good instincts. If my objective was to stay out of the hands of people, then I needed to stay out of sight. On the other paw, as it were, I needed what the people had to offer in the way of food and water. Although strong-jawed, I knew hunting wasn’t ever going to be my strong suit and that a life beyond the city, in the less populated hills, was out of the question. I needed a little advice.

That there were others loose on the streets was evident on every street corner and against every brick building. I just needed to track a likely mentor down. It wouldn’t be hard. The trace left by one male in particular suggested that he’d been on the streets for some time, which meant he knew the ropes, which meant, if I could catch up to him, he might be susceptible to obsequiousness and help me out.

By this time, and it had been since before dawn, I was wrung out. Instead of taking the time to try to find my hoped-for guide, I found a fairly protected niche in the low-growing bushes of the city park. It bore no sign of previous habitation, no circled-down foliage, no nesting, no scent of any other creature within those underslung branches. Like I say, I was a neophyte. I thought that if I couldn’t see out, they couldn’t see in. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes, just as I was entering that dream sleep we all need, when the sound of soft yelps
startled me awake. There was a moment of confusion, when I thought I was back in my cage and my siblings were begging for lunch. The yelps turned into a low, oddly compelling howling.

Apparently, I’d chosen a bush situated behind a very popular human mating area, and suddenly, I was eye-to-eye with a humping human, both of us openmouthed with surprise. I dashed out of my imperfect hidey-hole; he stood up, genitals dangling, and grabbed his pants. I do believe he thought I was going to attack him, the way he yanked his mate up and fled almost as fast in the opposite direction from that of my own flight. Okay, bushes in the park, no good. Another lesson.

Only slightly refreshed, I trotted a zigzag out of the city park and back onto the streets. I had to keep up a steady quickstep, although the pavement was beginning to wear on my pads. I’d never spent much time on pavement. People were everywhere, and I dodged them like a video-game master. No one was going to get a hand on me. I wasn’t going back to that cage.

Mostly, I kept to the alleys, having already figured out that my kind kept to those canyons like wolves in the wild. Miraculously, I found a nook ready-made for sleeping, about the size of my cage, which was oddly comforting, beneath a set of back stairs. Yes, it bore the scent of my kind, but the scent was very old, and I had to take a chance that this place was up for lease. There was even a ragged cloth, which I nosed into shape. It felt like a good place, and I was instantly asleep. I’d rest awhile and then go see what else I could find to eat. Maybe see if there were any females around looking for some company.

Before I fell asleep, I licked my paws and thought, This is
extraordinary. Not twelve hours ago, I was cage-bound, my life as circumspect in its routine as a monk’s. My battle of the week accomplished, kibble in my dish. My whole life contained in that cellar. Now here I am, making my own plans, eating like a king, thinking already about mating.

The only problem with this living in paradise was that my wound, the jagged rip my late opponent had sliced into me, had begun to hurt.

The Fort Street Center is in the worst part of town and serves homeless men, providing a hot meal, a gathering place, and, for twenty of them, a place to sleep out of the elements. Adam knows about the center only because it’s one of the hundreds of charities that solicit him every year. He’s maybe thrown a few bucks its way, without really thinking about the mission or the nature of the cause.

Homelessness
is not a word that Adam thinks about with any degree of interest. To him, a “homeless man” is a bum, a street person, a schizophrenic off his meds. A panhandler. An annoyance. Someone to dodge as he goes down the street, much like a stray dog. Might be diseased or drunk. Shaking empty paper cups, begging for coffee money. Giuliani got rid of the squeegee men in New York, so why couldn’t this city find a way to get the street people off the street? That’s what Adam thinks whenever some indigent crosses his path on the sidewalk.

If Adam has given any thought to the why of homelessness, it is to believe that as he is a self-made man, these must be
self-undone men. Victims of bad habits and bad decisions. Everyone knew of the guy who chose to live on the street rather than in his home, where his abandoned wife or caring children couldn’t keep him. Common knowledge. Or the guy who just fucked his life up so badly, no one wanted to be near him, his own violence and temper putting him on the street. The guy who won’t even try to hold on to his family.

Adam has spurned his lawyer’s offer to go with him. He will report to the Fort Street Center by himself, a man with free will. No hand-holding, no audience. No billable hour. Not sure what to expect, Adam dresses in his usual business attire. Most likely this Bob Carmondy fellow will be overjoyed to have a man familiar with business at his disposal. Maybe the worst that will happen is that he’ll hand Adam the books. These nonprofits are so often run on shoestrings, or, worse, like lemonade stands. Adam looks at his freshly shaven face in the mirror as he knots his Harvard tie. He tries not to see the dark circles of restless nights beneath his eyes or the faint yellow color tinging the whites, like pale echoes of the brown of his irises. Or the hollowness of his cheeks. The new gray in his hair. He’s even looking forward to putting in some volunteer time. That’ll look just fine, with tweaking, on his curriculum vitae. It is no longer enough to have enjoyed the career path he has been on: promotions and bonuses labeling him a man of substance. The ignominious departure from Dynamic has made him less than attractive; in this day and age, corporations are reluctant to hire people fired for such a violation as his. Only embezzlement would have been a harder crime to overcome. Time will help, counsels his lawyer. Get past the headlines, the blogs, the pillory of public discussion. Sit tight. It’ll blow over. In the meantime, his bank
account, the only one Sterling didn’t get, is dribbling away and he is powerless to stop the constant leak. Sterling resolutely refuses to give up any of the houses, the masseuse, the flower arranger. These aren’t luxuries, but necessities; she mustn’t give up her standard of living, not for her sake, but for their daughter’s. Ariel deserves the best-possible everything. She makes it sound like if she doesn’t have access to their time-share jet, it will be Ariel who will suffer the humiliation of commercial air travel. Her young life will be ruined.

Lying awake in the middle of the night, Adam realizes that Sterling has never wanted for anything. Not once in her gilded existence has any desire been left wanting. Ever. The basic needs so well met that luxury itself became a basic need.