The helper girl who’d played with the puppy walked out through the door that opened onto a long concrete corridor full of shadowy metal-fenced cages. Dogs immediately began barking again, and the foul animal odor entered the room almost shockingly. An odd place to seek employment, I thought.
“How long do you keep them?” I said, and set the puppy’s cage down on the concrete floor. Dogs were barking beyond the door, one big-sounding dog in particular, though I couldn’t see it. A big yellow tiger-striped cat that apparently had free rein in the office walked across the desk top where Sallie was going on writing and rubbed against her arm, and made her frown.
“Five days,” the puffy-faced Cajun woman said, and smiled in what seemed like an amused way. “We try to place’em. People be in here all the time, lookin’. Puppies go fast ’less they something wrong with them.” Her eyes found the cage on the floor. She smiled at the puppy as if it could understand her. “You cute,” she said, then made a dry kissing noise.
“What usually disqualifies them?” I said, and Sallie looked around at me.
“Too aggressive,” the woman said, staring approvingly in at the puppy. “If it can’t be house-broke, then they’ll bring ’em back to us. Which isn’t good.”
“Maybe they’re just scared,” I said.
“Some are. Then some are just little naturals. They go in one hour.” She leaned over, hands on her lab-coat knees and looked in at our puppy. “How ’bout you?” she said. “You a little natural? Or are you a little scamp? I b’lieve I see a scamp in here.” The puppy sat on the wire flooring and stared at her indifferently, just as he had stared at me. I thought he would bark, but he didn’t.
“That’s all,” Sallie said, and turned to me and attempted an hospitable look. She put her pen in her purse. She was thinking I might be changing my mind, but I wasn’t.
“Then that’s all you need. We’ll take over,” the supervisor woman said.
“What’s the fee?” I asked.
“Id’n no fee,” the woman said and smiled. “Remember me in yo’ will.” She squatted in front of the cage as if she was going to open it. “Puppy, puppy,” she said, then put both hands around the sides of the cage and stood up, holding it with ease. She made a little grunting sound, but she was much stronger than I would’ve thought. Just then another blond helper girl, this one with a metal brace on her left leg, came humping through the kennels door, and the supervisor just walked right past her, holding the cage, while the dogs down the long, dark corridor started barking ecstatically.
“We’re donating the cage,” Sallie said. She wanted out of the building, and I did, too. I stood another moment and watched as the woman in the lab coat disappeared along the row of pens, carrying our puppy. Then the green metal door went closed, and that was all there was to the whole thing. Nothing very ceremonial.
. .
On our drive back downtown we were both, naturally enough, sunk into a kind of woolly, disheartened silence. From up on the Interstate, the spectacle of modern, southern city life and ambitious new construction where once had been a low, genteel old river city, seemed particularly gruesome and unpromising and probably seemed the same to Sallie. To me, who labored in one of the tall, metal and glass enormities (I could actually see my office windows in Place St. Charles, small, undistinguished rectangles shining high up among countless others), it felt particularly alien to history and to my own temperament. Behind these square mirrored windows, human beings were writing and discussing and preparing cases; and on other floors were performing biopsies, CAT scans, drilling out cavities, delivering news both welcome and unwelcome to all sorts of other expectants — clients, patients, partners, spouses, children. People were in fact there waiting for me to arrive that very afternoon, anticipating news of the Brownlow-Maisonette case — where were things, how were our prospects developing, what was my overall take on matters and what were our hopes for a settlement (most of my “take” wouldn’t be all that promising). In no time I’d be entering their joyless company and would’ve forgotten about myself here on the highway, peering out in near despair because of the fate of an insignificant little dog. Frankly, it made me feel pretty silly.
Sallie suddenly said, as though she’d been composing something while I was musing away balefully, “Do you remember after New Year’s that day we sat and talked about one thing changing and making everything else different?”
“The Big Dipper,” I said as we came to our familiar exit, which quickly led down and away through a different poor section of darktown that abuts our gentrified street. Everything had begun to seem more manageable as we neared home.
“That’s right,” Sallie said, as though the words Big Dipper reproached her. “But you know, and you’ll think this is crazy. It is maybe. But last night when I was in bed, I began thinking about that poor little puppy as an ill force that put everything in our life at a terrible risk. And we were in danger in some way. It scared me. I didn’t want that.”
I looked over at Sallie and saw a crystal tear escape her eye and slip down her soft, rounded, pretty cheek.
“Sweetheart,” I said, and found her hand on the steering wheel. “It’s quite all right. You put yourself through a lot. And I’ve been gone. You just need me around to do more. There’s nothing to be scared about.”
“I suppose,” Sallie said resolutely.
“And if things are not exactly right now,” I said, “they soon will be. You’ll take on the world again the way you always do. We’ll all be the better for it.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry about the puppy.”
“Me too,” I said. “But we did the right thing. Probably he’ll be fine.”
“And I’m sorry things threaten me,” Sallie said. “I don’t think they should, then they do.”
“Things threaten all of us,” I said. “Nobody gets away unmarked.” That is what I thought about all of that then. We were in sight of our house. I didn’t really want to talk about these subjects anymore.
“Do you love me,” Sallie said, quite unexpectedly.
“Oh yes,” I said, “I do. I love you very much.” And that was all we said.
A week ago, in one of those amusing fillers used to justify column space in one of the trial lawyers’ journals I look at just for laughs, I read two things that truly interested me. These are always chosen for their wry comment on the law, and are frequently hilarious and true. The first one I read said, “Scientists predict that in five thousand years the earth will be drawn into the sun.” It then went on to say something like, “so it’s not too early to raise your malpractice insurance,” or some such cornball thing as that. But I will admit to being made oddly uncomfortable by this news about the earth — as if I had something important to lose in the inevitability of its far-off demise. I can’t now say what that something might be. None of us can think about five thousand years from now. And I’d have believed none of us could feel anything about it either, except in ways that are vaguely religious. Only I did, and I am far from being a religious man. What I felt was very much like the sensation described by the old saying “Someone just walked on your grave.” Someone, so it seemed, had walked on my grave five thousand years from now, and it didn’t feel very good. I was sorry to have to think about it.
The other squib I found near the back of the magazine behind the Legal Market Place, and it said that astronomers had discovered the oldest known star, which they believed to be 50 million-light years away, and they had named it the Millennium Star for obvious reasons, though the actual Millennium had gone by with hardly any change in things that I’d noticed. When asked to describe the chemical makeup of this Millennium Star — which of course couldn’t even be seen — the scientist who’d discovered it said, “Oh, gee, I don’t know. It’s impossible to reach that far back in time.” And I thought — sitting in my office with documents of the Brownlow-Maisonette case spread all around me and the hot New Orleans sun beaming into the very window I’d seen from my car when Sallie and I were driving back from delivering the puppy to its fate — I thought, “Time? Why does he say time, when what he means is space?” My feeling then was very much like the feeling from before, when I’d read about the earth hurtling into the sun — a feeling that so much goes on everywhere all through time, and we know only a laughably insignificant fraction about any of it.