In Trouble with the Dutchman
I'm more of a cat person, really — I prefer a warm purr on the lap to the bouncing, slap-happy kisses of dogs. But when my husband, Phil, brought Blister home from the park, I have to admit that I fell in love with him just as deeply, as swooningly and childishly, as he did. Phil'd been out jogging, which he did every weekend (although I knew, from having accidentally driven past him once, that he jogged five blocks to the park, walked to a bench, and sat down for a while before jogging back), when Blister came up, prancing, and licked his ankle. Blister was a small dog, knee-high, with short black hair that shone like an oil slick in the Saturday afternoon sun. He was wearing a red collar with a round tag that bore his name. After petting him a little, Phil looked around for the owner, who was nowhere to be found, and after a further while he brought him home to me, when the previously mentioned falling in love happened and there was a lot of petting and fetching and wagging and speculating about his name, which seemed to suit him perfectly in some strange way, and there was also, I'll be honest, some baby-talking to the dog, and after looking for posters and ads in the paper we took him to the pound, and since no one claimed him in fourteen days, Blister was ours.
We don't have kids. Phil doesn't want them, and I kind of do but not badly enough to push; but with Blister we made a family. Phil works days, as an actuary, and I work the night shift in the clean room of a computer-chip manufacturer, so we cross paths at home like the proverbial ships in the proverbial night. Before Blister, we were often so tired that we'd just sit on the couch, not talking, watching an hour of shared television before heading off in our separate directions. After Blister, we'd venture out into the neighborhood, to the park or along the weedy industrial lots behind the shopping center, where Blister could run off leash, investigating trash, spills, and the accidental wildlife that thrives along the unkempt edges of suburbia. We'd talk, Phil and I, not about anything major — just our days, people who were annoying us at work, that kind of thing — and although I hadn't realized that our marriage was in any danger, I could feel cracks being mended, a kind of basement-level fortification, and I knew that the dog was saving us.
Even in the freezing winters we walked Blister, or he walked us, even in ice storms when his paws slipped comically over the glittering carapaces of lawns, even in black afternoons after the end of daylight savings. The dog walk was our together time. And then, in March, Phil got his promotion and started working longer hours. The money was welcome but the hours were difficult; for one thing, I had to walk Blister alone, by myself, in the afternoon. When Phil finally got home, Blister would greet him in a frenzy, curling up beside him on the couch, his black chin on Phil's thigh; but I only heard about these things, because by then I was already gone.
At work I wear a bunny suit, helmet to booties, the entire thing, and have to move slowly, so as not to disturb the complex air-filtration system, and I don't talk much, either. I use a scanner to examine chips for defects. People say it must be hard working nights, the same tasks each shift, in silence. This, however, is not the case. It is an atmosphere of almost one-hundred-percent calm. I move through the shift in a trance, my mind in total focus, my body swathed and clean. The chips are made out of a square wafer and then cut out into circles, and the chemicals on them produce gorgeous and geometric patterns of pink and blue. When a chip comes under the scanner and I look at it — carefully, carefully — it reminds me of a jewel sparkling in a store window. It shows me that human beings can make something perfect and beautiful. I love what I do, and don't want to give it up, not even to be at home in the evenings on the couch with Blister and Phil.
So I started walking Blister by myself. I took him to the park, where he fell briefly in love with a Jack Russell named Zelda, and became fast friends with a lumbering Rottweiler named Chekhov. I teased him that he had a weakness for the literary types. Without Phil, the industrial avenues behind the shopping center seemed ominous and lonely, so I avoided those and paraded him around the neighborhood instead. In the dark late afternoons, with a prancing, curious black dog by your side, you can see straight into people's houses and lives: families arguing around dinner tables, children staring gape-mouthed at television sets, couples getting drunk by candlelight. During those walks the world seemed to me pitiful and exposed, lacking in some critical defenses. I tried explaining this to Phil a few times, at breakfast, but he was tired and hurried, gulping down cereal while trying not to spill milk on his tie, and I never felt he understood exactly what I was talking about, although I'm sure, I really am, that he tried.
March goes in like a lamb and out like a lion, or the other way around, but this particular March was roaring and hostile from start to finish. We'd been hit by the worst kind of weather: hours of snow one day, and then it would warm up and turn sleety, with ice storms that caused power outages and car accidents. Being outside made my skin feel raw and itchy, the air like a thousand pricking needles. My walks with Blister got shorter, and he'd stare at me reproachfully as we turned toward home. I found a new route, a short loop through an apartment complex whose height cut the wind a little, and I'd let him poke around its small yard while I huddled beneath a fire escape. This is where we were when it happened. I've gone over it a million times in my head since then, thinking of how I might have prevented it, but my memory never varies: the rush of wind; the muffled sounds of traffic through my wool hat; the appearance, as if from nowhere, of another dog.
I'm no expert on breeds, but I know what a pit-bull mix looks like. I hate those big, strong snouts of theirs, which remind me of a dinosaur's jaws, made for chomping other forms of life. This dog and Blister stood nose to nose, immobile, tails straight to the sky. I had Blister on the long, retractable leash, but was afraid to tug because I didn't know what the other dog would do if he moved. Everything was terribly quiet.
Then, from the shadows at the edge of the apartment complex, a man materialized in a red Gore-Tex jacket, his face hidden by the hood. “Sweetpea,” he called in a singsong voice. “Come here, Sweetpea.”
If I could have searched in my mind for the most unlikely name on earth for this dog, Sweetpea would probably have been the one I chose. This dog was staring at Blister as if contemplating which limb he was going to tear off first, but Blister was holding his ground. I was standing there paralyzed, which I will regret for the rest of my life.
When Sweetpea lunged, the leash lurched and took me with it, like a fisherman at the mercy of a monstrous fish. I heard snarling and a howl like a baby's, ghostly and keening, and then a sick crunch of teeth meeting flesh, and I saw the red of the Gore-Tex jacket, and both names, Blister and Sweetpea, were being yelled repeatedly, then something tripped me and I landed on the ground, the breath was knocked out of me, like it hadn't been since I was a little kid, all the air pushed from my lungs, the atmosphere of the world collapsing. The dogs were fighting, snapping at each other's throats.
“Sweetpea! Sweetpea!”
He finally got control of his dog and put it, still snarling, on a leash. Blister was lying on the ground. I breathed in, painfully, and crawled over to him. When I put my hand on his fur, it came away wet with blood. I said his name over and over, like a prayer, and his tail flapped lazily like it did when he was half-asleep. I turned to the guy in the red Gore-Tex and screamed, “Help me!” at the top of my lungs.
“I'll get my car,” he said. He took off running with the dog and I stayed there with Blister, watching him breathe, willing him to keep breathing. It seemed like hours later when a car pulled up and Sweetpea's owner got out. He carried Blister to the backseat of the car and said, “Tell me where you want to go.”