Biller wasn’t a hanger-outer. He had his entrepreneurial paces to go through, and his altruistic ones, too, which included checking in with Perkus and, most days, dropping off edible donated items of food and new clothes he thought might fit, most recently a pair of heavy and useful tan work boots. Otherwise, he left Perkus and Ava alone. When Perkus was drawn unexpectedly back a step or two into the human realm, it was Ava’s former walker, Sadie Zapping, who drew him. Sadie had other dogs in the building and still troubled to look in from time to time, always with a treat in her palm for Ava to snort up. This day she also had a steaming to-go coffee and a grilled halved corn muffin in a grease-spotted white bag which she offered to Perkus, who accepted it. This being not a time in life of charity refused or even questioned. She asked him his name again and he said it through a mouthful of coffee-soaked crumbs.
“I thought so,” said Sadie Zapping. She plucked off her knit cap and shook loose her wild gray curls. “It took a little while for me to put it together. Me and my band used to read your posters all the time. I read you in the Voice, too.”
Ah. Existence confirmed, always when you least expected it. “Broadsides,” he corrected. Then he asked the name of her band, understanding it was the polite response to the leading remark.
“Zeroville,” she said. “Like the opposite of Alphaville, get it? You probably saw our graffiti around, even if you never heard us. Our bassist was a guy named Ed Constantine, I mean, he renamed himself that, and he used to scribble our name on every blank square inch in a ten-block radius around CBGB, even though we only ever played there a couple of times. We did open for Chthonic Youth once.” She plopped herself down now, on a chair in Ava’s kitchen Perkus had never pulled out from under the table. He still used the apartment as minimally as possible, as if he were to be judged afterward on how little he’d displaced. Meanwhile Ava gaily smashed her square jowly head across Sadie’s lap, into her cradling hands and scrubbing fingers. “Gawd, we used to pore over those crazy posters of yours, or broadsides if you like. You’re a lot younger-looking than I figured. We thought you were like some punk elder statesman, like the missing link to the era of Lester Bangs or Legs McNeil or what have you. It’s not like we were holding our breath waiting for you to review us or anything, but it sure was nice knowing you were out there, somebody who would have gotten our jokes if he’d had the chance. Crap, that’s another time and place, though. Look at us now.”
Sadie had begun to uncover an endearing blabbermouthedness (and even when not addressing Perkus she’d give forth with a constant stream of “Good girl, there you go girl, aw, do you have an itchy ear? There you go, that’s a girl, yes, yessss, good dog. Ava, whaaata good girl you are!” etc.) but another elegist for Ye Olde Lower East Side was perhaps not precisely what the doctor ordered just now. Perkus, who’d preferred to think he was in the manner of a Pied Piper, influencing a generation following his, didn’t really want to believe that when his audience made itself visible again it would resemble somebody’s lesbian aunt. He sensed himself ready to split hairs-not so much Lester Bangs as Seymour Krim, actually-and thought better of it. He was somewhat at a loss for diversions, however. He couldn’t properly claim he had elsewhere to be. Sadie, sensing resistance, provided her own non sequitur. “You play cribbage?”
“Sorry?”
“The card game? I’m always looking for someone with the patience and intelligence to give me a good game. Cribbage is a real winter sport, and this is a hell of a winter, don’t you think?”
With his consent, the following day Sadie Zapping arrived at the same hour, having completed her walks, and unloaded onto the kitchen table two well-worn decks of cards, a wooden cribbage board with plastic pegs, and two packets of powdered Swiss Miss. Perkus, who hated hot chocolate, said nothing and, when she served it, drained his mug. He’d gone without marijuana now for more than a month, and alcohol (never his favorite anyhow), taking no stimulants besides caffeine and sucrose, both of which the hot chocolate provided in a rather degraded form. The game Sadie taught him was perfectly poised between dull and involving (so any talk could be subsumed to concentration) as well as between skill and luck. The first few days Perkus steadily lost, then got the feel of it. Sadie sharpened, too, her best play not aroused until she felt him pushing back. They kept their talk in the arena of the local and mundane: the state of the building, which had its own minor dramas involving the bureaucratic management imposed by the Manhattan Reification Society versus the pragmatic hands-on knowledge won by the volunteers themselves; the state of the streets, which had borne another two-inch snowfall, a treacherous slush carpet laid over the now seemingly permanent irregularities of black ice wherever the blizzard had been shoved aside; the ever-improving state of Perkus’s cribbage; above all, the state of Ava, who thrived on Sadie’s visits and seemed to revel in being discussed. Perkus could, as a result, tell himself he tolerated the visits on the dog’s account. It was nearly the end of February before Sadie told him the tragedy of Ava’s fourth limb.
“I thought you knew,” she said, a defensive near-apology.
He didn’t want to appear sarcastic-did Sadie think Ava had told him? — so said nothing, and let her come out with the tale, which, together with her age and the names of her former owners and other facts Perkus couldn’t know, Sadie had spied in Ava’s paperwork upon transfer to the canine dorm. Three-year-old Ava was a citizen of the Bronx, it turned out. She’d lived in the Sack Wern Houses, a public development in the drug dealers’ war zone of Soundview, and had been unlucky enough to rush through an ajar door and into the corridor during a police raid on the apartment next door. The policeman who’d emptied his pistol in her direction, one of three on the scene, misdirected all but one bullet in his panic, exploding her shank. Another cop, a dog fancier who’d cried out but failed to halt the barrage, tended the fallen dog, who, even greeted with this injury, only wanted to beseech for love with her tongue and snout. Her owner, a Dominican who may or may not have considered his pit bull ruined for some grim atavistic purpose, balked at the expense and bother of veterinary treatment, so Ava’s fate was thrown to the kindly cop’s whims. The cop found her the best, a surgeon who knew that she’d be better spared cycling the useless shoulder limb, its groping for a footing it could never attain, and so excised everything to the breastbone. It was the love-smitten cop who’d named her, ironically after the daughter whose terrified mom forbade their adopting the drooling sharky creature into a household that already made room for two Norwich terriers. So Ava came into the Friendreth Society’s care.
“She’s got hiccups,” Sadie pointed out another day, a cold one but then they were all cold ones, toward the end of February now. “She” was forever Ava, no need to specify. The dog was their occasion and rationale, vessel for all else unnameable Perkus Tooth and Sadie Zapping had in common. Anyway, it was her apartment, they were only guests. He spotted the start card she’d revealed, the jack of clubs, and shifted his peg two spaces-“Two for his heels,” she’d taught him to say.