It did not take long. The inside was impeccably clean. It smelled of rug shampoo and leather-nourishing cream. The glove compartment held only the car manual. The flashlight revealed no signs of the mud that covered Rafael’s shoes and clothes when he arrived. The trunk was empty and equally antiseptic. I lifted the trunk rug, but there was nothing underneath apart from the new spare and a gleaming jack. The undercarriage was mud-free. The tailpipe shone. The chassis had been recently washed and waxed. It was a high-quality detailing done by hand—I could tell because there was no wax residue on the windshield. How could a car this clean have been warehoused for years in a crummy Salva garage, and then driven 1,033 miles from D.C. to Elmira? Unless Rafael stopped nearby and got it cleaned. If he did, his coup yarn was undoubtedly a lie. I closed the car doors carefully, so he would not hear me. I found no traces of old McCabe in the car. Yet, the more I shone the flashlight on the blue sedan, the more it looked like the same car that had picked her up that night.
Back in the kitchen, I turned on the clock radio. A golden retriever was lost along Elmira County Route 24. The President had spent Christmas with her parents in her hometown of Laredo. She was expected to tour a war orphanage tomorrow. Servicewomen and men abroad had made a record 11,375,086 Christmas calls home. I gagged. Print, TV, radio, and Internet so-called news had a vomitive effect on me. They were a wad of lies, half-lies, and quarter-lies (the latter now anointed as truths by professional skeptics). I had avoided them for years, for health reasons. I did not realize it then, but it was a sign of incipient panic on my part to think I might be able to deduce truth by comparing the radio version of the world to Rafael’s. They were so far apart that only faith, in one version or the other, was possible. That was, after all, why I had stopped consuming “news” in the first place.
The snow had begun falling thickly. How long could a dog survive in this cold? McCabe had to take Route 24 to reach Elmira. She might see the dog. Rescue it. Or run over, maim, or kill it. A golden retriever would be visible against the snow, but it was hard to stop a car suddenly in this weather. You might crash into the icy ramparts that formed on either side of the road. McCabe would get out of the car anyway, whether or not she had hit the dog. She would rescue the dog if it was unhurt, or if it could be healed; if it was beyond help, she would finish it off, I didn’t know how, perhaps by snapping its cervical vertebra with her big hands; then she would drag the dead dog to one side of the road so that other vehicles would not disfigure it. Wasting time with a stray dog on a night like this was risky, especially if you were driving alone and were not accustomed to the fierceness of winter storms in this part of the country. It snowed in Maine, but nothing like this. What I was seeing through the kitchen windows could not be called a heavy snowfall anymore. It was a winter gale, the kind that buried Shangri-La for days, until we dug ourselves out with hand shovels and a snowplow that Ezequiel would chain to the corner Negroes’ decrepit pickup truck. He had found the snowplow in an illegal car dump down that same Route 24 the golden retriever was now wandering down. After one of his performances in front of their porch, he had asked the Negroes to help him fetch it. They did. Chained to their pickup, it became Shangri-La’s official blizzard buster. The Negroes were known to accept tips from grateful neighbors. Most went to keep their truck running. It was perennially being repaired in their yard. Ezequiel claimed he never saw a penny, nor did he want to. But I saw him exchanging bills and coins with the head Negro several times. I don’t know what he spent the money on. He did not smoke or drink, and Genoveva must have kept him fully occupied. My mother’s cousin was too “young and appetizing” for her own good, according to my grandmother. She preferred Ezequiel to her own niece. She sided with him in all their marital squabbles while pretending to be neutral. “It’s a pity that Rafael takes so much after his mother,” she used to say. Her pronouncements were absolute. Once uttered, they stuck to the person forever, at least in my mind.
I imagined McCabe and the dog in the snowstorm against all reason. The chances of her encountering that dog on that road at that time must have been staggeringly slim. Besides, McCabe was not a dog person. There had been no dogs in her stories. No mammals, in fact. But she had rescued me on a night not unlike this. And, genetically speaking, 85 percent of me, or any human, was doglike. On the other hand, she may have rescued me in spite of my genetic links to dogs and other inferior mammals. Perhaps it puzzled or amused her that, while genetically so close, nothing else in me was doglike, except my physical addiction to Mrs. Crandall. I was not loyal. I also thought that I was smarter than a hound. I’m not so sure anymore. It was one of those persistent images that cannot be dislodged by reason or sophistry: McCabe and the dog in the snowstorm. I stopped fighting it. I felt her large, warm hands touch my muzzle, then my furry belly, to see if my heart was still beating. I could not open my eyes. They were frozen shut. I felt her take me in her arms and walk with me for a long time. My head flopped to one side. I was dead or sleeping.
The grandfather clock brought me back to what we doubtfully call reality. It was 9:00 p.m. I was still sitting in the fragrant, darkened kitchen. The storm had eased for a moment. I went to the window. Something white and large was moving at the far end of the driveway. A large snow-covered branch swaying, I first thought. Then it seemed to move forward as well. A large, furry animal. A gigantic white bear. As it lumbered toward the house it became clear to me that this was no four-legged creature, but a biped sunk almost to the waist in the snow, and fighting its way forward. This was not McCabe. It was taller and wider. A tall man covered in a long, white fur coat and hat. Rafael may have been telling the truth after all. I considered grabbing a hunting rifle and blasting off his face the moment he came through the front door. But that would only alert the rest of the death squad. He wouldn’t be alone. Better lure him sweetly into my bathroom so that he could relieve himself, and hang up his wet coat. Get rid of him there, quietly and cleanly. Rafael might try escaping into the meadow behind the icehouse, and onto the road past the farm. I’d take him all the way to the icehouse. We’d both be wearing the Judge’s snowshoes. I would make him walk behind me, stepping in my tracks, so it would seem that only I had been out. On my way back to the house, I would create as many confusing and interlocking tracks as possible. I would explain them to the interrogators as healthy exercise. But the corpse of this first killer, what could we do with it? He was almost here. As he came up the last stretch of driveway, I moved away from the window so he wouldn’t see me. He had a large satchel across his chest. His chin was tucked into his coat, and his hat covered the rest of his face. I waited behind the front door holding my breath. I heard him stomp the snow off his boots on the front steps. I opened the door with a big smile.
McCabe smiled back at me. When I did not move, she picked me up in her white bear arms and delicately put me down to one side. Then she stepped in and closed the door behind her.
28
The Future Generations
When Rafael Cohen realized that he had little time left in this world, he was terrified first by death, then by oblivion. He could do nothing about the first, so he waged war against the second with the only weapons that he had left: pen, paper, and the certainty that he was right.
“I am leaving life,” he wrote. “I am helpless before an infernal machine that uses medieval methods, possesses a titanic power, and fabricates lies according to a carefully mapped plan, a machine whose audacity is matched only by its arrogance.