After what seemed an eternity, the road opened up again and Donna turned the car sharply into the other lane. In quick moments she had left the procession far behind.
On her own street she parked and walked quickly toward her door. She felt an unpleasant excitement. It was midmorning, and as always the neighborhood was quiet. Who knew what people did here? She never saw anyone on this street.
Then a dog began to bark, quite alarmingly. As she walked on, the rapid cry grew louder, more frantic. It was the poor old soul’s dog, Donna thought, the gray machine, somehow operative again, resuming its purpose. She knew. But it sounded so real, so remarkably real, and the disorder she felt was so remarkably real as well that she hesitated. She could not go forward. Then, she couldn’t go back.
SUBSTANCE
WALTER GOT THE SILK pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, the other white — an alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom that they made Tim cry. They were large and had to be removed with a backhoe, which did not please the landlord, who didn’t get anything, although he didn’t have to return the last month’s deposit either. Lucretia got the Manhattan glasses. They were delicate, with a scroll of flowers etched just beneath the rim. There were four of them. Andrew got the wristwatch. Betsy got the barbells. Jack got a fairly useless silver bowl. Angus got the photo basket whose contents he kindly shared. Louise got the dog.
Louise would have preferred anything to the dog, right down to the barbells. Nothing would have pleased her even more. It was believed that the animal had been witness to the suicide. The dog had either seen the enactment or come into the room shortly afterwards. He might have been in the kitchen eating his chow or he might have been sitting on the porch, taking in the entire performance. He was a quiet, medium-size dog. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have run for help. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have attempted to prevent the removal of the body from the house.
Louise took the dog immediately to a kennel and boarded it. She couldn’t imagine why she, of all people, had been given the dog. But in the note Elliot had left he had clearly stated, And to Louise my dog, Broom. The worst of it was that none of them remembered Elliot’s having a dog. They had never seen it before, but now suddenly there was a dog in the picture.
“He said he was thinking of getting a dog sometime,” Jack said.
“But wouldn’t he have said ‘I got a dog’? He never said that,” Dianne said.
“He must have just gotten it. Maybe he got it the day before. Or even that morning, maybe,” Angus said.
This alarmed Louise.
“I’m sure he never thought you’d keep it,” Lucretia said.
This alarmed her even more.
“Oh, I don’t know!” Lucretia said. “I just wanted to make you feel better.”
Louise was racking up expenses at the kennel. The dog weighed under thirty-five pounds but that still meant eleven dollars a day. If he had weighed between fifty and a hundred, it would have been fourteen dollars, and after that it went up again. Louise didn’t have all that much money. She worked at a florist’s and sometimes at an auto-glass tinting establishment, cutting and ironing on the darkest film allowable by law, which at twenty percent was less than most people wanted but all they were going to get. Her own car had confetti glitter on the rear window. It was like fireworks going off in the darkness of her glass.
She was sitting alone in a bar one evening after work worrying about the money it was costing to board the dog, who had been at the kennel for a week and a half. Louise had her friends, of course, and she saw them practically constantly, but sometimes she liked to be alone. Occasionally, she even took trips by herself, accompanied only by strangers, cruises or camping trips to difficult places where she was invariably lonely and misunderstood. These trips reminded her of last evenings, one of those last evenings which occur over and over in one’s life, and she thought of them as good training. She had learned a lot from them. More than enough by now, probably.
In the bar was a long fish tank which served as a wall separating the restaurant beyond. Louise had never been in this place before and would not select it again. She didn’t like to look at the fish, one of which was trailing a cloud of mucus behind it. In the restaurant beyond the fish she saw an older man deep in conversation with a party or parties outside her vision. He had moist, closely cut hair and a Band-Aid high up on his temple. A line of blood extended several inches down from the Band-Aid. Louise became engrossed in watching him chatting and smiling and sawing away at his steak or whatever it was. But she looked away for a moment and when she looked back the blood was gone. He must have wiped it away with a napkin, perhaps dipped in his water glass. Someone in the party he was with was fond of him or even possibly more than fond and told him about the blood. That was Louise’s first thought, though it had certainly taken them long enough to mention it.
The next morning she went to the kennel. A girl brought the dog out. It had yellowish wavy fur.
“Is that the right one?” Louise asked. The girl looked at her expressionlessly and cracked her gum. “It’s really not mine,” Louise explained, “it belongs to a friend.”
The dog crouched miserably on the floor in the backseat of Louise’s car. It didn’t even lie down.
“You’re going to get sick down there,” Louise said. The dog was clearly not habituated to riding in cars, and had no sense of the happiness it could bring.
After a week, she had discerned no habits. The dog didn’t seem morose, merely withdrawn. She began calling it Broom with a certain amount of reluctance.
Every other week, there would be a party at one of their houses, though it wasn’t Louise’s turn just yet. Rent was cheap, so they all lived in these big ruined houses. She went over to Jack’s and everyone was already there, drinking gimlets and looking at a rat Jack had caught beneath the sink on one of his glue traps.
“I’m not going to use these things again,” Jack said. “They’re depressing.”
“I use them,” Walter said, “but I never get any rats.”
“You’re not putting them in the right places,” Jack said.
The rat watched them in a sort of theatrical way.
One of the twins, Wilbur, got up and opened a window. He picked up the trap and sailed it with its rat accompanist into the street to fall amidst the passing traffic.
“I usually take it down to the Dumpster,” Jack said.
Wilbur and his twin, Daisy, were the only ones who said they remembered Broom. They said that he hadn’t eaten from a bowl but off a Columbia University dinner plate. But in their far-out nods Wilbur and Daisy could picture almost anything. They spent most of their time lovingly shooting each other up. They had not been acknowledged in the note as gift recipients, although of course they didn’t care. They insisted that matters would not have taken such a dreary turn had they been able to introduce Elliot to the great Heroisch, the potent, powerful, large and appealing Heroisch. The twins were so innocent they got on everyone’s nerves. They loved throwing up on junk. A joy develops, they’d say, a real joy. It’s not like throwing up at all.