“The men who’ll be coming for you have connections, friends in high places, resources. They’ll find you eventually.”
“But where would I go? I don’t have anyplace else to go.”
“Go to my guardian. I’ll call him and tell him to expect you.”
“Even in good weather that’s too far, Miss Gwyneth. In this blizzard, it’s impossible far, I mean for a man my age.”
“You still don’t drive?”
“My history, they’ll never give me a license, Miss Gwyneth. Who needs to drive in the city anyway? I got my bicycle and taxis, I do all right, but you can’t bike in deep snow, and no taxi is comin’ out in this storm.”
She hesitated, and then said, “I’ll come for you, Simon. I’ll drive you.”
“If those guys come around here, I won’t tell them the littlest thing. Not even the littlest. You know I won’t, Miss Gwyneth. I’d die first.”
“I know, Simon. But I don’t want you to die, and it might come to that. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Bless you, Miss Gwyneth, I’m sorry to be trouble to you. You’re an angel, and I didn’t mean for anythin’ like this.”
“I know you didn’t, Simon. Half an hour. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She terminated the call. “Telford and his kind pass for human but they’re animals.”
“They’re not animals,” I said. “Animals kill only what they need to feed themselves. Animals suffer but they cast no blame for their suffering, and they never envy. Who is Simon?”
“A man who almost lost his soul but found it again. Come on.”
47
The first time i saw real dogs, not just pictures of them, I was eight years old and recently banished by my mother from our house.
Between the church where I was almost beaten and the truck stop where I stowed away aboard a flatbed, I passed through woods alive with whip-poor-wills and tree frogs, crossed wild meadows where flocks of yellow butterflies swarmed up like fallen petals of the sun to which they sought return, before I came upon kept land encircled by a half-collapsed split-rail fence, a pasture where no livestock grazed.
Towering masses of clouds hung low and irregularly across the sky, the electric-blue of late afternoon visible between them. The westering sun flamed across the upper slopes of the cloud mountains, which were kettle-gray underneath, but golden at their summits. The waning day lay between storm and serenity, in an hour of indecision when any scenario might play out.
I vaulted the rail fence and began to hike the field. I had covered perhaps a quarter of it when two dogs came bounding through the grass from my left. One was a German shepherd, the other a mix of shepherd and perhaps a hound of some kind.
Because dogs were the most domesticated species on the planet, I assumed that they wouldn’t be as peaceable as the wild animals of the woods in which I had grown up. Bonded as dogs were to people, surely they shared the prejudices of them. I expected to be attacked and left to bleed to death as they circled and snarled their hatred.
I raced through the grass, though not at a pace that defeated dogs. When they caught up with me, they didn’t lunge, but instead paralleled me, one on each side, grinning foolishly, tails wagging.
I stopped running, concerned that my fear might be conveyed to them, but I kept moving at a walk. They loped ahead of me, gamboling together, play-biting, tumbling, springing to their feet once more. I feared them still, but it was a delight to watch them frolic.
When I was halfway across the field, they returned, panting, and sniffing. They smelled the church-picnic ham in my backpack. I had eaten two slices for breakfast, but one remained in a side compartment of the pack, wrapped in aluminum foil.
I thought perhaps dogs might after all be as amenable as the animals of the woods. Those creatures had been more of a family than my troubled mother. Without taking off the backpack, I reached the zipper of the side compartment in which I’d stowed the ham. I unwrapped it, tore it into pieces, and fed it to the dogs.
They had perfect manners, each waiting patiently as I gave the other a chunk of ham, back and forth, until the meat was gone. They didn’t snap the morsels from my fingers, but took them with soft mouths. When I said, “No more,” they didn’t insist on further treats.
Just then a voice called out, “They won’t bite. They’re good old boys.”
Fifty or sixty yards away, a man wearing a shooter’s jacket with satchel pockets ambled toward me, carrying a shotgun across the crook of his left arm. In spite of the weapon, he seemed unthreatening, but that would change when he drew closer and saw my face under the hood.
I pulled my scarf up to my eyes and sprinted, expecting a warning shot or a command to the dogs that would set them upon me. Neither came. I leaped the collapsed fence and fled into more woods.
The dogs accompanied me in a spirit of adventure. I shooed them away, but they would not go. They weren’t seeking more food, and by their demeanor I thought I understood. I dropped to one knee and with my gloved hands rubbed behind their ears and scratched beneath their chins. I told them that they must go at once, before their master thought I might steal them. Just then, he called out, much closer than before. Upon my further insistence, the dogs turned away and retreated to the pasture, though they went with their tails between their legs, looking back repeatedly, as if chastened by my dismissal.
Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first — and lost — home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wanting nothing more than food and play and love, by the deep satisfaction that they take from those humble things, they belie all creeds of power and fame. Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want.
And as it happened, in a critical hour, dogs did prove to be all that I imagined and more.
48
The city steadily succumbed to the blizzard, but Gwyneth did not. The chain-wrapped winter tires churned through soft powder and spat it out in compacted wads. Snow fell at nearly two inches an hour, and already more than half a foot mantled the ground, but she still thought this was a perfect night for speed, pressing the Land Rover faster, faster, making it slalom around a few stalled vehicles that busy tow trucks had not yet snared, taking corners as if the danger of tipping and rolling were obviated by some ruling she had won in court against the laws of physics.
Even as young as I was, I remembered a time when the plows were quick into the streets and the cleanup began even as the storm was still rising toward its peak. These days, judging by the delay in response, you might have thought the city relied, as in an earlier century, on brigades of shovelers who needed time to bundle against the cold and fortify themselves with spirits before reporting, and on wagon sleds and dray horses to haul away the accumulation.
Simon, to whose rescue we were riding, turned out to be the homeless man who, in search of redeemable soda cans to cash in for whiskey money, found the badly beaten, naked little girl in the Dumpster. Decades before that discovery, he had been a young artist whose career was taking off. But something about success scared him so much that, with alcohol as his copilot and a tendency to burn business relationships as if they were slips of a magician’s flash paper, he managed to stall out and crash so spectacularly that in one year he went from sleeping in a penthouse to passing his nights in a bedroll under bridges.
After his breakdown in the doughnut shop, where he brought the battered child, and after he was released from the hospital, he gave up alcohol overnight, without the help of drugs or counseling, or a twelve-step program. Lifting a glass or a bottle of the old poison to his lips, he recoiled from the stench of it, and when he tried to sip it, invariably he vomited. The smell and taste were as foul to him as the malodor in the Dumpster. Each time that he tried to drink, he was forced to confront the realization, which he’d made in the hospital, that it was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.