“Up too late, bro, I’m in the coffin after the grind.”
Sal roared a friendly insult to a woman passing on the sidewalk, and Shephard confronted his stairs for the second half of the journey.
Before he reached the porch he could hear Cal’s quiet whining coming from inside. Shephard stopped by the door and listened... a long whimper followed by another, the dog catching his breath, then starting in again. The muffled thumps of struggle, then nothing. Shephard slid his key into the lock with one hand, brought the Colt Python from his holster with the other, and stumbled through the door.
Cal was flopping in the middle of the living room floor, hog-tied and gagged with masking tape. Shephard stepped past the dog, the pistol held in front of him, and moved slowly into the bedroom, where he saw that the covers had been slashed lengthwise with something very sharp. He went into the bathroom, then back out to the living room and the struggling mutt. He beheld his apartment
The stereo speakers were smashed, the turntable arm twisted obscenely upward, the plants dumped from their pots onto the carpet, the lampshades crushed, his art collection — a single print of Hopper’s Nighthawks — pulled from its frame then torn to small bits that were scattered across the floor. The boxes had been toppled and gutted, the sofa overturned, a photo album mangled and thrown atop the heap of what had once been a growing dieffenbachia. He was trembling.
He untied Cal, who fled to the bedroom as soon as his legs were free. The dog was still whining when Shephard found him on the far side of the bed, scooped him into his arms, and brought him to the kitchen. Cal shivered as Shephard set him on the drainboard and tried to cut the tape from around his mouth with scissors. Back on the floor, Cal lay down and worked his paws over his nose, fly-style, trying to pull off the sticky bands. Shephard finally rubbed some vegetable oil into the dog’s hair, lifting the tape gently and pouring a slender stream of oil as he went. Cal’s right eye, puffed and bloodshot, regarded Shephard with unabashed terror. The other was swollen shut. Shephard’s head throbbed as he worked bent over his dog.
The telephone rang. Shephard worked his way through the littered living room and picked up the receiver, saying nothing. A wonder it still works, he thought.
“Shephard?” The voice was muffled and low. He waited, realizing now why the phone hadn’t been pulled from the socket. “Yeah, it’s you, Shephard. I left the phone alive so I could call and ask you if you got the picture. Get it?” Shephard said nothing. “You get it. Do yourself a favor and beat it for a while. You’ll make me very happy. How’s the dog? Worthless in a pinch, you know.” The man hung up.
Shephard went back out to the kitchen, poured a Scotch, and went back downstairs. He found Sal reclined on a sofa, balancing an ashtray on his stomach while he fiddled with a joint.
“Don’t bust me, Shephard. I’m a good guy.”
“You were up late?”
“Like you. Have a lady up there last night?”
“No, why?”
“ ’Cause the fuckin’ stereo was blasting for an hour. I figured you didn’t feel like filling up the neighborhood with moans and groans.” Sal’s conversational voice was concert-pitch. It seemed to ricochet from one wall of Shephard’s skull to the other.
“What time?” Shephard asked. The moans and groans were Cal getting kicked and his apartment being ransacked, he thought. That’s why the bastard turned up the music.
“Little after one. You ought to...” Sal understood. He got up from the sofa, set down the ashtray, turned off the television, and shut the door. “What happened?”
“I had a visitor last night. Did you see him?”
Sal seemed to diminish in size and become more alert, edgy. “Yeah, I saw him,” he said quietly. “I told you I was up. The door was open, I see everything that comes and goes around this ghetto. Tall and thick, good build, so I figured he was a cop. He came by the door about one, then the stereo. Back down a half hour later. The sonofabitch was driving a Carerra and I wondered how a cop got the dough for one of those. Midnight blue, right under the street lamp in front. Everything okay up there?”
Dark blue, and Michael Stett shiny, Shephard thought. “No.”
Sal eyed him warily. “Shit, Shephard. I’d have come right out with it but I wondered if you two were... well, shit, you know Laguna.” Sal’s hand fluttered on a limp wrist.
“He was alone?”
“Alone and not in a hurry from the way he walked. I had him pegged cop all the way. Sorry, bro.”
Shephard helped the vet hold Cal’s head still while the X-rays were taken. The doctor, a thick and docile man named Gillson, shot Cal with a long needle and told Shephard his dog would be all right. By the time the X-rays were processed, Cal was asleep and slobbering contentedly on Shephard’s leg. His skull was fine, Gillson said, and the swelling would go down in a day or two. After that he wanted a look at the eye.
The doctor closed the door of the examination room and asked how it happened. Shephard told him it was an accident. Gillson sighed and lit a cigarette. “Plenty of good shelters in town if you’re tired of your pet,” he said.
Back at his apartment, Shephard carried Cal upstairs and set him down on the couch. Standing amidst his degraded home, he knew that there would be no fingerprints or significant evidence, none of the careless calling cards left by youngsters, junkies, amateurs. Nothing was missing. He was in professional hands. And the act of violation was complete: his knees were still shaking, his tongue felt thick and dry. He noted the roll of masking tape tossed into the corner.
The quiet of the evening heightened his sense of aloneness as he stared down at the literal ruins of his life. Outside he heard a car moving down Thalia Street toward the highway, the far-off dialogue of a television, a peaceful breeze in the trees outside the house. The disgust he felt as he kicked the ruined Nighthawks frame wasn’t so much for the possessions in the house as for himself. Keeper of the peace, he thought. The keeper who can’t keep his wife, the keeper who can’t protect his home, can’t prevent his own dog from having the shit kicked out of him. And with the disgust came anger. The healing waters of action, he thought. He poured down a Scotch and made another. He smoked three straight cigarettes, lighting the last with the embers of the one before it. He paced the kitchen, and stood looking out from the balcony.
Then it all became clear.
By eleven he had piled everything from his past — letters from Louise, pictures of Louise, pictures of himself and his wife together, the books she’d given him, anything that tugged from the past rather than called him toward the future — into the middle of the floor. To this he added the boxes wholesale, and the ruined possessions that lay scattered about. His head was killing him. By twelve he had tied it all up in the slashed bedding and dragged the heavy bundles across the street, where he hefted them into the dumpster of St. Michael’s Church. It took several trips. There, he thought. In emptiness will be abundance.
He called Louise. A man answered politely and asked if he could say who was calling.
“Her ex, fuckhead. Put her on.”
“Gladly.”
Then she was there, Louise, he thought: lovely, bored, drifting Louise. “Hello, Tom,” she said. He could hear the new life in her voice, its sweet assurance. “Robert here is giving me a funny look. Did you say something bad to him?”
“Absolutely not. Scout’s honor. I’m just calling to tell you I’ve got a new life, a grand one. I know you felt a lot of guilt about me, but I want to let you off the hook now.”
“You’re drinking again, aren’t you?”
“Sober every night for the last month. Got any movie parts yet?”