Then I saw it. Lying atop a foyer table was a frayed dog collar decorated with glassy studs, some of them broken. A small metal tag identified the collar as belonging to Fee-Fee Popov.
I held my breath and listened again. Nothing but the spasm of the storm. I left the scene as I found it, although I did make sure the front door was shut tight. By now the wind and rain were beyond raging. I could barely see as I struggled back toward my house. Once inside, I sucked and gulped at the air as if I had been underwater, which I suppose I had been. Once again I listened for any sound beneath the raging din.
And I knew — I don’t know how, but the knowledge was absolute — that she was there.
I flipped on the flashlight, and it glimmered across the shadowbox and bookcases, television, couch, and my favorite club chair. I moved the circle of light onto the floor leading into the living room, looking for wet tracks. I swept the light through the kitchen door, and my eye caught something on the table there. It was my cell phone, placed neatly where it had not been just a few moments earlier.
As I approached it, the phone began to vibrate, its display glowing a white-blue color. The number was Harold’s cell. I didn’t pick up. Instead I turned back toward the entrance to the kitchen and peeked around the corner into the living room. I imagined her using Harold’s phone to call me from behind my club chair. Waiting for me to pick up, only to fall on me in a fury of assorted blunt weapons.
Ten seconds ticked by. Twenty seconds. Then the phone burped twice, signifying the arrival of a text message. Keeping one eye and the flashlight beam on the open kitchen doorway, I picked up the phone and read, I’m down in Silver Lake with my mother. Just checking to see if all is well. Hope you’ve battened down the hatches.
I licked my lips and considered typing a response. But the creak of wicker sounded behind me. I spun around. She was sitting in a small chair tucked beside the refrigerator, staring at me.
“What are you doing here?” I said in a shudder, struggling to level the rifle at her with one hand while trying to hold the cell phone and flashlight with the other. The flashlight’s beam shined unsteadily in her eyes. She never flinched. My heart beat upward into my throat, but I concentrated on forcing the fear from my voice. “I said, what are you doing in my house?”
“Do you like it?” she said, her voice soft and almost childlike. Her red hair was untethered and smeared wet and flat around her pale face. Water dripped from her nose and chin.
“What?”
“This. Living alone.”
“I’ve got a gun.”
“That’s funny.”
“Not really, no,” I said.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You mean, again, don’t you? You’re not going to hurt me again.”
“The dog was already dead when I found it. Your friend, the professor, backed over it the other day. He threw it into the trunk and drove off, but he forgot the little collar and tag.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“So why the note? Because maybe it’s funny?”
“It was a warning. I didn’t want that poor couple to lose another dog.”
“Okay,” I said, somehow convincing myself to feel convinced. “So how did the collar end up in his house?”
“I put it there. I want him to know that I know. That I have power over his cowardice. That there are consequences for daring to forget.”
The rifle in my hand felt as heavy as a dumbbell. Yet I still didn’t move for fear she would see me shaking. I said, “I’m going to call the police, and you’re going to be arrested.”
Her response was softer still, almost maddening and out of breath. “When my husband said goodbye to me, I knew he was going to die. I don’t know how, but I knew. And yet” — her features twisted up in pain — “and yet I also expected him to come back home. Safe and the same as when he left. And then we would laugh together at my silly premonition.”
“I can’t do anything about that,” I said. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
“Do you know what they put in his coffin? Do you know what they put there instead of his body?”
“Look—”
“You saw body bags in Iraq. You saw those that were full and those that only held pieces. You must know.”
I started to respond but stopped. I stopped because suddenly I believed her. Every word. Especially about what happened to the dog. But even more important than that, I suddenly felt her grief, arrayed around her, an instinctive defense mechanism that emitted its own warning signal. The sense of it was almost pious in its depth, like a religious ceremony, all of which made her pitiful, deflated appearance seem all the more heroic.
The woman straightened her back and stood up.
“Stop,” I said.
“Stop what?”
The cell phone finally slipped from my grip and clacked onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen. I settled the stock of the rifle across my forearm and steadied the light on her face. My fear was gone. Even the strain of holding the gun level had dissipated to numbness. I said, “I really don’t think I can help you.”
“I don’t either.” She edged closer.
Smoothly, I flicked the safety off, hoping the sound would deter her. “I’ll shoot,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. She walked forward but quickly veered to my left, toward the open kitchen doorway. I stepped aside, my finger loose against the trigger. Then she was past me and in the foyer. Without pausing, she opened the front door. The force of the wind threw it back against the wall, shaking the house. She had to lean forward to push herself out of the screen and into the wind.
As I watched her stumble out and down the porch steps, I felt it. Relief, certainly, but also something else. Something meaningful and harsh, like a wave of fever. It was something — or rather a mix of something, gunked together in a stew of senses — that I had not experienced before and would probably never experience again. It was the taste of sorrow, the wreckage of war, the feeble cries of the dead and dying, the silence of children — all of it culminating in a barren loneliness that we had fought for and so dearly deserved.
I ran forward, shouldering my way through the screen and onto the porch. I stopped there and called out to her. “Don’t! Wait!” I yelled. But she might as well have been walking into a roaring waterfall. In an instant she was gone, lost in the mighty pull of the storm, her dim impression sealed over.
I wanted to pursue her, to embrace her, to comfort her and share my feeling with her. I wanted to do all of that. I really did. But I could not move.
Thomas McGuane
Motherlode
From The New Yorker
Looking in the hotel mirror, David Jenkins adjusted the Stetson he disliked and pulled on a windbreaker with a cattle-vaccine logo. He worked for a syndicate of cattle geneticists in Oklahoma, though he’d never met his employers — he had earned his credentials through an online agricultural portal, much the way that people became ministers. He was still in his twenties, a very bright young man, but astonishingly uneducated in every other way. He had spent the night in Jordan at the Garfield Hotel, which was an ideal location for meeting his ranch clients in the area. He had woken early enough to be the first customer at the café. On the front step, an old dog slept with a canceled first-class stamp stuck to its butt. By the time David had ordered breakfast, older ranchers occupied several of the tables, waving to him familiarly. Then a man from Utah, whom he’d met at the hotel, appeared in the doorway and stopped, looking around the room. The man, who’d told David that he’d come to Jordan to watch the comets, was small and intense, middle-aged, wearing pants with an elastic waistband and flashy sneakers. Several of the ranchers were staring at him. David had asked the hotel desk clerk, an elderly man, about the comets. The clerk said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about and I’ve lived here all my life. He doesn’t even have a car.” David studied the menu to keep from being noticed, but it was too late. The man was at his table, laughing, his eyes shrinking to points and his gums showing. “Stop worrying! I’ll get my own table,” he said, drumming his fingers on the back of David’s chair. David felt that in some odd way he was being assessed.