“-please excuse me, but I’ve got to get into some warm clothes of my own and have a pot of coffee-”
Lem said, “God damn it.”
“-to thaw out these old bones.”
After a gasp of astonishment, Cliff Soames let out a hard bark of laughter, then glanced at Lem and said, “Sorry.”
Lem’s stomach cramped and burned with an incipient ulcer. He did not wince with pain, did not double over, did not even put a hand on his gut, gave no indication of discomfort because any such sign from him might increase Dilworth’s satisfaction. Lem just glared at the attorney, at the woman, then left without saying a word.
“That damn dog,” Cliff said as he fell into step at Lem’s side on the dock, “sure inspires one hell of a lot of loyalty.”
Later, bedding down in a motel because he was too tired to close the temporary field office tonight and go home to Orange County, Lem Johnson thought about what Cliff had said. Loyalty. One hell of a lot of loyalty.
Lem wondered if he had ever felt such a strong bond of loyalty to anyone as the Cornells and Garrison Dilworth apparently felt toward the retriever. He tossed and turned, unable to sleep, and he finally realized there was no use trying to switch off his inner lights until he satisfied himself that he was capable of the degree of loyalty and commitment that he had seen in the Cornells and their attorney.
He sat up in the darkness, leaning against the headboard.
Well, sure, he was damn loyal to his country, which he loved and honored.
And he was loyal to the Agency. But to another person? All right, Karen.
His wife. He was loyal to Karen in every way-in his heart, mind, and gonads.
He loved Karen. He had loved her deeply for almost twenty years.
“Yeah,” he said aloud in the empty motel room at two o’clock in the morning, “yeah, if you’re so loyal to Karen, why aren’t you with her now?”
But he wasn’t being fair to himself. After all, he had a job to do, an important job.
“That’s the trouble,” he muttered, “you’ve always-always-got a job to do.”
He slept away from home more than a hundred nights a year, one in three. And when he was home, he was distracted half the time, his mind on the latest case. Karen had once wanted children, but Lem had delayed the start of a family, claiming that he could not handle the responsibility of children until he was sure his career was secure.
“Secure?” he said. “Man, you inherited your daddy’s money. You started out with more of a cushion than most people.”
If he was as loyal to Karen as those people were to that mutt, then his commitment to her should mean that her desires ought to come before all others. If Karen wanted a family, then family should take precedence over career. Right? At least he should have compromised and started a family when they were in their early thirties. His twenties could have gone to the career, his thirties to child-rearing. Now he was forty-five, almost forty-six, and Karen was forty-three, and the time for starting a family had passed.
Lem was overcome with a great loneliness.
He got out of bed, went into the bathroom in his shorts, switched on the light, and stared hard at himself in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken. He had lost so much weight on this case that his face was beginning to look downright skeletal.
Stomach cramps seized him, and he bent over, holding onto the sides of the sink, his face in the basin. He’d been afflicted only for the past month or so, but his condition seemed to be worsening with startling speed. The pain took a long time to pass.
When he confronted his reflection in the mirror again, he said, “You’re not even loyal to your own self, you asshole. You’re killing yourself, working yourself to death, and you can’t stop. Not loyal to Karen, not loyal to yourself. Not really loyal to your country or the Agency, when it comes right down to it. Hell, the only thing you’re totally and unswervingly committed to is your old man’s crackpot vision of life as a tightrope walk.”
Crackpot.
That word seemed to reverberate in the bathroom long after he’d spoken it. He had loved and respected his father, had never said a word against him. Yet today he had admitted to Cliff that his dad had been “impossible.” And now-crackpot vision. He still loved his dad and always would. But he was beginning to wonder if a son could love a father and, at the same time, completely reject his father’s teachings.
A year ago, a month ago, even a few days ago, he would have said it was impossible to hold fast to that love and still be his own man. But now, by God, it seemed not only possible but essential that he separate his love for his father from his adherence to his father’s workaholic code.
What’s happening to me? he wondered.
Freedom? Freedom, at last, at forty-five?
Squinting into the mirror, he said, “Almost forty-six.”
NINE
1
Sunday, Travis noted that Einstein still had less of an appetite than usual, but by Monday, November 29, the retriever seemed fine. On Monday and Tuesday, Einstein finished every scrap of his meals, and he read new books. He sneezed only once and did not cough at all. He drank more water than in the past, though not an excessive amount. If he seemed to spend more time by the fireplace, if he padded through the house less energetically… well, winter was swiftly settling upon them, and animals’ behavior changed with the seasons.
At a bookstore in Carmel, Nora bought a copy of The Dog Owner’s Home Veterinary Handbook. She spent a few hours at the kitchen table, reading, researching the possible meanings of Einstein’s symptoms. She discovered that listlessness, partial loss of appetite, sneezing, coughing, and unusual thirst could signify a hundred ailments-or mean nothing at all. “About the only thing it couldn’t be is a cold,” she said. “Dogs don’t get colds like we do.” But by the time she got the book, Einstein’s symptoms had diminished to such an extent that she decided he was probably perfectly healthy.
In the pantry off the kitchen, Einstein used the Scrabble tiles to tell them:
FIT AS A FIDDLE.
Stooping beside the dog, stroking him, Travis said, “I guess you ought to know better than anyone.”
WHY SAY FIT AS A FIDDLE?
Replacing the tiles in their Lucite tubes, Travis said, “Well, because it means-healthy.”
BUT WHY DOES IT MEAN HEALTHY?
Travis thought about the metaphor-fit as a fiddle-and realized he was not sure why it meant what it did. He asked Nora, and she came to the pantry door, but she had no explanation for the phrase, either.
Pawing out more letters, pushing them around with his nose, the retriever asked: WHY SAY SOUND AS A DOLLAR?
“Sound as a dollar-meaning healthy or reliable,” Travis said.
Stooping beside them, speaking to the dog, Nora said, “That one’s easier. The United States dollar was once the soundest, most stable currency in the World. Still is, I suppose. For decades, there was no terrible inflation in the dollar like in some other currencies, no reason to lose faith in it, so folks said, ‘I’m as sound as a dollar.’ Of course, the dollar isn’t what it once was, and the phrase isn’t as fitting as it used to be, but we still use it.”
WHY STILL USE IT?
“Because… we’ve always used it,” Nora said, shrugging.
WHY SAY HEALTHY AS A HORSE? HORSES NEVER SICK?
Gathering up the tiles and sorting them back into their tubes, Travis said, “No, in fact, horses are fairly delicate animals in spite of their size. They get sick pretty easily.”
Einstein looked expectantly from Travis to Nora.
Nora said, “We probably say we’re healthy as a horse because horses look strong and seem like they shouldn’t ever get sick, even though they get sick all the time.”