I Am the Cheese (4 page)

The dog lifts his head at my approach, alert, ears sharp, as if he is accepting a challenge. My eyes swing quickly, left to right and back again, but there are no rescuers in sight. The driveway behind the dog is empty, no cars in sight, and the house itself wears an abandoned look, as if the people have all gone away. Across the street, an open field lies behind a wandering low stone wall.

As I approach, the dog steps out into the road and I think, It’s as if he has been waiting for me all my life. The dog is unmoving, his tail not wagging, his eyes like marbles. He is silent, watchful, a killer dog. I am close enough now to see how his sleek hair is shiny, and I tell myself, Let’s go, it’s just a dog, a dog is man’s best friend, it’s not a lion or a tiger.

The dog makes a move, steps into the roadway directly in the path of the bike, his head lifted now, a snarl on his lips. He is silent, he has not barked or growled or maybe I can’t hear the growl as the wind rushes past my ears. I pedal hard, crouched on the bike, fingers clutching the handlebars, legs pumping away, the bike aimed directly for him, afraid that if I try to steer around him, I will somehow lose my balance and be flung to the pavement, at his mercy on the pavement. I slit my eyes and my legs slash away and I hurtle toward the dog. And at the last possible moment the dog darts aside, and now I hear his growl and then the growl erupts into short sharp savage barks and this is worst of all because the barks reveal his teeth.

The dog keeps trying to dash in front of the bike, as if he is more interested in stopping the bike than in attacking me. I take heart at this. The dog bites at the front tire and turns away as the tire scrapes his nose and the wheel wobbles frantically. And I keep yelling to myself,
It’s all right, it’s all right
, but my words are lost on the wind and inside I am saying, The hell with this, if I get away from this dog, I’m going home, I’m taking the first bus back, the hell with Rutterburg, Vermont, the hell with everything …

The bike is in danger of toppling now as the dog continues to attack the front wheel and I realize with horror that this has been his intention from the beginning: to topple the bike, send it askew and have me crashing to the roadway, his victim.

We are past the driveway now and approaching a curve. I hope desperately that there is safety around the curve, a house or a store or a shack or anything. That’s when I hear a car approaching and a horn frantically blowing. I suddenly realize that I have drifted perilously close to the center of the road. The oncoming car, a yellow Volkswagen with luggage lashed to the roof, has to cut speed and swerve to avoid hitting me, the blast of the horn joined by the squeal of brakes. The dog is distracted by the car and the honking and the screeching and it hesitates for a moment, pausing almost in midair, looking at the car as if puzzled. Or tempted. I keep pedaling. But I can’t resist looking behind me and I see the dog streaking away, down the road in pursuit of the VW, barking wildly, body arched and stretched, a fuzzy furry arrow.

“Let’s get out of here,” I yell to nobody, and renew my pedaling, fear and panic having obliterated any weariness, any aching muscles. The barking of the dog grows distant as I swoop around the curve and sail steadily onward.

I am approaching the main street of Fairfield and it is hardly a Main Street and hardly a town, just a few stores and that church with the white steeple, and I speed through the street, carried by my momentum. I know I should stop but I don’t want to get off the bike. I want to keep going, to get to Rutterburg. I have a
feeling that the dog will pursue me forever, will wait for me outside stores if I stop to eat or go to the john. I open my mouth and gulp air and the rush of air is sweet in my lungs and I feel strong again as the air caresses my lungs. I pedal through the town, across a wooden bridge, the sound of the slats like applause in my ears. And I say hello and goodbye to Fairfield and continue on my way, feeling as though I will never stop, never stop.

He was wary again, on guard, distrustful. Yet he had no reason to distrust Brint, even though he was a stranger. Anyway, he was feeling much better, and he didn’t even care if feeling better was only an illusion. Maybe he should tell Brint some of the clues. Not all, but some. He could do it because he felt good, in command. He could parcel out information as if he were dealing cards, a little at a time. But he would have to be clever, cunning.

The dog wasn’t big but it made up for its lack of size by its ugliness, the intensity of its eyes and the way it stood there, implacable, blocking their path. There was something threatening about the dog, a sense that the rules didn’t apply, like encountering a crazy person and realizing that anything could happen, anything was possible.

“What kind of dog is that?” the boy asked, whispering.

“I don’t know, Adam,” his father said. “I don’t know much about dogs.”

“What do we do, Dad?”

“We bluff.”

The boy looked up at his father in wonder and disbelief. Suddenly, this man did not seem like his father. His father was an insurance agent who went to the office every day and changed his car every two years and belonged to the Rotary Club. He wore hornrimmed glasses and had a mustache—not a shaggy mustache like the ones people wore who also had long hair but a neat trimmed mustache with glints of gray. Adam had always been aware of his father as a
father
, reading the newspaper, watching baseball and football on television, rooting for the Red Sox and cursing the Patriots, bringing work home from the office at night, reading the newspaper, kissing him good night
with a peck on the forehead. A father. Like a cutout figure whose caption said
Father
. The only time his father emerged as a person was when the subject of books came up. His father’s eyes would shine and he’d shake his head with wonder as he discussed this writer or that writer—writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and a lot of others who stirred no recognition in Adam when he was a child. “Wait until you get older, Adam, there are so many great books to be read.” His father often could be found reading late into the night, slumped in his chair, the glasses perched on his long thin nose, lost in the pages of a book, a sudden stranger in the house.

Now his father seemed like a stranger again, as they stood in the woods confronting the dog. He and his father weren’t the kind of people who ordinarily strolled through the woods. City pavement was more natural under their shoes than grass or woodland paths. “Give me Mother Nature working nervously in neon,” his father once said, “instead of turning the leaves all kinds of colors in the fall.” Then what were they doing here in the first place, in the woods, at least a mile from nowhere? Adam wasn’t sure. Actually, they had been heading for the library, a midafternoon stroll on a windtossed March Saturday. Adam loved to walk along with his father, trying to match his nine-year-old stride to his father’s loping legs. They’d walk along and his father would have to slow down once in a while so that he wouldn’t get too far ahead. His father loved the library—a treasure house, he called it. All those books, all those records. Today, he said, they’d look for Louis Armstrong records and bring them home. Great
stuff that Adam also would love—a marvelous old record called “Twelfth Street Rag” in which Louis Armstrong made his trumpet sound like a man staggering drunk along the street. Ah, that Armstrong. His father could do that—arouse Adam’s interest by making him curious: How could a trumpet possibly sound like a man staggering along a street? Or, he’d say, “I’ll show you a mystery novel in which the first two letters of the first word of the first chapter hold the secret to the book!” (“When, Dad, when?”) Anyway, they were on their way to the library for the Armstrong record, bending against the dancing wind, when suddenly his father stopped in his tracks, and Adam, who had been holding his hand, was thrown off balance and almost fell. He looked up at his father, puzzled. His father stood there like a statue in the park, or as if stricken by some terrible disease that had paralyzed him.

“Let’s go,” his father said, finally snapping into action. He tugged at Adam’s arm. He almost dragged him around the corner and through a narrow alley between Baker’s Drugstore and Admadio’s Furniture.

“Hey, Dad,” Adam cried. “Where are we going? The library’s not this way.”

“I know, I know,” his father said, plunging into one of his imitations, this time W. C. Fields, an old-time movie comedian who talked out of the side of his mouth, giving forth fancy and ridiculous words as his father was now doing. “Let us stalk other landscapes as we ponder the wonders of the third month of the year, my boy.” His voice nasal and his fingers flicking the ash from an invisible cigar as he hurried along, pulling Adam with him.

Adam looked behind—they seemed to be running away. But from whom? From what?

“Ah, the woods,” his father said, still W. C. Fields as he indicated the beginning of a section of trees and brush that ran for a mile or so toward the state highway.

As they entered the wooded area, he saw his father glance backward. Adam followed the glance—still nobody there.

“Everything all right, Dad?” he asked, lips trembling.

“Just fine, Adam, just fine,” his father said in his own voice.

So they plunged into the woods, tripping sometimes over tree limbs knocked down during winter storms, crashing through brush as if they were on safari in Africa, and after a while Adam began to enjoy himself.

“Hey, Dad, this is kind of fun,” Adam said.

His father, breathing hard, tousled Adam’s hair. “Not as bad as I thought it would be,” he said.

Adam felt a sense of camaraderie. And that was when they encountered the dog, like an apparition from nowhere, ugly, unidentifiable, a piglike snout, glittering eyes, and yellowed teeth.

“This is ridiculous,” his father said now.

Adam knew what his father meant by ridiculous. Here they were being frightened and intimidated and held at bay by, of all things, a dog. Not an armed robber. Not a wild animal. But a dog. Adam felt, in fact, that he and his father might have been running away from a greater danger behind them. But that danger
evaporated in the presence of the dog. The dog looked capable of attack and violence, the low growl in its throat menacing, deadly.

“Let’s back up a little,” his father said.

But the movement brought a loud growl from the animal. The boy’s heart began to beat wildly.