Ruffly Speaking (33 page)

I looked at Steve. He shook his head. “Not a sound.”

“I’d better find out what he wants.” Stephanie rose.

“Shouldn’t Ruffly be barking?” Rita asked. “He isn’t, is he?”

“No,” I said, “he isn’t. He does his whole routine if it’s one of
his
sounds. Otherwise, he might just show some kind of interest. That’s why Stephanie’s supposed to watch him.”

“Probably the fireworks,” Steve said. “From the Esplanade.”

Stephanie’s voice reached us from the kitchen. She was conversing with a partner different from herself but highly intelligent, a gifted child, perhaps, or a wise and kindly extraterrestrial. “What is it? Tell me what it is,” we heard her say.

“We’d better let her know about the fireworks,” Rita said. “Steve’s probably right, and she can’t hear them.”

As Rita stood up, Doug’s face took on a look of boyish mischief. He boomed like the cannons that get shot at the conclusion of
The 1812 Overture
and, when Rita gave a startled glance over her shoulder, switched to the “Marseillaise.” With an upswing of his arms, he led all of us in a march toward Ruffly. Doug’s rich, trained voice was infinitely better than Morris’s enthusiastic bellowing, and Doug lacked Morris’s expansiveness. Even so, the performance was unmistakably Morris’s.

Once we were assembled in the kitchen, Doug became himself again. “Stephanie, I am so sorry. I never thought. This is unforgivable. Ruffly is
working,
and we’ve gone and interrupted him.”

But we hadn’t. Ruffly’s concentration was so intense that if the Boston Pops had deserted the Esplanade for Highland Street, the dog would probably have kept to his task, which consisted of posing stiff-legged before one of the glass doors to the deck while becoming all ears. The dog’s little body was so rigid that the air around him seemed to vibrate. No one spoke. To prevent Rowdy from breaking the respectful silence, I caught his eye, raised a finger to my lips, and rested a hand on his head. Ruffly suddenly quivered all over, veered around, pawed at Stephanie’s dress, gave one sharp bark, and again pointed his nose at the glass door.

“Ruffly, what is it?” Stephanie spoke exactly as if she expected a verbal reply.

Like an adept translator, Rowdy whined a question.

“Shh!” I told him.

Ruffly’s answer came suddenly and almost violently. He barked so loudly that Rita’s and Stephanie’s hands
^s
hot to their aids. His black-and-tan head twisted around toward Stephanie; his paws frantically scraped the door Panels.

“Desperate to do his doo-doo?” Doug asked frivolously.

Stephanie’s perfunctory smile was half-frown. Her hand fingered the squash blossom necklace as if she were counting rosary beads. “This isn’t how he asks. Whatever it is, he thinks it’s important. I’d better check it out. Ruffly, I’ll find out. I understand. We’ll go see what it is. My turn now. Good boy.”

She reached for the door. I grabbed Rowdy’s collar and tried to remember where I’d left his leash. Reading my mind, Steve spotted the leash on the counter, fastened it to Rowdy’s buckle collar, and handed it to me.

“Training collar?” I asked. I usually remove the slip collar and leash together. Then I remembered that to prevent Rowdy from choking himself, I’d taken off the chain when I’d tethered him to the deck post earlier in the evening. I’d probably left it outside.

Doug, Rita, and Steve had followed Stephanie and Ruffly to the deck, where Doug was bending over the gas grill.

“Doug, that’s not what Ruffly means.” Stephanie followed the determined little dog down the steps to the yard.

Rita was fiddling with the controls on her aids. “Holly, do you hear anything?”

I listened. “No. Not really. Steve, can you hear the fireworks?”

“No. Rita? Turn the volume way up on those things.”

Rita had once explained to me that the pioneers of psychology studied mental processes by examining their own inner lives. It seemed to me that if the introspective method ever came back in vogue, I could switch careers and dredge a book out of the depths of my own stupidity-Never before had it crossed my mind that Rita might hear better with her aids than I did with my so-called normal ears.

Doug straightened up. “Does anyone smell smoke?”

I sniffed. “It’s the charcoal. Could that be what Ruffly is—?”

“Probably not, unless it’s generating sound,” Steve said. “Rita, are you picking up anything?”

“Static. Loud background noise. Cars. Rowdy’s tags.” She paused. “Where’s Ruffly?”

“Down here somewhere,” Doug called from the yard.

I abandoned my search for the training collar, and Rowdy and I descended the stairs. As we did, I could smell the glowing charcoal and a lingering hint of steak and salmon. So could Rowdy, who lunged toward the Weber grills. “
This
way,” I told him. “And there’s nothing there. All you’ll do is burn yourself.”

The immediate vicinity of the house was bright with floodlights, but Stephanie’s voice came from the darkness. “Damn! Where is he? Ruffly? Ruffly, I know you mean it, and I’m trying. Where
are
you?”

Ruffly’s answering bark carried a note of exasperation. As I headed toward the back of the lot, the white of Stephanie’s dress appeared ahead of me, and as my eyes adapted to the dark, I saw that she was next to the shrub border that separated Morris’s yard from Alice Savery’s. Leaves rustled.

“Maybe he’s after an animal,” I said to Steve. “There’s an old carriage house back there, and there are supposed to be raccoons living in it.”

“There
are,”
Doug said. “Morris used to insist on feeding them.”

“Christ,” Steve muttered.

“That’s what I told him,” Doug said. “After all, they are wild animals.”

“Oh, God, it’s not a skunk, is it?” Rita cannot be talked out of the belief that skunks not only can direct their spray, but will aim it straight at her.

“Oh, all right, Ruffly. If we really have to. But wait for me.” Stephanie pushed her way through the shrubbery.

Doug followed her. “If
someone
finds us in her yard, we’re going to get a good scolding, and if someone sees a dog violating the leash law, God forbid, are we ever going to catch it. Do you know that you-know-who once tried to file an official complaint against Nelson and Jennie for playing in their own yard? Can you believe it? That woman has rabies on the brain. Her carriage house is positively crawling with raccoons, and she’s utterly phobic about fully immunized dogs being off leash.”

Rowdy and I had cleared the shrubs. I held a branch for Steve, who was in back of Rowdy and me, and we waited for Rita, whose high heels were slowing her down. “What is this stuff?” she complained.

“Laurel, I think, or maybe azaleas,” I said. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t have thorns. Rita, why don’t you take off your shoes?”

She crashed out of the bushes. “This is horrible! If God had intended plants to grow wild, He’d never have invented pots.” She sniffed. “I smell smoke.”

“Rita, calm down,” I told her. “It’s probably just someone else’s charcoal. I mean, it is the Fourth—” But it didn’t smell like briquettes. I wished that Alice Savery’s house had motion-sensitive lights like the ones on the path beside Morris’s. I could see Rita, who was right next to me, but the others were ahead of us somewhere in the shadows. The white of Rowdy’s face stood out, and the white of his tail was waving over his back. Ahead of us, Ruffly was hard at work. His barks were increasingly urgent. I felt a surge of irrational dissatisfaction with Rowdy. His hearing probably wasn’t quite as sharp as Ruffly’s, and he lacked Ruffly’s passionate attention to sound, but he could at least make some effort to help. Rita was sputtering. “These things are set wrong!

Everything is so damn loud that I can’t hear anything. Holly—”

Doug collided with me. “It’s the carriage house,” he exclaimed. He dashed off.

“He must be going to call—” Rita began.

“Of course he is. Rita—” I was going to tell her to hurry up, but at that moment Rowdy ran out of patience.

I found myself hauled like a racing sled toward the carriage house at the rear of Alice Savery’s property. There were no lights on in the building itself, but spots mounted high in the trees of an adjoining yard revealed a distraught Stephanie. She paced in front of the tall doors of what looked like a small bam. “Ruffly, your work is all done. I’ll take over. My turn now,” she was saying. “Good boy. Thank you. It’s okay now. I’ll take over.” Ruffly, however, kept frantically barking, jumping in the air, and racing back and forth between Stephanie and the building. Catching sight of me, Stephanie asked anxiously, “Can you
hear
anything? He will not calm down. Is there a smoke alarm going off in there?”

If there’d been an alarm in the building, it would certainly have been sounding. No flames were visible, but the air stank of smoke. I tried to get my face in the light so that Stephanie could see my lips, and I spoke as clearly as I could, but my Caruso reincarnate had added his arctic canine voice to Ruffly’s, and he almost certainly drowned me out. “No, not that I can hear, but the dogs are making so much noise!” I shook my head, pointed at the dogs, told Rowdy to hush, and finally clamped my hands around his muzzle.

Stephanie returned her attention to her dog. “Ruffly, I’ll take it from here! What on earth is wrong with him! He’s supposed to let me...” Her voice broke.

“Move back! Stephanie, move back!” Against the smoggy city sky, the slate roof of the carriage house showed only its usual sag; no sparks, no visible signs of a blaze, not yet. A few yards ahead of us, the espaliered tree I’d noticed from the street still shinnied its way benignly upward, its leaves blurred and blackened only by nightfall. Nothing but the burning chemical stench betrayed the shabby building’s transformation to a gigantic smudge pot set to metamorphose to a blast furnace when the vapors trapped within found air and flame, and the fire reached its flashpoint.

“Stephanie, we’re too close. Move back!” I touched her arm. She flinched as if my hand had seared her flesh. I waved toward Alice Savery’s house and Highland Street. As I did, Steve came sprinting down the drive, and Rita finally showed up. Matthew and Leah were at her heels.

“I can’t rouse anyone there.” Steve jabbed a thumb toward the big house. Catching sight of Stephanie, he yelled at her as uselessly as I’d done, “Get back! Hey, get away from there!” Veterinarians are trained to act in emergencies, and they’re used to shoving around large creatures. Steve gripped Stephanie’s forearms and began dragging her away from the danger zone around the carriage house. The fumes became nauseating, medical, and weirdly sick now, as if within the old wood and under the slate, an evil surgeon were merrily cauterizing the raw stump of a leg he’d just had fun amputating. The stench had a pesticide taint: I imagined the sadist medico basting the severed limb in bug killer and roasting it for his own consumption.

Matthew and Leah arrived bearing flashlights. The beam of Matthew’s brought me the welcome light of reality. When he ran it over the carriage house, I saw through the grimy haze a pair of wide double doors that looked as if they’d open outward. I stared at them. Smoke oozed through, I thought, but the doors remained closed-No one opened them to hurl out charred remains. No half-dead, legless creature shrieked from within.

Ruffly’s leaps became ferocious, his barks menacing-

Stephanie battled to shake Steve’s grip. “It’s a sound!” she insisted. “He hears something. It’s not like the phone. He’s not playing.” Unable to hear her own desperate voice, she clamored wildly.

“Steve, it couldn’t—” I began. A hideous phrase ran through my head, a fear-twisted snatch from a song, “the crown of creation,” but grossly distorted, like words of melted wax:
the crown of cremation.
“Where is Miss Savery?” I demanded. “Matthew, Leah,
run
and see if you can find her. Bang on her doors. Yell. Do anything!”

As they took off, Doug appeared. “Morris’s raccoons! This is awful! They’re in there, and—”

The stench?Chemicals. Petroleum. Kerosene. Gas. And fat, maybe? Melting fat, the rendering of fat-streaked flesh. The nausea started in my throat and spread down until my stomach gagged.

Steve was calm. “At this time of night, raccoons are checking out garbage cans.”

“Doug,” I shouted over Ruffly’s unremitting noise, “what if Miss Savery’s in there! Where the hell are the fire trucks? Doug, would she be in there? Does she keep anything—?”

Doug answered. “Hideous junk and the world’s oldest Volvo station wagon. You must’ve seen her in it, sitting bolt upright going directly against the traffic the wrong way up—”

Rejoining us, Leah interrupted him. “Matthew’s looking for a hose. Why isn’t anyone else
doing
anything?” Leah had found a garden fork. She plunged it into the grass.

“Leah,” I told her, “you were supposed to be looking for Miss Savery and not—” Leah extracted the garden fork from the ground. “Put that thing down!” I ordered her. “If you want to do something useful—”