Ruffly Speaking (34 page)

Ruffly was still dashing to Stephanie, wheeling around, almost flinging himself against the harmless-looking doors of what now felt and stank like a giant crematorium about to blow open and shoot out half-incinerated remains, the singed bodies of small, furry animals, monstrous human limbs with flame-eaten flesh. Stephanie kept trying to assure Ruffly that his work was done. “He can’t be made to feel that his efforts are ignored,” she told Steve, “but when I tell him I’ll take over, he’s supposed to... Why is he
doing
this?”

She may have missed Steve’s reply: “I haven’t got a clue.”

Yes, a single incident, one crash of a high jump, can ruin a high-strung obedience dog by making him refuse all jumps ever after. Hauled away from what he considered a vital task, Ruffly might learn a permanent lesson and never work again. So
what!
This was, for once, no time to discuss dog training. Ruffly’s life was more important than Stephanie’s need for his help. The fire patiently smoldered. It wouldn’t wait forever. Ruffly’s mad forays to the carriage house doors could place him inches from the building when the fire grew tired of this grimy, smoky waiting, gulped for air, found a spark, and exploded in glorious, greedy flames.

Angrily brandishing the garden fork in the smudgy darkness, her flaming red-gold curls standing out around her head, Leah looked like a particularly beautiful devil venting its fury on the cinders of home. She stomped into the reeking smoke around the burning carriage house and, I assumed, toward Ruffly, who had quit flying around to station himself rigidly in front of the closed doors, where he’d be instantly incinerated when flames shot out or, if the building collapsed, excruciatingly crushed to death by falling timbers and slabs of slate. I remembered how decisively Leah had dealt with Willie and how effectively she’d cut off his yapping and nipping. She, at least, could act. Over her shoulder, she chastised us: “Don’t you people know the first thing about hearing dogs?”

As I tried to think what the first thing was, Leah approached Ruffly. When she reached him, the smudge around us thickened. “Hurry up!” I shouted to her. “Grab him and run!” Leah bent down. Enraged, I realized that she was murmuring to Ruffly. Starting toward her, I shouted again, “Leah, grab him!
Grab
him and
run!
” But instead of scooping up the little dog, Leah raised the gar-den fork waist high and began to poke at the big iron latch on the carriage house doors.

“NO!” I screamed.

Steve’s voice joined mine. “Jesus Christ, Leah, oxygen is—”

Rowdy had caught the contagious excitement. My efforts to control his joyful bounding slowed me down. Before I reached Leah, she succeeded in lifting the latch. As the door swung open, Ruffly shot through and disappeared into a dense billow of smoke, visible even in the darkness of night, fetid, thick, and hungry for air.

Doug took over the task of restraining Stephanie, who’d begun to scream; Steve appeared at Leah’s side and started dragging her away; and in one smooth, heart-stopping motion, Rowdy backstepped, twisted his head, and slipped his collar. I dashed after Rowdy and nearly caught him. Only a few yards from the gaping door to that smoldering furnace, I lunged for his tail, even felt its coarse guard hairs brush my fingertips, but there was no stopping him. Before I caught my breath in the smutty air, a streak of white trim and dark wolf gray zoomed after Ruffly, straight into the black smoke, straight into the furnace, straight toward fiery death.

Burned alive.Rowdy. The crown of creation. The crown of...

For a second, I froze. Crazed with fear, I groped desperately for smothered memories of fire-safety films and dormitory drill procedures. A lungful of smoke brought me a terrible vision of Rowdy’s thick, beautiful stand-off coat ablaze in an aura of crimson flames. The memories kindled and caught.
Stay low. Avoid the real hazard: smoke.
At the open door of the still-smoldering building, I dropped to my knees and crawled.
Find something to breathe through.
My black dress. I tugged the skirt up over my mouth and nose. “Rowdy! Rowdy, come! I love you!” The smoke ate at my eyes like drops of burning acid. “Rowdy, don’t do this to me, you son of a bitch! Rowdy,
come!
” Blinded by smoke and darkness, I edged forward. My knee whacked a hard ridge in the floor. A sharp object that felt like iron sliced into my right shoulder. Then something hit me in the face and bounced off. Little dog claws cut through the jersey. A small dog, low to the ground. Ruffly! In seconds, he was gone.

My chest ached, but the choking and coughing seemed to come from far outside my body. My left hand, searching, palm down, found cracks and grit. With no warning, huge, sharp spikes hammered so fiercely through flesh and tendons that I could have sworn my hand was being nailed to the concrete floor. When a bone-hard mass grazed my cheekbone, pain radiated to my ear and across my scalp and down my neck. Human fingers wrapped themselves around my ankles. I saw nothing and heard nothing, but I know Steve’s touch. I knew his hands as surely as I knew Rowdy’s big-dog nails and that massive, malamute-perfect heavy-boned chest.

“Move, for Christ’s sake! Holly,
move!
Open your damn eyes!”

And then, miraculously, I was on the grass. Thick smoke swirled around me. “Rowdy! Steve... Oh my God, where is he?”

A flashlight played on the open door to a hell now backlit by luminous flames. From its mouth emerged the cutout silhouette of an Alaskan malamute, a huge black dog, black face, black paws, black tail, pulling and struggling, head down and awkwardly twisted, taking impossibly slow, labored steps, jaws locked on the burden it dragged, the body of a boy too small for his nine years, light in life, heavy now.

Dead weight. Ivan.

33

 In the year of our Lord 1636, two events no-table in the history of Cambridge occurred almost simultaneously. The first has never re-curred. Once founded, Harvard College was what it was and has stayed that way ever since. The sec-ond event took place immediately after the first. As you’ll remember, God let a whole week slip by between
Fiat lux
and a well-earned rest, but the word
Veritas
had no sooner passed the lips of the founders of Harvard than they began to congratulate themselves.
(Had to be done! Knew it all along! I told you so, didn’t I? Didn’t I?),
and before long, when they’d reached a jolly state of puritanical merri' ment in which no one would listen to a single word that anyone else had to say, an unusually modest and witty founder became responsible for the second notable event, the one that’s been endlessly repeated ever after, the cracking of the old Cambridge joke (A.D. 1636), “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.

When I listen to Leah, I sometimes reflect that, in this regard, Harvard women have finally achieved a status equal to that of Harvard men.
“I’m
supposed to be the novice,” Leah announced, “and
you
people are supposed to be the experts. So how come not one of you remembered the first thing, the
first
thing, about hearing dogs? Watch your dog! Trust your dog!” She caught her breath. “Remember?
Trust
your dog.”

We were sitting outside Morris’s house. Matthew had located a couple of garden hoses and two faucets on the foundation of Alice Savery’s house, and he and Doug were making what I suspected were futile efforts to contain the carriage house blaze. Stephanie and Steve had taken Ruffly indoors; Steve needed the bright kitchen light to examine and treat the burns on the dog’s feet. Rita was using Stephanie’s phone to place another 911 call and to call Ivan’s mother, Bernadette. It had been minutes, not the hours it seemed, since Doug had originally called, but as it turned out, he’d innocently given Alice Savery’s name and address. Thus he might as well have told 911 that he wanted to report a false alarm. I’d left Rita with the receiver of the big white phone clamped to her left ear. The hearing aid she’d removed before making the calls was resting on the counter. Or that’s where it was until I palmed it,

“Trust your dog!” Leah repeated.

“Leah, that will do,” I said. “You are being—”

“Leah?” a small voice echoed.

“Ivan, the fire trucks are coming,” she told him. Ivan Was determined not to miss their arrival. That’s what we were doing outside. “They’ll be here any minute.”

“Leah, God is everywhere, right?”

“Ivan!”

“This is important, Leah.” Scraped and black-smudged, Ivan’s face had lost none of its intense curiosity. Those round violet eyes commanded attention. “Leah, I Was thinking: God is everywhere, is everywhere to
start
with. But if I go into a room, and the windows are closed and the doors are all locked, and it’s a, uh, confined space... Does that mean that now there’s less of Him? Or does He just get squished up?”

“Ivan,” Leah said gently, “you don’t need to worry about locked doors anymore. Just, from now on, stay out of people’s yards.”

“Raccoons don’t,” he countered. “Matthew told us—”

I stopped listening. Except for the weak, scratchy voice, Ivan sounded like himself. He remembered screaming for help. He also remembered resting his head on the floor by the side door of the carriage house, where, he’d reasoned, a little fresh air would seep in through the crack. It had. He looked horrible, though. So did I. In one of the most politically correct cities in the world, I wore blackface—and black arm and black leg, too. Rowdy still looked like the malamute from hell, but the pads of his feet were fine, and, although he’d taken more smoke than I had, he wasn’t wheezing. I stood up, smacked my lips to him, then led him down the illuminated path next to Morris’s house, through the shrub border, and across a little stretch of lawn to Alice Savery’s back door.

Light was no problem anymore. The smoldering carriage house was now a bonfire that had attracted a crowd of neighbors. The cautious clustered in a group at the end of the drive; the bold formed a scraggly line near Matthew and Doug, who were soaking the area around the building with their hoses. The smoke was steamy now-Everyone faced the fire. No one watched Rowdy and me-

The back door had glass panes. After I’d tried ringing the bell, I tapped on one of them. Then I took off one shoe, placed the sole against the pane, rested my left elbow on the upper, and used the flat of my right hand to deliver a hard whack to my left fist. I’m not an experienced housebreaker; what I am is a landlady who does her own repairs, including glazing. In almost no time, I’d removed enough glass to let me reach in, locate the knob, and open the door. Most houses in that neighborhood had expensive security systems. I’d half expected to hear an alarm like the one Ivan had triggered by pounding on the front door. Nothing happened. My fingers found a light switch.

Careful not to let Rowdy step on the broken glass, I led him through a little mud room, where we paused. I inserted Rita’s aid in my left ear. Then I removed the wide jersey belt from my waist, wrapped it around and around Rowdy’s head, and tied it on top. He looked ridiculous, of course, a large charcoal-colored dog wearing a hair ornament, but I didn’t happen to be carrying any canine ear plugs, and the belt effectively pinned down his ears and added a few layers of muffling.

Beyond the mud room was a shabby, ugly kitchen with yellow-speckled green linoleum, greenish-yellow walls, and restaurant-size cabinet space. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, were brown paper grocery bags packed with junk mail, newspapers, and bright-colored, neatly folded boxes that had once contained such diverse items as graham crackers, cornflakes, radon detectors, and at-home kits to test water purity. The sour air certainly smelled as if it could use testing, and the layer of grease that clung to every surface was so thick that if you’d scraped it into cans, you could’ve supplied the shortening needs of a bad diner for six months. Perched on the edge of a counter, ready to fall off and break someone’s foot, was a great big red fire extinguisher.

“Miss Savery!” I called.

My left ear felt as if someone had jammed a full-size radio into it. When my fingers explored the aid, they felt huge and clumsy, and when they finally located the minuscule volume control, one touch in the wrong direction cut off all sound to the ear. In an effort to turn the damned thing back on, I made what I intended as a fine adjustment. The air came to buzzing, crackling lif
_e
Rowdy’s tags clanged like cymbals. Almost in the ear itself, a fully inflated five-wad bubble of Bazooka in the mouth of an infant Dizzie Gillespie burst with a weirdly metallic
POP!
The origin of the deafening explosion proved to be my own mouth; I’d lightly clicked my tongue. But I left the volume set high. If an ultrasonic blast cut off the aid, I’d definitely notice.