The Dog That Whispered (22 page)

Hazel listened and her heart lurched a little.

Did that soldier in mom's picture kill people like that?

“I mean, they didn't go out and strafe enemy positions or anything. But if they took fire, the gunners fired back. Toward the end, I heard that the VC would sneak in next to where the wounded were and give 'em everything they had. Knocking out a helicopter, no matter what kind, I guess, was a big deal for the VC.”

Hazel tried to swallow the last bite of toast, which seemed to go dry and stale in her throat.

“Any gunner on any helicopter was fair game, and a great target. You could see where the tracers were coming from and every VC in the area would open up on it. Them gunners didn't have a real long life expectancy.”

“Oh. I didn't…I didn't realize.”

“That's okay. No one does. Or did.”

Woody's eyes took on a faraway look, like he was staring backward forty years and seeing things he did not really want to see again.

“That's why I didn't want to give up that picture. He was one of them that went home. I saw him leave. He made it. Too many others didn't, you know. Kind of a success story. If there are any success stories that came out of that stupid war.”

Hazel sat still and willed herself not to tear up, not to tear up over Woody's pain after forty years, at the futility of conflict, at the sacrifice so many young men made in courageous service to their country, not to tear up over this one unnamed gunner and his role in Hazel's life.

If he has one, that is
.

Woody wiped at his face. If he was wiping away a tear, it was a practiced move so it would not look like he was doing so.

“But every G.I. says that about every war, I bet. You do your duty, and that's a good thing. Honorable. Noble, even. But after all the killing, after so many years have gone by, you sort of have to think and wonder if it was all worth it, you know?”

Hazel replied, “I do.”

“I guess it was. I tell myself it was. I did what I was called on to do. And that's all I could do.”

Thurman seldom climbed the steps to the second floor of Wilson's house. Occasionally he took the stairs, one at a time, with small, careful, gingerly placed steps, just to see if Wilson was okay and comfortable. Once he felt assured that all was well, he would make his way back downstairs, like a mountain climber descending a sheet of ice or the face of a glacier.

Wilson imagined that Thurman felt that it was his duty, as the dog of the house, to provide the first line of defense, in case of attack, or burglary, or intrusions by mailmen. Being close to the door and the window—midway, equidistant to both—was of prime importance to Thurman, so his preferred choice in sleeping locations was still his first pick the first day he arrived: situated on a thickness of folded blanket in the family room, adjacent to the couch.

Wilson had offered Thurman a fancy bed he purchased at the fancy pet store in Shadyside—tartan plaid on one side, imitation lamb's wool on the other. Thurman had tried it, both sides, decided to have none of it, and then somehow managed to nudge the door open and drag his blanket back out of the hall closet where Wilson had stored it “temporarily.”

But tonight Thurman gave up on his task of protecting the house.

Instead, he followed Wilson up the stairs and sat beside his bed.

Wilson sat at the edge of the bed, wearing a University of Pittsburgh T-shirt with a snarling panther on the front.

Thurman came up silently and stared at Wilson.

“What?” Wilson asked.

Company
.

“For you or for me?” Wilson asked.

Thurman growled his reply.

You
.

“And you think I need company tonight? Why tonight?”

Thurman grew serious, as serious as a black Lab can make his expression, narrowing his eyes.

Emily. Sad
.

Wilson took a deep breath and exhaled loudly.

“Maybe. But not sad.”

Thurman did not buy it.

Sad
, he growled.
Confuse
.

“You mean ‘confused.' And maybe that's it, Thurman.”

Sad
.

Wilson reached out and put his hand on Thurman's head, and Thurman pressed back against it.

“Thurman, I know my mother prays. She has prayed. She continues to pray.”

Thurman looked up, his eyes peeking through Wilson's wrist.

Pray
.

Wilson did not speak. It appeared that he wanted to speak, but the words were trapped in his throat, trapped by a thickness there, a darkness that occurred when the pain rose up and squeezed at his heart.

“But after what I've done, Thurman, there is no redemption.”

Thurman sort of shook the hand off his head and growled.

Redemp?

“Redemption. It means forgiveness, Thurman. When you do something bad. For me, there is no redemption.”

Thurman was having none of this.

He backed up and half-jumped, so his front paws landed on Wilson's thighs, so his eyes were almost at Wilson's eye level. The dog stared as hard as a dog is capable of staring.

Bunkum
.

Wilson just shook his head as if rejecting that evaluation.

Grace. Gift
, he growled, his mumble-growls more emphatic than Wilson had ever heard up until this moment.

Grace. Gift
.

Thurman's back legs did a little back-and-forth dance, as he often did when he was trying to make a point, when he was serious about some aspect of life.

Grace. Grace. Grace
.

“Yeah, Thurman, maybe for you. But you haven't done what I did. No grace.”

Bunkum. Bunkum
.

Wilson gently took Thurman's paws off his thigh and replaced them on the floor. Then he lay back on the bed and pulled the covers up and appeared to be trying to hide.

Thurman did something that he had never done before.

He jumped up on to the bed, his legs stepping with great care, not certain of the surface of a bed and how it would react to four paws. After a moment, he must have decided that it was safe to walk, and he took puppy steps toward Wilson and lay down, folding his legs under him, as gentle as a fawn, then laid his head on the second pillow and stared at Wilson, his dark eyes wide and open and welcoming.

“Thurman, what are you doing?”

Sleep. Not sad. Grace. Faith. God. Friend
.

Thurman rattled off the words almost as fast as he could, words that he obviously hoped would provide rest and balm for Wilson's wounds, years and decades old, some open and festering, others hidden and covered by a thick patina of years.

Sleep. Protect. Not sad
.

O
N THE
WAY
back to her hotel from the Desert Skies Mobile Home Park, Hazel had stopped at a drugstore and had purchased a large road atlas. She could have used the map app on her tablet, but the small screen made it hard to really get the big picture. Plus it would be too tempting to start searching the Internet for more information. If she did that, she might lose her nerve to go at all. And so she had left the tablet buried in her other suitcase in the back of the Quest, where it would remain until she got to Pennsylvania. When she had returned to her room, she'd opened the book up to the two-page spread of the map of the entire United States.

She knew where Pittsburgh was, almost for sure, out east, but not as far as New York City, yet the land between her and that city remained a big unknown.

Geography was never my best subject in school
.

It had taken a minute to locate Phoenix on the map.

I wonder if they still teach geography these days. Since everybody has a map on their smartphones, maybe not
, she'd thought.

Between one finger placed on Phoenix and another placed on Pittsburgh, there was a very large swath of the country that Hazel had never once visited or seen or had even been curious about, for that matter.

I guess I was pretty provincial in my outlook. Maybe everyone from Portland is that way. You know, hipsters. It's in the water. There is no other part of the country that is as cool as Portland, so why bother with them?

There were all sorts of blue lines snaking across the middle of America. Hazel had to flip a page to find out what the blue lines were and what the red lines were. Blue lines were interstates with limited access, and red lines were regular roads, with easy access to Waffle Houses.

She'd brought the map with her to the huge, multistory atrium lobby of the hotel, had gotten a large complimentary coffee, which was served all day, and had sat, tracing one route and then another. She assumed that the GPS system in the Quest would pick the shortest and the fastest route, but now that she had a destination in sight, she felt a hesitation, as if the possibility of finding out the truth was a scarier proposition than she had first imagined.

I can get there soon enough. But I don't want to travel faster than…

She'd looked at the fountain in the lobby, the one that filled the atrium with a liquid sort of echo.

…faster than I don't know what
.

She had a notepad with her and had jotted down the route:

Phoenix to Albuquerque. From Albuquerque to Oklahoma City. Then on to Wichita to Kansas City to Des Moines.

That's a long trip already. But I always wanted to see Wichita and Des Moines. My mother talked about both those cities.

Then from Des Moines to Chicago and then past Detroit and then to Cleveland.

From Cleveland, it did not seem like a long trip to Pittsburgh.

She used a torn piece of paper that matched the distance key to measure each section of roadway. It was a rough guess—some twenty-five hundred miles, give or take.

At fifty miles an hour, that will take…uhh…fifty hours. I could go faster, but I like to stop a lot.

She had finished her coffee and had debated getting a second cup, which would actually be her eighth cup of the day.

If I don't push the driving, and maybe stop once in a while to look at things, that could take me a week. Maybe ten days
.

She decided on one more cup, pouring it from the urn that seemed to have a limitless supply.

That's not bad. A week or so until I find out
.

She sipped at her eighth cup.

Or not find out
.

Sharif Moses Yusry waited in his cab, listening to a baseball game, thinking that listening to native English speakers would help improve his English, although he understood little of what happened on a baseball pitch.

He did know that the team here in Pittsburgh were called the baseball Pirates.

Sharif and his cab were outside the Heritage Square Senior Apartments and Retirement Village, parked in the shade of a maple tree, waiting. He was the second of three cabs. Today was the fifteenth of the month, the day many of the residents received a government check—and also the day many of them needed a ride to the bank or the grocery store or sometimes the liquor store.

Sharif hoped it would not be the last place.

“Old people should not spend the money on such things,” he said to himself after taking an old woman, tottering even when sober, to one such business.

But cabdrivers could not be selective in fares or their destinations. He would go where they asked to go.

Sharif watched two people make their way out of the front doors. They both headed to the cabstand. Gretna Steele was one of them. She allowed the other person to take the first cab and walked to the second cab. Sharif was out and opening the back door as she approached.

“Morning, Mizz Steele,” he said. “Delightful, is it not? Outside.”

Gretna eyed the driver with suspicion, scowled, and garrumped a short “Hello,” and slid into the backseat.

“Where to go?” Sharif asked as he climbed behind the wheel and started the engine.

“Giant Eagle,” Gretna replied. “I'm out of coffee.”

“Most assured,” Sharif replied.

“And someplace where they sell cigarettes,” Gretna said, her voice low, almost a whisper. “You know of a place that sells cigarettes?”

Sharif shrugged.

“I do not use them. But the Eleven-Seven shows signs for them in their windows.”

Gretna grumped, “Good. On the way back. Okay?”

“For certain,” Sharif said as he pulled onto Negley Avenue and headed to the store.

Traffic slowed and Sharif looked in the rearview mirror.

“Mizz Steele, I see your son last night.”

“What? Who? Where?”

“Your son, Mizz Steele. I know his looks. At the store…at de coffee shop. Some sort of Coffee Tree store.”

“My son? Wilson?” Gretna leaned forward, which was difficult because of the slant of the rear seat. “When?”

“It was last night. Not late. With a woman. I think the woman goes to Heritage some.”

Gretna leaned forward more and grabbed at the back of the front seat, as if wanting to hear every word.

“Black hair? The woman, I mean. Did she have black hair? Pretty?”

“Indeed. Pretty, indeed. I only drive past fastly. It was, as I have heard, a flash in de pan? Is that right?”

Gretna seemed much lighter all of a sudden, and much less prickly, much less caffeine-deprived.

“Almost right. But I know what you mean.”

She leaned back against the seat with a smile.

Sharif turned the corner to the Giant Eagle.

“You wait here. I will be back in a minute,” Gretna ordered.

“Will do that, Mizz Steele.”

Hazel had decided to spend the night in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, well before the signs indicated that the city, and the college, lay only a few miles ahead.

With a name like Slippery Rock, it has to be cool
.

Then she berated herself for using the word “cool.”

At my age, I have no right to decide on what is cool or not
.

She switched on her turn signal.

But it is still an interesting name
.

She found an all-suites motel, having resisted staying at a single-room motel during her entire cross-country expedition. She wasn't sure why exactly, but having two rooms, and a bathroom, made it feel less transitory, and more like she was living in a series of very compact, very tidy apartments.

She had not expected to feel the negative effects of rootlessness, and of travel, as intently as she had.

Tour the country for months on end? What was I thinking? I can't do this much longer
.

She wondered if Pittsburgh might be a good place to call it quits, to call an end to her very brief nomadic experience.

Pittsburgh sounds nice on the Internet. It looks pretty. I could live there. They have rivers I could live near
.

She slooped her suitcase toward the elevator and the fourth floor. One wheel had already broken off, so the suitcase rolled sort of off-kilter, making a canvas hissing noise as Hazel dragged it across lobbies and down hallways.

The all-suites motel boasted free high-speed Internet access, so Hazel got a cup of coffee from the lobby…

They all have coffee in the lobby. Isn't that nice?

…and returned to her room to do a little research on her tablet.

She had resisted doing so until she got close to her intended destination.

If I found some tantalizing information, well, that would just make me hurry to get there. Which might not have been so bad
.

During her trip and its less than frantic pace, she did stop and see the sights in Chicago, and had spent an entire extra day walking along the city's lakefront. She had taken extra time in Cleveland too, where she'd also walked along the lakefront for much of a day.

Different lakes, though. I really think I should live by the water
.

Now ensconced in the Slippery Rock Comfort Suites, Hazel accessed the University of Pittsburgh website. There was a page that described the overall academic standing and stature of the faculty, but did not offer a complete alphabetical listing.

Hmmmm
.

However, there was a place that offered a “People Search,” so she typed in the name Steele. But she waited to push enter on the tablet—waited because she was afraid that she might find him, and just as afraid that she would not.

Before doing anything, she stood up and walked around her two-room suite, not wanting to know as much as wanting to know. The closer she came to the truth, or the possibility of the truth, the more anxious and worried and concerned and nervous she became.

She took several deep breaths.

Then she sat down, picked up the tablet, and hit enter.

The little ball on the screen whirled for ten seconds, and then a name popped up: Wilson Steele, PhD.

And then a faculty profile picture and a very brief biography.

She almost dropped the tablet back onto the table. She stared at the picture for a long time. She had all but memorized the picture of her mother and the soldier, so she did not really need to refer back to it.

She stared.

“It could be him. It really could.”

The biography was sparse in detail.

His PhD was from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as his MA and BA.

That must be unusual. Woody did say he intended on going to Pitt when he returned
.

His area of specialization was writing and rhetoric and American literature. The information explained that he focused on teaching creative writing, mainly at the graduate level, but he also taught contemporary American literature at the undergraduate level. The web page included a long list of titles of papers he had written, mostly for academic-sounding journals that Hazel had never heard of, and three books—two on writing and one on rhetoric.

There were no other personal details mentioned.

She stared at the picture.

It really could be him. The eyes are similar. Very similar
.

She looked up at the closed door of her two-room suite and did not think of anything for a long time. Then she went back to the tablet, went to Google, and typed in his name and added “University of Pittsburgh” in the search.

Instantaneously, several million links were discovered. The second item on the list, however, caught her attention.

The citation referenced an article in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
newspaper, highlighting a Gretna Steele, who was the wife of the late Dr. August Steele, focused on her decision to return to the Pittsburgh area after having initially retired to Florida.

That could be his mother
.

She tapped at the screen and the article came into view. Hazel read it carefully. It must have been from a local edition of the paper; the heading was “Squirrel Hill Comings and Goings.”