The Dog That Whispered (3 page)

“Well…he's not going back.”

Wilson waited. Thurman rumbled a little.

“You have to take him home,” she continued.

Wilson did not hesitate.

“No.”

“Just for a day or two. Maybe three. Tops. I'll make calls. I'll find him a good home. Mrs. Berkowitz downstairs said that her son might want him. The dog can't go back to the shelter. They won't keep him. They'll…well, they don't want to, but they're overcrowded. I won't let them do that. I won't be party to a gassing.”

It was obvious to Wilson that his mother was maneuvering, and he had already assumed that she had no intention of finding this horrid dog another home.

“No,” he said with a firm tone.

“Wilson, you have always been a good boy. Just for a few days. I'll find him a home. I will. You want to make your mother happy, don't you?”

At this, as if on cue, Thurman stood, shook himself, and walked carefully and deliberately to a few feet in front of Wilson. He sat down, looked up, and warbled-grumbled-growled a long sentence.

Wilson listened, and for a moment he thought that the dog said,
I will be good
.

Wilson actually took a step backward.

What? Is he talking? It sounds like he's trying to…talk—but that's crazy
.

Wilson looked first at the dog, then at the pained face of his mother attempting to radiate guilt, like a flu victim radiates germs, then closed his eyes.

It was useless to argue with this woman.

“Mom, if I agree that I'll take the dog, you have to guarantee that it will only be for a day or two. Will you promise? Or else I'll take him back, regardless of the unpleasant consequences. Understand?”

Wilson was hedging his bets—he had his mother committing to locate another home for the beast, and she was on record for acknowledging that any stay with him had to be short-lived.

Gretna nearly dove at her son, embracing him fiercely, holding him tight, murmuring that he was a good son, all the while Thurman's mumble-growling seemed to agree.

His mother let him go, offering a knowing smile.

I knew that today was not going to be a good day. I knew it
.

Y
OU ARE
son of Mizz Steele?”

Wilson felt perturbed when recognized—by shopkeepers and former students, let alone cabdrivers whom he had never once seen before.

He narrowed his eyes.

Sharif Yusry climbed out of the driver's seat and hurried to the back door.

“De door, sir, it sometimes sticks.”

The driver clattered with it for a moment, then managed to get the door open.

“I say son of Mizz Steele. I recognize dog. I drive Mizz Steele to animal place. I wait and she arrives out with de black dog.”

That makes sense. He doesn't know me. He knows the dog
.

Thurman growled and wiggled and shoved his nose at the cabdriver's hand.

“He is an appropriate dog, sir. Most friendly.”

Thurman hopped into the backseat.

“Indeed. Friendly. I suppose that is an admirable trait.”

“Oh, yes indeed, sir,” Sharif repeated. “For a dog, most noble.”

Wilson had considered walking back to his house, but with his briefcase, a half-consumed bag of dog food, two dog bowls in a plastic Giant Eagle supermarket bag, and a blanket that “Thurman just loves to sleep on,” Wilson knew that the two-mile walk would be fraught with danger.

The dog could lurch out into traffic. He could attack a toddler. He could…relieve himself in someone's yard. No. The only solution was a cab ride.

Sharif pulled out of the Heritage Square Senior Apartments and Retirement Village.

Thurman braced himself on the seat beside Wilson, grinning as only a happy dog can grin, sniffing the air through the half-open window and turning back to Wilson every quarter block.

“I know your mother,” Sharif said from the front seat.

At least he had waited for a red light before he started chattering.

“Sorry,” Wilson replied.

“No, sir. I like her. Full of life. Tasty. Is that correct word?”

Wilson grinned in spite of his horrible mood.

“You mean testy, I think.”

“Testy?”

Wilson smiled at the absurdity of it all.

“Yes. Testy is the right word for her.”

Yes indeed.

Wilson paid the cabdriver, gathered up everything he carried, and escorted Thurman to the front door of his house, a tidy midcentury brick house, built in the manner of a Cape Cod style, but not really, more like Pittsburgh's interpretation of a Cape Cod house. Thurman sniffed at everything and paid close attention to every stone and bush and nuance of the front walk.

“Yes, this is where I live. And where you will live. For a day or two. So don't get comfortable. Because you are not staying.”

Thurman warbled a reply.

“I mean it,” Wilson replied, and he jangled out his house key. “You may have bamboozled my mother, but she is old and much easier to bamboozle. She is a bamboozle-lite, as it were.”

Thurman warbled again, as if to say,
We'll see
.

Wilson stared down at the dog, who was now seated on the front stoop.

Not as if. It really sounded like
We'll see
.

Wilson unlocked the door and slowly opened it, Thurman craning his neck to peer inside, not wanting to precede his host and lunge inside like a normal canine would probably do. Thurman did not do normal.

Wilson set all his parcels down on the long table in the front hall, carefully placing the folded blanket so it would not slip off and knock something else when it fell.

“You can follow me, Thurman. And pay attention.”

Thurman growled a reply.

“I know you're a dog, Thurman. No matter. You can still listen.”

Wilson led him to the tidy tile-and-steel kitchen; the only modern touches were a new stainless steel refrigerator and a stove.

“This is the kitchen. I imagine that I will feed you in here. I haven't decided yet.”

He walked into the small, wood-paneled “rumpus room,” which held a newer flat-screen TV, a couch that looked pristine even though it must have been fifteen years old, a leather recliner next to a towering stack of books, and an old gooseneck lamp with a hundred-watt bulb in it.

“The living room and dining rooms are that way—but we never use them.”

Thurman peered in that direction and nodded.

“Upstairs are the two bedrooms and bathroom. The door leads to the basement. We don't go down there either. And this door leads to the backyard.”

Wilson stepped outside himself for a moment and realized how ridiculous, how absurd this all was—him leading a dumb animal around the house as if the dumb animal understood what he was saying—but even so, he gamely pressed on, aware or not aware.

He opened the back door.

Thurman's snout puckered as he drew in a large nosey breath.

The backyard was fenced, but no one could tell for sure, since the thickets of bushes and pines all but concealed the stockade fence along the property's perimeter.

And in the middle of the modest backyard ran a long reflecting pool, some thirty feet long and six feet wide and five feet deep at the far end, gradually sloping up to a depth of two feet nearest the house. The pool was lined with slate and granite with a small fountain at the far end, spouting a steady stream of water into the air and back into the pool with a dignified hiss.

Wilson, upon his return to peace and civilization, and after his stint in rehab so many decades earlier, had spent his first summer back home, back in America, back in a land devoid of the scarring realities of war. He spent it—the entire summer—digging the pool and reinforcing the walls with rebar, mixing cement, setting the stone, installing the piping, and bringing the water supply out from the house through a trench he had dug by hand from the basement.

He wasn't sure then why he had felt compelled to create such a massive serenity pool, all he knew was that he had to do it. Perhaps he was serving penance. For what he had done and what he had seen done. And even now, years and years later, he sometimes wondered why he had worked so hard to build it. And how hard he worked to forget.

Yet there were moments, slivers of moments, when he stepped outside and stared at the water and the ripples and listened and the sun caught the water just so and the noise of the outside world was muted and stilled by the gurgling water, when all else disappeared save this long, narrow strip of water lined with flinty slate and black granite—there were those slight glimpses into the why of all this.

He could smile for that brief second and feel balanced, or more precisely, feel nothing at all—nothing hidden, nothing looming, nothing lurking in the shadows.

For that one, brief pellucid moment, Wilson felt at peace, his soul and his heart and all the rest at total, restful peace.

The absence of all care.

For that one moment.

Then the world and his awareness of it would come upon him, like an unbidden wave against the shore, and he would be standing there with fists clenched.

But those small moments of peace were enough. Those moments were what kept him together.

When Thurman caught scent of the water, he tore off in pursuit and launched himself from the closest end, leaping, flying, charging into the air and coming down a full fifteen feet farther with a huge, collapsing splash.

It all happened so fast that Wilson did not even have time to sputter and curse his outrage at this horrid canine intrusion into that serenity.

“Thurman!” he shouted.

Thurman might have growled, but if he did, his splashing drowned it out. He kept dog-paddling to the far end, under the spouting water, then turned around, as if he had been practicing serenity pool turnarounds for years, and dog-paddled back toward Wilson, grinning more like a maniac this time, and less like a lunatic.

“Thurman! Get out of there. Now!”

Thurman's nails scrabbled at the slick slate surround, but he managed to get a pawhold and hauled himself out, an immense grin on his face.

Retrievers and water. Why didn't he consider that before he let him out?

“Stay.”

Thurman stayed put but shook himself off, water spreading up and out in splayed rainbows as the droplets arced into the afternoon sun.

Wilson returned with two towels, old towels, from a stack of them he kept in the garage for emergencies. This was the very first time he had come upon an emergency that required two towels.

And at that, he smiled to himself, just a little, but much less than Thurman was grinning.

Wilson knelt down next to Thurman and began to towel off the excess water. The coats of retrievers and water dogs appeared to be designed to shed water quickly, so a single towel was all that was really required. But he took the second towel and grabbed at Thurman's feet, making sure the bottoms of the paws were dry.

Thurman leaned into him, his head against Wilson's shoulder, growling and rumbling as he tolerated Wilson's attentions.

Wilson stopped and leaned back.

“What?”

Thurman turned his head and re-growled.

“You like my pool?”

Thurman smiled.

“Really?”

Thurman nodded this time and tried to widen his grin.

“Really,” Wilson said, his tone dry and tending to the ironic and definitely to unbelief.

As he listened, that is exactly what Thurman's growls sounded like:
I like your water.

Thurman turned back toward the pool, and if Wilson had not held on to his collar, Thurman most likely would have launched himself back into the water to prove that he meant what he said.

“You expect me to believe that you understand?”

Thurman appeared a bit offended, or as much as an oddly grinning dog can look offended, and growled.

I understand
.

Wilson stared at Thurman.

“I'm going senile,” he said, “just like my mother. Two peas in a pod.”

And when Thurman growled in reply, Wilson tried not to pay attention to him. But if asked, he would have said that Thurman had said that he shouldn't worry about things like that, since other things were going to happen to make all of it make sense.

Or something like that.

I
N
P
ORTLAND,
O
REGON
, at the end of a residential lane filled with tidy Craftsman-style houses and cozy bungalows, Hazel Jamison stood outside one particular house, carrying three
GARAGE SALE
signs under her arm. The sale was scheduled for the weekend, and that gave Hazel four more days to finish organizing her mother's worldly possessions and pricing them.

“She was a bit of a pack rat. She never married, so she never had a husband to sort of keep control of the clutter,” Hazel had told her employer when asking for the time off. “I know crafters will love what she has—yarn and cloth and old clothes and antiques and all sort of bric-a-brac. A couple of sewing machines. A couple of boxes of knitting needles. A couple of bushels of yarn for future projects. Nothing all that valuable, but I don't simply want to pitch it. She had a knack for finding things that other people thought were useless and turning them into something beautiful and wonderful.”

She entered the home she had grown up in and where she had not lived for nearly two decades.

Not much has changed. Still the same artwork and sofa and lamps. The rug might be new.

As she walked from room to room, she began to make a tally of what was left to process—what she would sell and what was obviously headed for the Dumpster that was coming at the beginning of the next week. Whatever did not sell in the sale and was too far gone to donate would be dumped.

“And there's a lot of junk hiding out here,” Hazel said to herself. “There's still the attic and the garage and the basement.”

She walked into her mother's bedroom, also mostly unchanged over the last few decades. There were a few pictures of Hazel, snapshots, tucked into the mirror—Hazel in grade school, Hazel in high school, Hazel with her college cap and gown.

She sat down at her mother's dressing table and picked up one picture, a small photo, trimmed to fit a tiny square frame. It was a photo of Hazel and her mother at a county fair somewhere—early dusk, a Ferris wheel in the background and both of them with goofy, happy grins on their faces, both holding on to large pink puffs of cotton candy.

Hazel looked at it for a long time and began to softly cry, shedding the tears she had not shed during the last brief burst of sickness that took her mother.

I needed to be strong for her.

She placed the picture back on the table.

Since there was no one else to do it for her.

There had been no one to help with any of this. Not really. Yesterday she'd watched as a pair of not-too-interested workers manhandled the stone above her mother's grave in the Skyline Memorial Gardens, overlooking Portland, although from that spot Hazel could only see a line of trees to the north, which in the summer blocked the views of the city and river.

Some plots offer better views
. Hazel found that notion endearingly odd.

The setting of the stone took less than ten minutes. Both men had nodded, with practiced solemnity, as they gathered their tools—shovels, pry bars, levels, and the like—and motored off in the cemetery's golf cart. The sedate puttering as they rounded the curve and disappeared from sight was oddly suited to the sedate location.

I imagine cemeteries are pretty quiet places most of the time. How often do people visit gravesites? Or play raucous music?

She remembered looking down at the small granite rectangle containing her mother's name, her date of birth, and date of death.

Hazel had the monument company add a single Bible verse to the stone. “Make it as small as you can,” she had said. “My mother would kill me if she knew what I was doing, but since I'm paying for it, not much she can do at the moment.”

The monument company representative must have encountered such requests with regularity, because it had been met with not even the slightest hint of a raised eyebrow.

“What's the verse?” he had asked, pen poised in midair.

“Jeremiah 29:11.”

“That's on a number of markers.”

Hazel had felt obligated to repeat it. “
‘For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'
That's sort of been my life verse, you know.”

The agent had nodded, offered a comforting smile, then added, “We'll use an actual Bible for the quote—and we ask which version you prefer. We always do. In the past, you wouldn't believe how many people get a word or two wrong, then want us to make changes after the stone is cut.”

The representative, whose name Hazel knew but quickly forgot, had leaned closer and said softly, “It's not like a computer. We can't autocorrect engraving on granite.”

“No, I am sure you can't. And thank you for being thorough.”

And now she sat picturing the engraved words.

They had all been there.

She looked out the window of her mother's room to the sky, the sun breaking through a dense cloud cover, shafts of light dancing along the quiet and overgrown lawn.

Now I am alone, Mother. All alone.

Just like you always wanted to be, isn't it?