The Drop (2 page)

He lived alone in the house he grew up in, and when it seemed likely to swallow him with its smells and memories and dark couches, the attempts he’d made to escape it—through church socials, lodge picnics, and one horrific mixer thrown by a dating service—had only opened the wound farther, left him patching it back up for weeks, cursing himself for hoping. Stupid hope, he’d sometimes whisper to his living room. Stupid, stupid hope.

But it lived in him, nonetheless. Quietly, even hopelessly most times. Hopeless hope, he’d think sometimes and manage a smile, people on the subway wondering what the hell Bob was smiling about. Odd, lonely Bob the bartender. Nice enough guy, can be depended on to help shovel a walk or buy a round, a good guy, but so shy you couldn’t hear what he was saying half the time, so you gave up, tossed him a polite nod, and turned to someone else.

Bob knew what they said, and he couldn’t blame them. He could step outside himself enough to see what they saw—a never-was loser, ill at ease in social situations, given to stray nervous tics like blinking too much for no reason and cocking his head at odd angles when he was daydreaming, kinda guy made the other losers look a little brighter in comparison.

“You have so much love in your heart,” Father Regan said to Bob the time Bob broke down crying in confession. Father Regan took him back into the sacristy and they shared a couple glasses of the single malt the priest kept tucked away on a closet shelf above the cassocks. “You do, Bob. It’s plain for everyone to see. And I can’t help but believe some good woman, some woman with faith in God, will see that love and run to it.”

How to tell a man of God about the world of man? Bob knew the priest meant well, knew that he was right in theory. But experience had shown Bob that women saw the love in his heart, all right, they just preferred a heart with a more attractive casing around it. And it wasn’t just the women, it was
him
. Bob didn’t trust himself around breakable things. Hadn’t in years.

That night, he paused on the sidewalk, feeling the ink sky above him and the cold in his fingers, and he closed his eyes against the evening.

He was used to it. He was used to it.

It was okay.

You could make a friend of it, as long as you didn’t fight it.

With his eyes closed, he heard it—a worn-out keening accompanied by distant scratching and a sharper, metallic rattling. He opened his eyes. A large metal barrel with a heavy lid clamped tight on top. Fifteen feet down the sidewalk on the right. It shook slightly under the yellow glare of the streetlight, its bottom scraping the sidewalk. He stood over it and heard that keening again, the sound of a creature that was one breath away from deciding it was too hard to take the next, and Bob pulled off the lid.

He had to remove some things to get to it—a doorless microwave and five thick Yellow Pages, the oldest dating back to 2005, piled atop some soiled bedding and musty pillows. The dog—either a very small one or else a puppy—was down at the bottom, and it scrunched its head into its midsection when the light hit it. It exhaled a soft chug of a whimper and tightened its body even more, its eyes closed to slits. A scrawny thing. Bob could see its ribs. He could see a big crust of dried blood by its ear. No collar. It was brown with a white snout and paws that seemed far too big for its body.

It let out a sharper whimper when Bob reached down, sank his fingers into the nape of its neck, and lifted it out of its own excrement. Bob didn’t know dogs too well, but there was no mistaking this one for anything but a boxer. And definitely a puppy, the wide brown eyes opening and looking into his as he held it up before him.

Somewhere, he was sure, two people made love. A man and a woman. Entwined. Behind one of those shades, oranged with light, that looked down on the street. Bob could feel them in there, naked and blessed. And he stood out here in the cold with a near-dead dog staring back at him. The icy sidewalk glinted like new marble, and the wind was dark and gray as slush.

“What do you got there?”

Bob turned, looked up and down the sidewalk.

“I’m up here. And you’re in my trash.”

She stood on the front porch of the three-decker nearest him. She’d turned the porch light on and stood there shivering, her feet bare. She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and came back with a pack of cigarettes. She watched him as she got one going.

“I’ve got a dog.” Bob held it up.

“A
what
?”

“A dog. A puppy. A boxer, I think.”

She coughed out some smoke. “Who puts a dog in a barrel?”

“I know,” he said. “Right? It’s bleeding.” He took a step toward her stairs and she backed up.

“Who do you know that I would know?” A city girl, not about to just drop her guard around a stranger.

“I don’t know,” Bob said. “How about Francie Hedges?”

She shook her head. “You know the Sullivans?”

That wouldn’t narrow it down. Not around here. You shook a tree, a Sullivan fell out. Followed by a six-pack most times. “I know a bunch.”

This was going nowhere, the puppy looking at him, shaking worse than the girl.

“Hey,” she said, “you live in this parish?”

“Next one over.” He tilted his head to the left. “Saint Dom’s.”

“Go to church?”

“Most Sundays.”

“So you know Father Pete?”

“Pete Regan,” he said, “sure.”

She produced a cell phone. “What’s your name?”

“Bob,” he said. “Bob Saginowski.”

She raised her cell phone and took his picture. He hadn’t even known it was happening or he at least would have run a hand through his hair.

Bob waited as she stepped back from the light, phone to one ear, finger pressed into the other. He stared at the puppy. The puppy stared back, like, How did I get
here
? Bob touched its nose with his index finger. The puppy blinked its huge eyes. For a moment, Bob couldn’t recall his sins.

“That picture just went out,” she said from the darkness. “To Father Pete and six other people.”

Bob stared into the darkness, said nothing.

“Nadia,” the girl said and stepped back into the light. “Bring him up here, Bob.”

THEY WASHED IT IN
Nadia’s sink, dried it off, and brought it to her kitchen table.

Nadia was small. A bumpy rope of a scar ran across the base of her throat. It was dark red, the smile of a drunk circus clown. She had a tiny moon of a face, savaged by pockmarks, and small, heart-pendant eyes. Shoulders that didn’t cut so much as dissolve at the arms. Elbows like flattened beer cans. A yellow bob of hair curled on either side of her oval face. “It’s not a boxer.” Her eyes glanced off Bob’s face before dropping the puppy back onto her kitchen table. “It’s an American Staffordshire terrier.”

Bob knew he was supposed to understand something in her tone, but he didn’t know what that thing was, so he remained silent.

She glanced back up at him after the quiet lasted too long. “A pit bull.”

“That’s a pit bull?”

She nodded and swabbed the puppy’s head wound again. Someone had pummeled it, she’d told Bob. Probably knocked it unconscious, assumed it was dead, and dumped it.

“Why?” Bob said.

She looked at him, her round eyes getting rounder, wider. “Just because.” She shrugged, went back to examining the dog. “I worked at Animal Rescue once. You know the place on Shawmut? As a vet tech? Before I decided it wasn’t my thing. They’re so hard, this breed . . .”

“What?”

“To adopt out,” she said. “It’s very hard to find them a home.”

“I don’t know about dogs. I never had a dog. I live alone. I just was walking by the barrel.” Bob found himself beset by a desperate need to explain himself, explain his life. “I’m just not . . .” He could hear the wind outside, black and rattling. Rain or bits of hail spit against the windows. Nadia lifted the puppy’s back left paw—the other three paws were brown, but this one was white with peach spots. She dropped the paw as if it were contagious. She went back to the head wound, took a closer look at the right ear, a piece missing from the tip that Bob hadn’t noticed until now.

“Well,” she said, “he’ll live. You’re gonna need a crate and food and all sorts of stuff.”

“No,” Bob said. “You don’t understand.”

She cocked her head, gave him a look that said she understood perfectly.

“I can’t. I just found him. I was gonna give him back.”

“To whoever beat him, left him for dead?”

“No, no, like, the authorities.”

“That would be Animal Rescue,” she said. “After they give the owner seven days to reclaim him, they’ll—”

“The guy who beat him? He gets a second chance?”

She gave him a half frown and a nod. “
If
he doesn’t take it”—she lifted the puppy’s ear, peered in—“chances are this little fella’ll be put up for adoption. But it’s hard. To find them a home. Pit bulls. More often than not?” She looked at Bob. “More often than not, they’re put down.”

Bob felt a wave of sadness roll out from her that immediately shamed him. He didn’t know how, but he’d caused pain. He’d put some out into the world. He’d let this girl down. “I . . .” he started. “It’s just . . .”

She glanced up at him. “I’m sorry?”

Bob looked at the puppy. Its eyes were droopy from a long day in a barrel and whoever gave it that wound. It had stopped shivering, though.

“You can take it,” Bob said. “You used to work there, like you said. You—”

She shook her head. “I can’t even take care of myself.” She shook her head again. “And I work too much. Crazy hours, too. Unpredictable.”

“Can you give me ’til Sunday morning?” Bob wasn’t sure how it was the words left his mouth, since he couldn’t remember formulating them or even thinking them.

The girl eyed him carefully. “You’re not just saying it? ’Cause, I shit you not, he ain’t picked up by Sunday noon, he’s back out that door.”

“Sunday, then.” Bob said the words with a conviction he actually felt. “Sunday definitely.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Bob felt crazed. He felt light as a communion wafer. “Yeah.”

T
HE DAILY
7:00
AM
mass at Saint Dominic’s hadn’t drawn a crowd since before Bob was born. But now the numbers, always grim, dwindled by the month.

The morning after he found the dog, he could hear the hem of Father Regan’s cassock brush the marble floor of the altar from the tenth row. The only people in attendance that morning—a bitter one, to be sure, black ice all over the streets, wind so cold you could nearly see it—were Bob; Widow Malone; Theresa Coe, once the principal of Saint Dom’s School, when there was a Saint Dom’s School; Old Man Williams; and the Puerto Rican cop, whose name, Bob was pretty sure, was Torres.

Torres didn’t look like a cop—his eyes were kind, sometimes even playful—so it could be surprising to notice the holster on his hip when he turned into his pew after Communion. Bob, himself, never took Communion, a fact not lost on Father Regan, who’d tried several times to convince him that the damage done by not taking the Eucharist, if he were, in fact, in a state of mortal sin, was far worse, in the good priest’s opinion, than the damage that could be wrought by partaking of the sacrament. Bob, however, had been raised old school Catholic, back when you heard a lot about Limbo and even more about Purgatory, back when nuns reigned with punitive rulers. So even though Bob, theologically speaking, leaned left on most Church teachings, he remained a traditionalist.

Saint Dom’s was an older church. Dated back to the late 1800s. A beautiful building—dark mahogany and off-white marble, towering stained glass windows dedicated to various sad-eyed saints. It looked the way a church should look. The newer churches—Bob didn’t know what to do with them. The pews were too blond, the skylights too numerous. They made him feel like he was there to revel in his life, not ruminate on his sins.

But in an old church, a church of mahogany and marble and dark wainscoting, a church of quiet majesty and implacable history, he could properly reflect on both his hopes and his transgressions.

The other parishioners lined up to receive the host while Bob remained kneeling in his pew. There was no one around him. He was an island.

The cop Torres was up there now, a good-looking guy in his early forties, going a bit doughy. He took the host on his tongue, not in a cupped palm. A traditionalist too.

He turned, blessing himself, and his eyes skipped across Bob’s before he reached his pew.

“All rise.”

Bob blessed himself and stood. He lifted the kneeler back into place with his foot.

Father Regan raised his hand above the throng and closed his eyes. “May the Lord bless you and keep you all the days of your lives. May He make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His face upon you and give you peace. This mass has ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Amen.”

Bob exited his pew and walked down the aisle. At the holy water font by the exit, he dipped his fingers and blessed himself. At the next font over, Torres did the same. Torres nodded hello, one familiar stranger to another. Bob returned the nod and they took separate exits out into the cold.

BOB WENT INTO WORK
at Cousin Marv’s around noon because he liked it when it was quiet. Gave him time to think over this puppy proposition he was facing.

Most people called Marv Cousin Marv out of habit, something that went back to grade school, though no one could remember why, but Marv actually was Bob’s cousin. On their mothers’ side.

Cousin Marv had run a crew in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It had been primarily comprised of guys with interests in the loaning and subsequent debt-repayment side of things, though Marv never turned his nose down at any paying proposition because he believed, to the core of his soul, that those who failed to diversify were always the first to collapse when the wind turned. Like the dinosaurs, he’d say to Bob, when the cavemen came along and invented arrows. Picture the cavemen, he’d say, firing away, and the tyrannosauruses all gucked up in the oil puddles. A tragedy so easily averted.