A Multitude of Sins

  “‘Well, you have to understand we really try to place the more mature dogs whose owners for some reason can’t keep them, or are being transferred.’ Oh God, I hated her, Bobby. She was one of these wide-ass, Junior League bitches who’d just gotten bored with flower arranging and playing canasta at the Boston Club. I wanted just to dump the dog right out in the shop and leave, or take a swing at her. I said, ‘Do you mean you won’t take him?’ The puppy was in its cage and was actually being completely quiet and nice. ‘No, I’m sorry, it’s untamed,’ this dowdy, stupid woman said. ‘Untamed!’ I said. ‘It’s an abandoned puppy, for fuck’s sake.’

  “She just looked at me then as if I’d suddenly produced a bomb and was jumping all around. ‘Maybe you’d better leave now,’ she said. And I’d probably been in the shop all of two minutes, and here she was ordering me out. I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I know I shouted then. I was so frustrated. ‘You’re not a pet pal at all,’ I shouted. ‘You’re an enemy of pets.’”

  “You just got mad,” I said, happy not to have been there.

  “Of course I did,” Sallie said. “I let myself get mad because I wanted to scare this hideous woman. I wanted her to see how stupid she was and how much I hated her. She did look around at the phone as if she was thinking about calling 911. Someone I know came in then. Mrs. Hensley from the Art League. So I just left.”

  “That’s all good,” I said. “I don’t blame you for any of it.”

  “No. Neither do I.” Sallie took a breath and let it out forcefully into the receiver. “We have to get rid of it, though. Now.” She was silent a moment, then she began, “I tried to walk it around the neighborhood using the belt you gave it. But it doesn’t know how to be walked. It just struggles and cries, then barks at everyone. And if you try to pet it, it pees. I saw some of those kids in black sitting on the curb. They looked at me like I was a fool, and one of the girls made a little kissing noise with her lips, and said something sweet, and the puppy just sat down on the sidewalk and stared at her. I said, ‘Is this your dog?’ There were four of them, and they all looked at each other and smiled. I know it was theirs. They had another dog with them, a black one. We just have to take him to the pound, though, as soon as you come back tomorrow. I’m looking at him now, out in the garden. He just sits and stares like some Hitchcock movie.”

  “We’ll take him,” I said. “I don’t suppose anybody’s called.”

  “No. And I saw someone putting up new signs and taking yours down. I didn’t say anything. I’ve had enough with Jerry DeFranco about to die, and our injunction.”

  “Too bad,” I said, because that was how I felt—that it was too bad no one would come along and out of the goodness of his heart take the puppy in.

  “Do you think someone left it as a message,” Sallie said. Her voice sounded strange. I pictured her in the kitchen, with a cup of tea just brewed in front of her on the Mexican tile counter. It’s good she set the law aside. She becomes involved in ways that are far too emotional. Distance is essential.

  “What kind of message?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Oddly enough, it was starting to snow in St. Louis, small dry flakes backed—from my hotel window—by an empty, amber-lit cityscape and just the top curve of the great silver arch. It is a nice cordial city, though not distinguished in any way. “I can’t figure out if someone thought we were the right people to care for a puppy, or were making a statement showing their contempt.”

  “Neither,” I said. “I’d say it was random. Our gate was available. That’s all.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Does what?”

  “Randomness.”

  “No,” I said. “I find it consoling. It frees the mind.”

  “Nothing seems random to me,” Sallie said. “Everything seems to reveal some plan.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll work this all out,” I said. “We’ll take the dog and then everything’ll be better.”

  “For us, you mean? Is something wrong with us? I just have this bad feeling tonight.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with us. But it is us we’re interested in here. Good night, now, sweetheart.”

  “Good night, Bobby,” Sallie said in a resigned voice, and we hung up.

  That night in the Mayfair Hotel, with the window shades open to the peculiar spring snow and orange-lit darkness, I experienced my own strange dream. In my dream I’d gone on a duck hunting trip into the marsh that surrounds our city. It was winter and early morning, and someone had taken me out to a duck blind before it was light. These are things I still do, as a matter of fact. But when I was set out in the blind with my shotgun, I found that beside me on the wooden bench was one of my law partners, seated with his shotgun between his knees, and wearing strangely red canvas hunting clothes—something you’d never wear in a duck blind. And he had the puppy with him, the same one that was then in our back garden awaiting whatever its fate would be. And my partner was with a woman, who either was or looked very much like the actress Liv Ullmann. The man was Paul Thompson, a man I (outside my dream) have good reason to believe once had an affair with Sallie, an affair that almost caused us to split apart without our even ever discussing it, except that Paul, who was older than I am and big and rugged, suddenly died—actually in a duck blind, of a terrible heart attack. It is a thing that can happen in the excitement of shooting.

  In my dream Paul Thompson spoke to me and said, “How’s Sallie, Bobby?” I said, “Well, she’s fine, Paul, thanks,” because we were pretending he and Sallie didn’t have the affair I’d employed a private detective to authenticate— and almost did completely authenticate. The Liv Ullmann woman said nothing, just sat against the wooden sides of the blind seeming sad, with long straight blond hair. The little white-and-black puppy sat on the duckboard flooring and stared at me. “Life’s very fragile in the way we experience it, Bobby,” Paul Thompson, or his ghost, said to me. “Yes, it is,” I said. I assumed he was referring to what he’d been doing with Sallie. (There had been some suspicious photos, though to be honest, I don’t think Paul really cared about Sallie. Just did it because he could.) The puppy, meanwhile, kept staring at me. Then the Liv Ullmann woman herself smiled in an ironic way.

  “Speaking about the truth tends to annihilate truth, doesn’t it?” Paul Thompson said to me.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m certain you’re right.” And then for a sudden instant it seemed like it had been the puppy who’d spoken Paul’s words. I could see his little mouth moving after the words were already spoken. Then the dream faded and became a different dream, which involved the millennium fireworks display from New Year’s Eve, and didn’t stay in my mind like the Paul Thompson dream did, and does even to this day.

  I make no more of this dream than I make of Sallie’s dreams, though I’m sure Merle Mackey would have plenty to say about it.

  When I arrived back in the city the next afternoon, Sallie met me at the airport, driving her red Wagoneer. “I’ve got it in the car,” she said as we walked to the parking structure. I realized she meant the puppy. “I want to take it to the shelter before we go home. It’ll be easier.” She seemed as though she’d been agitated but wasn’t agitated now. She had dressed herself in some aqua walking shorts and a loose, pink blouse that showed her pretty shoulders.

  “Did anyone call,” I asked. She was walking faster than I was, since I was carrying my suitcase and a box of brief materials. I’d suffered a morning of tough legal work in a cold, unfamiliar city and was worn out and hot. I’d have liked a vodka martini instead of a trip to the animal shelter.

  “I called Kirsten and asked her if she knew anyone who’d take the poor little thing,” Sallie said. Kirsten is her sister, and lives in Andalusia, Alabama, where she owns a flower shop with her husband, who’s a lawyer for a big cotton consortium. I’m not fond of either of them, mostly because of their simpleminded politics, which includes support for the Confederate flag, prayer in the publ
ic schools and the abolition of affirmative action—all causes I have been outspoken about. Sallie, however, can sometimes forget she went to Mount Holyoke and Yale, and step back into being a pretty, chatty southern girl when she gets together with her sister and her cousins. “She said she probably did know someone,” Sallie went on, “so I said I’d arrange to have the puppy driven right to her doorstep. Today. This afternoon. But then she said it seemed like too much trouble. I told her it wouldn’t be any trouble for her at all, that I’d do it or arrange it to be done. Then she said she’d call me back, and didn’t. Which is typical of my whole family’s sense of responsibility.”

  “Maybe we should call her back?” I said as we reached her car. We had a phone in the Wagoneer. I wasn’t looking forward to visiting the SPCA.

  “She’s forgotten about it already,” Sallie said. “She’d just get wound up.”

  When I looked in through the back window of Sallie’s Jeep, the puppy’s little wire cage was sitting in the luggage space. I could see his white head, facing back, in the direction it had come from. What could it have been thinking?

  “The vet said it’s going to be a really big dog. Big feet tell you that.”

  Sallie was getting in the car. I put my suitcase in the back seat so as to not alarm the puppy. Twice it barked its desperate little high-pitched puppy bark. Possibly it knew me. Though I realized it would never have been an easy puppy to get attached to. My father had a neat habit of reversing propositions he was handed as a way of assessing them. If a subject seemed to have one obvious outcome, he’d imagine the reverse of it: if a business deal had an obvious beneficiary, he’d ask who benefited but didn’t seem to. Needless to say, these are valuable skills lawyers use. But I found myself thinking—except I didn’t say it to Sallie—that though we may have thought we were doing the puppy a favor by trying to find it a home, possibly we were really doing ourselves a favor by presenting ourselves to be the kind of supposedly decent people who do that sort of thing. I am, for instance, a person who stops to move turtles off of busy interstates, or picks up butterflies in shopping mall parking lots and puts them into the bushes to give them a fairer chance at survival. I know these are pointless acts of pointless generosity. Yet there isn’t a time when I do it that I don’t get back in the car thinking more kindly about myself. (Later I often work around to thinking of myself as a fraud, too.) But the alternative is to leave the butterfly where it lies expiring, or to let the big turtle meet annihilation on the way to the pond; and in doing these things let myself in for the indictment of cruelty or the sense of loss that would follow. Possibly, anyone would argue, these issues are too small to think about seriously, since whether you perform these acts or don’t perform them, you always forget about them in about five minutes.

  Except for weary conversation about my morning at Ruger, Todd, Jennings, and Sallie’s rerouting victory with the AIDS race, which was set for Saturday, we didn’t say much as we drove to the SPCA. Sallie had obviously researched the address, because she got off the Interstate at an exit I’d never used and that immediately brought us down onto a wide boulevard with old cars parked on the neutral ground, and paper trash cluttering the curbs down one long side of some brown-brick housing projects where black people were outside on their front stoops and wandering around the street in haphazard fashion. There were a few dingy-looking barbecue and gumbo cafés, and two tire-repair shops where work was taking place out in the street. A tiny black man standing on a peach crate was performing haircuts in a dinette chair set up on the sidewalk, his customer wrapped in newspaper. And some older men had stationed a card table on the grassy median and were playing in the sunlight. There were no white people anywhere. It was a part of town, in fact, where most white people would’ve been afraid to go. Yet it was not a bad section, and the Negroes who lived there no doubt looked on the world as something other than a hopeless place.

  Sallie took a wrong turn off the boulevard, and onto a run-down residential street of pastel shotgun houses where black youths in baggy trousers and big black sneakers were playing basketball without a goal. The boys watched us drive past but said nothing. “I’ve gotten us off wrong here,” she said in a distracted, hesitant voice. She is not comfortable around black people when she is the only white—which is a residue of her privileged Alabama upbringing where everything and everybody belonged to a proper place and needed to stay there.

  She slowed at the next corner and looked both ways down a similar small street of shotgun houses. More black people were out washing their cars or waiting at bus stops in the sun. I noticed this to be Creve Coeur Street, which was where the Times-Picayune said an unusual number of murders occurred each year. All that happened at night, of course, and involved black people killing other black people for drug money. It was now 4:45 in the afternoon and I felt perfectly safe.

  The puppy barked again in his cage, a soft, anticipatory bark, then Sallie drove us a block farther and immediately spotted the street she’d been looking for—Rousseau Street. The residential buildings stopped there and old, dilapidated two- and one-story industrial uses began: an off-shore pipe manufactory, a frozen seafood company, a shut-down recycling center where people had gone on leaving their garbage in plastic bags. There was also a small, windowless cube of a building that housed a medical clinic for visiting sailors off foreign ships. I recognized it because our firm had once represented the owners in a personal-injury suit, and I remembered grainy photos of the building and my thinking that I’d never need to see it up close.

  Near the end of this block was the SPCA, which occupied a long, glum red-brick warehouse-looking building with a small red sign by the street and a tiny gravel parking lot. One might’ve thought the proprietors didn’t want its presence too easily detected.

  The SPCA’s entrance was nothing but a single windowless metal door at one end of the building. There were no shrubberies, no disabled slots, no directional signs leading in, just this low, ominous flat-roofed building with long factory clerestories facing the lot and the seafood company. An older wooden shed was attached on the back. And a small sign I hadn’t seen because it was fastened too low on the building said: YOU MUST HAVE A LEASH. ALL ANIMALS MUST BE RESTRAINED. CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR ANIMAL. IF YOUR DOG BITES A STAFF MEMBER YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE. THANKS MUCH.

  “Why don’t you take him in in his cage,” Sallie said, nosing up to the building, becoming very efficient. “I’ll go in and start the paperwork. I already called them.” She didn’t look my way.

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  When we got out I was surprised again at how warm it was, and how close and dense the air felt. Summer seemed to have arrived during the day I was gone, which is not untypical of New Orleans. I smelled an entirely expectable animal gaminess, combined with a fish smell and something metallic that felt hot and slightly burning in my nose. And the instant I was out into the warm, motionless air I could hear barking from inside the building. I assumed the barking was triggered by the sound of a car arriving. Dogs trained themselves to the hopeful sound of motors.

  Across the street from the SPCA were other shotgun houses I hadn’t noticed. Elderly black people were sitting in metal lawn chairs on their little porches, observing me getting myself organized. It would be a difficult place to live, I thought, and quite a lot to get used to with the noise and the procession of animals coming and going.

  Sallie disappeared into the unfriendly little door, and I opened the back of the Wagoneer and hauled out the puppy in his cage. He stumbled to one side when I took a grip on the wire rungs, then barked several agitated, heartfelt barks and began clawing at the wires and my fingers, giving me a good scratch on the knuckles that almost caused me to drop the whole contraption. The cage, even with him in it, was still very light, though my face was so close I could smell his urine. “You be still in there,” I said.

  For some reason, and with the cage in my grasp, I looked around at the colored people across the street, silently watching me. I
had nothing in mind to say to them. They were sympathetic, I felt sure, to what was going on and thought it was better than cruelty. I had started to sweat because I was wearing my business suit. And I awkwardly waved a hand toward them, but of course no one responded.

  When I had maneuvered the cage close up to the metal door, I for some reason looked to the left and saw down the grimy alley between the SPCA and the sailors’ clinic, to where a round steel canister was attached to the SPCA building by some large corrugated aluminum pipes, all of it black and new-looking. This, I felt certain, was a device for disposing of animal remains, though I didn’t know how. Probably some incinerating invention that didn’t have an outlet valve or a stack—something very efficient. It was an extremely sinister thing to see and reminded me of what we all heard years ago about terrible vacuum chambers and gassed compartments for dispatching unwanted animals. Probably they weren’t even true stories. Now, of course, it’s just an injection. They go to sleep, feeling certain they’ll wake up.

  Inside the SPCA it was instantly cool, and Sallie had almost everything done. The barking I’d heard outside had not ceased, but the gamy animal smell was replaced by a loud disinfectant odor that was everywhere. The reception area was a cubicle with a couple of metal desks and fluorescent tubes in the high ceiling, and a calendar on the wall showing a golden retriever standing in a wheat field with a dead pheasant in its mouth. Two high-school-age girls manned the desks, and one was helping Sallie fill out her documents. These girls undoubtedly loved animals and worked after school and had aspirations to be vets. A sign on the wall behind the desks said PLACING PUPPIES IS OUR FIRST PRIORITY. This was here, I thought, to make people like me feel better about abandoning dogs. To make forgetting easier.

  Sallie was leaning over one of the desks filling out a thick green document, and looked around to see me just as an older stern-faced woman in a white lab coat and black rubber boots entered from a side door. Her small face and both her hands had a puffy but also a leathery texture that southern women’s skin often takes on—too much sun and alcohol, too many cigarettes. Her hair was dense and dull reddish-brown and heavy around her face, making her head seem smaller than it was. This woman, however, was extremely friendly and smiled easily, though I knew just from her features and what she was wearing that she was not a veterinarian.