Three Dogs in a Row Page 5

  It took a lot longer than usual to walk up to The Chocolate Ear. Rochester believed it was his duty to sniff out every detail of every other animal who had passed by, and he was strong and stubborn when I tried to drag him along. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun sitting high in a bright blue, cloudless sky, and though the air was chilly there was no breeze and it felt warm out in the sun.

  Every bush, every tree trunk, every fire hydrant needed to be investigated. He peed over and over again, making me wonder how much liquid he had stored up in his bladder. “Can Rochester come in?” I asked when we reached the café, sticking my head in the door.

  Gail, her grandmother Irene, and Edith were all sitting at a big round table, along with Gail’s high school friend Ginny, a stay-at-home mom and part-time real estate agent who also helped out at the café as needed. I remembered that I had meant to call Edith and tell her about Caroline, make sure that her financial troubles had been figured out. But I’d just forgotten.

  “Of course,” Gail said, jumping up. “But what are you doing with him? I have some pumpkin biscuits in the back just for him.”

  I told them about Caroline when Gail returned a moment later with a biscuit, and Rochester settled on the floor. Since the Courier-Times hadn’t identified Caroline the day before, they didn’t know what had happened. “I read that a woman was killed by the nature preserve,” Irene said. “But I had no idea it was Caroline. The poor, poor girl.” She touched her iron-gray hair, which was always shellacked into a big globe around her head.

  As we all fretted about Caroline’s terrible fate, Gail made me a café mocha with a couple of pumps of raspberry syrup, and brought me a slice of lemon cake to go with it. She wore a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a pink tank top and jeans. “You need something sweet,” she said. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” Ginny said, shaking her head. “It’s so tragic.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Last night, somebody broke into her townhouse. Rochester woke me up barking.”

  There was a collective gasp around the table, and I described the events of the previous evening. “You must be exhausted, dear,” Edith said, reaching over to pat my hand. Her fingers were long and pale, twisted from arthritis, and her hand was cool to the touch.

  “What a terrible thing,” Ginny said. “Do you think it was someone who knew Caroline? It just seems so random. Any of us could be shot any time.” She crossed her arms over her cream-colored sweater.

  “And I always thought Stewart’s Crossing was so safe,” Gail said. She and Ginny had grown up in Levittown, a big suburb on the other side of the railroad tracks from Stewart’s Crossing. Burglaries and even the occasional shooting were much more common over there.

  “No place is safe,” Irene said. “When it’s your time, it’s your time, and no doubt about it.”

  “I’m with Gail and Ginny,” I said. “Especially after last night. It’s spooky just to go outside after dark. If I didn’t have to walk Rochester, I’d stay in the house as soon as the sun went down.”

  “That’s what Caroline was doing, walking Rochester,” Ginny said.

  “Enough,” Irene said. “Ginny, you should ask Rick if he knows Caroline’s next-of-kin. Maybe you can get the listing on her townhouse.”

  “Grandma!” Gail said, in a scandalized tone.

  “The world goes on,” Irene said. “When you get to be my age you’ll realize that. It’s a terrible thing that poor girl is dead, but somebody’s got to sell her house, and it might as well be Ginny.”

  We talked about Caroline, but none of us had any insight into who might have killed her or why someone had trashed her house. “Stewart’s Crossing isn’t the same place it was,” Edith said, shaking her head. “Every week you read in the newspaper about a house broken into, a car stolen. Last week a boy I taught to play Chopin was stabbed at the junior high by a boy from another class.”

  “Rick told me that Caroline’s murder was the first since the shooting at The Drunken Hessian,” I said. “That didn’t make me feel any better.”

  That was another sad story. Johnny Menotto, a guy who’d been a few years ahead of us at Pennsbury High, had come back from the first Gulf War with a lot of problems. He freaked out at loud noises and sudden movements, and imagined persecution all around him. He’d lost his job and his marriage—just like me—only he’d ended up hanging out at The Drunken Hessian, a bar slash tourist trap in the center of town. A plaque outside said that an inn of some kind had been on that spot since the Revolutionary War, and the décor hadn’t much changed, except for the introduction of indoor plumbing. The sign depicted one of the Hessian soldiers whom Washington had surprised at Trenton on Christmas day, looking like he’d had quite a few too many.

  It was the kind of dive that looked innocent on the outside, sucking in the clueless tourists with quaint charm and delivering flat beer and overcooked burgers served in plastic baskets shaped like Stewart’s ferry boat. Johnny had gotten to be a pest, bugging the tourists for change and harassing them about Republican politics. The night bartender, a high school science teacher picking up extra cash because he and his wife had a baby on the way, had asked Johnny to leave a couple of times.

  One night Johnny returned an hour after leaving, with a sawed-off shotgun, which he used to blow the poor bartender away. The tragedy had rocked Stewart’s Crossing, and my father had relished the chance to tell me all the gory details.

  “It’s still a terrible world,” Edith said. “It makes me glad I never had children.”

  “I feel just the opposite,” Irene said placidly. “It’s a terrible world, so I’m glad I had children and grandchildren who can do their part to make it better.”

  I didn’t know how I felt. The door hadn’t closed yet on my fatherhood possibilities, though I suspected my ex-wife had been right when she said I was too self-centered for fatherhood. Look at how much just taking care of Rochester had changed my life—and that was only for a few days.

  The dog in question rolled over on the floor below me, resting his head on my foot. I chatted with the women for a while longer, and just before I left Gail gave me a half-dozen of the pumpkin biscuits in a plastic bag, all of them shaped like her signature ear. Then Rochester and I made our way back to River Bend—slowly, as usual.

  In the newspaper the next morning, there was a brief follow-up article, which identified Caroline and said that the police were still following leads in her murder. There was an obituary, too; she was being shipped to upstate New York, where her parents were buried and her great-aunt lived, but there was going to be a memorial service at a church near her Center City office in two weeks.

  All that day, when I tried to sit at the kitchen table to grade papers, Rochester draped himself over my feet. If I sat at the computer, he lay behind me and curled his legs around the chair so that I couldn’t move. Throughout the weekend, when I came home after being away—even if I’d just run to the grocery for a single item—it was as if I’d abandoned him and then come back just as he was about to lose all hope.

  Sometimes I felt like he was sucking up all the oxygen in the house. It was always all about him—feed him, walk him, pay attention to him. He was worse than Mary had ever been—at least she had her own career, her own clique of girlfriends who believed every mean thing she said about me and who sympathized with her in a way I couldn’t seem to. All Rochester had was me.

  On Sunday afternoon, after three days of calling at random times, I got hold of Rick Stemper again. “That dog has chewed up my cell phone, a pair of glasses, a stuffed bear, and a pair of socks,” I said. “Find some place for him before he chews me out of all my belongings.”

  “Sorry, nobody seems to know what she wanted to do with him, and nobody I talked to wants him,” he said. “You’ll just have to take him to the pound.”

  “Did you find out who killed her yet?”

  He sounded distracted, like he was
listening to another conversation in the background. “We’re still pursuing leads,” he said. The background noise disappeared, and Rick was there again. “Hey, would you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Caroline’s mailbox key is on her kitchen table. Could you pick up the mail for the next few days? Just until the great aunt can get her act together?”

  “Sure.”

  I lost him again, I could tell. “Great. Listen, I’m following another case right now, but I will let you know if anything new comes up.”

  I thanked him and hung up the phone. “I guess we’ll never know what happened to your mom,” I said to Rochester, who was lying at my feet. “But now, what do I do with you?”

  He looked up at me with his brown doggy eyes. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out, and it looked about as close to a smile as a dog can get. Maybe I’m reading into it, but it looked like he was asking if he could stay with me.

  I remembered conversations I’d had with the Wicked Witch of the Valley. We’d talked, off and on, about getting a dog, but she worried she’d get stuck doing all the work. “You’re just not a caretaker, Steve,” she’d said.

  “I can take care of you,” I said, leaning down to scratch behind Rochester’s ears. “Don’t you think so, boy?”

  In answer, he rolled over onto his back so I could rub his stomach. I got down on the floor next to him. “I know I’m not as self-centered as Mary thought. I can take care of a dog.” He squirmed under my touch, and his head lolled to the side, his long tongue rolling out. “I can take care of you. What do you say, boy? You want to stay with me?”

  Rochester rolled around to his feet and started to climb on me, licking my face. “I guess that’s a yes,” I said, laughing.

  6 – Romeo

  I’d forgotten how much snow fell in Eastern Pennsylvania during the winter, and it was disorienting to navigate familiar roads when they were covered in white. Landmarks disappeared, and cars without snow tires skidded on the ice. That weekend, the snowfall was so heavy that Eastern almost closed down, only deciding to open after Sunday was sunny.

  Driving to Eastern on Monday morning, River Road was still dangerous, and I narrowly saved myself from a skid on a patch of black ice. It was with great relief that I pulled into the newly-plowed parking lot, where a group of two dozen students, bundled in down vests and colorful knit caps, waved signs which read “Olive Us Love Olives” and “Bring Back the Olives.”

  The week before, the administration had announced that in a cost-cutting measure, olives would no longer be available on the salad bar in the dining hall. The saving to the college was estimated at $100,000 a year.

  I didn’t even eat olives when I was in college, and I marveled that these students were giving up sleep time or study time, cutting classes or jobs, to march around in the parking lot protesting about olives. As I got out of my car, a campus police patrol car pulled up and two cops got out, wielding polyethylene shields and metal batons, as if they were breaking up a demonstration in Watts or South Central rather than Leighville, PA. One of them spoke into a microphone, though the words were garbled and unintelligible.

  The group’s chant changed to “Down with Pigs,” and for a minute I thought it had morphed into some kind of anti-bacon demonstration. Then I realized somebody was channeling the SDS, circa 1969. Since that was even before my time, I hurried on toward Blair Hall, as the two campus cops began banging their batons against their shields, and I heard sirens approaching.

  I had been back at Eastern three months by then, but it still seemed like an alien world. I’d be walking along, talking to a student, and look up to realize I had no idea where I was. The bookstore had moved, the student union expanded beyond recognition. The concrete sidewalks were often icy, and the grassy shortcuts full of unsuspecting dips.

  I walked to my freshman comp class, which meets in a second-floor room in Blair Hall. Tall, gothic-arched windows along one side let in the light and give students the chance to look outside in case I’m boring them. Fluorescent lights hang on pendants around the room, and a rich wooden wainscoting runs around the perimeter of the room, a legacy of our long history of deep-pocket alumni. The chairs, though, are a relic of the seventies, with a slanted arm attached to one side just at the right angle to dump an unsuspecting student’s laptop into his lap.

  From outside the classroom, I could hear raised voices, though I couldn’t tell what the arguing was about, and as soon as I opened the door the voices stopped. Tension hung in the air, until Menno Zook raised his hand and said, “Are we allowed to bring animals to class?”

  Menno had a short beard, and often wore overalls and white t-shirts. Give him a straw hat and a horse and buggy, and he’d be at home in the Amish country.

  “He’s not an animal, he’s a dog,” Tasheba Lewis said. Since I wasn’t there to teach biology, I didn’t think it necessary to correct her.

  Tasheba is one of my sharper students, which is like saying there were worse dictators in history than Nero or Attila—weak praise, at best. She has skin the color of cinnamon and straight brown hair, and carries herself with an air of privilege. “This is Romeo,” she said, lifting him out of a Burberry traveling bag on the chair next to her.

  “One of the great lovers in literature,” I said. I decided not to address Menno’s question, but instead to shift our emphasis back to something close to English composition. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” I turned and wrote that phrase on the blackboard. “Notice that there’s no comma after the word thou,” I said, when I turned back to the class. Romeo the dog sat next to Tasheba, who wore a matching Burberry tennis visor, as if she was planning to head from English class to her next match. Like most of my students, she paid more attention to her attire and her social life than to her class work. “Anybody know why?”

  No one seemed to know why there was no comma. “Let me repeat it for you,” I said, and I did. “The key is in the word wherefore.” I put the chalk down and brushed the dust off my hands. “In Shakespeare’s time that word meant ‘why.’ So Juliet’s asking ‘Why are you Romeo?’ not ‘Yo, Romeo, where are you?’”

  The class laughed. Take a forty-something white-bread English professor, and drop in a word or two of urban slang. It’s a sure laugh-getter, and sometimes it wakes them up.

  “Can someone tell me the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet?”

  Open-ended questions like that are always iffy. Is anyone awake enough to consider it? Did any of them study Shakespeare at the expensive private schools that are Eastern’s biggest feeders? Did they recognize the undercurrents of violence that ran through Shakespeare’s works were the same ones that passed through our lives—parking lot protests, court cases, jail time and death?

  I looked around the room, which had filled up in the last few minutes. By then, I knew all the students by name, though the two slim girls with matching long dark hair who sat next to each other tripped me up. One was Dianne and one was Dionne, and I just marked them both present if at least one was there.

  The lovebirds in the back row were Billy Rubin, who wanted to be a doctor, and his girlfriend, Anna Rexick, who wanted to be a nurse, specializing in eating disorders. She was painfully skinny, as if she lived off bird seed and water.

  There were three Jeremys, two Melissas, two Jennifers, and two Jakes. Almost all of them looked like generic, interchangeable college students, distinguished only by piercings and hairstyles.

  Jeremy Eisenberg raised his hand. “Romeo loves Juliet but their families don’t get along so eventually they kill themselves,” he suggested. He had a shaggy mop of brown hair, shorn close to the scalp on both sides, a torn Butthole Surfers t-shirt, a studded dog collar around his neck and many earrings, as well as an eyebrow ring and a tongue stud.

  “Close enough,” I said. “So Romeo has gained this reputation as a great lover.” I walked over toward Tasheba, whom I always imagine was named after the Japanese electronics manufacturer. She’s the kind of
young woman who always has a brand name plastered across her body, whether it’s Juicy Couture, Rocawear, or whatever’s hottest at the moment. “Tell me, has Romeo been neutered?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Ah, irony! The great lover can’t consummate his love!” The class laughed. “But who can define irony for me?”

  Melissa Macaretti disapproves of any antics in the classroom. She’s a bulky young woman with mousy brown hair, wearing kilts and Fair Isle sweaters—the kind with the embroidered yoke that was popular back when I was a student—and she’s often frowning. “The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning,” she said, and I suspected she had some kind of electronic dictionary stuck away in her purse. But then, she always spoke that way.

  “Exactly. So Romeo’s name is ironic. He’s a lover who can’t love. Let’s think about the readings in our description unit. Where else have we seen irony?”

  There was a general restlessness, as students stared down at their desks, holding their bodies rigid, as if the slightest movement might cause me to call on them. At times like that I felt like my class was full of wild creatures, and at the slightest provocation they could turn on me. Joaquin and Wakeem, athletes who lurked in the back row, always wore T-shirts with aggressive sayings on them, things like “Fuck Authority,” and other phrases that were probably the titles of hip-hop songs. Though I was only forty-two, they made me feel as old and frail as a 90-year-old with a walker.

  We made it through the rest of the class, though I can’t say for sure what else we covered. Part of my brain was still focused on the student demonstration, and another part was obsessing about Caroline Kelly.

  Just as I was gathering my papers, Menno raised his hand again, and without waiting for me to call on him, said, “Professor, you never answered my question. Are we allowed to bring animals to class?”