*
Roy walked out on his father without answering. He grabbed the car keys from the kitchen table. He drove, and while he drove he tangled with the scan button on the car radio. “Don’t Do Me Like That.” “Don’t Bring Me Down.” “Love Is a Rose.” “Straight Tequila Night.” He liked all those songs, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to seek. There had to be something more—his itchy finger was sure. And there was. “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” The song made him forget that his much younger sister would be getting married next month. He drove, open, porous, and yellow, his tires floating above the asphalt. He drove, threading together seams and streets, all his ideas, until, quite suddenly, the night became rigid. In one moment, there was nothing—no music, no thoughts, just a pure electric shock of adrenaline. Something black and furry had darted out into the road, frozen in Roy’s headlights, and tumbled out of view. Squeals, brakes, and wrong-sounding mechanical thumpings followed. He had hit a dog. Roy had hit someone’s dog.
Pulling off onto the soft shoulder, he felt a certain resistance from the undercarriage. The vehicle and the animal had been joined in a terrible union. He sat without moving. Perhaps it wasn’t a dog. Perhaps it was some other creature, a beast unnamed and unknown, part woman, part deer. The thought gave him pause. He sat. Not long but long enough to know the thing was truly dead. There’d be no watching it limp away into the dark night, no gnashing teeth. He would not have to back the car up and over the creature. He would not have to kill it a second time.
Eventually Roy got out and the night stayed silent.
He circled the vehicle two, three times. There was nothing to be seen. Overhead, black branches cut their silhouettes on the navy sky. Roy crouched and there it was. Just a dog. Simple. Its body had been wedged behind a back wheel. Roy grabbed its tail and yanked the broken thing out from under. Something tore like fabric. The neck was soft and floppy like a harshly used work shirt. The dog was dead for certain. Roy hoisted the animal into his arms and set out for the nearest driveway. He could see it up ahead. An outdoor floodlight spilled onto the road in a narrow swath, most of the light getting trapped in the yard by a line of tall maples. The dog’s body, not yet cold, warmed Roy and kept his arms from shaking.
*
Roy rang the bell, but Susanne was vacuuming. He carried the dog around to the side door. Front doors are for holidays. The dog’s brown eye caught the light. It was no holiday. As Roy waited on the stoop, Susanne, with a vacuum hose in hand—her exhausted life—came into view. His knocking grew more desperate. He couldn’t very well leave the carcass on her doorstep. He’d be forced to carry the dog from house to house until he found someone either heartbroken or intrepid enough to claim it.
She started when she saw Roy. It wasn’t a busy street but the sort where too much wealth kept neighbors from dropping by unannounced.
Earlier, Susanne’s husband had detected a certain ticking in her. He’d packed their children into the car for a night of pizza and a double feature at the second-run movie theater, leaving her alone to explode, to splatter the house with a combination of things she’d ingested as a teenager—films and punk rock records that confirmed what she’d guessed back then: one dies alone.
Best to have her family out of the way. Best to have them hidden in a dark cinema when the desire surged to chop her hair roughly and live on cigarettes. These bursts of freedom, while infrequent, were dangerous. Their self-indulgence could tear holes in evenings, marriages, families.
She’d been lost in the roar of the vacuum—a device that had the power to put her under a spell so she could contemplate the nature of the universe, the purpose of love, the purpose of death, and a fantasy she sometimes had of being bound nude to a parking meter in the city.
It was in this trancelike state that she saw Roy. What was he holding? She shut off her vacuum by yanking the plug from the wall. She opened the door.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“I’m afraid I’ve killed someone’s dog.”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “That’s Curtains. He belongs to my children.”
“Curtains?”
“It’s an old story.” And then, looking at the animal again, “Oh, dear.” She reached out and took the dog’s body from Roy and, for one moment, like an uninspired actor in the uninspired film her husband and children were just then watching, she brushed the skin of Roy’s forearm. She held his eyes, trying to remember if they’d met before.
“Poor Curtains.”
They had never met.
“Oh,” Roy said. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” When nervous, he adopted an inflection that was not his own. His voice ratcheted up into a phony British accent, as if British accents were so appropriate, so authoritative that they could make any American dog be not dead. “I’m dreadfully sorry.” There it was. London, England, done very poorly.
Roy hoped that maybe she’d wanted the dog dead for some reason. Maybe she’d grown tired of feeding him or accidentally petting those hard body lumps that old dogs get.
“I’m sorry.” Roy tucked his chin in shame. “He came out of nowhere. I didn’t even have a chance to brake. I’m sorry. Let me give you some money for a new dog.” He reached for his wallet. He was broke. “What does a dog cost?” There was sixteen bucks in his wallet.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Susanne said. She carried the dog into the living room. “For a mutt.”
“Oh.” He fumbled and followed her. Two hundred and fifty seemed like robbery. “Can I write you a check?” He had two hundred and sixty-seven dollars in his bank account. If he wanted, he could go to an ATM tonight and withdraw it all, long before she could cash his check.
Susanne covered Curtains with an afghan that had been draped across the couch. She crouched in front of the dog, shielding him from Roy. What a thing for her dog to do—run out in front of a stranger’s car and open himself up. What desperation. Curtains should have come to her, Susanne thought foolishly. Don’t go to strangers, Curtains. There was blood on Roy’s jacket. Blood on her arm, in her hair. Curtains’s insides made pornographically public. Death really was mortifying. “A check is fine. Make it out to Susanne Martin.”
“Susanne Martin. Certainly.” He found a seat and began to write.
One surprisingly rigid paw stuck out from beneath the blanket. She knew the paw well, dipped in white fur, claws that alternated black, ivory, black, ivory. A piano on her dog’s foot. She felt the dog lose his heat. She felt his body go cold.