at night. In the low landscape lighting, snails were crossing the
walkway, antennae glistening, leaving silvery trails of slime, some
creeping from the right-hand bed of ice plant to the identical bed on
the left, others laboriously making their way in the opposite
direction, as if these humble mollusks shared humanity’s restlessness
and dissatisfaction with the terms of existence.
I weaved with the bike to avoid the snails, and although Orson sniffed
them in passing, he stepped over them.
From behind us rose the crunching of crushed shells, the squish of
jellied bodies tramped underfoot. Stevenson was stepping on not only
those snails directly in his path but on every hapless gastropod in
sight. Some were dispatched with a quick snap, but he stomped on
others, came down on them with such force that the slap of shoe sole
against concrete rang like a hammer strike.
I didn’t turn to look.
I was afraid of seeing the cruel glee that I remembered too well from
the faces of the young bullies who had tormented me throughout
childhood, before I’d been wise enough and big enough to fight back.
Although that expression was unnerving when a child wore it, the same
look-the beady eyes that seemed perfectly reptilian even without
elliptical pupils, the hate-reddened cheeks, the bloodless lips drawn
back in a sneer from spittle-shined teeth-would be immeasurably more
disturbing on the face of an adult, especially when the adult had a gun
in his hand and wore a badge.
Stevenson’s black-and-white was parked at a red curb thirty feet to the
left of the marina entrance, beyond the reach of the landscape lights,
in deep night shade under the spreading limbs of an enormous Indian
laurel.
I leaned my bike against the trunk of the tree, on which the fog hung
like Spanish moss. At last I turned warily to the chief as he opened
the back door on the passenger side of the patrol car.
Even in the murk, I recognized the expression on his face that I had
dreaded seeing: the hatred, the irrational but unassuageable anger that
makes some human beings more deadly than any other beast on the
planet.
Never before had Stevenson disclosed this malevolent aspect of
himself.
He hadn’t seemed capable of unkindness let alone senseless hatred. If
suddenly he had revealed that he wasn’t the real Lewis Stevenson but an
alien life-form mimicking the chief, I would have believed him.
Gesturing with the gun, Stevenson spoke to Orson: “Get in the car,
fella.”
“He’ll be all right out here , I said.
“Get in,” he urged the dog.
Orson peered suspiciously at the open car door and whined with
distrust.
“He’ll wait here,” I said. “He never runs off.”
“I want him in the car,” Stevenson said icily. “There’s a leash law in
this town, Snow. We never enforce it with You. We always turn our
heads, pretend not to see, because of . . . because a dog is exempted
if he belongs to a disabled person.”
I didn’t antagonize Stevenson by rejecting the term disabled.
Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I
was sure he had almost said before catching himself. because of who
your mother was.
“But this time,” he said, “I’m not going to sit here while the damn dog
trots around loose, crapping on the sidewalk, flaunting that he isn’t
on a leash.”
Although I could have noted the contradiction between the fact that the
dog of a disabled person was exempt from the leash law and the
assertion that Orson was flaunting his leashlessness, I remained
silent. I couldn’t win any argument with Stevenson while he was in
this hostile state.
“If he won’t get in the car when I tell him to,” Stevenson said, “You
make him get in.”
I hesitated, searching for a credible alternative to meek
cooperation.
Second by second, our situation seemed more perilous. I’d felt safer
than this when we had been in the blinding fog on the peninsula,
stalked by the troop.
“Get the goddamn dog in the goddamn car now!” Stevenson ordered, and
the venom in this command was so potent that he could have killed