“I don’t think they set the house afire to kill me. They didn’t really
care whether they killed me or not. If they cared, they would have
made a more direct effort to get me. They set the fire to cover up
Angela’s murder. That was the reason, nothing more.”
Sniff, sniff sniff-sniff-sniff. out with the remaining bad air of the
burning house, in with the revitalizing scent of squirrel, out with the
bad, in with the good.
“God, she was such a good person, so giving,” I said bitterly.
“She didn’t deserve to die like that, to die at all.”
Orson paused in his sniffing but only briefly. Human suffering.
Terrible. Terrible thing. Misery, death, despair. But nothing to be
done.
Nothing to be done about it. Just the way of the world, the nature of
human existence. Terrible. Come smell the squirrels with me, Master
Snow. You’ll feel better.
A lump rose in my throat, not poignant grief but something more
prosaic, so I hacked with tubercular violence and finally planted a
black oyster among the tree roots.
“If Sasha were here,” I said, “I wonder if right now I’d remind her so
much of James Dean?”
My face felt greasy and tender. I wiped at it with a hand that also
felt greasy.
Across the thin grass on the graves and across the polished surfaces of
the granite markers, the moonshadows of windtrembled leaves danced like
cemetery fairies.
Even in this peculiar light, I could see that the palm of the hand I
had put to my face was smeared with soot. “I must stink to high
heaven.”
Immediately, Orson lost interest in the squirrel spoor and came eagerly
to me. He sniffed vigorously at my shoes, along my legs, across my
chest, finally sticking his snout under my jacket and into my armpit.
Sometimes I suspect that Orson not only understands more than we expect
a dog to understand, but that he has a sense of humor and a talent for
sarcasm.
Forcibly withdrawing his snout from my armpit, holding his head in both
hands, I said, “You’re no rose yourself, pal. And what kind of guard
dog are You, anyway? Maybe they were already in the house with Angela
when I arrived, and she didn’t know it. But how come You didn’t bite
them in the ass when they left the place? If they escaped by the
kitchen door, they went right past You. Why didn’t I find a bunch of
bad guys rolling around on the backyard, clutching their butts and
howling in pain?”
Orson’s gaze held steady, his eyes deep. He was shocked by the
question, the implied accusation. Shocked. He was a peaceful dog.
A dog of peace, he was. A chaser of rubber balls, a licker of faces, a
philosopher and boon companion. Besides, Master Snow, the job was to
prevent villains from entering the house, not to prevent them from
leaving. Good riddance to villains. Who wants them around, anyway?
Villains and fleas. Good riddance.
As I sat nose-to-nose with Orson, staring into his eyes, a sense of the
uncanny came over me-or perhaps it was a transient madness-and for a
moment I imagined that I could read his true thoughts, which were
markedly different from the dialogue that I invented for him.
Different and unsettling.
I dropped my bracketing hands from his head, but he chose not to turn
away from me or to lower his gaze.
I was unable to lower mine.
To express a word of this to Bobby Halloway would have been to elicit a
recommendation of lobotomy: Nevertheless, I sensed that the dog feared
for me. Pitied me because I was struggling so hard not to admit the
true depth of my pain. Pitied me because I could not acknowledge how
profoundly the prospect of being alone scared me. More than anything,
however, he feared for me, as though he saw an oncoming juggernaut of
which I was oblivious: a great white blazing wheel, as big as a
mountain, that would grind me to dust and leave the dust burning in its
wake.
“What, when, where?” I wondered.
Orson’s stare was intense. Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of