The dog was all over him, chuffing in a friendly way, licking his face affectionately, licking his hands when he raised them to cover his face.
‘Stop, damn it, stop, get off me.’
Scootie scrambled off Tommy’s lap, onto the floor -but seized the heel of his right shoe and began to worry at it, trying to gain possession of it.
Not wanting to kick at the mutt, afraid of hurting it, Tommy reached down, trying to get hold of its burly head.
The Rockport suddenly slipped off his foot.
‘Ah, shit.’
He heard Scootie hustling away through the darkness with the shoe.
Getting to his feet, Tommy said, ‘Lights!’ The room remained dark, and then he remembered the complete command. ‘Lights on!’
Scootie was gone.
From the study, adjacent the living room, came a single bark, and light appeared beyond the open door.
‘They’re both crazy,’ Tommy muttered as he went around the coffee table and picked up the rubber bone from beside the second armchair.
Scootie appeared in the study doorway, without the shoe. When he saw that he’d been seen, he retreated.
Limping across the living room to the study, Tommy said, ‘Maybe the dog wasn’t always crazy. Maybe she made it crazy, the same way she’ll make me crazy sooner or later.’
When he entered the study, he found the dog standing on the bleached-cherry desk. The mutt looked like an absurdly oversized decorative accessory.
‘Where’s my shoe?’
Scootie cocked his head as if to say, What shoe? Holding up the toy hotdog, Tommy said, ‘I’ll take this outside and throw it in the harbour.’
With his soulful eyes focused intently on the toy, Scootie whined.
‘It’s late, I’m tired, my Corvette blew up, some damn thing is after me, so I’m in no mood for games.’
Scootie merely whined again.
Tommy circled the desk, searching for his shoe.
Atop the desk, Scootie turned, following him with interest.
‘If I find it without your help,’ Tommy warned, ‘then I won’t give the hotdog back.’
‘Find what?’ Del asked from the doorway.
She had changed into blue jeans and a cranberry-red turtle-neck sweater, and she was holding two big guns.
‘What the hell are those?’ Tommy asked.
Hefting the weapon in her right hand, she said, ‘This is a short-barrelled, pump-action, pistol-grip, 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun. Excellent home-defence weapon.’ She raised the gun in her left hand. ‘This beauty is a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum pistol, Israeli-made. It’s a real door-buster. A couple of rounds from this baby will stop a charging bull.’
‘You run into a lot of charging bulls?’
‘Or the equivalent.’
‘No, seriously, why do you keep heavy artillery like that?’
‘I told you before – I lead an eventful life.’
He remembered how easily she had dismissed the damage to her van earlier in the evening: It comes with the territory.
And when he had worried about the rain ruining the upholstery, she had shrugged and said, There’s frequently damage… I’ve learned to roll with it.
Tommy sensed a satori, a sudden profound insight, looming like a tidal wave, and he waited breathlessly for it to wash over him. This woman was not what she appeared to be. He had thought of her as a waitress, but had discovered she was an artist. Then he had thought of her as a struggling artist who worked as a waitress to pay the rent, but she lived in a multimillion-dollar house. Her eccentricities and her habit of peppering her conversation with cryptic babble and non sequiturs had convinced him that she had a few screws loose in the cranium, but now he suspected that the worst mistake he could make with her would be to write her off as a flake. There were depths to her that he was only beginning to perceive -and swimming in those depths were some strange fish
that would surprise him more than anything that he had seen to date.
He recalled another fragment of their conversation, and it seemed to have new import: Reality is perception. Perceptions change. Reality is fluid. So if by ‘reality’ you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events, then there’s no such thing. I’ll explain someday when we have more time.