disregard.
Gabe held the printout under his kitchen light and looked at it for a long time,
and Rook lay in the doorway in his sphinx position and watched him look at
it. It was a black dog. It was even, possibly, a black Lab. What it was not โ
and he turned the paper to the light, and then away from it โ was Rook. The
dog in the picture carried its tail higher than Rook carried his, and there was
something wrong in the set of the ears. Black Labs were the beige sedans of
the dog world; there were four others within six blocks, including a cheerful
criminal named Biscuit on the crescent who escaped his yard with the
regularity of a tide table. The picture proved a black dog had stood on the
path. It did not prove whose. Gabe understood, standing in his kitchen, that
he could not prove a negative โ and that this was, in fact, the design of the
thing, if it had a design. A fine small enough to pay and forget. An
accusation shaped so that answering it cost more than it cost to make.
He wrote back. One page. He identified the dog as not his, cited the tracker,
offered the data again, noted that his dog was leashed at all times in common
areas, and requested the original photograph with its date information. The
fine was waived, two weeks later, by a letter of three sentences that
apologized for nothing and explained the waiver as a courtesy extended in
light of his service. The original was never produced. He filed the whole
exchange in Amos's old desk, in a folder he'd labeled, in his medic's block
capitals, ASSOCIATION โ DOG, and thought of it the way Amos had
13
taught him to think of Oregon rain in October: as weather. You don't argue
with weather. You note it, you dress for it, you watch what it does to the
ground.
In September โ three weeks after the refusal letter โ came the barking
complaints. Two of them, relayed in a letter of Vivian's, unsigned at their
origin, which the letter acknowledged with the phrase residents who prefer
not to be identified, as though anonymity were a kind of fragility the
association was sheltering rather than a kind of ammunition it was firing.
Rook barked at the doorbell. Rook barked, once, at thunder, with
embarrassment, like a man clearing his throat in church. That was the
inventory. Grace Park, consulted over the fence, had snorted so hard she'd
had to take off her glasses. "Gabriel, that dog has barked eleven times in
three years and I have counted most of them as events."
And in late September, the citation: menacing posture. A resident โ
identified by initials only, in the association's new style โ reported having
felt unsafe passing his fence on the greenbelt path, where Rook had been
lying in the yard in the sun and had raised his head and watched the resident
pass. That was the citation. The dog had looked at somebody, from inside his
own yard, over a fence, with his head. Gabe answered it in one page that took
him forty minutes to write, because the first three drafts had contained
sentences he was prouder of than he was wise, and in the end the page he
sent said only that the dog had been in his own yard, that the dog had been
lying down, and that he regretted any resident's discomfort and would keep
the dog's yard time to the rear of the lot if the board thought it would help.
He sent it knowing it conceded nothing, which was the only kind of apology
he intended to make.
He kept the dog's yard time in the rear of the lot anyway. Not because the
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citation deserved it, but because the point, he had decided, was to be visibly,
boringly, recordably blameless โ to build, out of Tuesdays and trackers and
one-page letters, a wall nobody could later claim not to have seen. It was the
medic's instinct: when you cannot stop the bleeding, you document, you
witness, you write the times on the casualty's forehead so the next pair of
hands knows exactly what happened and when.
On the morning of Tuesday, October the fourteenth, the wall had a good day.
They all did, that day. That was the obscenity of it, later, when he went over
it the way you go over a route you drove before the ambush: how entirely
ordinary it had been, how full of the small change of a life going right.
The night before had been a working night โ the dream had come twice, the
second time at just past four, and Rook had done his job with the weary
patience of a night nurse, weight and chin and breath, and Gabe had surfaced
and steadied and slept again, so the morning, when it came, came almost
gentle. The walk was gold and cold. A storm was forecast for the evening,
the first real one of the season, and the street had the busy energy of people
battening down: Henry was on a ladder he had no business being on, clearing
the gutters of the blue house, with Grace at the bottom delivering
commentary of the highest order. "If you fall," she called up, as Gabe and
Rook passed, "I am not feeding the dog your hospital food. Gabriel. Tell this
man his wife is a tyrant."
"His wife," Gabe said, "is a tyrant with an excellent ladder policy."
Henry, from the gutter, with a fistful of fir needles: "The policy is, she holds
it. The policy is always, she holds it."