He got the one he thought of as the Baby Vet: how old was she, twelve? And those frosted nails, for God’s sake; did she come to work expecting to type and file? But Jasper had no choice. He watched her listen to Pluto’s heart, her brown ponytail twining around the cord of her stethoscope. She frowned. “Sounds like it’s beating behind a pillow. He’s what”—she glanced at the chart—“eleven? That’s pretty old for a working husky, a dog this big.” She stroked Pluto’s thick fur and crooned, “Handsome guy, you are. Handsome, handsome guy. Sweet fella.” When she scratched the magic zone behind his ears, he registered no pleasure. Miserable, that’s all he was.
X-rays, as Jasper had feared. He sat in one of the hard plastic chairs, desperate for distraction, though fat chance he’d pick up magazines called Cat Fancy and Bird Talk—or pamphlets urging him to brush his dog’s teeth, buy something called the “gentle leader” (Obama springs to mind), consider the wisdom of pet insurance. (Ha. Deductible, at least, the bills for a working dog’s health.)
When Baby Vet called him into the room with the machine, she stood in front of a computer screen showing the image of Pluto’s organs and bones. The tense set to her Bazooka-pink lips telecast the verdict. “Mr. Noonan, I am so sorry. Pluto’s heart is encased in fluid. There’s a massive growth in his thoracic cavity, and whether or not it’s benign, I’m afraid …” She stood in front of the screen, arms crossed. Did she think him too dim to look at the evidence himself?
She read his expression. “Do you want to look?”
“I most certainly do.”
She turned to the computer and, with one of her pearly nails, tapped at the alien shape, a cloud of smoke confounding the clean arc of Pluto’s rib cage. No mistaking the abnormality, its fatal placement.
“There’s a cardiologist up in Burlington,” she said. “I could shoot these over to him. But honestly, Mr. Noonan?” She looked genuinely mournful, as if she knew what a hard worker, what a profoundly good dog, this animal was; as if she had the faintest notion what Jasper would be losing.
She told him Pluto would die on his own in the next day or two. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen; he would suffocate. “I can be blunt with you, I’m guessing,” she said. “Euthanasia is what I’d recommend.”
“Ain’t no youth to it,” he muttered. “Oughta call it decrepitasia. Endatheroadasia.”
Her anxious smile tipped toward a smirk. You could bet she had a boyfriend, this twiglet of a girl: likely another vet, a muscular type who doctored boutique dairy cows or pleasure horses, hobby livestock of the New Vermont. Once they had babies, she’d devote herself to them. The manicure told you as much.
“Do you want to be alone with Pluto?” she asked. “You can take your time. All the time you need to say good-bye.”
As if he’d never been through this before, the holding of a sick or maimed dog, too big for a lap, down on the cold steel table. The one-two punch of the drugs. The brief spasms, the palsied letting go of every ligament and muscle. Followed by the absurd request about cremation, ashes to take home in a carton or urn like some morbid souvenir. Jasper mourned his dogs when they died, he damn well did, but put them on the mantel or bury them in a childlike cemetery plot? What sort of treacly pantomime was that?
“Prolong his pain?” Jasper shook his head. “Fetch the drugs.” He resisted calling her honey. Loraina had set him straight on that. (“I can call you honey—or buster or boss—but not vice versa, hon,” she had informed him the day she started work at the shop.)
Like his teammates, Pluto was a kennel dog, but this did not mean that a great deal of love talk and physical affection hadn’t passed between Jasper and Pluto, all the way back to puppyhood: training, working, pulling cart or sled up and down the mountain trails, over logging roads, through meadows feathered with Queen Anne’s lace one season, pillowed in snow the next. Pluto’s death meant more than sorrow, however; more than reminders of Jasper’s own less-than-reliable heart. It meant, to begin with, the cancellation of that bachelor party over Thanksgiving. Jasper needed two full teams, with two solid leaders, for a gig like that. He’d have to return the deposit, tell Jim he’d have one less job. Could he offer those rich boys an alternative? A midnight ski party? Unlikely. Unwise. The boys would want to be drunk as bees on thistle. That was the nature of these rituals. Some things change too fast to keep up with, others not a whit. Knuckleheaded customs tend to stay the same.
Third, and this surprise was of a different order, the wild card: Kit had sent him an e-mail. Jasper found it when he returned from putting an end to Pluto, after he greeted the other dogs in the kennel, promised them a run before dark, told them that no, Pluto hadn’t returned from town, wouldn’t be back. “He’s gone, crew.” Jasper would fry up a couple of steaks, spread the drippings on their kibble. Steak sandwiches for a week: to hell with doctor’s orders.
Now, Jasper realized, he’d have to make the decision he’d been putting off: whether to roll up his sleeves for a new batch of pups or let the veterans dwindle into retirement—something Jasper himself should consider, according to Dr. Forster.
But Kit. Kit was asking to visit—alone, no wife, no kids. Just “taking a break.” (Who was that boy fooling? He had to be getting the boot.) The professor professed he’d be happy to help Jasper around the house, make himself useful. He felt guilty they weren’t in better touch, wanted to amend that.
Kit belonged, in Jasper’s life, to what he wryly—not bitterly; never bitterly!—called the Daphne Decade. Of course it wasn’t the boy’s fault that his mother had fled, decamped, traded Jasper in for the younger model—leaving Jasper with the awkward dilemma of a mostly (but not entirely) grown child whom he had actually adopted, had partly (well, half attentively) raised through the bumpy years, the ones you dream will be easy when you’re up all night with bawling babies, assuring yourself, This is the hard part, it’s all downhill from here. Downhill via slalom and a few rocky drop-offs that first steal your breath, then slam you down hard. Avoid an avalanche, you’re lucky.
Kit still carries Jasper’s name, whatever that’s worth. But the boy’s mother did a job on Jasper. “A snow job and an ax job, neatly rolled into one,” declared Rayburn, Jasper’s best friend. Poor Kit was caught in the middle, and with the intuition of a Sensitive Guy (this was how Jasper thought of young Kit, not a scrap of disrespect intended), he clearly understood the damage his mother had wrought. Jasper remembers hearing about Daphne’s pregnancy with his replacement, barely a blink after hearing about the marriage. Had to get the withering news from poor Kit, who was visiting Jasper for a week at the start of his first college summer, en route from Wisconsin to a job at a museum in Boston. Christ: the look on that boy’s face as he explained how he’d argued with himself for the whole drive east whether Jasper needed to know. Of course he needed to know, Jasper told him; even thanked the boy. They left it there, end of pathetic story. (Or the end of it as shared by them.)
Through the rest of his time at college, Kit came back to visit Jasper for a week or so each summer, till he went off to graduate school in California. Then he wrote a postcard every so often, cards with pictures of Indian masks, beaded relics, totem poles, these things he claimed to be “studying.” One day, Jasper opened a thick blue envelope, his name in a handwriting delicate and foreign, and pulled out a wedding invitation. Along with the card linking the name of the lucky, hopeful young woman with his, Kit had enclosed a note. He couldn’t wait to introduce Jasper to Sandra, but Oregon was clearly a long, expensive haul from Vermont, so Kit would understand perfectly if Jasper chose to decline. And it would be a small wedding, the boy just happened to mention.…
Small. Code for awkward up the wazoo and beyond. How infuriating to find that Daphne could wound him all over again, even from a distance of years and miles, from across the border between their sister states. (In some ways, she’d never fully traversed that border, had she?)
So Jasper met Sandra a year later, when she and Kit were driving to Maine for a
summer vacation. A pillar of a woman, handsome as a Greek statue, meet-your-eyes-every-minute direct in her manner. The sort who might wrestle your arm to the table, then help you kindly into the sling.
He answered Kit’s e-mail right away, not wanting to dither or brood. Sure thing. Come anytime. Do expect to work however. I’ll take you up on that offer.
The computer made its pneumatic Ricochet Rabbit noise: SENT!
He called the best man from the rich boy’s wedding party, left a message with the numbers for two other dogsledding outfits, promised the refund on the deposit. He put off the call to Jim. He’d have to say he was sorry to withdraw the few hours of work that gig had meant (never mind the kind of tip those trust-fund boys were taught to leave): no chump change to Jim, a guy with three little kids and no prospects of a regular job. Last week he confided to Jasper that he was thinking of enlisting. God help these young people over at that jackassed conundrum of a war. Though maybe his son Kyle should have joined up years ago; maybe he’d have been shaken straight, scared clean once and for all. Or maybe not, maybe the reverse. You read about all the suicides of the boys returning home. Such a befuddling mess. On the way to the clinic with Pluto, Jasper had passed two young bucks in desert camo smoking outside a narrow saloon, the kind without windows, wedged between two sad-sack storefronts that might or might not have tenants. They looked unsteady, rootless, antsy for a brawl. Well, who was Jasper to judge from a glance—judge at all? Kyle was twice the age of those fellows, wasn’t he? And maybe their futures were brighter than his.
So now Jasper stands between the rupture to his house and the toppled tree, contemplating both. Here’s a mess that can be handled, has a tidy end in sight. For starters, hire Jim to cut up the tree. Jasper knows enough not to handle a chain saw at his age. Okay then, two problems solved as one. The call to Jim will be a good-news-with-the-bad.
But the repair of the house. Well, he thinks, let’s hope that boy Kit (though he isn’t in earshot of boyhood anymore, is he?) means what he says about pitching in. Despite all his soft bookish years in the Jersey suburbs, maybe he still knows how to handle a hammer and saw. As a teenager, he wasn’t half bad.
Jasper looks at the sky, blue as blue can ever be. “You up yonder there. How about a fourth surprise? Snow the first week of November, that too much to ask? Just gimme ten inches.”
Quoth the actress to the bishop, Rayburn would have quipped.
Christ does he ever miss Rayburn.
As Kit stands in the kitchen gushing on about how good it feels to be there, how Jasper hasn’t changed a bit, how he’s glad to see the dogs are still in the picture—and wow, so many!—Jasper tries to unite the jittery middle-aged man before him with his memories of the boy, even the younger man. Last time they faced each other, Kit was new to fatherhood, taking a detour en route to Christmas with his mother.
His hair is still Daphne’s, still blond and curly though thinner, fogged with gray. He wears brittle wire-frame specs that do little to hide the fatigue laying claim to his eyes. But he’s still fairly slim, maybe still in shape despite the scholar’s life. (Probably frequents some gym in a strip mall.) Jasper notes the barely scuffed work boots, the good intentions (and lack of use) they show.
“Hungry?”
“Sure.” Kit offers eagerly, “I’m up for cooking.”
“No need. Chicken’s in the oven.”
“Chicken’s great.”
“Chicken and potatoes. Nothing out of the ordinary here. You remember.”
“I always liked your meals.”
“Short on green, that’s why.” Jasper puts away the few dishes in the rack by the sink. He doesn’t bother with the dishwasher anymore, except when Rory comes with his kids in tow. In other words, once in a polka-dot moon.
“Take either bedroom. Big one’s warmer, but maybe you want your old lair up top. Sheets in the bathroom closet.”
“I know where everything is.” Kit laughs. “Well, I used to.”
“Unpack, have a shower. Water still takes its own blessed time getting hot. Dinner in half an hour, that good?”
“That’s perfect.” Kit lingers, his eyes moist behind the glint of his lenses, his hands seemingly trapped in the pockets of his jeans (urban issue, same as the boots). They hadn’t hugged when Kit arrived; is he waiting for a gesture like that?
Jasper moves toward his former stepson and puts a hand on one of his shoulders. “Christopher, I’m glad to see you. Glad to have you here. I am. And I’ll make good use of you, too. No idle warning.”
“Bring it on.” Kit looks grateful, anxious to please.
They smile stiffly at each other for a moment, then Kit pulls a phone from his pocket. “Just let everybody know I arrived.”
Jasper points at the phone on the wall. “Best resort to prehistoric connections. Reception here’s spotty at best. Outdoors if you’re lucky. Give ’em my number as the way to reach you.”
“Later’s fine.” Kit pulls his suitcase toward the stairs. Hard to tell, though it’s fairly small, how long a “visit” the boy has in mind. Does it matter? Jasper may take pride in self-sufficiency, but he likes company, too. This arrangement will be better, far less difficult, than Kyle’s random drop-ins. As if to grasp for an antidote, he glances at the latest picture of Rory’s little clan, magnetized to the door of the fridge. Rory’s golden wife, two golden girls, a boy like the proverbial cherry on the sundae, spoiled sweet by all concerned.
At least one child turned out happy, one out of two.
And Kit, does he count as maybe half a child to Jasper? And is he happy—maybe half happy? Jasper has a hunch he’ll be finding out the answer to that one.
The upstairs shower goes on, the pipes thudding briefly in protest. Everything in the house is deferring to gravity in brand-new, unsettling ways. Awakened at dawn that morning, his room glowing a lurid blue as sunlight hit the tarp, Jasper noticed that one of the beams above him was starting to bow, ever so slightly. Too much heavy snow on the roof this winter and it will crack. But then again, too much snow—business thrives on that. Rory tells Jasper he’s too old to keep up a house like this. Had the balls to suggest that Jasper move into one of those condos near the slopes, the units that look like ice-cube trays.
When Kit comes down, yet again he stands uncertainly beside the table, now set for two.
“See I forgot something,” says Jasper. “You’re hoping for a beer or an honest-to-God drink. I been warned off that habit by my doctors. And then I’m afraid there’s Kyle. Here’s a story you don’t know, and I wish I didn’t have to tell you. I’ll give it to you in a thimble—or should I say a shot glass. Kyle’s had what they call substance issues. Shows up here, time to time, no warning, so I don’t run the risk of temptation any longer. He’s been on the wagon a good few months—last report, at least—and once again I got my fingers crossed. But pick up a case or a bottle tomorrow, go right ahead. Don’t mean to be inhospitable. ’Specially if I’m putting you to work.”
“No!” says Kit. “I’m fine with coffee. Water. I mean, I’m sorry about Kyle. I had no idea. The last I knew, he was going back to finish college.”
Jasper laughs. “That was a good dog or three ago. And he did, you know? He did finish. Even had a good job for a stretch. Real estate. Which is a no-brainer business in these parts. Or was until recently.”
Kit looks miserable, poster child for foot-in-mouth.
“Sit,” Jasper says. “I’ll wait on you tonight. Tomorrow, your turn. Freezer’s full of meat and make-believe ice cream. I am pathetically dependent on soybeans masquerading as pleasures I once took for granted.”
Kit takes his place. “The chicken smells amazing.”
“I’d be a dunderhead not to have that one down cold. How many chickens’ve I roasted by now?”
Roast chicken, baked potatoes with pretend butter, forget gravy (for which Jasper has found no decent consolation). Quarter heads of iceberg lettuce. Fat-free dressing with Paul Newman’s mug on the label, i
ts texture disturbingly akin to mucus.
“Tell me about Rory,” says Kit. “Where’s Rory these days?”
Jasper tells the easy story about his older son. The only hard part is that he chose to stay out west after meeting Kim at that sports-gear company in Boulder. In a previous era, he’d be the son to take over his father’s business. In the current era, he has the once-you’ve-skied-out-west-no-turning-back excuse not to do so. (Not like Kim has family there; she’s from Minnesota.) Easy to see, when Rory brings the family out, that Kim and the oldest girl are mildly bored with even the double-diamond runs on the mountains hereabouts. Rather than condescend to these lesser slopes, they take to cross-country, tolerating its tamer pleasures. “Sort of like,” he tells Kit, “if you can’t have the very best steak, you’ll take the meat loaf. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, I try to figure out what I might’ve done different. As if it’s personal, his making a life so far away.”
“I always thought you were a great dad,” says Kit.
“I was around the place some. That’s nine-tenths of it, I think. Being present when needed.” He sighs. “It’s how the planet spins these days. Families splinter apart and spread. Bounce around like beads of mercury. Probably good for the master gene pool, in the scheme of things. Hybrid vigor.”
Kit asks about the business. Jasper tells him about moving the shop from the village to the slope, his bargain with the particular devil who came north from Atlanta to buy up a mountain or two. “They’re always getting us back for that war. One day I expect to find a Confederate flag flying from the lodge.”
Kit nods and laughs. “Oh, I had a colleague like that from Charleston. He hummed while grading papers. ‘Swanee River,’ I am not kidding.”
Jasper finds himself gratified to describe to a sympathetic outsider the ups and downs of recent winters, the influx of yoga-minded folks who show up in slinky outfits to commune with the “spirit of place” or restore their chakras.
“First time I heard that word, I took it to be the national currency of Tibet,” says Jasper. “Frankly, I don’t lead too many hiking trips these days. Today’s small talk is a foreign language to me. Hired some Bennington grads who riff that woowoo jazz like Miles Davis. I still do the sledding runs, though. The day I stop working the dogs is a sorry day indeed.” He thinks briefly, mournfully, of Pluto. The other dogs clearly miss him. Against common sense, Jasper could swear they regard him with a suspicious, quizzical look every time he goes out to the kennel now. Where’d you hide our leader?