Chapter 12
With the same speed that Russell jerked awake from a fitful, nightmare-strewn sleep, he rolled over onto his back and stared up at the tilted ceiling. He stayed that way for close to an hour, watching dust motes flurry through a shaft of mellow morning sunlight while trying his hardest to erase the horrors that, against his wishes, had seared his memory in the night. Except for the fan on the floor, the house was hollowly silent. For some reason, he thought of hotel rooms then wished he hadn’t.
He used the hallway phone to call in sick to work, having no qualms whatsoever with leaving Busby on his own for the day. Customers were rare, and if one were to come in or call, it wasn’t as if the old man was completely daft. He’d figure something out.
Feeling queasy, Russell lumbered downstairs and made his way to the piano room. Next to the leg of the Baldwin grand, in a beam of sunlight, the Dane sat rigidly, lordly. Russell startled at the sight of the big, yellow dog, then quickly recovered by grinning and asking:
"Hey, boy. Where is everybody?"
Apollo turned his head, then slid down to his belly, sphinx-like. Deep in his throat, he whined sadly.
Russell approached and rubbed the top of his friend’s head. "What’s a matter, boy?"
Apollo sniffed Russell’s hand, then licked it with his broad tongue. "Stop!" Russell said, stepping back. "I know—Mom and Dad are at work, and you’re lonely. Is that it?"
Apollo neither barked nor whined.
"Did you think I was at work, too?"
Extending his front legs, Apollo tucked his chin between his knees and raised his butt high into the air.
"Oh Apollo…" Russell said in reaction to the dog’s servility. Then, chiding the Dane—reluctantly, and only because he had to: "Stop bowing at me like that. You know it’s stupid. I said stop it!"
Apollo rose and moved to the ebony bench, unsure, Russell thought, of what he was supposed to do once he arrived there.
"Do you always come in here when I’m gone—when you think I’m gone?"
Russell knew that he did, although he’d never be able to prove it. He just knew, the same way he instinctively knew how to finish a song if the last page was missing. Now he knew that when nobody was home (or when Apollo thought nobody was home), the Dane parked his tall frame next to the piano and waited there until somebody returned. And when a car pulled up the driveway, he would run to the door to greet whoever it happened to be. The greeting part Russell was already familiar with, but he had always assumed Apollo either slept or wandered around the house while he and his parents were away. This new discovery opened a cold pocket in his bowels, and he thought he knew why.
Standing patiently by the piano bench, Apollo waited for a command that never came. The Dane stared at Russell; Russell stared back. Apollo cocked his head; Russell did the same. When Russell opened his mouth then closed it in a failed attempt at giving an order, Apollo’s ears perked to receive the instruction. Since Russell never spoke, they went on staring at each other, each trying to figure out the other’s motives. Eventually it turned into a staring contest. The pure ridiculousness of it was not lost on Russell. But he perpetuated it anyway by never looking away, by always gazing into those dark, canine eyes, with those burnished, indiscernible pupils bleeding into muddy, too-large irises.
The entire time Russell’s eyes were locked with Apollo’s, one thought permeated his mind: What am I doing? Am I really trying to stare down my dog?
And that thought, coupled with his blurring vision, finally compelled Russell to look away. Defeated, he sat on the piano bench and said, "You win, boy. Are you happy?"
Apollo rested his chin on the corner of the bench. His breath tickled the hairs on Russell’s thigh, but Russell didn’t tell him that. He didn’t want to hurt the Dane’s feelings any more today.
"What do you want to hear, Apollo-my-boy?" Russell said convivially, allowing the frustration of losing a staring contest with a dog escape with the air used to ask the question. (Was it even a contest to begin with?) He lifted the fallboard and slid it back, exposing the black and white teeth that had provided him with so many hours of bliss over the years. "How about Fur Elise? I know, I know—it’s a cliché. Don’t worry, I’ll jazz it up for you."
He stroked Apollo’s long muzzle, then cracked his knuckles and placed his fingers on the keys.
Soon he was off in another universe, a parallel earth comprised of sound instead of matter—a world where tonal building blocks stacked and inchoate images flashed like phosphorescent algae churned by tumbling waves. Anytime he attempted to see what was going on around him, to hold on to a specific image and expound on it, flesh it out, it would fade away like the dimming of a firefly, only to be replaced by the sparking of a new one that would eventually, tragically, suffer the same fate.
Allowing the music to sweep over him, he took in the flashbulb bursts of light that accompanied his deepest of reveries, not caring one bit whether he escaped the world he had created and returned to the real one he hadn’t. Then he dove further in, as if into a swimming pool of Jell-O, and sank to the bottom. For hours he lingered there, baring the weight of the fluid matrix universe on his shoulders. It was comfortable, that weight: viscous and amniotic. When he wondered how much further down he could go, the bottom of the pool melted away and he began to slowly sink.
"No!" he shouted, warm saline cascading into his mouth, muffling his cries, turning them into garbled whale sounds.
Looking up, he saw the rectangle of light closing shut. The four walls loomed over him like magnificent slate cliffs. He screamed again and sank deeper into the aquamarine abyss. He clawed and kicked for purchase of a crag of rock, of anything, but the pull was too strong, the walls too smooth. His legs became stone pillars while, at the same time, something grabbed hold of his ankles and yanked him down faster. He thought he heard the slightest tincture of laughter as the jazzy piano music dried up and was supplanted by deep, echoing heartbeats. The last objects he saw before the green light faded to an eerie mauve were his long, elegant fingers hammering away at absolutely nothing.
Russell awoke with a choked scream and looked down at his fingers blurring across the keyboard. They were all hitting all the right notes, but the ones on his left hand were lagging behind those on his right. He stopped playing.
"What’s your problem?" he asked the offending hand, rotating it to check both sides. "Why are you dragging?"
Lowering his hand back onto the keyboard, he noticed the shaft of light on the cream-colored carpet. Dread seeped like magma into his marrow. When he’d sat down, the midmorning light had skirted the edge of the angled piano lid, but that must have been…
Three, maybe four hours ago.
This wasn’t Russell’s first occurrence of losing all sense of temporal awareness while creating music, but this time around had been different. Something strange had happened after slipping into what his mother called a "Rusty coma." It had been bad. Bad enough to cause him to yelp like a scared little
[Dog]
girl. And what about his left hand? Why had he spoken to it like it was
[Some kind of traitor]
a person? Russell didn’t even know where to start with that one. Maybe it was the stress of the past four days. Or maybe it was overspill from a lifetime full of non-combativeness and reality denial.
No. I’ve always accepted what was real, whether I’ve wanted to or not.
But that was a lie. Russell always skirted reality when it started to suck, when homework assignments began piling up and people started coming after him in droves in the spring when the school talent show sign-up sheet went up in the cafeteria. Did they all not want a piece of little ol’ musical prodigy Rusty? And when they wouldn’t take no for an answer (and he usually did say no), and they began calling him at home, did he not blow them off, albeit politely so, while replaying his favorite melodies in his head? He was so goddamn popular at school, yet he rarely stepped outdoors during the weekends, because as he liked to tel
l his admirers on Monday morning: "I was working on a song." And they always fell for that crap, too, because they all bought the illusion of RUSSELL WHITFORD, MUSICAL GENIUS. He could be dark and moody, or he could be fanciful and flighty. He was afforded that prerogative. After all, he was "That guy who knows all the Zeppelin solos" and "That kid who can play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ on piano." He was a musician, and that title came with certain perks—the chief one being the right to stay home on Saturday nights and pound on a piano without running the risk of being called a loser. "He’s only perfecting his craft," he imagined people saying about his absence from parties he was expected to attend. "He’s not hiding from us. He’s not isolating himself from a world that’s becoming more and more confusing and disappointing with every passing second."
"Ahhh, shit," Russell said aloud to the room.
Once again, Russell found himself alone, this time in a room that was undecorated save a pair of gilded-framed Renoir prints on two of the crown-molded walls and, of course, the Baldwin grand plopped dead center. (Apollo had scuttled off to a less noisy part of the house during the four-hour piano recital.) Looking around, Russell realized—and not for the first time— how truly isolated he was. Funny, he mused, how he could wish for the company of others when alone, but when he was actually around people, he tended to despise their presence. This wasn’t always the case, though. Usually, he was content with whomever he happened to be with, if he was with anybody at all. But this wasn’t one of those times. At that moment, he yearned for human contact, contact that Apollo (wherever he may be) couldn’t provide.
So, not knowing what else to do, Russell got up and went to the kitchen, rolling his neck and popping his vertebrate along the way. The digital clock on the microwave read 12:05. Russell sighed. He felt like a bum: it was past noon and he was still in his boxers.
"Son of a cicada," he mumbled.
Far away, Apollo’s tags clinked.
He went upstairs and took a shower. Thirty minutes later he came back down, his hair soaking the back of his Black Sabbath shirt, and made a beeline for the kitchen. His conscience was quieter, but his stomach was thundering. He shouldn’t have been surprised: for the second time in four days, he had forgotten to eat breakfast.
Just as he was beginning to get somewhere with a sealed package of salami, the doorbell rang. Groaning, he threw the salami down and trudged through the hall to the front door. When he opened it, Michelle greeted him on the porch with a wry grin. Then, lifting to her tiptoes, she leaned forward and raised a sheet of paper to her chest.
She’s covering the best part, Russell thought before noticing she was trying to show him something, not hide something else.
"What is it?" he asked, his eyes moving from the drawing to her anxious face.
When she didn’t answer, he tried again. "What’s up?"
She exhaled a disgusted "Ugghhh!" and barged into the house. "I thought you’d get it," she said in the foyer. "Don’t you see?" She shoved the sketch in Russell’s face. "I made this. I-made-this!"
He reached for the drawing, thinking it would calm her, but she yanked it away before he could take it. Russell’s forehead wrinkled. What did she want? Obviously some sort of grand acknowledgment for what was, at best, a second-rate doodle. She had even drawn motion lines behind the smudged arrow to connote movement. If it were a single-panel cartoon in the weekday paper (and the artistry was well along those lines), it would have blended in perfectly alongside Ziggy and Garfield, but, as it was, it certainly wasn’t anything to brag about. Definitely not worthy of being shoved in someone’s face, that’s for sure. And it didn’t even make sense. An arrow and some grass, framed with a bunch of curly-cues and spirals. There just wasn’t anything there.
Of course, Russell didn’t say any of this. All he said was, "It’s nice, Michelle. Did you draw it freehand?"
"What do you think," she asked, charging down the hall and into the kitchen, "that I traced it out of some fucking book? You suck sometimes, Rusty. You know that?"
"Why do I suck?" Russell asked, coming up behind her, attempting to sound detached and curious and not brimming with anger, which he really was.
"Because you don’t see the prettiness in this. I had to shove it in your face to get you to say anything."
"I said it was nice." Russell approached and she backed away. "Please calm down, Michelle."
"I am calm!" Michelle shouted. In some faraway recess of the house, Apollo barked.
Taking her upper arm, Russell guided Michelle to a bar stool by the island. "No, you’re not," he said.
She relented to his grip, both touched and shocked by how feminine it was, while also appreciating its firmness and pliability. Looking down at the hand grasping her arm, she contemplated the talent imbued in it. Whatever he had in there, floating between tendons and veins (maybe even through those organic cables and conduits) was something she clearly lacked. She’d never catch up to him on guitar, no matter how many hours she practiced. Even worse, she’d never be as creative or talented as he had been when he was ten.
"You’re not calm at all. Sit down."
Russell stared at her staring at his hand. Her face had gone blank. Something about her head posed in oblique profile with the precursor of tears in her eyes made him abruptly pull his hand away.
"What?" she said, looking up.
"Nothing."
"Are you calm, Rusty?"
"No," he answered
"Why not?"
"I can’t explain it."
"Can’t or won’t?" Michelle asked bravely. Russell had to give it to her. For lack of a better term, Michelle had balls.
"Can’t and won’t."
"That doesn’t even make sense, because if you won’t tell me, that means you can. But if you can’t tell me, then by default, you won’t."
"You sound like Pete," Russell dodged.
"Shut up." Michelle shot back. "Don’t ever compare me to Pete."
"Fine, I won’t. But why were you about to cry a minute ago? Can you tell me that at least? Will you tell me that?"
She paused, collected herself, then blurted, "Freddy ran away Sunday morning. My dad’s been bitching at me ever since, saying it’s my fault, even though he’s the one who left the gate open. Twice."
"I’m sorry to—"
"Thanks, but that doesn’t exactly bring him back now, does it? Shit, I didn’t mean that. The reason I came by was…well…I figured you’d be on your lunch break, and I thought that, since you’re the genius and all, maybe you could help me come up with some ideas on how to find Freddy."
Russell walked to the sink and filled a glass under the tap. He brought it to the island, sat down next to Michelle, and slid the glass over to her.
"I didn’t go in to work today," he said.
"Why?"
Leaving out the more graphic parts, Russell told her about Rhoda Baker and the dog tracks in the kitchen.
"That was you?"
"Yeah," Russell said, looking out the window and recalling the image of Mrs. Baker’s peeled face and missing throat. "I was the one who found her. It was what you would call…bad."
Michelle leaned sideways, toward him. "What did she look like?"
Eying a blue jay perched on the gate outside, Russell said, "You don’t want to know."
"But I do want to know."
"No, you don’t."
"I do," she pressed.
"No, you don’t!" Russell said way too loudly. In another part of the house, but closer now, Apollo let out a quick double bark to let the humans know he was still there.
Russell apologized immediately, then stood and walked around the kitchen. "I—I don’t want to think about it right now, okay. I’m not even supposed to be talking about it."
Michelle perked. "Why not?"
"Price. Sheriff Price. He told me not to go blabbing to anyone. Said it was important to get all the facts straight before letting the public in on it. A bunch of bullshit that was. I bet the whole
town knows. It’s probably all over today’s paper. Isn’t it?”
"Well…yeah, but—"
"Hell, any idiot could’ve figured out a dog ripped that old lady’s face off like the top of a pudding cup and that it had rabies."
"Rabies?"
"Isn’t it obvious, Michelle? Lola had rabies, and now some other dog has it, too. I mean, come on! Put two and two together. There’s a rabies outbreak, for the love of God!"
"They didn’t say anything like that in the paper. What they said was—"
"Well, the paper got it wrong then."
"I guess they could’ve—"
"Yeah, they got it wrong. Believe me."
"Shit! Freddy!" Michelle said, getting up. This time she grabbed Russell’s arm.
"What about him?"
"Do you think Freddy could’ve killed her?"
Russell considered it.
"You think he did, don’t you? Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!!"
"That’s enough, Michelle," Russell said coolly. "I guess it’s possible, but there’s no point in thinking that way when we don’t know for sure."
"The tracks in the kitchen, were they big?"
"Yeah, but that—"
"It was him! Fuuuuuck."
"You don’t know that!"
"I know."
"No, you don’t."
"I do," Michelle said. "Don’t ask me how, but I do."
"Intuition can be wrong. Most of the time it is wrong, especially when it’s about the ones we love."
"But I don’t love Freddy."
"You don’t?"
"No, I can’t stand him. That’s how I know it’s him. My dad trained him to be a guard dog, so he’s mean."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive."
"Then I’ll call Price." Russell went to the junk drawer next the refrigerator and began fishing through it. "He said to call him if I discovered anything useful for the case."
"Don’t!" Michelle pleaded.
"Why not?"
"Because he’ll shoot him."
Russell grinned dolorously. "If he’s rabid—as he’d have to be to rip someone’s throat out—then he needs to be shot."
"But what if he’s not rabid? What if I’m wrong and it’s some other dog?"
"You just said—"
"I know what I just said, but I could still be wrong. You said so yourself."
"Michelle," Russell said, shaking his head, "I’m so disappointed in you."
"Why?" she responded, shocked.
"You’re not trusting your instincts. One minute you’re positive Freddy did it; the next you’re not."
"Like you said, there’s a chance I’m way off about this whole thing. I—or you—can’t go run and tell Price to be on the lookout for a Doberman Pinscher—my dad’s dog—when we both know damn well he’d shoot him the second he saw him. And it’s not like there are a ton of Dobermans wandering the streets of Riley."
"I know, but what do you want me to do about it?"
"Do I have to spell it out for you?" She pointed at him. "You," then pointing at herself, "and me are going to come up with a plan to find my dad’s dog before he comes home from work tonight and yells at me again."
"Is that what this is all about: your dad yelling at you? Suppose we do find Freddy. How are we going to bring him back to your house? The way you describe him, he’s not exactly the friendliest dog in the world. And if he has rabies…well, then I’m staying the hell away. Sorry, Michelle, but I’ve had enough of that shit this summer to last a lifetime."
Russell turned and walked down the hallway, toward the front door, hoping Michelle would get the hint and follow.
She didn’t.
From the kitchen, Michelle begged, "No. You gotta help me. I don’t know how to do this on my own."
From the foyer, Russell called out, "Why don’t you make up some flyers or something."
"I tried," she said, sniffling, "but apparently I can’t draw either."
Russell went back to the kitchen and, seeing Michelle’s flushed cheeks, asked, "Now why are you crying?"
"Because," she said, reaching for the drawing on the counter and holding it up for Russell to see, "Because you think this sucks. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
Michelle ripped the sheet in half. Then, sobbing and muttering through clenched teeth, she tore the two halves in half. The quarters she also tore. Then again, again, again, again, and again, until all that was left were tiny scraps of ragged, eggshell-colored paper. These she threw up over her head. As they fluttered down on and around her like giant snowflakes, Russell’s nose prickled with the unmistakable sweep of helplessness and despair that preludes all crying spells known to mankind. But he held the flow back. He was determined not to let her see him cry.
"Why did you do that?" he asked, unsteadily.
At that, Michelle’s lips twisted into a sideways figure eight and she began to wail. Looking at Russell through shimmering, slit eyes, she shook her head and croaked, "I don’t know!" Slamming her fists on the counter now: "I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!"
"Shhhh…"Russell said, walking around the island and reaching out to her heaving back. At the last second, he snapped his hand to his chest. He couldn’t touch her in that state. She was too alive. She was too there.
"I’ll help you find Freddy," he whispered into her ear. "We’ll find him together. I promise."