* * *
Russell ran inside and grabbed a role of masking tape from the junk drawer in the kitchen. When he returned to the truck, Michelle had his CD case on her lap and was thumbing through the sleeves.
"Didja get it?"
"Right here." He spun the roll around his index finger. Nodding at the CD’s, he said, "Go ahead. It’s cool."
"This one alright?"
"Yeah, but there’s only one good song on there."
"‘Kodachrome?’" Michelle asked with a slanted smile.
"Okay—two good songs. But one great one."
"Hmmm, let’s see…"
"And no, it’s not ‘Tainted Love.’"
She slid the disk into the slot. "I never pegged you as a R.E.M. fan, Rusty."
"Because I’m not. It’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers one."
"I knew that," she said. "You practically have a shrine to them in your room."
"No I don’t! I’ve got a whole bunch of band posters."
"But the biggest one is of them, and it’s right over your bed."
"So?"
"So that makes them your favorite."
"Fine," Russell relented, backing out the driveway.
Michelle pressed the NEXT button until coming to the song they both loved. They were a stone’s throw away from Johnson Avenue when John Frusciante’s jangly guitar shook the cabin.
"TURN IT DOWN!" Russell shouted, reaching for the volume knob and twisting it left. "Do you always listen to music this loud?"
The bass and drum kicked in, and Michelle laughed and bobbed her head with the beat. When the first riff ended, a slide lead took over. Out of the dozens of CDs in the case, she had chosen the one with his favorite song of all time on it. To Russell’s ears, the song was sonic perfection—the holiest of holies. And right as Anthony Keidis was about to come in, they both looked at each other and sang the first line to “Soul to Squeeze” in unison.
Then they looked away, their simple excitement over a mutually loved song wrenched out from under them. To sing along to those lyrics now seemed wrong. They both felt it, and Russell paused the track before Anthony could continue. The awkwardness that followed was palpable. It was as if somebody had played Kool and the Gang’s "Celebration" at a funeral, and they had not only sung along but had also formed a conga line around the casket.
"So," Russell began, breaking the silence, "what’s the plan?"
"I thought you had the plan."
Russell stalled. "We can ask the people we talked to yesterday if they’ve seen anything. Put up some more flyers…"
"This is the last day. I promise."
"Are you going to tell your dad you’re giving up?"
"Look, Rusty. Freddy’s gone. Either he’s dead or he’s far away from here. And if I’m wrong, and he’s in the backyard when I get home—by some miracle; it would have to be a miracle—then that’s fine, too. Either way, I’m positive there’s nothing more we can do."
"We could—"
"Nothing," she interrupted, "more we can do. But you know what, let’s put up some stupid flyers anyway. I paid for them. Might as well use them."
Russell turned onto Main then slammed on the brakes. Michelle blurted, "What the—"
Before them, up and down the half mile drag of Riley’s downtown district, on light poles, in storefront windows, on the backs of public benches, on waste barrels, under windshield wiper blades of parked cars, were hundreds of multicolored Missing Dog flyers.
Russell pulled into the empty parking lot in front of Busby’s Electronics and Repair Shop and got out. "What’s this?" he asked, making a broad sweeping gesture to the varicolored gallery. "I mean…what the hell is this?"
Michelle climbed out, rounded the truck, and stared down the corridor alongside him. Sharing in Russell’s confusion, she asked, "Were they here earlier?"
"They weren’t here this morning," he answered. "But then again, I was out on calls most of the day." A couple of flyers were even taped inside Busby’s shop window, which caused Russell to say again, "They weren’t here this morning."
"What’s going on, Rusty?" Michelle said, grabbing his arm.
"I’ll tell you what’s going on." He ripped a flyer from a nearby utility pole, crumpled it into a ball and threw it to the ground. "It’s pretty fucking obvious: dogs are running away from their homes."
Then he laughed, tittered maniacally, at a joke that only he got.
"Stop it. You’re creeping me out."
He ignored her. "Oooooh, look at this one. ‘Missing: 4-year-old Dachshund. Name: Squiggles. Please call if you have any information.’ Then it goes on to give a number. ‘Family loves her very much!’ You gotta love that last part. Why aren’t you laughing?"
Michelle avoided his eyes. "Because it’s not funny."
"At least now you know Freddy isn’t the only dog that’s run away."
"And somehow that doesn’t comfort me."
"I know, but look at all of these flyers. There’s gotta be hundreds of missing dogs here."
Together, they walked the sidewalk toward the hum of the interstate, stopping intermittently to examine new postings taped to street lights or stapled to trees. A few minutes into their trek, they both gleaned that there weren’t as many missing dogs as they had originally estimated, only hundreds of duplicate flyers of about a dozen or so AWOL pooches. Squiggles kept showing up again and again on bright goldenrod.
I just saw you, Squiggles, Russell thought. You’ve made some new friends. Dirty fellows. Not the type you’d normally associate with, that’s for sure. How can you spend your day rolling around in alley dirt with a bunch of mongrels when your family’s out searching for you? Don’t you know that they love you ‘very much?’ How do you sleep at night, Squiggles?
Russell wondered if all the dogs had gone missing today, or if they had run away several days ago and the owners were just now putting up signs due to the unspoken fear they all shared. Had Michelle’s flyers precipitated their decisions to take action? Had they also heard the rifle shot last night and arrived at similar conclusions: That could be my dog.
As if fate were reading his mind, a single shotgun blast rang out behind them, beyond the Lewis Boulevard park—not quite in the boonies, but close. Russell marveled at the synchronicity between his thoughts and reality. He shivered, too.
"That was a little too close, don’t you think?" Michelle said, trying to cover up the warble in her voice. Then a piercing, shrill cry erupted behind them, startling Russell and Michelle even more than the gunshot had.
"They’re killin’ ‘em," someone said.
When they turned, a squat, middle-aged women peered up at them with bespectacled eyes.
"Huh?" Russell asked, in a daze.
"I said they’re killin’ ‘em. Dogs, mutts, mongrels—anything on four legs that barks."
"Who’s killing them?" Michelle demanded.
The lady tilted her head back as if to slide the answer from her brain to her mouth. "Anybody with kids, to start. Farmers, cattlemen, anybody with somethin’ to lose."
The late afternoon light played through the woman’s thick, plastic-rimmed glasses, painting moving rainbows across her chubby cheeks. Even a blind man could see that she was lonely, and since lonely people, especially lonely women, take their companionship in any form they can—
"Your dog ran away, didn’t it?" Russell asked before she could speak again.
"Oh, yes," she replied, nodding. "He gone missing sometime last night. There was a gunshot, and I guess it done scared him off. I don’t suppose you heard it, too?"
Russell was about to tell her that he had, in fact, heard it when she spoke up.
"He’s just a Corgi. He can’t defend hisself if something bad attacks him. I hate thinking ‘bout it, but there’s something out there—something rabid." She spat on the ground, as if to expunge the vile taste the word left in her mouth. "And if it can tear apart hunnerds of little critters and desecrate the sanctity of a little o
ld lady before killing her, then it can do the same to Mr. Humphrey. It can do the same to me!!"
"Whoa-whoa-whoa…whoa!" Russell said, raising his hands and arranging them into a T. "Time out. You—you need to calm the hell down. What do you mean ‘desecrate a little old lady’?"
"I mean just that!" she said, holding back tears. "The dog that killed her…" Tears flowing now: "…raped her, too!"
Michelle looked at Russell.
Russell lowered his gaze and shook his head. Then, glancing up at Michelle, he said, "Probably some stupid rumor."
"No, it’s true! I heard she was naked when the police found her, and her legs were spread wide open." She illustrated with her arms. "Like this. And her face was missing, too!"
Russell took hold of Michelle’s upper arm and whispered in her ear, "Ignore the crazy bitch and start walking to the truck. No! Don’t look at her!" Still clutching her arm, he spun Michelle around and pushed her toward Busby’s parking lot.
"Oww! You’re hurting me."
"Sorry," he said, letting go of her arm. Where he had grabbed her, white finger shadows marred her tan skin.
Behind them, but farther away now, the woman yelled, "I’m not crazy, you lil’ squirt! That lady was raped, and anybody says different is wrong! I heard from my friend Maybeline Adams that she was, and she don’t lie! Hey, listen to me, you no-good idjit! She was raped. RA—AAPED! By a dog with rabies. And I bet it was your dog, too. You look like the type of kid who’d raise a raping, woman-killing dog. Don’t ignore me when I’m talking to you! Come back here!"
"Go, go, go…" He had his hand on Michelle’s back now, pressing her toward the solitary truck gleaming in the slanting sun. For some reason, Russell looked over his shoulder. He immediately regretted it. Fifty yards back, the off-kilter lady sat on the sidewalk with her knees drawn to her chest. There was something about the way she gently rocked herself by pushing her toes against the cement that filled his heart with total despair. Crying, the woman gazed absently at the evening traffic rolling indifferently past her feet.
Now there’s someone who knows what it means to be alone, Russell thought, climbing into the truck.
Then, turning onto Main, Michelle said to him softly, "She was talking to me," hoping Russell would refute it.
"I think she was talking more to herself than us," Russell said. "Besides, that lady she mentioned—Rhoda Baker—wasn’t raped." He dismissed the idea with snorting, jittery laugh. "A dog raping a person? Give me a fucking break."
"If she was dead…" Michelle considered.
"Then it wouldn’t be rape, would it?" Russell was aware of the futility of arguing semantics at a time like this, but he had a point to make and he intended to make it. "It’s not rape if the person is already dead."
Michelle looked at him as if he had just said the most ghastly thing imaginable, and the truth was he might have done just that. Scooting away from him, she replied, "That’s got to be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard anyone say."
"Oh, come on, Michelle! All I’m doing is trying to make a point."
"What point? That you’re weird?"
She had thrown a javelin through his heart. "No," he defended, "that she was crazy. That’s all."
"Was she really naked?" Michelle asked, leaning toward him again. Russell couldn’t believe what he was seeing. "You saw her, didn’t you?"
His mind flashed back to the day (Monday—two days ago), and he recalled the tableaux with such resounding clarity and detail, his memory shut down at its recollection. So much information flowed through his circuits at once that they overloaded and fried. What he was left with was a fleeting snapshot of something green—her nightgown—and of something so horrible he refused to acknowledge it, though eventually, as always, he did.
He swallowed. "She had a nightgown on. Green. And, if you really want to know, her legs were spread open." His bowels gurgled, and he felt about the same shade of green as Mrs. Baker’s nightgown.
See where the truth gets you, buddy? Nowhere. Stick to your ivory ticklin’ and your reality denyin’. Stick to your fantasy world, because the real one is kicking your ass right now. You should have lied. It would have been so easy for you. Aren’t you creative enough to tell a simple lie and save your friend from at least some of the mental torment she’s bound to be feeling? See what you’ve done? She’s going to worry even more now, because she’ll think Freddy raped that Rhoda bitch—a lady you never should have seen lying dead in her damn recliner in the first place because her air conditioner was never broken!
Simply, all Michelle said was, "Gross." There were no alarmed expressions, no pleas for reassurance. She said that one word and was mum.
As his circuits gradually unfried, unfroze, unoverloaded, Russell fully recalled the scene he had stumbled upon Monday morning. "Yeah. It was gross," In his mind, he saw the remote control partially buried in the shag and the one maroon arm making a lifeless grab for it. He saw the elderly lady’s veiny, bruised, and akimbo pale legs and her body slumped over the arm of the blue recliner. He saw, or rather re-saw, everything. Even the saggy tit that had popped out of the gown’s armhole and the ragged cavity where her throat should have been. But what he remembered with most detail was the face and only because there hadn’t been one. That red, coagulated mess that resembled a pizza after the cheese had slid off was the one image he knew he’d never forget. Years from now, after trying to erase this whole neurotic summer from his memory, he would always remember that complete wreck of a face.
"So, you’re going to tell your dad you’re throwing in the towel?" Russell asked, coming to a stop in front of Michelle’s house.
"Yeah. He should be home soon. I’ll tell him first thing. It’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid." She made a tearing gesture in the air. "Do it real quick and it doesn’t hurt…as much."
"He won’t hit you, will he?"
Picking up the tenderness and concern in Russell’s voice, Michelle felt instantly sorry for him. Why she felt this way, she didn’t know. Russell had everything a person could ever need and want. And more.
But he didn’t like my drawing. He said he did, but I saw it in his eyes. He thought it was lame.
Russell had so much going for him, so many people in his corner, that to hear him ask that question hurt her in a way, disappointed her. It wasn’t unlike him to care, but it was unlike him to be so off in his perception of her. Her dad had never once laid a finger on her. He yelled a lot, sure, and threatened, but he never hit.
Why would he think that? she wondered, gathering all of the useless flyers that she would drop in the trash can the moment she stepped inside. And why have you been acting so funny lately, Rusty Whitford?
"No, he won’t hit me," she responded. "What makes you think that?"
Russell appeared lost in another universe. "I don’t know—really, I don’t"
"Well, he won’t. He’s never hit me. Besides, you know I’m not the type of girl who lets herself get smacked around. If he ever tried that shit with me, I’d fight back." She put up her dukes to illustrate. "I’d be like, ‘Put em up, Dad! You ready to rummmmmmmbllllllllllle?!’"
When Russell didn’t laugh—or respond in any noticeable way—she palmed his shoulder and shook him. "You okay?"
Russell startled to life. "Yeah, I’m okay. You’ve already asked me that today, you know?"
"You’ve been acting so weird."
"And you’ve already told me that today also," Russell countered. Then, looking into Michelle’s worried eyes, he added, "Don’t look at me like that, like I’m some sort of cancer patient or something. You’re feeling sorry for me. Stop it."
Michelle reached out and lightly traced his cheek and temple with the backs of her fingers. "You haven’t been getting enough sleep."
"No, I haven’t."
"Then you lied to me earlier." She tucked a wisp of his auburn hair behind an ear
Russell took her hand and pressed it against his cheek. Then, still holding on
, he lowered it to her lap. "I know I’ve been acting kind of strange lately, Michelle. It’s just that—it’s hard to explain. There’s been so much flying at me at once, I…I can’t handle that kind of pressure, okay? First it’s Pete and Hector rubbing egos; then, less than twenty-four hours later, I’m chopping off Lola’s head. After that, I’m stuck with O’Brien because he can’t go home, and I don’t know what to do with him. He scares me, Michelle. He’s the weird one. He’s too weird."
She urged him to go on, to get it all off his chest.
"Then I kick O’Brien out of my house because he does something so strange I won’t even mention it. And once he’s gone, I’m thinking it’s all over, time to move on. Great. So the next day I end up finding some dead grandmother, and then Price is telling me not to talk about it, telling me I didn’t really see what I know I saw—as if those paw prints in the kitchen were some sort of…mirage. Then you come along the next day with Freddy missing, and now I’m helping you track down a dog that’s most likely dead and you don’t really want to find in the first place. Then there’s that crazy bitch telling us a dog raped that Baker lady—a woman I saw with my own two eyes—and she has the nerve to blame me! As if Apollo would ever do something like that. That bitch is as crazy as Mike O’Brien. I want to say she’s crazier, but that’s impossible. It’s all so fucked up, Michelle. Don’t you see that?"
She did see it. She saw it clearly now.
"Wherever the brink is, people are jumping over it. They’re killing dogs they have no business killing. And I don’t buy the whole ‘rabies outbreak’ rationale either, because it can’t be that bad yet. I saw a shitload of dogs today, and none of them looked rabid to me. What I think is happening is that people are doing what they’ve wanted to do all along. They’re just using the guise of ‘We’re protecting the children’ and ‘We’re doing what has to be done’ to fulfill their secret heartless desires. They want to reaffirm their belief that, when push comes to shove, they possess the resolve to look down the barrel of a rifle into the doughy, brown eyes of a dog and snuff out an innocent life. They want to do it, Michelle. People want to kill. This rabies nonsense is just giving them an excuse."
She pulled her hand out of his (he had been squeezing it harder and harder as his speech grew more fervent) and touched a finger to her lips. Then, stepping out of the truck, she walked around the hood to the driver’s side. There, she opened the door and wordlessly ushered Russell out.
Russell stood on the curb and Michelle in the dry, whispering grass. "What?" he asked before she reached out and drew him in, embracing him and burying her head into the curve of his neck. With her firm yet pliant body pressed against his, her hands on his back, she drew him in closer still. He did the same, but eased up on the pressure. The last thing he wanted to do was crush her.
With the hot evening breeze lifting and fanning her hair across Russell’s face, Michelle sighed deep into the cup of his ear. "Thank you. I know you don’t hear that enough—from me or from anyone else—so I’ll say it again: Thank you, Russell Whitford, for everything you do and for everything you are."
Unsure of how to respond, or if he had the ability to respond, Russell just stared at her house and squeezed her slim waste. If he hurt her, she didn’t let him know.
At the same time, they both let go and Michelle turned and walked up the path to her front door. On the porch, she glanced back and waved a silent goodbye with a swipe of her hand. The way the soft sunlight lit her purple hair, turning it red, and highlighted the rumples in her shirt and jean shorts, made Russell forget about the rising cry of a cicada in a nearby oak. She was the most beautiful thing ever, and nothing could interrupt this ephemeral—and ethereal—moment. Not even the hissing cicada. He wanted the feeling to last forever, and, for a while, he thought that it just might, for the musicians in his head were clamoring victorious chords on thousands upon thousands of instruments, as if to usher in a new era, or to play out a dying one.
Then she stepped forward and through the door. A second later, the door closed and she was gone.