Whitenaur laughed. He laughed and laughed.
Made Lewis mad. “Tyler Whitenaur wouldn’t have approved,” he said. “Your daddy wouldn’t have thought high of what you’ve done.”
Whitenaur took short breaths. Huffing. His hands folded into fists. “You leave Dad out of this!”
“Tyler Whitenaur was a fine dog handler. He was honest as the day is long. Everybody who knew your daddy thought the world of him.”
Doug Whitenaur shrank before their eyes, “Oh hell,” he said. “I haven’t got your dog.” He turned and walked back inside.
Sergeant Nelson looked at Lewis and said, “I’m sure I heard him invite us in.”
“Uh-huh.” For the second time that morning, Lewis lied. They all went inside.
The blinds were down and Lewis couldn’t see much at first. He could smell stale beer, cigarette smoke, bad socks and a woman’s perfume. He couldn’t smell any dogs. Whitenaur was at his bar (50s Danish modern) dropping ice in a drink.
He waved a negligent hand, “Go ahead. Help yourself. Knock yourself out. Ought to be fun for you, huh, Burkholder, searching Tyler Whitenaur’s house.” Fiercely, he hissed, “My Daddy was twice the man you’ll ever be!”
For the first time Lewis wondered if maybe Nop wasn’t here. He shook the thought off.
Somewhere in the back of the house a door closed and then water running.
Whitenaur downed half his drink and shook himself, miming the effect as the booze hit his stomach. For a moment he seemed a teenager, a boy who’d not yet put on the mantle of manhood. Lewis wondered how old he was. Older than Mark.
Footsteps behind them. A woman brushed by them into the kitchen. She was brown haired and in a hurry.
Whitenaur asked, “Do I call my lawyer?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think that necessary, Whitenaur.”
A whine from the kitchen: “Dougie? Where the hell’d I leave my smokes? I can’t find my damn smokes.”
Whitenaur slapped on a man-to-man grin, “Try the bedroom, sweetheart.”
“I already tried the bedroom. Why do you think I came out here?” She burst into the living room where the four men were, three and one. She had freckles on the backs of her hands. Her hands clutched her robe together at the throat. “One of you got a Marlboro Light?”
Lewis and Sergeant Nelson shook their heads. She said they were a pair of duds. Mark didn’t offer his hand-rolled smokes because he was ashamed of them.
“H’lo, Marge,” Nelson said.
“I know you?”
“Steve Nelson, remember? Goodies Saloon?”
“Oh yeah. Yeah. Well I hang out at Billy’s Temptation now. I moved out to Edgeworth and Goodies is too far to drive. Sure, you and a couple other cops used to come in to Goodies.” She pointed at Whitenaur, “Him and me met at the Temptation.” She wrapped her arms around Whitenaur and made a child star’s face: “Honey, let me have one of yours. They’re awful strong but I need my smoky.”
Whitenaur looked over her shoulder with a fixed smile while she rummaged his pockets. Puffed, coughed, returned Whitenaur’s lighter.
“Honey, these men think I’ve stolen their dog.” Whitenaur was repeating a charming anecdote.
“They think you stole their dog? Oh, really?” Marge was awfully amused until she coughed and lost it. She said, “Dougie honey, fix me up,” indicating the bar. “I gotta go make weewee.”
When her back was turned, Whitenaur made an ugly face and didn’t care who saw it.
Whitenaur slapped his glass down. “You have ten minutes, Sergeant. Then you and your friends leave and don’t come back. You hear me, Sergeant?”
Nelson backed out of the room and his nods were like the deference shown to royalty.
“The kennels are out back,” Whitenaur added. “I don’t keep animals in my house.”
Lewis touched Sergeant Nelson’s sleeve. “He’s got Nop,” he said. “Don’t let him whip you.”
“Shut up.”
Lewis wanted to feel like Nop was near but his heart was too low in his chest to get a jack under it. He felt disloyal as hope died.
Behind the house where most of his neighbors had a swimming pool, Doug Whitenaur had a long row of dog kennels—twenty in all—chain-link affairs with frame walk-in doghouses.
Two dogs were in the runs, barking their frantic welcome: “Hello, hello, so nice to see you, welcome.”
Not Nop. Lewis closed his eyes and opened them again but nothing changed.
One dog was Bit O’ Scot. The other was a red dog. Lewis faced Sergeant Nelson squarely, “No,” he said, “they’re not mine. Neither of them is my dog Nop.”
“Do you want to go through the kennels?”
“I can see the kennels, sir. Nop’s not in these kennels.”
“Are you satisfied now, Burkholder?”
“No sir. This man had my dog Nop stolen. I don’t know where Nop is now and likely he’s dead, but Doug Whitenaur is the man who had him stolen.”
“Hey, Lewis,” Whitenaur had followed. “Now you’ve searched the kennels, maybe you’d like to search the house? Look under the beds? Maybe I have your ‘homegrown’ dog under the bed.”
Grimly, they went through every room. Mark opened every closet door. Though they didn’t look under the beds, Lewis sorely wanted to.
Whitenaur led them down to the basement. The furnace room had a furnace in it. A storage room was full of crates and cardboard boxes bound with twine.
Finally, Whitenaur blocked their way. “No. You clowns don’t come in here. This was Tyler Whitenaur’s den and by God, you’re not going to search it.”
They’d found his point of principle. Here, he was willing to fight.
So they stood there like tourists before a museum room roped off. The mantel of the brick fireplace was crowded with trophies. Pictures of men and dogs on the wall. Shelves above the desk held more dusty honors: platters, loving cups, shields. All those dogs were dead now. Tyler Whitenaur too.
Wordlessly, they trooped back up the stairs. Wordlessly, they passed through the front room where Marge had built her own wake-me-up and silently toasted them. She had the TV on, some morning show. No sound.
Sergeant Nelson said, “Appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Whitenaur. Sorry we had to bother you.” The sergeant was itchy, just standing there.
“Don’t ever come back. This is my home!” Whitenaur invested home with such rage and self-pity the word shook like a badly cast bell.
Lewis wasn’t going to offer any apology. No sir.
Doug Whitenaur swallowed and took a breath and, very sweetly, inquired, “Will I be seeing you at the Bluegrass this year, Lewis?”
Mark grabbed Lewis’s arm. “Let’s go,” he hissed, and so they did.
The spring day was still bright and pretty. Nobody cared. Sergeant Nelson drove downtown faster than he’d traveled out. Lewis stared out the dirty window.
It was the lunch hour and the sidewalks were full of lovely girls, around the fountains, in the light and shadows of the arcades.
At the station Sergeant Nelson skidded to a stop. “Okay. That’s that. Maybe we all learned something.” He was ready for them to be gone. “I went out on a limb for you, Burkholder, and I shouldn’t have. Thanks, pal.”
“Whitenaur stole my dog.”
“Yeah. So you said. We went that way, Burkholder. That’s it. Full stop. You bother Mr. Whitenaur again and you’ll bump right up against me. Have a nice day.”
Lewis chewed on that. He didn’t have to like it, but he had to chew on it.
Lewis missed the I 71 ramp so they crawled through downtown Cincinnati at lunch hour. Plenty of exhaust fumes. Hot.
An hour later, outside of Lebanon, they picked up the gooseneck. Lewis said they’d sluice it out when they got home. He said they’d been away from the farm too long. Maybe they could drive straight home and Mark could see his family some other trip.
Mark said it’d be months before he got another chance. If Lewis didn’t want
to meet Mark’s mother or brother, he could just wait in the truck.
Lewis said, “What do you take me for?”
So they headed north. Mark found some country music, but no matter how softly the radio played, it seemed too loud. The empty gooseneck clattered and bounced behind them. It had been a long time since breakfast.
Pulling their livestock trailer through Columbus’s university district, they collected stares passing rows of townhouses and apartment complexes. “There’s something you should know about my brother Scottie,” Mark said. “Scottie’s autistic.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s like being retarded but it isn’t the same thing.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not hereditary, if you’re worried about that.”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Lewis said. “I never had a chance to get worried if I wanted to. I just now heard about it.”
“Over on the right. Pull on through the alley. The parking places are in back.”
Modest brick apartment building with balconies on the second and third floor.
Mark assured Lewis that he could stay in the truck if he was scared of meeting Mark’s mother. “I wouldn’t want to put any pressure on you,” Mark said. It wasn’t much of a joke but it hadn’t been much of a day. Lewis laughed.
A note on the door of 15B directed them to the laundry room and that’s where they met her, in the basement stairwell. Her big plastic basket was neatly covered with a towel. Lewis touched his hat, mumbled something.
Mrs. Hilyer (“Call me Bebe”) was a pert little thing with a beehive hairdo that provided another foot of altitude. She wore more than her fair share of makeup, but laugh lines radiated from the corners of her eyes like cracks. “Mark, you carry that darn basket. I’ll put some water on for coffee.”
“Ma’am,” Lewis said, “we wouldn’t want to be any trouble.…”
“I took the afternoon off so I’d be home when Mark showed up. I guess I can afford a cup of instant coffee.”
Behind his mother’s back, Mark grinned at Lewis’s discomfiture.
A small apartment: just bedroom, living room, stove, refrigerator and sink against the living-room wall. Much of the floor space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling stacks of Avon cartons. “Just put the laundry on the bed. You goin’ out to see Scottie?”
“Uh-huh,” Mark said. “We’ll visit with Scottie and then we’re going straight back.”
She busied herself at the stove. “Darn it, I was hoping you’d come back here after. I canceled all my evening visits so we could go out to dinner. You like Chinese?”
Lewis had to come up with the explanation. He couldn’t tell the truth that he’d been whipped bad and wanted to get home where he could lick his wounds, so he concocted some lame explanation about livestock farming, how they couldn’t leave the stock for too long, and so on.
Her sharp glance. “When Mark phoned, he said you were coming out here to find a dog?”
“Yes, ma’am. That was our hope. It didn’t work out.”
Her silence invited him to say more. His silence declined. They sat at the little dinette table before the window that overlooked the parking lot. She blew on her coffee to cool it. “I was sorry to miss Mark’s wedding,” she said. “I wanted to come out—Scottie started having seizures. There isn’t much I can do about his seizures, except worry, but I didn’t want to be far away. Mark brought Penny here a couple times. She’s a great gal. Just great. So. You’re a farmer. I’m a city girl myself. You see the boxes? ‘Avon calling.’” She made a wrist gesture like somebody ringing a little bell. “That’s me. The job calls for a strong smile and healthy kidneys. When you go into a woman’s home, you got to accept her cup of coffee. It’s good I’m a real coffee nut. You haven’t had lunch, have you?”
Lewis opened his mouth but she was already at the stove. Her electric can opener whirred. “Chicken noodle all right? That’s what I got. Chicken noodle. And I’ve got some cottage cheese too and lettuce for a salad. I don’t dare put on an ounce of weight.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Lewis was dog paddling against the torrent of words.
“Before Mark went away to school, this place was pretty small. It didn’t get bigger when he moved out because I took on two new lines, men’s colognes and aftershave.” She abandoned her stove for her cartons and the emerald-green bottle of aftershave which she set before Lewis. “Here,” she said. “Free. Even a farmer’s got to shave, right? Unless you’d rather have the lemon-lime.” A small gold box was “bath salts for Mrs. Burkholder. Heather.” She shook the box. “I use them myself.” Her confidence faded as she smiled.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She put her hand on his. Feather-light. “Please don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel old as the hills. Call me Bebe.”
Lewis’s turn to blush. “Sure thing … Bebe.”
She whirled into her bedroom and sorted laundry into drawers. “I’m glad to meet you after so long, Lewis,” she called. “Mark says you have a lovely farm. Maybe I’ll get to see it someday.” Bam, she slammed a drawer. Bam, another one. “I’ll come for a nice visit when the baby’s born.”
She ate her cottage cheese with ladylike bites that were rapid. “You know about Scottie?”
Mark said, “I told Lewis just now. We didn’t tell the Burkholders before. Penny wanted to, but I didn’t want them worrying about the baby.”
Lewis said, “It wasn’t your place to keep things hid from us. I thought poorly of you because you hid your family from mine.”
Bebe listened to this exchange with eyebrows cocked.
“Lewis is right. Scottie’s no secret. He’s not locked up in some darn attic someplace. Scottie’s autistic.”
“I suppose I heard about autistic,” Lewis said. “I never knew anyone who had it.”
“Scottie’s eleven and he’s not toilet trained and he doesn’t speak. Scottie is in a world of his own. When he was first diagnosed, I used to think it was better for him to be in his private world, but now I think his world is pretty frightening and I’d rather he get out with everybody else. They don’t know what causes autism. They used to think it was the parents and I’ll tell you that was pretty horrible. It drove me and my husband apart. He’s in Detroit last I heard. Nine years he’s been gone and not so much as a Christmas card. Now, they think it’s something chemical that causes it. I don’t care what causes autism. I just want Scottie to get better.” In a jiffy, she washed their dishes. She asked, “Will you keep on looking for your dog?”
While waiting for Lewis’s answer, she dialed her phone.
“I don’t know.”
She spoke into the phone, arranging a sales appointment for that evening. The next number she tried was busy. “I suppose it’s the same on your farm? Never a free minute?”
“Well, I don’t know …”
“You should keep on looking for your dog. Never give up. Mark, I got some shirts and a cap for you to take to Scottie.”
The way she held the cap, it meant something, but Lewis wasn’t sure what.
“Maybe your visit will do him some good. He was always happy when you visited him. I was going to go up this weekend, but if you’re going, I’ll give myself the weekend off.”
Before they left she made two more appointments. At the door, she shook Lewis’s hand. Her hand was paper-dry. “You sure the aftershave is okay? I could get you the lemon-lime. I’m sorry I missed the wedding. It isn’t easy for a woman alone.”
They could smell their livestock trailer fifty feet away. Nobody had parked near. Lewis rolled down a window to air the cab. “How long you say you lived here?”
“Since the old man ran off. The school’s out the River Road, just past the State School for the Deaf and Blind.”
They drove along beside the Olentangy River. The ground here was recently developed or brushy farmland waiting for the developer.
“It looks like good ground,” Lewis said.
“You bet it??
?s good. When I was in FFA, some of the kids lived up here. The farms were still farming then. Some places had fourteen inches of black topsoil. Beautiful.”
“Well, it sure grows an ugly townhouse.”
Row on row of new townhouses, making sterile what had been fruitful before.
Scottie’s school was called the Nightingale School. The buildings had several decades on them and probably had always been one sort of school or another.
“Pull into that lot there.”
Older American station wagons, badly rusted economy cars, none washed. Bumper stickers advised that NO NUKES IS GOOD NUKES and asked HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR KID TODAY?
Scottie’s dormitory was a one-story stone house. The door was latched inside, high enough so the kids couldn’t reach it. The young woman who let them in was black, slender as a rail. “Hi, Mr. Hilyer. Good to see you again. Scottie’s out in the playground.”
“Hi, Linda. Here’s some shirts and his mother sent along this sailor cap.”
The woman took the shirts gladly but turned the cap around in her hand. “Scottie can’t wear this,” she said. “You can go to the Director and argue if you want, but Scottie can’t wear this.”
“I suppose my mother just hoped … you know.”
Linda had a good smile. She introduced herself to Lewis as Linda Huss, Scottie’s teacher.
Scottie Hilyer was a fine-featured blond boy, wearing a child-size crash helmet on his head. He was small for his age. He sat in the playground dirt.
A chunky black kid came right up to Lewis and took his hand. He beamed. “Bobble,” he said. “Bobble, Bobble.”
Mark ruffled the black kid’s hair. “Hello, Woodie. Woodie’s all right, aren’t you, pal.”
The kid swapped Lewis’s hand for Mark’s.
“Now, Woodie,” the teacher admonished, “Mark’s here to see his brother Scottie. When your mother comes to see you, Scottie doesn’t bother her.”
Scottie sat in the sunlight. A string of drool hung from his slack lower lip. He wrung his fingers like a terribly worried man.
“Scottie, you stop that.” The teacher took one of his hands. He plucked it away and resumed the worried motions.
“He’s got a whole world in those little hands of his. Unless we get his attention, he’ll watch them all day. I wish he’d take a little interest in other people. I always thought he was happiest when Mr. Hilyer came to visit. Scottie hasn’t really accepted any of the staff. Go, stay, talk, be quiet—I’m afraid it’s all the same to Scottie. Isn’t it, champ?” She put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.