Nop wagged his tail and grinned, charming as a boulevardier. She didn’t exactly feed him the piece of bun. She let it drop. He sniffed and looked up at her.
“Go ahead. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.”
Though it was unappetizing, Nop gobbled it down. He was anxious to cement bonds between them. He’d been too long friendless, too long alone.
“Dog’s gonna hook his leash on somepin’,” the vendor observed.
“I ain’t got time to take care of no dog,” Susie Q said. She waited until the vendor offered her a napkin; then she dabbed carefully at her lips. “Thank you,” she said. “You are a real saint.”
“ ’S all right,” the vendor said. He’d feed her but he wouldn’t look at her. “I’ll undo the leash,” he said. “Then the dog won’t hook himself on nothin’. He could strangle.”
She tucked the steel lead in a shopping bag that held two skirts, a holey wool sweater, a copy of Cosmopolitan (August 1980) and a statuette of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, six inches tall. She always set it at bedside, when she had one.
She also carried an envelope with her Social Security card, birth certificate, high-school transcript (Woodrow Wilson High, Flint, Michigan), a certificate of marriage to one Jack D. Cunningham and several letters from the VA hospital where he’d been for three years now—Parkinson’s disease. Though she had always loved him, and, in a way, depended on him, he’d beat her and hurt her and drank too much and fooled around with other men’s wives and she didn’t mind that so much on account of not being a jealous person but she certainly didn’t want her own husband killed on her doorstep, or, God forbid, in the kitchenette of her little apartment by some jealous husband not as forgiving as she.
When Jack was admitted by the VA, her world fell apart. She’d been a fifty-year-old housewife. And now what was she? The VA put Jack in the hospital but wouldn’t give her anything and the SSI check wasn’t much to live on and one month, when the check was late, or maybe stolen from her mailbox, they evicted her right into the street.
At first she tried to get back. She’d made the laborious rounds of the various bureaucracies. She sought papers to prove who she was, papers to prove her need. From one office to another, and a crowded bench of supplicants ahead of her at each office. She’d taken to dozing off in the offices instead of pursuing the papers they said they wanted but seemed to lose or require in triplicate as soon as she had her hand on them.
She began to think of papers as talismans, rare bits of magic that opened guarded doors. On the street she’d been robbed time after time—perhaps eight times in the past three years—by street kids who believed the rumor that shopping-bag ladies always had wealth stuffed into their sacks of belongings. She’d been hit and knocked down and her clothing strewn all over the pavement, but the only thing she ever cared about was her little statue and her precious envelope of papers.
She’d lost track of her relatives. She thought she had a sister somewhere in California. She’d never made any particular effort to trace her because her sister was married and had kids and a house and a car and everything she was supposed to have so why would she need Susie Q?
She walked slow but Nop stepped along, precisely at her side. From time to time she spoke to him and he listened, quite intently. She shot him a glance, occasionally, when she thought he wasn’t looking.
Invisibility was her protection. When she walked into the train station, nobody asked her her business, even when she went into the ladies’ room with a black-and-white Border Collie at her heels.
Three other women like her, at the far end of the rest room where they wouldn’t bother fastidious travelers. One woman dried her face with the automatic drier. Susie Q took a corner sink where she stepped out of her ruined shoes and with her hands hoisted one leg into the bowl and ran water over her toes.
One black woman, one white woman, one Puerto Rican. America, the melting pot.
Susie asked Alice what day it was. She didn’t know. Marietta, the PR, didn’t know either but the question reminded her of the House of Naomi, the women’s shelter where they asked you all sorts of tough questions before they told you they had no vacancy in any of their programs.
Alice said she’d ask the attendant when she came back. The others urged her not to ask because “it’s better she doesn’t notice us. Better.”
Marietta was afraid of Nop and moved away as far as she could. Alice admired him. She said he was a nice doggy and invited him to come over for a pat—an invitation which Nop declined because he didn’t wish to abandon his friend.
During winter months a half-dozen women gathered here and slept fitfully under the down-turned hand driers. The cops let them stay until 5 A.M., and they were proud of leaving the room as clean as they found it.
Susie Q removed her blouse to wash her upper arms.
At the sink in her worn brassiere, she scrubbed. This was one of her important daily rituals and one of the few events that made her feel good.
Usually the women who came here didn’t speak to each other—each ashamed, each afraid. But Nop provided the excuse for a curious normalcy. “He’s a nice dog,” Alice said. “I used to have a dog like that when I lived out in Kansas. It was a black Labrador Retriever. My daughter … he was great with my daughter.”
“I hope your daughter is well,” Susie said.
“Yeah,” Alice said, sadly. “I hope so too.”
Marietta was humming a sad tune. She was arranging her things around her and making a place to sit.
Alice told Susie about her former life. She’d been married three times ever since she was “just a child of fifteen.” She’d never been lucky with men but she’d never been locked up in no “loony bin” either she said, with a sly thumb poked at Marietta.
Like most states, Ohio had deinstitutionalized many former mental patients. After years of custodial care and the frailest connections to the community at large, most of them ended up like Marietta, on the street.
Fresh off the train, a couple of perfectly ordinary women came into the room. They didn’t react to the ladies but one of them gave Nop a funny look.
“She’s gonna make trouble,” Alice said after the white swinging door closed.
“It’s the dog,” Susie Q said. “Thought the dog was going to bite her. He’s a good dog, look at him.”
Nop wagged his tail and panted. Nop lay with his snout between his paws. Cold tile under his belly. White fluorescent lights. Mirrors. Strange smells. Every time a train departed the station, Nop could feel the vibration through his belly. The women couldn’t, but he could.
The two women gossiped for a while. When they couldn’t think of anything to say about people, they said something about the dog and that kept conversation flowing. It was a nervous business, conversation, because they weren’t practiced. They were in the same boat. That was the gist of what they said. Each listened to the other and began to think that since the other person was destitute and on the streets and still seemed decent, that maybe she was too.
The attendant came into the ladies’ room and said, “You can’t keep a dog in here.”
Nop got to his feet and eyed her.
Rather airily, Susie Q said, “He’s a thoroughbred, you know. A genuine, uh, thoroughbred dog. I believe we’ll go over to the Belvedere and collect my check.”
Her feet hurt like blazes and she was pavement weary but she’d washed and had a conversation with another soul and she had a dog that depended on her. Fancy that. A dog that depended on her. She snapped her fingers, “Come on, King,” she said and Nop followed her right away. “See,” she said, “he knows his name already.”
They walked down the street, side by side.
The Belvedere Arms was built in the 1880s as housing for unmarried immigrants. The Belvedere was a “workingman’s residence” and said so on one substantial cornerstone.
The architect who designed the Belvedere (and similar residences in Cleveland, St. Louis, Toledo and New York) had a str
ange conception of what an unmarried immigrant required. Rooms lined four sides of a central airshaft. The courtyard below may once have provided a sort of immigrant street life but now it was a place to toss bottles and nobody dared walk across it.
The Belvedere’s windows never opened. Above the first floor the panes facing the street were frosted glass, like bathroom windows. The building broadcasted a fey, massive sense of modesty.
The Belvedere was an SRO, meaning single-room occupancy, meaning the city used it as a dumping ground for the homeless, aged, mad and helpless. The hotel housed the newly destitute and those whose destitution was a way of life. It housed the same people who’d been institutionalized by the state previously. It housed paroled convicts, welfare mothers and elders and Medicaids.
The Belvedere was absentee owned, absentee managed and only the black man behind the desk was concrete. “Hi there, Susie Q. Come for your check?”
The tall desk was paneled with looks-like-wood paneling. A brace of fluorescents buzzed overhead. It was the bright focus of that lobby that smelled like booze, medicine and defeat. Mounds of rags dozed on the hopeless couches. It was safer down here than upstairs in the rooms and, who knows, maybe someone would have something to say.
A couple of the desk clerk’s pals occupied a red vinyl couch which was dragged so close to the front of the desk that Susie Q had to step over outstretched feet.
“Yeah,” she said, and there was a shrillness in her voice Nop hadn’t heard before. “I didn’t know what day it was, whether it was Thursday or not, so I didn’t know if to come.”
The clerk was pure beef in a navy-blue shirt and hip-length white leather jacket. His two pals were of the same mold but a weaker casting. Any of them could have hurt Susie Q. To give them full credit, they had never done so in the past.
The clerk held the envelope to the light. He drawled, “Mrs. Jack Cunningham. That you, Susie Q?”
The woman chittered. She put her hand over her mouth to hide her bad teeth. Nop’s ruff and the hackle line along his black back erected.
“That’s me. Sure that’s me. I get my checks here and I always take a room, too, you know. The check isn’t all it should be, but it’s enough so I get by.”
He let the letter dangle from his very fingertips like maybe it was some disgusting thing. It was just beyond the woman’s farthest reach. “We’re supposed to mail this right back if the correct person—the addressee—don’t pick it up. Says so, right here on this envelope: Do Not Forward. That’s what it says.”
The woman set down her bags and dug inside, dropping clothing on the filthy floor. “Mrs. Jack Cun ningham,” she whispered. “That’s me. I got proof. I got a marriage certificate right here.” When she found the envelope, she clutched it like salvation. She placed it precisely before the clerk. “Me. I’m me,” she said.
“I don’t want your cruddy papers,” the clerk said. “You may remove them.”
Susie blinked. She didn’t understand. The man flicked the precious documents off the desk. She scuttled for them.
Disdainfully, he poked his finger into her SSI envelope and ripped it open. “You got a check here for one hundred twenty-eight dollars and fifty cents, Susie. How long you want a room, week or two weeks? You ain’t got enough here for a month.”
Her documents were pressed against her breast like a letter from her dearest love. She gaped.
“The week is sixty dollars, less ten percent for cashing this, comes to thirteen dollars call it seventy-three, suppose we’ll call it an even seventy-eight fifty, means I owe you fifty bucks. Sign and you get your money.” Plain black ballpoint beside her check.
She didn’t know whether to go backward or forward. Eventually she’d sign the check and take what was offered to her and a room key. She always had signed, eventually.
Nop didn’t know that. He didn’t follow the words of the conversation, but he understood the ritual perfectly well. The man was threatening his friend, and he reacted like any honest dog when a packmate is threatened. He set his feet and coiled and bared his white teeth. His tail shot out straight behind him, and with all his hair standing on end, he looked like a much larger dog than he was. He made a sound in the very back of his throat which was meant to let her know he was with her and meant to tell her enemy that a stud dog was dealing himself in.
It was the last thing the desk clerk expected. Susie Q was shocked too. The clerk took an involuntary step backward and both his pals jerked their legs back as far as they could get from that dog’s jaws.
Nop slipped sideways where he could keep a balance point between all three men.
“Goddamn,” one man breathed hurriedly, “goddamn. Goddamn.”
In the far shadows of the lobby, somebody sneezed.
“That dog,” the clerk stuttered, “you get that dog …”
She said the name like a prayer. “King!”
It was seven feet from the floor to the surface of the Belvedere’s desk. Nop made the jump, caught with his elbows and pulled himself up. His snarling face wasn’t twenty inches from the desk clerk’s own. The clerk opened his mouth wide but no word came out.
“I’d like you to meet my dog,” she said. “Him and me are great pals, don’t you know. He’s a real thoroughbred.” She snapped her fingers. “And don’t you know he’d tear out your throat just like that! Like that!” She snapped her fingers again.
“Get. Him. Off my. Desk.”
“How much did you say the room rate was? For one night? I don’t like it here. It’s dirty and it isn’t very safe. Do you think people stay here because they want to?”
The clerk had both his hands clutching the desk. Nop stayed at the ready and his eyes blazed like fire opals.
She ignored the clerk’s silence. “I suppose it’ll be twelve dollars for one night. My, you do get a pretty penny. Twelve dollars from one hundred twenty-eight dollars and fifty cents leaves me one hundred sixteen dollars and fifty cents.”
His hand groped through the cash drawer. His eyes never left the dog. The dog was actually drooling. Drooling with lust to kill. “Please,” he said.
“One sixteen fifty,” she said, as merciless as she was proud.
His fingers found the correct bills and laid them down beside that damn animal’s feet, that damn thing that never moved, just drooled and glared. She took quite a long time to count the money and then, recount it. She endorsed with a flourish. “My full name is Mrs. Jack Cunningham,” she said. “I am known to my friends as Susanna. You may call me Mrs. Cunningham. My key?”
Room 228, second floor rear. Since it was a simple skeleton key, likely the key fit other doors and other keys fit the lock of this room.
The iron army cot had a mattress pad, one sheet and a pair of skimpy blankets. Blue light filtered through the frosted windowpanes. A gunmetal wall locker, a sink, a kitchen chair, its yellow seat pad mended with gray tape. No mirror. Susanna was disappointed. Some of the rooms had a mirror.
Nop sniffed carbolic, vomit, feces, urine, fear. Fear from the night sweats, fear from D.T.s. Fear of cells. Fear of rape. Fear of loneliness. Death fear.
He was still nervy from facing the desk clerk and the smells were so strong they made him sneeze and sneeze again.
“Next time,” Susanna muttered. “Next time we’ll get one with a mirror.”
Nop’s hackles stayed up. They just wouldn’t come down. He growled once, very softly, and dribbled a bit of urine on the doorframe, to make the room his.
“Now look what you’ve done,” she said. She smiled. “Well, I suppose dog pee isn’t the worst thing been spilled between these walls.”
A shout in the hall. Some drunk screaming and another man yelling at him to shut up, shut his face.
The bathrooms were in the halls. Between certain hours they were dangerous.
Nine days ago her check ran out and she hadn’t lain in a bed since then. She longed for the narrow cot, but decided to go out again. She had an animal to feed.
She too
k only one shopping bag, the one with her envelope and money. Usually she was afraid to leave her possessions in the room, but today she felt rather devil-may-care. On the street, in her best dress, she looked just like every woman except for her broken shoes.
She marched right into the Greco-American Deli, as if she had every right. The waitress asked her to sit in back but she parked beside the door. “I got my dog fastened up out there,” she said. “I got to keep an eye on him.”
She had the hamburger steak (medium) and the tomato soup (bowl, not a cup) and a big piece of lemon meringue pie. All that food made her nauseous but she still managed to choke down the coffee that came with the meal (double cream, double sugar) because who knows what tomorrow will bring? She had them fry up a burger pattie. “It’s for my dog. If you come over here, you can see him. He’s a thoroughbred dog.”
The waitress went to the window. “That black-and-white thing?”
“That’s him.”
“I’d never keep a dog in the city. It’s cruel. I got cats.”
“Well, he’s good protection. A woman alone.”
“Here’s your burger. It’s only sixty-five cents on account of it’s plain.”
“Thank you.” And Susanna left a twenty-five-cent tip beside her water glass, just like every woman might.
Sitting on the curb, she broke the burger into bits and fed it to Nop. When Nop had gobbled every piece, she let him lick her palm clean and actually laughed when his rough tongue tickled. She laughed. Think of that.
Though Nop had passed through cities, going to and from trials, he’d never stayed overnight in one. The noises. The smells. Long after the woman fell into an exhausted slumber, he paced the room from locker to sink, cot to door. With a thump, he’d lie down, but with every siren or outcry from the bowels of the hotel, he’d be up and pacing again.
Border Collies learn well. They are able to think on their own. Now, Nop didn’t know what to think. His world had been Lewis, the farm, the woolies and Lewis’s family. Occasionally, as a great adventure, he’d travel to a stockdog trial, but his life was fairly well ordered and quite predictable and he’d created his understanding from that order.