Blue Collar Dogs

I live in a blue collar neighborhood with blue collar dogs. I say this with no admiration, for the neighborhood or the dogs. It’s a red brick neighborhood, a front stoop neighborhood of bare lawns and low roofs. Trash in this neighborhood is dropped over the back fence. You find bottles and shoes and flattened cans in those weeds, bald tires, broken toys, oil filters, shells of toaster ovens and stereos, piles of cinder blocks and shingles, a smashed stroller, a rain soaked mattress... The life of the neighborhood can be read in that alley. Up and down the block, pit bulls and rottweilers bark wildly, chained to trees, running bare circles in the grass. On hot days the air is ripe with dog shit and death. To tell the truth this place scares me.

Reese, my immediate neighbor, is a black man; I’m white. This is a factor, unfortunately. It’s not the issue, but it’s a factor. How can it not be in a country like this? He and another guy lift weights in his garage. After an hour of grunts and encouragements and the thud and clanking of iron disks they emerge into the hot sun, overinflated, to tussle with the dogs. Two rottweilers, two sweating men, happy with their sausage arms and broad, heavy tits. The ground shakes as I wait at the fence. The friend pulls Alii in a circle, clamped to the end of a thick tug rope. He circles close to Reese and I hear, “It’s the poodle guy.”

Reese looks my way and lifts his chin, as if smelling trouble in the air.

“How ya doin?” I say, adopting the tone. Even now I adopt the tone, trying to get along.

He answers with a grunt and a slight tilt of the head. His friend straightens up beside him, releasing the dog, who worries the rope, kicking up dust. They are like animals, presenting themselves to be feared.

“I’m putting up a new fence on Saturday. I wonder if you could keep the dogs inside for a while.” My right hand rests on the old fence, rusted wire, ruptured in a dozen places and patched with plywood, oven grates, and zip cord. Reese stares at me as if he doesn’t understand. He places his hands on his hips and exhales through his cheeks.

“That’s not gonna happen,” he says. “Not this weekend.”

* * *

I came to this neighborhood with the typical liberal’s illusion about “the workers.” Namely, that I was one of them. So I joke with my friends. I call it my Grand Illusion. I’m a forty-five-year-old print salesman, I read books and follow world events, I quit eating beef and pork because I don’t like the way they treat the animals, and I own a silver standard poodle named Tristan. OK, I don’t punch a time clock, but my father was a steel worker, a union man, and I never lost my respect for the workers. On a deeper level I’m one of them. A Solidarity banner hangs in the hall, and my workshop is full of tools that I know how to use. Carol says I’ll never be a worker, no matter how much I putter around in the basement.

Our first weekend in the house I’m out back pruning away dead oleander when Reese introduces himself, reaching over the fence to shake hands.

“You’re missing a good game,” he says.

“What game is that?” I ask, wiping sweat from my glasses.

His head jerks back a bit, surprised. “Cowboys, man. Forty-Niners.”

I recognize the names. Football. “Who’s winning?” I ask.

“Forty-Niners by two at the half. Thirty, twenty-eight.”

“Close.” I nod, as if imagining a field goal or a touchdown, a hard tackle or a flubbed pass. But I’m not imagining these things, not really, I’m faking it so this big black man might see in my expression the common bond of the worker, something that transcends race. I’m trying to build a bridge between us, trying without words to say, We’re not so different, you and I.

But it’s a shaky bridge, this deception, and I feel myself slipping between the boards. One minute I’m nodding convincingly, the next my guts drop and I meet my neighbor’s eyes with what he must recognize as fear. He surely sees me for exactly what I am, a little white man in khaki shorts, skin like a milk glaze over my bones. I foolishly hook the pruning shears around a branch that is too thick and momentarily hang from the bush like a frustrated insect.

The screen door bangs and Tristan saunters into the yard. “Hey, look at that!” Reese says.

I unhook myself. “That’s Tristan,” I say.

“I saw her out here yesterday...what the hell kinda dog is she?”

“He. He’s a poodle.”

“Jesus, she’s big. How old is she?”

“He’s about two and a half.”

Reese reaches down. “Come here, girl, come on!” Tristan picks up a ball and strolls over. “Look at that, she’s got her ball.” He’s doing it on purpose, this she business. “Do you breed her?” he asks.

“He’s a neutered male.”

“Male? Damn! I wouldn’t let him walk down that alley alone if I was you, with an ass like that!” He laughs a hearty, young laugh. “Old Corkey might get some ideas, you know what I mean?”

“Hey,” I say, taking his lead, echoing his inflections, “I wouldn’t let Mike Tyson walk down that alley alone.”

“Sheeit. He walk wherever he want.”

There’s tension flowing over that fence, I can feel it. There’s disparagement and mockery in that voice. People always comment on the dog, that’s all right. Sometimes there are jokes, good-natured jibes, but in Reese’s false friendly manner lies a grain of hostility.

I hang up the pruners and narrow my eyes toward the fence. Reese has gone back to his game. “It’s all right, Tristan,” I say, carefully wiping his feet. “He’s just jealous.” I often talk to Tristan this way, and I think he understands me, at least the tones and some of the words.

“I see you met one of our neighbors,” Carol says without looking up from her computer.

“He kept referring to Tristan as she.”

“That gets old.”

Generally, Carol doesn’t encourage me on animal issues. She thinks I’m soft, she thinks I get hysterical, so she holds back. She keeps the dog-talk to a minimum.

“Come on, Tristan,” I say, “Let’s go see what the mailman brought.”

* * *

The park down the street is large and green, rolling at one end, with a small creek. On weekday mornings we have it to ourselves, weekends we run into picnickers and league teams. In the shade of the trees beyond the diamonds I unleash Tristan and he prances—there’s no other word for it—head up like a thoroughbred.

A group of young men loll at a picnic table, laughing aggressively, trading insults and challenges. At our approach they stop talking, their heads turn. Some I recognize from the neighborhood. Some have seen Tristan before, some haven’t. Word, I imagine, has gotten around. They lean forward from their perch on the edge of the table, they step aside and stand motionless.

Ignoring an impulse to angle off casually, I say, “How ya doin?” adopting the tone. They don’t hear me. They hang forward, like birds hanging in the wind. Tristan glides toward them. They smile—inward, private smiles. Something is not right here, but I don’t want to be a white middle-aged coward. I want to get on in this neighborhood, I want someone to say “Beautiful dog,” or simply ask, “Is that a poodle?”

They don’t ask. One of the boys shifts sideways and a pit bull springs roaring from beneath the picnic table.

My own reflexes are inadequate, dulled, perhaps, by white middle age. My arm raises slightly, fingers flaring, my mouth opens, my heart contracts. To protect my dog I would fling myself upon the pit bull, but the signal doesn’t reach my legs. Hobbled by these feeble responses I watch Tristan, graceful even in extremis, jump nimbly aside as the animal hits the end of its chain and falls wallowing to the ground. The boys laugh. “He almost had a poodle for lunch! Ha, ha, ha!”

No real harm done. I smooth my jangled stride and smile to show that I appreciate the humor of the situation, but in truth the joke is on their poor dog, enslaved by his vicious temperament, doomed to be always chained up or fenced in. A trip to the park is simply a different chain, a different post. I blame the fathers for this, for the dogs and for the sons.

* * *

“Tristan up,” I say, coaxing Tristan onto the bed. “These people think of dogs as weapons.” The words give me pause. We’re here less than a month and already our neighbors are “these people.”

“Tristan down,” Carol says, commanding him to lie next to her. He rolls over and exposes his stomach.

I haul the covers from under him and adjust the pillows behind my back. “It wasn’t neutered,” I say.

“Of course not. They want their dogs as ballsy as possible.”

I open my book, but continue thinking about “these people.” These fathers who think and act like sixteen-year-olds, who want their dogs as ballsy as possible because testosterone, to them, is as precious as gold. I hold that thought for a moment and then wonder, Why do I measure it against gold? Are mine the corrupted values? Maybe testosterone is all the working man has in this life. I try to think of my own working class father, who carried a baseball bat on the picket line in ’58, who came home hoarse and bloody and smiling, but the image is hopelessly mixed up with that of the reticent old man I see at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I stroke Tristan’s top knot and say, “How many dogs on this block are sleeping on their owner’s beds tonight?”

“Well...probably one.”

One. The one belonging to the man who prefers gold to testosterone. The rest dig cold holes for themselves alongside a fence or a walk. The rest are not neutered and not up on their shots, and they probably never get a bath unless they happen to roll in their own excrement. My values, I think, are OK.

“It doesn’t prove anything,” Carol says. “Coco slept in a doghouse.”

“Coco also got left behind when your parents moved to Tampa.”

“Their condo didn’t allow pets.”

“I wouldn’t move anywhere without Tristan.”

“So what does that mean, you’re better than my parents?”

“Would you?”

“Of course not.” Her hand lies affectionately on Tristan’s neck, proof that she is not her parents, that the generations do sometimes advance. “I might be persuaded to leave you behind,” she says.

* * *

I’m up under the eves scraping paint when Reese brings home the first dog. His wife Evette goes to greet him at the curb, and what from a distance looks to be an adult rottweiler leaps from the back seat and grovels at their feet, rump down, wagging its way around the yard.

Carol is working on the first-floor windows. I stand beneath her, cleaning my scrapers. “Guess what the neighbors just brought home,” I say, keeping my voice down. “A rottweiler.”

“Oh,” she says, “your favorite dog.” That’s all she says. She doesn’t want to encourage, but I know she’s thinking the same thing I’m thinking.

Ask anyone who owned rottweilers ten years ago and they will tell you: rottweilers have been ruined as a breed. They once stood upright, large and heavy like something cut from rosewood and ebony. They were cattle dogs. Strong and loyal working dogs. Sweet-tempered dogs. How different from the rotts you see around here, stooped under the weight of chains and spikes and poor breeding. Drooping and drooling and growling and biting.

Reese’s dog is a lanky mixed-breed female named Aloha. Since I know something about dogs I take the opportunity to be neighborly. We haven’t talked much since that first meeting, but I want to get a closer look at the dog. I feel her ribs and look her over. “Part rottweiler,” I say, trying to sound appreciative.

“Pure rottweiler,” he says. “Registered A-K-C.”

“Really?” I rub behind her ears and check the shape of her skull. It’s too pointed. The body’s all wrong. “She’s got papers?”

“Course she’s got papers, what do ya think?”

“It’s just her conformation...”

“Hey, man, you bring that poodle of yours over here and you’ll see some confirmation. You’ll see confirmation comin out its ass.”

I let the comment pass and decide I like Reese’s kind more in theory, from a distance. The working man. I don’t like him living next door with a rottweiler, or anything resembling a rottweiler. My friends have labs and shepherds and greyhounds and boxers and none of them ever said “you’ll see confirmation comin out its ass.”

Before the week is out Reese has a second dog, a large male he names Alii. A true rottweiler—although, like Aloha, it is untrained, possibly not even housebroken. With this pair Reese hopes to produce a fortune in rottweiler pups.

* * *

There’s trouble from the start: nightly rounds of yelping and crying, the snap of leather and gruff commands. I accept it, the same way I accept the graffiti on the back of the garage and the impatient honking at five in the morning, as an unalterable part of the blue-collar landscape. I don’t like it but it’s there. Carol is grumbling. After several difficult nights she can’t bear it any longer. She leans into the dark screen and yells, “Stop it! Stop beating those dogs!”

The evening is hot and thick. I push the sheets down and stretch out across the bed. My wife is yelling out the window. She has never done this before, but before we lived among green carpet lawns and sweep-around driveways. You don’t yell out the window in that kind of neighborhood. You place a call, a polite call, you don’t even mention the problem except in oblique terms. “I heard your dogs crying and I wondered if everything was all right.” Everyone wants everything to be all right. The problem will disappear, because in that kind of neighborhood people understand subtlety.

“You’re yelling,” I say, wanting only to go back to sleep.

“When in Rome...” she says, humorlessly.

After a few minutes the beatings resume. “Go talk to him,” she says, “you’re the animal lover.”

“You’re the one who can’t sleep.”

“He’s beating them!”

What can I say? I’m too tired to go into the blue-collar landscape thing. Maybe I’m not such an animal lover. “We don’t belong here,” I say.

“What? Now’s a fine time to figure that out.”

“Tristan doesn’t like it here. No suitable playmates.”

A series of sharp yelps halts our conversation. The dogs seem to be taking her side. “Why don’t we just call the police,” I say, looking for my pants. I dress slowly, hoping the crisis will pass by the time I get to my shoes.

Outside, black kids are playing stick ball under the street lights. Good kids, they say hi, shyly, when I walk Tristan. They still talk about school with affection, say please and thank you. If only they would stay kids and not grow up to be their fathers and mothers. If only they were taken off by rich uncles and raised for the Black Ivy League, where they don’t buy guns and they don’t buy rottweilers or pit bulls and they think a great dog is a golden retriever.

I knock. At the sound of impatient footsteps I breathe deeply. My only strategy is to be civil, but where does that get you in such a neighborhood as this, a neighborhood of big obscene gestures, of vein-popping curses, of shoving and slapping and hitting? The list of options in neighborhoods like this starts with anger and skips right to violence. Civility is not on the list. You can’t talk calmly to someone about their dogs. They’ll say, “I’ve raised plenty of dogs in my life.” They’ll slam the door in your face.

* * *

After a few weeks of abuse, the dogs emerge for their inaugural walk around the block. I leave off painting baseboards and peer up over the window sill. Dogs and dog owner are tangled together, trying to get out the front door, the dogs in brand new studded harnesses with full breast plates and Reese in black leather half-gloves, also with studs. In their eagerness for some type of freedom the dogs twist Reese around and nearly pull him off the steps. He jerks them straight, trying to maintain some semblance of cool, and attempts to hold them in check as they bulldoze their way out to the sidewalk.

“What are you laughing at?” Carol asks, behind me at the window.

“Shhhh,” I say, and then inspired to cleverness: “He’s taking the rototillers for a walk.”

“The what?” she says.

“The rottweilers,” I say, “the rottweilers!” annoyed that she didn’t get the joke. Some jokes you have to get the first time or it’s useless.

Reese marches down the sidewalk, flanked by his gasping dogs. This is his little military parade—the warlord and his flesh-ripping wolves. How juvenile this show of force! How pathetic this grown man with studded gloves! In any normal neighborhood he would be laughed at, but here... Here this Circus Maximus get-up works, here flesh ripping is highly regarded. I imagine his neighbors—whose own rotts and pits howl boisterously—holed up in their houses, cracking the curtains and cursing under their breath. Only the children are out, awestruck, shouting dares and pulling back, they who will give excited accounts at the dinner table, unaware that Reese’s finely arrayed animals are of the same class as the galled and mangy beasts their fathers keep chained in their own back yards.

* * *

Why do I hate these dogs so? One day in my narrow driveway I consider the question. I lean on a lug wrench, my face pressed into the side of my truck as Reese’s rottweilers hurl themselves against the fence, and I consider the question. I think it over as best I can while being bombarded by noise and saliva. It’s not the dogs, I tell myself, it’s the owner. Reese and I haven’t spoken in three months. When we pass each other we find something else to look at. The humane society has been out a few times—at our request—but they never find anything wrong with the way he treats his dogs. “Guard training,” that’s his term for it.

The barking is hot on my neck, saliva hangs from the wire. I stand up and shout, “No!” but it only increases their frenzy. They swarm the fence like angry bees, rising higher and higher. The fence itself sags and squeaks like an old, dripping bedspring.

A door opens and Reese yells, “Aloha! Alii! Get in here!” The two dogs scamper past him into the kitchen and he pulls the door closed, barely glancing in my direction. I realize that I’m bent backward over the hood of my truck. I straighten myself out, humiliated. The owner’s the one you really want to kill.

* * *

After his Saturday bath Tristan lounges in the grass with a beef knuckle between his paws while I read a book on canine genetics. He has learned to ignore the two rottweilers running the length of the fence. He chews with eyes closed, lost in some sort of animal paradise. I don’t deny him this paradise, though I don’t eat meat myself. It’s biological, a part of his animal nature that can’t be altered by domestication. The rottweilers drum up and down the line, barking. The book is unintelligible. I want Reese to get out here and silence his dogs, but he never does. Then the barking abruptly stops and I look up to see Tristan on his feet. Alii, the big male, is coming through the fence. It’s almost like a birth the way he pops through and then simply stands, awestruck by the wonders of this new world. Tristan is nose to nose with him, tail straight up like a battle flag. I run, upending the lawn chair, calling for Carol, and at the same time thinking maybe he’s friendly after all. Before I reach them Tristan attacks.

This is normal. Two dogs, territory. Tristan attacks only when he senses hostility—and in truth I trust his judgment more than most people’s. I pull them apart by their collars. They separate easily, and I think that might be the end of it, but the bitch Aloha shoots through the fence and lights into Tristan’s haunch. Alii wrenches away, pulling me to my knees, and grabs Tristan’s shoulder. Held at both ends like this Tristan goes down, no longer rival but prey. I grab Alii again and Carol appears swinging a broom.

“The back door!” I yell, and we manage to move the fight across the yard and pull Tristan into the house. Aloha darts in after him, but I catch her hind leg and drag her down the steps. Before she can turn on me, Reese calls his dogs back to their own yard. On the way out one of them picks up Tristan’s knuckle bone.

I go to the fence, staggered by rushing adrenaline. “Your dogs,” I say, panting, “just attacked my dog.” My muscles are tight, causing my arms to float away from my sides. They threaten to take me off with them, into space. My chest feels big and my feet jab the ground. I want to pull myself together. Down. I don’t want to start anything that would draw me into physical combat with Reese. I don’t want to get hurt. I have to be smart, he has to see that I’m right.

Carol comes marching across the grass. “Keep your God-damned dogs out of our yard!”

Reese turns away, shaking his head. He too is sensitive to male conflict, but by this time Evette is at his side, yelling. “If you’d fix that fence our dogs wouldn’t get into your yard!”

“It’s your responsibility,” I say, suddenly sounding official, “to keep your dogs out of our yard whether we have a fence or not.” I’m still puffing, but I’ve made a point of logic, or law, or something like law. Irrefutable. They turn and go into their house, Reese mumbling something to his wife that I can’t make out. I can make out three words: “fucking asshole” and “poodle.”

The attack has left Tristan with a gash in his flank that takes three stitches to close. I demand that the vet send the bill to Reese, but Carol pulls me aside and says, “Let’s just consider this a lesson, OK?”

I know the hair over the scar will come in black, marring Tristan’s otherwise perfect silver coat, but I acquiesce. He is, after all, a pet, not a show dog. Reese would never pay the bill anyway and my credit would be ruined. We decide instead to build the wall.

It’s a mistake to tell Reese our plans so soon after the attack. Especially in front of his friend. All he can say is, “That’s not gonna happen.” I don’t reply. I walk back into the house and place an order for the fence.

* * *

Reese wears dark glasses now when he walks the dogs, he wears a red nylon warm-up suit. He has lost the gloves and spikes, the harnesses are too much trouble and he no longer needs them anyway. He saunters along with a studied air of debauched virility, the dogs in perfect lockstep at his sides. I look and don’t look, trying to time my steps to avoid him, but he’s also timing his steps and he catches me halfway between the truck and the house. The dogs sit flanking him, straight ahead like praetorian guards. They don’t recognize me as the one they previously tried to annihilate. They don’t recognize my existence.

“Hey, man,” Reese says. “I hope you can appreciate the situation. We’ve been planning this trip for weeks.”

My arms are full of groceries. I don’t want to talk, I want to get the ice cream into the freezer before it melts. It’s my own fence in my own yard, I don’t see why I have to accommodate him and his dogs. I’ll do exactly what I want, and if the dogs try anything I’ll deal with it. That’s how I feel, but with the ice cream and everything I just say, “OK, don’t worry about it.” My compromise is to do as much of the fence as I can without tearing out the old section between our yards. I’ll finish the job sometime after he returns.

* * *

I sit in the deepening night with Tristan, throwing the ball. The redwood fence is up on three sides. Along the fourth side, the broken and rusted wire side, Aloha runs her path, barking. Her master’s voice. This is what a guard dog does: it barks at the neighbors. Alii, inside the house, is quiet now. Earlier we heard something fall and shatter. You don’t leave a dog like that locked up inside for the weekend. Where does it shit, for one thing? As far as I know nobody has been around to let it out.

I resent having to wait to finish the fence. It could be done by now and I wouldn’t need this crowbar propped against my chair. This is what they understand in working class neighborhoods. Crowbars, bats, knives, guns. The law is an artificial thing, it means nothing until the police show up. Until then there’s only force and the threat of force.

Tristan is fearful. He won’t retrieve the ball when it rolls near the fence. I walk over and kick it out into the yard. Not two feet away Aloha snaps wildly at my legs. I’m not afraid, I have the crowbar in my hand. I stamp my foot and she redoubles her snarling and snapping. This is the working man’s idea of security: a vicious dog loose in the back yard. It could break through this piece of plywood and seriously injure a child or another animal. Then everyone would be sorry, but then it would be too late. That’s the problem in this neighborhood, people don’t think things through. They don’t see what could happen.

I knock the plywood away from the fence and step back. At first the dog does nothing, so I growl and stamp at the opening. She responds to my foot and charges. If she got through clean she would surely be too fast for me, but her hind quarters catch in the wire and slow her down. The crowbar flies in a two-handed arc over my head, pulling me nearly off my feet. It strikes her above the eye, driving her to the ground with a clipped yelp. I hoist the bar again, but she makes no move to get up. Her front legs jitter briefly, dreamlike, then she is still.

I am surprised, standing over this dog, the crowbar humming in my grip, surprised at how easily defeated she was, at how quickly my moment of triumph fades away in the darkness. I nudge her with my foot. An aching weakness floods into my veins. I look around—hearing cars in the distance, a television newsman, crickets—until I am sure nobody has seen me. Not even my wife, who folds laundry in the light of the utility room. The night is warm. For five minutes I let the dog lie while I try to decide what to do. Tristan sniffs at the body, then stands looking around for a moment before drifting back to his ball.

I back the pickup into the drive and put Tristan in the front seat. He sits upright, the long hair on his ears curling to his shoulders. From the back he looks like a teenage girl, he always has. People sometimes pull up beside us on the street and do double-takes. I don’t mind it at all, in fact I enjoy it. I like the looks of surprise, then the smiles and waves. Grabbing bunches of skin at Aloha’s neck and back, I pull her through the fence and drag her to the truck. She isn’t rigid like I expect her to be, she is completely flaccid inside her loose skin. Her tongue trails along in the dirt like a slug.

* * *

Reese and Evette get home Sunday night during “60 Minutes.” It’s about a health care scandal, but I loose the thread. Images flicker and jump on the tube without meaning as my mind follows Reese into his house, where he drops his bags and yells at Alii, then around the house—with more exclamations—and out back where he discovers Aloha missing. It takes him a few more minutes to spot the hole in the fence, which I haven’t covered, and make his way to my house.

I get up before he knocks.

“What’s the matter?” Carol says.

“We’ve got company,” I say. Then he knocks.

I’m determined to stand up to Reese. I can’t play dumb, that’s why I left the plywood off the hole. I have to acknowledge at least partial culpability, yet there’s retaliation against Tristan to worry about. “Yes,” I will say, “Aloha broke through the fence again. I tried to chase her into your yard but she ran out the back gate. Last I saw of her she was headed down the alley.”

Reese is more subdued than I expected, less accusatory. He must be tired from driving. The house is probably a disaster. He accepts my story and goes away. All he says is, “If you see her can you grab her for me? She’ll come if you call her.”

I feel sorry for Reese, and it isn’t all guilt. An odd balance has been struck, I no longer hate this man. I tell him I will keep my eyes open, and he thanks me. As he walks away a flush of sympathy washes over me, almost love, and for the first time in my life I understand the value and utility of revenge. When I turn from the door, Carol is waiting.

“What was that all about?”

“One of his dogs got loose.”

“Good, I hope it never comes back.”

“I don’t think it will.”

* * *

I’ve been watching Reese for the last week. I try to place myself on the porch around six, when he gets home, and watch from behind the newspaper. Today he seems weary, going up the walk. In his hand he holds what looks like a collar. I think it’s Aloha’s collar. Some good soul must have found her out on Hibbard road. I tried to make it look like she’d been hit by a car. Now Reese has to break the news to Evette. How will she take it? Reese told me once that Aloha was her first dog, so perhaps she’ll take it bad. She’ll be hurt, perhaps, I don’t know. I remember my own first dog, a Doberman my father brought home when I was a kid. The dog died young. I came home from school and it was gone. We were working class then, it was a working class dog. I don’t remember crying, we just went on with our lives.

After five minutes Evette appears in the yard with Alii. She tosses a ball for him, underhanded, as if he were still a puppy. He looks at her, not knowing what to do. I don’t think fetch is in his repertoire. She kneels and hugs him and I notice Reese standing on the stoop. He wipes his eyes with the palm of his hand, the way a big man does who sees pain as an adversary. He helps Evette to her feet and they hug with such intimacy I have to lower my eyes. I try to focus on the newspaper but it’s a blur. I listen as they get into their truck and drive away, perhaps to visit a makeshift country grave and thank some farmer for his kindness. I listen until the rumble of the truck merges with the other neighborhood noises. Tristan climbs up next to me on the love seat. I find my reading glasses and return to the newspaper, but I can’t concentrate on news. Tristan is warm beside me. We’ve had him for three years and he’s like a child to us. Not many people would let their dog curl up on the furniture. Not in this neighborhood.