The Dogs of Littlefield

by Suzanne Berne

  Julia stumbled across the footbridge, half running, half limping toward the mouth of the woods, tall grass whipping her bare calves. Her throat ached from calling, ‘Nicholas, Nicholas,’ her breath coming in gasps; she had a stitch in her side and she couldn’t stop picturing her mother staring at the clock that afternoon.

  Two trails stretched before her. She hesitated and then plunged off to the right, running along the trail past a tree trunk split in half and a gray boulder that resembled a sleeping baby elephant. She had never been in the woods by herself before. Branches and leaves closed above her so that it was like running into a green tunnel. Left she turned, then right; she was running hard, covering a lot of ground – but there again was the tree with the split trunk and the elephant boulder. How had that happened? But she had no time to think; she kept running, taking a different path this time, one marked by a blue blaze on a tree. More trees, more branches overhead, the world a soft green blur. She heard the sound of someone else’s footsteps and realized Nicholas must be just ahead; but no, it was only the drumming of her heart. How could she have run so far and not found him? After a few minutes she saw the split trunk once more and the elephant boulder, and now she no longer had any clear idea of where she was running to, or even why she was running, only that she must keep on, and as she was running a branch hit her in the face and once more the elephant and something she had refused to think about was suddenly, sickeningly right there. Her mother asleep on the sofa, face white and sunken. Her father’s sad grimacing. ‘I can’t hold on much longer.’ Her mother’s voice, on the phone to Hannah’s mother two nights ago. ‘Dr Vogel says we’ll have to tell Julia soon –’ Then she broke off. ‘Julia, is that you?’

  Hardly eating dinner. Headaches. Collapsing at Christmas (‘Just tired,’ her father had said, looking away). I love you. No matter what. I want you always to remember …

  Three children in the woods. No one knows where they are, and at this point neither do they, so perhaps their location should be clarified, if only for the inattentive universe. The meadow of Baldwin Park (now empty) leads to the wooden footbridge over the creek and then stops at the woods, where after a short distance two trails fork in opposite directions: Matthew and Nicholas both followed the one to the left and have wound up together in a small clearing fifty feet off the trail. The woods are full of brushy white pines and an understory of scrub oak. Matthew and Nicholas are quite hidden. Even loud sounds become muffled in such a dense place, though creaks and rustles seem amplified wherever one is standing. As for Julia, she took the other trail, which is really a loop, something she did not know, and she is running in circles.

  But where is Binx?

  Another growl, this time closer. A footfall in the dry leaves. ‘Get up on the rock, dude.’ Matthew seized the kid and boosted him up, a hand on the seat of his shorts, realizing too late that the kid’s shorts were wet.

  A shrill chorus started up: icky Nicky, icky Nicky.

  ‘Hey, Nicky.’ He tried to make his voice sound camp counselorish. ‘Stay up there, okay?’

  The kid crawled to the top of the rock and then turned to stare down at him, eyes dark and round in his little white face.

  ‘Okay? Don’t move.’

  He wiped his damp hand on his jeans, heart beginning to hammer as he bent down to pick up a stick lying near his feet, but he was still stoned enough to think, This is pretty cool. Like, there’s something OUT there, when another twig snapped.

  Never, ever go into the woods alone, her mother used to say every time they visited the park when she was little. You could get lost and no one would hear you.

  No farther than the bridge. Promise me.

  Whenever they went to the park, Julia thought about the woods where you could get lost and no one would hear you. In fairy tales, you had to do the thing you were not supposed to do. Bite the apple. Drink from the well.

  Once when her mother was talking to another mother, she had run across the little bridge. Stood at the mouth of the trail, looking in at the cool, imperturbable stones, the fan-like green ferns and dark tree trunks rising from quiet brown heaps of dead leaves. What a relief it would be to go into the woods and get it over with. To find out what happened when nobody could hear you. She’d imagined a cave, vines, a pool of black water. Rising from the pool, a white beckoning hand. But then her mother had snatched her up, scolding, and carried her back to the park.

  Julia stopped running and slid her hands to her knees, gasping for breath. High above branches of leaves and pine needles the sky was still as blue as a circus balloon, but in the woods it was beginning to get dark.

  Head hanging low, ears back, haunches rising and falling, the creature stepped darkly into the little clearing, drawing some of the shade of the woods with it. Matthew stared; all the stories he’d ever heard about coyotes in the woods sprang at him. But this was no coyote. It could not be categorized, even down to its color. Wet coal? It kept its tail down, its mouth gaped open. Foam collected at the corners of its wide jaws, dripping greenish slime.

  And though Matthew realized he was stoned, and that he was seeing what he was seeing because he was stoned, he knew this only distantly, like something written on a blackboard for him to memorize.

  The creature stopped and slowly began moving its heavy slick head back and forth, so that for a moment in the uncertain light of the woods it seemed to have three of them. And then he smelled it, rank and rotten, like waterlogged dead things at the bottom of a well.

  Stoned or not, he knew what he was facing – something terrible, something old and terrible – and though Matthew also understood that he would never be able to defeat it, that it was too powerful, too basic, too faithful to its own dark instincts, he realized that it had been conferred upon him to try.

  He waved the stick in his hand, swish, swish, like a sword.

  The creature bared its teeth. Black gums. White fangs. Yellowish eyes.

  Its big muscles quivered. And then it growled. Deep and low in its chest.

  He waved the stick again.

  ‘Scat?’ he said.

  And the thing leapt.

  A child’s faraway scream.

  Then nothing.

  Julia stayed where she was, standing on the trail in the middle of the woods. As long as she stood there, as long as she didn’t move in any direction, she could stay just as she was, not knowing anything, not responsible for anything, just a girl lost in the woods.

  Eventually she stepped off the trail and sat down on an old rotting log covered with bright green moss. She breathed in the soft, dry scent of decomposing leaves; the log, when she looked at it, was lively with charcoal-colored armored bugs crawling in and out of holes. Everywhere she heard cracklings, like a hidden fire, secret stirrings beneath old leaves, all the way into the clayey soil down to the roots, which she understood to be stirring, too, sending hair-like feelers toward the surface of the earth. The world was full of live and dead things. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you? she used to ask her mother. And then one day not long ago she asked her father and he told her.

  ‘Did you bury them?’ she’d asked.

  Her father had looked confused for a moment and then said something about building the waterfall by the pool, a kind of memorial.

  It came back to her now, this conversation, and as it did she knew at last what her mother was seeing when she stared out of the kitchen windows. This realization reached Julia numbly, as if she were standing on the ice once again, cold air rising up in drafts. She was not all that her mother had ever loved or worried about.

  I will never forgive her, she thought, surprising herself because she knew this was true.

  Voices called out. Shadows moved in and out of the trees. The sun shifted overhead and a patch of whiteness shone beside her, a kind of neutral blankness that was nevertheless calming. She had been shivering; now the coldness let her go. But for a long time Julia continued to stay as she was, sitting on the log, fingers of sunlight r
eaching toward her through silvery pine needles. And though she did not notice, when she got up at last and walked back to the trail, the patch of whiteness followed her, all the way out of the woods.

  20.

  It could have been a lot worse, Naomi told Clarice Watkins over a glass of wine at the Tavern, though it was bad enough. Matthew bitten three times on the arm and once on the leg. Eighteen stitches. The animal had to be destroyed, of course. Sent to a farm, they told the girl, to look after sheep, but she wasn’t stupid. Kids always know when you’re not telling them something. Better to be truthful, no matter how bad it is.

  Clarice nodded as she listened. She had finally mastered the ‘record’ feature on her iPhone, which allowed her to relax during conversations and actually hear what people said.

  ‘I mean I love dogs, I have one, too,’ Naomi was saying. ‘But that thing wasn’t safe around children.’

  The postman testified the dog tried to bite him every time he came to the house. Even Margaret admitted it wasn’t the first time he’d gone after someone. They’d had him fixed, thinking that was why he was so aggressive, but it was just bad nature. Some dogs were like that. Out of control.

  And poor Emily. Scared to death when she realized little Nicky was lost, though he’d been fine, of course, thanks to Matthew. Naomi had seen Emily last week at Clean Up Littlefield Day, picking up trash around the trolley tracks; she looked like someone who’d been walking barefoot for miles in the snow. That brute of a husband, running off with a student. What was wrong with people? Didn’t they understand that actions had consequences? That little boy was a mess already and now –

  Naomi ordered another glass of chardonnay and talked on in a way Clarice had come to recognize: a busy woman drinking wine on an evening out, freed from kitchen tyranny and from helping with homework, enjoying the brief luxury of feeling fortunate, moved to consider all the hard luck among her friends.

  On and on she went:

  Poor Margaret especially. A lovely woman, but an absolute wreck. This last episode with Julia has pushed her right over the edge. Now she thinks she’s seeing things. One minute she’s looking at a bush, the next it’s a dog. Well, no surprise, given the monster she had right in her house. That’s what I told her. I said, Margaret, you are projecting, and it may even be helpful, a defense mechanism, given all your stress. Because the woman is barely functioning. Marriage on life support. She’s been having an affair, which I’m sure you’ve already guessed, so this isn’t news: George Wechsler. I know. I don’t see it, either. Anyway, Bill’s firm shut down, the poor man out of work and on antidepressants. About time, frankly. I suggested that months ago.

  And then Julia. One thing after another. First her stunt on the ice, then taking the boy and that crazy dog for a walk and losing them both in the woods. Comes home afterward and doesn’t say a word, with half the village out looking for her. Just goes to her room and closes the door. Probably posted the whole thing on Facebook. That YouTube video of her received almost 800,000 hits. Can you believe it? Margaret’s finally got the girl in therapy. I finagled an appointment with someone I know, a very good person. No easy thing these days, let me tell you – every child in town has some kind of anxiety disorder. I blame it on the dogs. Kids are resilient but there’s a limit.

  Sweet, though, how Matthew stuck up for little Nicky, saying he didn’t think the dog should be put down. Wrote about it in his blog. Very political. Quotes poetry. I’ll give you the link. Of course, I’m his mother, but I can’t help feeling proud. Out for a walk in the woods, just to clear his head – high school these days! so much pressure! – when he finds little Nicky sitting on a rock, all alone, bawling like a lamb. Tries to calm him down and that creature springs out of nowhere. Had to fight it off with a stick. Frankly, if there were more kids like Matthew, sacrificing themselves for others, the world wouldn’t be such an awful place. He’s taking a gap year, by the way. ‘Mom,’ he said, ‘when I go to college I want to go there to learn something.’ Isn’t that smart? But he’s very interested in the University of Chicago. Oh, that’s right, that’s where you teach. How funny. I was just saying to Stan –

  After listening to Naomi talk at the Tavern until almost eleven, Clarice was at her usual window table the next morning at the Forge Café, drinking a third cup of coffee and listening to Ahmed Bhopali in his stained white kitchen coat.

  Ahmed’s voice was wounded, intimate; he kept his mouth very small, like a man lodging a protest through a keyhole.

  The Littlefield police had been harassing him for months. Ticketed him for chaining his bicycle to a parking meter in front of the post office; cited him for jay-walking across Brooks Street; given him a warning for sitting in Baldwin Park after dusk. Treating him like a dog. All because a dark-haired man with facial hair was spotted spray-painting the front of a college test preparation office on April 16th. A person of interest.

  Ever since then, the police had been stopping anyone who met that description, including Ahmed, twelve times.

  LEASH YOUR BEAST was all over town, stenciled on banks, nail salons, the Dairy Barn, even across the front door of a yoga studio. No dogs had been poisoned since November and yet it was as if they were all going to be, at any minute. The whole village was hysterical. The Department of Public Works could no longer keep up with graffiti removal.

  Last week Ahmed decided to shave off his beard in the hope of looking less interesting; but yesterday (‘the final piece of straw’), a policeman threatened to arrest him for shoplifting as he left Walgreens with an electric razor he had tried to return. His beard was too thick for electric razor blades and had burned up the motor. Thirty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents.

  ‘I did not poison any dog,’ he said. ‘Why would I? I do not care about any dogs.’

  Clarice nodded. She had adopted her professional listening look: raised eyebrows, head tilted to the side. She had listened so much in the past nine months that her ears had become enormous. It was hard to fit them through doorways. When she lay down at night, she had to fold them, like wings, against her pillow.

  ‘But no more,’ Ahmed was saying.

  His white coat looked like a painter’s smock with its dabs of pink and brown icing, the yellow smears of batter. Ahmed’s fingers, too, looked like a painter’s fingers: long and sensitive, not very clean under the nails. He also had something of a painter’s way of looking critically around the room, displeased by its composition. At a nearby table sat a large, pale, bearded young man, wearing a green sweatshirt in spite of the heat, slumped over a cup of coffee. Ahmed glared, perhaps at the man’s beard.

  He had quit his job, he told her. Baked his final batch of doughnuts.

  ‘I will be very happy to leave this place. It is too crazy.’ Gingerly he patted his clean-shaven chin, pocked with bloody nicks.

  Clarice put a hand to her eyes to see him more clearly in the glare from the windows. The sun had risen past the rooftops of the village since she first sat down; now sunlight blazed in at an angle that made it difficult to look at anything but what was directly in front of her.

  ‘All people do here is complain about problems,’ he was saying. ‘They say they are scared about everything. But they do not realize what the real problem is. The problem is that everyone has problems. I have decided I do not want to be a lawyer and spend all my days solving people’s problems.’

  Good idea, she heard herself say.

  He stared at her. ‘I am going home to open a computer repair business with my cousin.’ A moment later, with a small formal bow, he added, ‘You are a sympathetic person. May you succeed with your endeavors.’

  After Ahmed returned to the kitchen she went back to her laptop and her notes. She was typing up her grant proposal. Dr Awolowo had proposed her for a university fellowship.

  It is my hope that this community, which might be declared by reason of its insularity, economic security and lack of significant cultural or manufacturing achievement to be of no interest, be reass
essed as providing strategic research materials that may be applied generally to questions of …

  The working title for her monograph on Littlefield was Never Enough: Toward a Sociocultural Theory of Trained Incapacity and Discontent in an American Middle-Class Village and the Effects of Global Destabilization on Conceptualizations of Good Quality of Life. She had planned the first chapter: a case study of Margaret Downing. Margaret would serve as the ‘face’ of Littlefield.

  On her steno pad, open beside her laptop, were the following handwritten notes:

  Overeducated and unemployed, M.D. is married to a latent pedophile whose investment firm is under investigation for insider trading, while she herself conducts an affair. Her adolescent daughter, J., has responded to the deviant behavior of both parents by deliberately walking onto the thin ice of a local pond – a YouTube video of which incident has been widely viewed. A few months later, she lost herself and another child in the woods, perhaps in a second attempt to gain widespread social media attention. J. is an example of today’s technology-addicted but intellectually crippled middle-class youth, depressed, overscheduled, poorly served by the public education system and by so-called ‘helicopter parents’, simultaneously overprotective and neglectful.

  M.D. herself responds to stress by turning to alcohol. At a holiday dinner party, she collapsed in front of guests and several children; over the objections of her husband, she was then carried up to her bedroom in the arms of the man who subsequently became her lover …

  Like her once pleasant village, turned into a place of suspicion and fear by a spree of dog poisonings, M.D. seems menaced by forces beyond her control …

  … her own dog turned from pet to vicious …

  … she is the embodiment, therefore, of the phenomenon of …

  Clarice frowned at her notes.

  Often she reminded herself that Galileo had made his students repeat I do not know. ‘A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing,’ she told her own students, quoting Kenneth Burke. ‘To focus on object A involves a neglect of object B.’