Dog Have Mercy

by Neil S. Plakcy

  As soon as Lili got out of the car at the grocery, Rochester tried to squirm his way between the seats to the front. At eighty-plus pounds, though, he was having trouble, and I pushed gently on his chest to reinforce that he belonged in the back. “You stay there, puppy.” I turned in my seat to face him. “Did you have a good time today? Did you like having all those people pay attention to you?”

  I already knew the answer was yes. Rochester was true to his breed – a happy dog who loved attention, was gentle with kids and was always ready to play. I had worried a bit about how he’d react to having Lili move in, when he wouldn’t be the center of my life any more. But instead, he’d been delighted to have another human around for tummy rubs and treats. Lili and I often walked him together after dinner and talked about our days as he sniffed and peed. I called Rochester my Velcro dog, because he always wanted to be around me, curled around behind my office chair or lying on the floor beside my bed. It was nice to have another person in the house he could pay attention to sometimes.

  As the time Lili was in the grocery stretched out, I took Rochester for a walk around the parking lot. It was cold and dry but he had his own fur coat, and he happily chased a squirrel up a tree, then sniffed the wheels of a couple of cars.

  When Lili finally reappeared she was pushing a cart full of groceries. “All this for Rick and Tamsen?” I asked when I met her at the car.

  “I figured as long as I was here I’d do a big shop.”

  I started loading the bags into the Beemer’s trunk, where they’d be safe from Rochester’s inquisitive nose and tongue. Though it was chilly and gray, felt happy to have Lili and Rochester there in my world.

  Once we got home and unloaded the groceries, Lili and I went into the kitchen and started to prepare dinner, and Rochester lay down flat on the kitchen tile, his front paws outstretched, his head resting between them. His eyebrows twitched as he watched me sprinkle the baking potatoes with kosher salt, then wrap them in aluminum foil.

  I gave in to the pleading in his eyes and handed him a doggie treat. I’d had to stop buying the little ones in the shape of T-bone steaks, because they were made in China, and I had read a couple of horror stories online about dogs getting poisoned. The new treats weren’t as cute, but they were made in the US with all natural ingredients. Rochester didn’t mind; he gobbled them all.

  “I have some final papers to grade,” Lili said, once the roast and potatoes were in the oven. “I’m going upstairs to try and knock them all out.”

  “This is one of those times when I don’t miss teaching.” I had taught as an adjunct at Eastern for a couple of semesters, but since becoming the administrator of the college’s Friar Lake conference center, I’d stopped. “When are grades due?”

  “Tuesday. So I have time. But I hate to let things slide until the last minute. And I’ll be busy policing the rest of the department.”

  In addition to teaching classes in photography, Lili was the chair of the fine arts department, which involved a great deal of administrative work. She went to the small bedroom we shared as an office, and I relaxed on the sofa downstairs, with Rochester sprawled on his side next to me.

  Lili had given me an early Hanukkah present, an iPad, and I was still setting it up. I’d always considered myself a PC guy and resisted Apple products, but once I’d bought my first iPhone I had gotten hooked. I wasn’t going to give up my Windows-based laptops, though – partly because the tools I used for my occasional illicit forays online were there.

  I had spent a year in a California prison for computer hacking, and only recently finished my two-year parole. Mine wasn’t a malicious crime; I had hacked into the databases of the three major credit bureaus and placed a red flag on my then-wife’s credit cards, so that she couldn’t drive us into bankruptcy in a flurry of retail therapy after suffering her second miscarriage.

  Though the state of California had tried, I hadn’t been rehabilitated, and I had continued to use my hacking skills to help Rick, though he frequently told me not to. But that summer, after he and Lili had staged an intervention, I had acknowledged that my itchy fingers and my arrogance could get me into trouble again if I wasn’t careful.

  I had joined an online support group for ex-hackers and promised that I would talk to either Lili or Rick before I tried anything stupid again. I’d only screwed up once so far, but I knew how slippery that slope was. I was sure that part of Lili’s incentive to buy me the iPad was to remove some of the temptation, because the hacking tools I had required a PC’s operating system to work.

  I played around at the Apple store for a while, looking for interesting apps I could download, and eventually the smell of the rib roast in the oven brought Lili back downstairs. I set the table with my mother’s Lenox china and the Baccarat crystal tumblers Lili had collected on duty-free shopping sprees, and by the time the food was ready, the house was glowing with candles and filled with delicious scents.

  Rochester heard Rick’s truck pull up in the driveway, and answered the joyful barks of Rick’s bristly-haired black, white and brown Australian shepherd, Rascal, with a few of his own. It was a canine cacophony that didn’t stop until both dogs were in the house, chasing each other up and down the stairs.

  Tamsen was a beautiful blonde who had also grown up in Stewart’s Crossing, but she was a few years younger than Rick and I were. She had a natural grace that made me think she might have been a fashion model at some point. She certainly had the figure for it, with a shapely bust and long legs. There was also a gravity to her, perhaps the result of losing her husband when she was young and having to raise her son Justin on her own.

  After all the kisses and handshakes, Tamsen said, “Something smells yummy.”

  “Standing rib roast with baked potatoes,” Lili said.

  “That was Kyle’s favorite,” Tamsen said. “I haven’t had it in years.” Kyle Morgan, Tamsen’s first husband, had been an Army lieutenant and had been killed in Iraq a few years before. “I’m sure it’s going to be delicious. My mouth is watering already.”

  Lili took her arm and the two of them walked into the kitchen. Rick and I went into the living room. “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “In general, or with Tamsen?”

  “Whichever.”

  “Tamsen is great. We really connect. A couple of weeks ago, before it got cold, Justin went to her sister’s for the weekend, and we went up to a country inn in the Poconos with Rascal. We hiked during the day and played pool in the evening and had a great time.”

  “And the whole Kyle thing?” I knew Rick had been reluctant to date Tamsen because he’d be competing with a dead war hero.

  “He’s a part of her life, the way Tiffany will always be a part of mine.” Tiffany was Rick’s ex, who had left him shortly before I returned to Stewart’s Crossing. “He sounds like he was a great guy, but Tamsen has made it clear he wasn’t a saint. And Justin was still so little when Kyle left for Iraq that he doesn’t remember his dad much.”

  “Okay, boys, dinner is served,” Tamsen called from the dining room, and Rick and I joined her and Lili there. The dogs were right on our heels, and settled beside us on the floor, waiting for tidbits.

  “How’s the crime beat in Stewart’s Crossing?” Lili asked Rick over salad. “Nothing new for the Hardy Boys?”

  When Rochester and I first began helping Rick, he’d referred to me as either Nancy Drew or Miss Marple, but eventually I’d graduated in his eyes to Joe Hardy, the younger of the two investigative brothers.

  “Only ordinary drama,” Rick said. “A couple of break-ins out at Crossing Estates, though we pulled in a guy for that, an ex-con with a long record for burglary. A shoplifter at the hardware store and a couple of domestic disturbances. And it looks like we’ve got a growing homelessness problem.”

  I remembered the man we’d seen outside the nursing home and realized I’d seen a few other homeless people around town.

  “The economy is taking its toll,” Rick said. “Lots
of people are upside down on their mortgages, and those layoffs in New York and Philly are reverberating here. I know a guy who used to be a greenhouse assistant at Teacups and Tulips until they had to cut back because the rich folks weren’t buying fresh flowers. Now he sleeps in the woods behind their parking lot.”

  “Hannah says that the Friends are getting involved,” Tamsen said. Hannah was her older sister, the Clerk of the Meeting in Stewart’s Crossing. “We’re going to serve dinner to the poor and the homeless on Christmas day.”

  “That’s a lovely gesture,” Lili said. “There’s a problem in Leighville, too. People gravitate there because students can be so wasteful, so the dumpsters are full.”

  “You haven’t been dumpster-diving, have you?” Rick asked.

  She shook her head. “But I’m putting together lesson plans for the course I’m teaching this winter on photojournalism, and I’m including a unit on homelessness.”

  “What does that involve?” Tamsen asked. “When I think of photojournalism I think of those pictures in the newspaper of wars and natural disasters.”

  “That’s the way things used to be,” Lili said. “But with the budget cuts in print media, that career is going the way of buggy-whip makers. Today’s photojournalists are more likely to focus on issues and use their pictures as a way of pushing social change.”

  Lili and Tamsen took away the salad plates and brought out the rib roast and potatoes. We talked more about photojournalism and life in Stewart’s Crossing as we ate, and the dogs nosed us for handouts. By the time we had demolished slices of the awesome carrot cake that Tamsen had baked, the dogs had slumped into post-beef comas and the humans were lounging in back in their chairs.

  After Rick, Rascal and Tamsen left, Lili and I took Rochester for a quick late-night walk. “Do you ever stop to think how fortunate we are?” Lili asked. “We both have our health, we have jobs, and we have a roof over our heads. So many people aren’t as lucky.” She turned her head and pretended to spit three times. “Keyn ahora.”

  I remembered my father using that same expression after mentioning anything good in our lives, an imprecation against the evil eye. “We’ve both been hit with life events,” I said. “But we’ve been resilient.”

  Lili had bounced back after two divorces and an abortion, and though I knew she still suffered from some of the things she had seen as a photojournalist, she was at heart an optimistic person. I had suffered the loss of two unborn children, the destruction of my marriage and my career in IT, as well as my year’s incarceration.

  “It’s not just the ability to be resilient,” Lili said. “Some people don’t have the emotional and financial resources we do. I read somewhere that a huge percentage of people on the streets have psychological problems.”

  “I consider myself very fortunate,” I said, taking Lili’s hand. “I had a home to come back to and a dog to teach me how to love again. And then I met you, which was the luckiest thing yet.”

  I hoped that my luck would hold, and that I wouldn’t do something to screw up my relationship with Lili. Even after less than a year together, my heart told me that what Lili and I had was so much stronger than what I’d had with Mary. Sure, Lili and I had small problems, but at heart I knew we were well-suited to each other, and she seemed to agree.

  * * *

  Sunday morning Rochester didn’t want to walk very far, which was unusual for my happy-go-lucky dog, and he seemed to be favoring his back right leg. I was attuned to his moods and I’d learned that he could be very skilled at hiding pain. When we got home, I sat down on the tile floor and pulled him over to me. “Let’s see what you’ve got going on, puppy,” I said.

  He squirmed and wiggled but I immobilized him and shifted so I could see check each of his paws. He had torn a toenail on one of his back paws, and the nail bed was red and swollen. “What did you do? I trimmed your toenails last week.”

  He looked up at me with a woeful face. We had a regular grooming routine. I cleaned his teeth every couple of days with turkey-flavored toothpaste; I groomed him with a special brush that pulled dead fur from his undercoat; I swabbed his ears with medicated pads and whenever his toenails got too long I trimmed them with an electric gadget.

  “What’s up?” Lili asked as she walked downstairs.

  “We’re going to have to go see Dr. Horz first thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “Rochester has an infected toenail.” I cleaned the wound and squeezed some antibiotic ointment onto it, and then sat on the floor scratching Rochester’s belly.

  Edith called later that day to thank us for our visit. “It was so wonderful to see you,” she said. “I admit, I get a little depressed here. Sometimes it feels like God’s waiting room, that people come here to die. My roommate, that poor Mrs. Tuttle? She passed away right after you came to see us.”

  “I’m sorry, Edith,” I said.

  “I’m sure it was her time, dear,” Edith said. “It was very sweet that she reached out to Rochester just before she died. He might have been the last being who touched her.”

  I shuddered. Rick had occasionally referred to Rochester as “the death dog,” because he had a knack for finding dead bodies, or clues in the solution of who killed them. I didn’t want to believe that he’d moved on to initiating the deaths of people who petted him.

  I chatted with Edith for a few minutes and promised to bring Rochester for another visit soon. Lili went out to take some photographs around River Bend, our townhome community, and I went up to the office. Rochester followed me, and once I was in my chair, he slumped down at my feet.

  I opened the desk drawer and pulled out the laptop I had inherited, along with Rochester, from my late next-door-neighbor Caroline Kelly. It was close to four years old, at least, and didn’t have as much power as my desktop computer, but I kept my hacking tools on it. I didn’t have any plans to break in anywhere I didn’t belong, but I did want to keep my software updated.

  The online hacker support group I had joined would have called that a red flag – simply thinking about hacking was enough to trigger an alert. But I was trying to channel my impulses to snoop in protected places—recognizing that I’d always have those urges, and that if I tried to ignore them completely I’d only get myself in trouble.

  Hackers are an elusive bunch, and the sites where people uploaded new and improved tools were always changing, so I had to keep up. As it was, several of the sites I’d bookmarked had been shut down, and I spent an hour following coded messages and encrypted links before I could find where my tribe was hiding.

  I read blogs and posts about updated port sniffers and password-breaking programs, and downloaded a couple of programs. While I waited for the last of them to come through, I remembered our conversation with Rick and Tamsen the night before, that an ex-con with a long record had been arrested for the break-ins at Crossing Estates.

  There but for the grace of God go I, I thought. I had been incredibly lucky in my online forays. I had only made one major mistake, and I had paid for that. But I had done many other things, almost all with good intentions, and hadn’t been caught.

  I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, that if I got too cocky I could end up in trouble again. And this time I had so much more to lose. Lili knew about the laptop, and my struggles to keep from hacking, but what if I got caught again? Would she see my actions as a betrayal of her trust, and be terribly hurt? Would she stand by me, or would she dump me the way Mary had?

  I had to be strong enough to resist temptation. But just updating my tools wasn’t illegal – or at least that’s what I told myself.

  Rochester sat up and sniffed me, and when my download finished I shut down the laptop and lowered myself to the floor to rub his belly.

  Rochester was a constant reminder of what was important in my life. His love and devotion had helped me climb out of the despair I had felt after I left prison, and I was determined to do everything I could to take good care of him.

&n
bsp; I checked his nail and dabbed more antibiotic cream on it, and when he dozed off I Googled as many sites as I could find about what might have happened and how I could help him heal. One site scared me – a vet blogged about a dog whose owner had ignored an infection, which had then spread to the dog’s vital organs, eventually causing its death. That was not going to happen to Rochester.

  3 – Nail Bed

  Monday morning after breakfast I kissed Lili goodbye and bundled Rochester into the car. The vet’s office was on the other side of Stewart’s Crossing and we drove through downtown to get there, beneath illuminated snowflakes hanging from light stanchions along Main Street. Storefronts were decorated with multi-colored lights, and Santa and his sleigh rested on the lawn in front of the hardware store, each reindeer wearing a tool belt.

  I parked in the vet’s lot and took Rochester for a quick pee before going inside. He was still limping, but that didn’t stop his enthusiasm for sniffing every possible smell. The vet had put up a new sign out front, with room for custom messages, and that morning it read “Live Nude Dogs. Free Lap Dances.”

  I was surprised to see Rick’s truck in the parking lot. I hoped that Rascal hadn’t gotten sick or hurt himself running around the house with Rochester. I didn’t see Rick or his dog in the waiting room, though it was crowded with people and pets. A yappy Yorkie in one corner kept up a barking and snarling match with a persnickety Pekingese. There were cats in crates and dogs big and small on leashes, mostly sitting beside their owners.

  I walked up to the receptionist’s desk with Rochester by my side. She was a young Indian woman I’d never seen before, with red dot in the middle of her forehead. Maybe it was the influence of the spy movie I’d seen a while before, but I couldn’t help seeing that dot as the target from a laser rifle.