by Tor Seidler
“Do you speak English?” he asked as he slid into the backseat.
“Of course,” the driver snapped.
Roberto gave him the street address of Monsieur Pierre Ponson, and off they went. From the way the gruff driver weaved in and out of the airport traffic, Roberto figured the meter must speed up along with the tires. Soon they were barreling down a highway that reminded him more of New Jersey than of the Paris he’d seen in movies. But before long the roadway rounded the side of a hill, and there, gleaming in the bright morning sunlight, were the Eiffel Tower and the spires and steeples of the great French capital.
Soon the driver was slaloming down a grand boulevard bordered by trees with mottled, peely bark and kiosks plastered with advertisements for strange-looking products. Cars didn’t stick to lanes: Driving seemed to be a total free-for-all. Even when the driver turned down a cobbled street far narrower than any in Queens, he managed to swerve around other cars.
The street widened out onto a little square, and the taxi screeched to a halt across from the bakery — it had the word boulangerie in gilt letters on the window — the one from the picture in the Ponsons’ living room. Roberto counted out some of the foreign currency he’d exchanged dollars for at the airport. He had no idea how much to tip over here, so he gave fifteen percent, which got an honest-to-goodness smile from the surly driver.
After the taxi screeched away, Roberto just stood there a moment on the hosed-down cobblestones, carrying case in one hand, knapsack in the other, eyes fixed on the top of the Eiffel Tower, which was visible over the roof of the building opposite. On the overnight flight he’d dozed off about twenty times, and each time he’d woken up, he’d wondered if he’d done the wrong thing in depleting his Hollywood fund to pay the airfare. But now that he was here, inhaling the mingled odors of freshly baked bread and wet stone, gazing up at the famous tower, he somehow knew he’d done the right thing.
A bell over the door tinkled when he walked into the boulangerie. A pretty girl about his age smiled at him from behind a glass case displaying all sorts of delicious-looking breads and pastries. She spoke to him in French.
“Sorry, je ne parle pas français,” he said, using his one French phrase. “Is Monsieur Ponson around?”
The girl turned to a doorway screened with hanging strands of colorful beads and called out something in French. Soon Monsieur Ponson emerged through the beads — instantly recognizable from the photo despite the fact that his dark face and hair were considerably lightened by a dusting of flour. He came around the counter grinning and embraced Roberto as if he were a long-lost member of the family.
“Bienvenue à Paris,” he said. “Welcome to Paris.”
The French Mr. Ponson was far thinner than the American one, which was kind of surprising, considering his profession, and he spoke in a lyrical way that was pleasing to the ear. He called Roberto Robert (Row-bear).
“Robert, I wish you to meet Felice.”
Roberto put down the carrying case and knapsack and offered his hand across the counter. This seemed to take the girl by surprise, but after a moment she reached over and gave his hand a quick shake. Her huge brown eyes, peering out from under clipped brown bangs, had a tinge of purple in them, like Dr. Pepper.
“You must be hungry from your voyage,” Mr. Ponson said. “You will have brioche? Croissant?”
“Wow, thanks. But . . . is Gully really here?”
Mr. Ponson picked up Roberto’s knapsack and led the way to a door in the back of the shop. Roberto grabbed the carrying case and followed the man up a narrow staircase to a sort of garret apartment. The furniture in the living room was pretty modern; on a white formica table, toasters were winging their way across the screen of a laptop. Mr. Ponson motioned to Roberto, who set down the carrying case and followed the man down a little hallway that led to a kitchen. A scrawny Lhasa apso was curled up asleep on the floor by the stove.
“It is him?” Mr. Ponson whispered.
Roberto stared for a few moments, then nodded his head.
“He’s exhausted,” Mr. Ponson whispered. “The first two days he just sit and shiver, but he finally fall asleep. He choose the warmest place.”
Roberto wanted to pick Gulliver up, but the poor dog clearly needed his sleep, so he followed Mr. Ponson back out into the living room.
“How’d you . . . How’d he get here, sir?”
“Pierre.”
“Pierre.”
“It was Tuesday. On Tuesday morning I always take the Turkish bath.” Pierre grinned. “The heat remind me of home, I think. I walk back by the Seine and this dog sits by himself staring down at the water.”
“The Seine?”
“The river, just over there. It go through Paris. So this dog look like the one in the picture François send me. And then I see the collar. This unusual collar, no? So I click my tongue, and he look up. He look at me hard. Then when I turn to go, he follow me. So I give him some food, but he don’t eat. Like I say, he just sit shivering, mostly. I take a picture and send it to François.”
“Could you show me where you found him?”
“Don’t you wish to rest after your voyage?”
“Oh, I’ll find a youth hostel later. First I — ”
“Youth hostel? But you stay here.” Pierre opened the door to a small room with a bed in a nook under a dormer window. “It is not deluxe, but just for you,” he said.
“Wow, that’s . . . thanks.” Carlos had given him two hundred dollars spending money, but it wouldn’t have gone far if he’d had to rent a room.
“Let me wash, and I show you,” Pierre said, setting the knapsack on a chair.
“You can take off now?”
“It is my shop. And I have a very good apprentice.”
Pierre soon emerged from the bathroom minus the dusting of flour. On the walk to the river, several people greeted him by name, including an old woman sweeping out the gutter with a broom made of twigs. Soon Roberto had his first look at the Quai. Set up by a long stone wall overlooking the river were stalls offering used books and prints and maps for sale. Pierre led the way toward a low stone bridge, but instead of crossing it, he turned down a set of stone steps that took them to a lower riverbank, where several boats were tied up. Two cabin cruisers, a small barge, and a tourist boat called L’Esprit de la Seine with pictures of tourist attractions like Notre Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower painted on the stern. It was by this boat that Pierre stopped.
“The dog was right here,” he said.
A gnarled-up man in a faded blue Breton fisherman’s jacket and a beret was smoking a smelly cigarette on the deck of the tourist boat. When Roberto asked if he spoke English, the man squinted at him and said, “A leeetle, yes.”
“Do you know anything about a dog, sir? A Lhasa apso?”
The man shrugged, mystified. Then Pierre said something in French, and the two of them started an animated conversation that made Roberto wonder if he should have taken French instead of Drama as his elective last year. After about five minutes, Pierre thanked the boatman and led Roberto back up the stone steps to the Quai.
“We have a little lunch, yes?” he said.
“Great. But what did he say about Gully?”
Pierre led him down a side street to what was clearly a very popular outdoor café. They squeezed into rickety metal chairs at a small table, and Pierre ordered something called croques monsieurs and, to Roberto’s delight, a carafe of white wine with two glasses. Best of all, the waiter filled both glasses without carding him.
“You know I’m not twenty-one yet,” Roberto whispered when the waiter sidled away.
“To your first visit to la belle France,” Pierre said, clinking glasses.
The wine tasted a bit bitter, but Roberto pretended to like it. “So what did the boat guy say?” he asked.
“He does tours up and down t
he Seine. He docks in Le Havre — this is the port at the end of the river — and a dog jump off another boat to his deck.”
“What kind of other boat?”
“A fishing boat. How you say . . . a trawler. He talk to the crew, they are mostly Dutch, and they say they get the dog from another fishing boat, an American one, way off in the Grand Banks. The Americans say they fish the dog out of garbage, in the water near the Long Island.”
After digesting all this, Roberto said, “You think Gully got onto one of those garbage scows?”
“This he did not know. Still, it is quite a history, no?”
A croque monsieur turned out to be something like a ham-and-Swiss sandwich, only grilled and better. But Roberto was too excited to pay much attention to his lunch.
“You’ve got a digital camera, right?” he said.
Pierre nodded.
“And you’d act as a translator for me?”
“I think it is possible.”
A plan was taking shape in Roberto’s mind. He would interview the boatman and snap a photo of him with Gulliver on the boat. When he got home, he would take a picture of the beach at Far Rockaway where Gulliver had vanished. Then he would write up the story to the best of his ability and send it to the woman at the Daily News. And perhaps he could get Pierre to translate the piece into French and interest a Parisian newspaper in it . . .
His eagerness to get started was so plain that Pierre skipped his usual after-lunch espresso. He laughed off Roberto’s attempt to pay the bill, and instead of checking on his apprentice when they got back to the shop, he followed Roberto upstairs so he could lend him his digital camera.
Roberto headed straight for the kitchen. No dog was curled up by the stove. He went back and joined Pierre in the living room.
“He’s not there,” he said.
“Really?”
Pierre clucked his tongue. Gulliver didn’t appear.
“Oh, no!” Roberto cried. “Don’t tell me I came all this way and now — ”
“Was that open before?” Pierre said, pointing at the door of the carrying case.
It hadn’t been. Somehow Gulliver must have managed to open it. For when Roberto squatted down and peered inside, there the dog was, curled up inside, fast asleep.
This time Roberto couldn’t resist. He reached in and stroked the dog’s belly.
“Hey, Gully,” he murmured.
Gulliver opened his eyes. For one ecstatic moment he thought the familiar face actually was Roberto’s. But then he realized he must be dreaming and closed his eyes again.
“Gully, it’s me,” Roberto said.
Gulliver reopened his eyes. Whether he was dreaming or not, the hand on his belly was the nicest thing he’d ever felt. He twisted his head around and gave the hand a lick.
Accompanying the article were two photos, one of the beach in Far Rockaway where Gully went missing,the other of Mr. Pierre Ponson alongside the one-of-a-kind Lhasa and the boatman who brought him to Paris.
Till now the proudest moment of Roberto’s life had been when Ms. Treadle told him about his natural acting talent. But that didn’t begin to compare to the day his article appeared in the Daily News.
His brother and sister were less thrilled about it. “How could you call me a tormentor?” Juanita cried.
But his parents were every bit as proud as Roberto was.
“This’ll put him on top of the heap for that Columbia School of Journalism,” Carlos observed.
“You know, honey, maybe he could just skip journalism school,” said Consuela. “After all, he’s already a professional.”
It was true: The Daily News paid Roberto two hundred and fifty dollars for the piece. This wasn’t enough to replenish his Hollywood fund. But then Roberto was beginning to have second thoughts about a movie career. The truth was, he’d enjoyed writing the article far more than he’d ever enjoyed doing an acting scene. He was particularly pleased with “the traumatized creature clawed his way to freedom” and “the roiling waters of the river Seine.”
If Gulliver had been able to read, he would have been impressed as well. Roberto had done a pretty darn good job of piecing together his adventure. But of course he’d missed things. How could Roberto possibly know about his two days in a FedEx van? Or his miraculously finding Rodney, only to be utterly spurned by him? Or his leaping off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge in hopes of putting an end to his misery?
Gulliver had expected to smack into the East River and drown. But when he came to, he was neither sinking toward the riverbed nor frolicking in dog heaven. He was lying on his side in a bed of smelly, squishy garbage, his already soiled coat now smeared with coffee grounds and what smelled like rancid bean curd. High overhead a full moon was peering down at him pityingly.
Wherever he was, it was as unsteady as that horrid trampoline. He tried to stand but couldn’t. It felt as if all his bones were broken, all his muscles torn. His eyes drooped shut.
When they opened again, the full moon was a hazy sun. Now he was able to get to his feet, just. He was very wobbly, and the footing wasn’t good, but by taking puppy steps he managed to make his way across a bed of banana and orange peels to a rusty retaining wall. It wasn’t high. He planted his front paws on it and looked over.
The wall lurched, and he was nearly thrown overboard into the sea. That was all he could see: sea. Miles and miles of it, wrinkly and blue-green.
Gulliver backed off and curled up on a relatively unsmelly pile of corncobs. He figured he would soon expire of hunger or thirst, though he was curiously unhungry and unthirsty. He was just achy and weary and scared and lonely and ready to have everything over with. He closed his eyes again and drifted off into the jumbled realm between waking and sleeping. As scenes from his past scrolled by, walks in Washington Square and evenings at Le Petit Café, he wondered vaguely what he’d done to deserve to die alone in a heap of garbage out at sea. Had he been too arrogant, too superior? Maybe so . . . Oh, if only J.C. were around! He wouldn’t have even minded hearing about his scummy rat friend. Or if only Roberto was there to rub his belly!
A grating grinding broke in on his reverie. He cracked an eye and saw it was twilight. Then the corncobs started shifting beneath him — and with a mixture of horror and relief he understood exactly what was happening. The bottom of the scow was opening, discharging the biodegradable garbage, him included, into the icy sea. The end . . .
And, indeed, the shock of the frigid water sent him into oblivion. But then, little by little, he grew conscious of a horrid smell. Oh, dear dog! Instead of going to heaven, he’d been sent to the other place! Would his miseries never end? Was he now to be tormented for all eternity by the odor he liked least in the world, the stink of fish?
He managed to open his eyes. Doggy hell seemed to be a little cabin with bunk beds and yellow slickers hanging on pegs and a Coleman stove on a counter and a shortwave radio mounted on the wall. He was curled up on a reeking net.
He stood up to try to escape the smell but felt so weak and unsteady he immediately had to sit back down.
“Hey, Dogfish, you’re up.”
Gulliver turned and gaped. Human beings were allowed in canine hell? For there, lounging on a bunk in a heavy turtleneck sweater, was a man with a shaggier version of his professor’s beard.
The man swung his feet down — he was wearing thick wool socks — and padded over. He scooped Gulliver up, then set him down on the teak floor.
“You’re a bag of bones, Dogfish.” The man took a plate off a table and put it on the floor. “There you go, some nice smoked cod.”
Whether he was alive or dead, Gulliver’s stomach was definitely growling. But whether alive or dead, he wasn’t about to eat fish. He’d eaten dry food, and shared drinking water, and ridden the subway, and stepped in mustard, and spent the night in a van, and begged from Rodney, and jumped off a br
idge. But there were things he wouldn’t stoop to, and eating fish was one of them.
In the long run, of course, he stooped. It turned out he wasn’t dead. He was on a fishing boat bound for the Grand Banks, and the only thing the fishermen offered him was fish. He didn’t eat much of it, and he held his breath when he nibbled, but nibble he did.
He ate so little, however, that the fishermen — there were four of them, all from the Carolinas — feared that he might not last the two weeks it would take them to fill their hold with fish. So they passed the anorexic creature off to a crew of fishermen heading back to port.
This second boat, with its full hold, stank even worse than the first. But overall it was a bit of an improvement. For one thing, these fishermen didn’t call him Dogfish. For another, they ate a lot of sausages and gave him scraps from their plates.
Though the crew was Dutch, they were selling their catch to a French cannery, in Le Havre, and by the time they put into port, Gulliver had actually regained a pound or two. And when he spotted a tourist boat with an image of the Eiffel Tower on the stern, he regained the will to live as well. Chloe! He would find his darling Maltese and finally settle down with her!
For once, fate smiled on him. He stowed away in the galley of L’Esprit de la Seine, where a cook, who prepared sandwiches for the tourists up on deck, let bits of jambon (ham) and boeuf (beef) and fromage (cheese) fall onto the floor. And on a cool gray Monday in October, after two days of feasting, Gulliver arrived in his beloved Paris. The boat even moored on the Left Bank of the Seine, the same side as Le Petit Café!
Above all things he would have liked to head straight for Cheveux de Chien. His once-silken coat was all matted and ratty, and he suspected he didn’t smell so great either. But even if he could have located Chloe’s groomer, he had no money, so he had to settle for giving himself a Pogo-like sponge bath with his tongue.
Daylight was dying when he slipped ashore. He scooted up a flight of stone steps to the boulevard that ran along the Quai. Familiar landmarks were everywhere. In fact, he was just blocks from his July apartment. But it wasn’t July. With nightfall it was turning quite chilly, and when he reached Le Petit Café, the tables under the blue-and-white-striped awning were all empty. The line of French doors, always open in the summertime, was closed. The double doors that served as the formal entrance to the café were closed as well.
