Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  The sled was overturned, the snow churned up; the dog had marked this ground as its own. It still had Anna by the shoulder. Gold heard the rage boiling in its gut. He saw the tensed hindquarters and the flattened ears and the red gleam of gum under the wrinkled snout. Anna was on her back, her face bleached and blank, staring at the sky. She had never looked so small. Gold seized the chain and yanked at it, but could get no purchase in the snow. The dog only snarled more fiercely and started shaking Anna again. She didn’t make a sound. Her silence made Gold go hollow and cold. He flung himself onto the dog and hooked his arm under its neck and pulled back hard. Still the dog wouldn’t let go. Gold felt its heat and the profound rumble of its will. With his other hand he tried to pry the jaw loose. His gloves were slippery with drool; he couldn’t get a good grip. Gold’s mouth was next to the dog’s ear. He said, “Let go, damn you,” and then he took the ear between his teeth and bit down with everything he had. He heard a yelp and something cracked against his nose, knocking him backward. When he pushed himself up the dog was running for home, jerking its head from side to side, scattering flecks of blood on the snow.

  “The whole thing took maybe sixty seconds,” Gold said. “Maybe less. But it went on forever.” He’d told the story many times now and always mentioned this. He knew it was trite to marvel at how time could stretch and stall, but he was unable not to. Nor could he stop himself from repeating that it was a “miracle”—the radiologist’s word—that Anna hadn’t been crippled or disfigured or even killed; and that her doctor didn’t understand how she’d escaped damage to her bones and nerves. Though badly bruised, her skin hadn’t even been broken.

  Gold loved his daughter’s face. He loved her face as a thing in itself, to be wondered at, studied. Yet after the attack he couldn’t look at Anna in the same way. He kept seeing the dog lunge at her, and himself stuck forever on that hill; then his heart began to kick, and he grew taut and restless and angry. He didn’t want to think about the dog anymore—he wanted it out of the picture. It should be put down. It was crazy, a menace, and it was still there, waiting to tear into some other kid, because the police refused to do anything.

  “They won’t do a thing,” he said. “Nothing.”

  He was going through the whole story again with his cousin Tom Rourke on a Sunday afternoon, a week after the attack. Gold had called him the night it happened, but the part about the police was new, and Rourke got all worked up just as Gold expected. His cousin had an exacting, irritable sense of justice, and a ready store of loyal outrage that Gold had drawn on ever since they were boys. He had been alone in his anger for a week now and wanted some company. Though his wife claimed to be angry too, she hadn’t seen what he had seen. The dog was an abstraction to her, and she wasn’t one to brood anyway.

  “What was their excuse?” Rourke wanted to know. “What reason did the cops give for their complete and utter worthlessness?”

  “The chain,” Gold said. “They said—this is the really beautiful part—they said that since the dog was chained up, no law was broken.”

  “But the dog wasn’t chained up, right?”

  “He was, but the chain reaches into the park. I mean way in—a good thirty, forty feet.”

  “By that logic, he could be on a chain ten miles long and legally chew up the whole fucking town.”

  “Exactly.”

  Rourke got up and went to the picture window. He stood close to the glass and glowered at the falling snow. “What is it with Nazis and dogs? They’ve got a real thing going, ever notice that?” Still looking out the window, he said, “Have you talked to a lawyer?”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “She. Kate Stiller. Said the police were full of shit. Then she told me to forget it. According to her, the dog’ll die of old age before we ever get near a courtroom.”

  “There’s the legal system for you, Brian me boy. They’ll give you all the justice you want, as long as it’s up the ass.”

  There was a loud thump on the ceiling. Anna was playing upstairs with Rourke’s boy, Michael. Both men raised their eyes and waited, and when no one screamed Gold said, “I don’t know why I even bothered to call her. I don’t have the money to pay for a lawyer.”

  “You know what happened?” Rourke said. “The cop who took the complaint fucked it up, and now the others are covering for him. So, you want to take him out?”

  “The cop?”

  “I was thinking of the dog.”

  “You mean kill the dog?”

  Rourke just looked at Gold.

  “Is that what you’re saying? Kill the dog?”

  Rourke grinned, but he still didn’t say anything.

  “How?”

  “How do you want?”

  “Christ, Tom, I can’t believe I’m talking like this.”

  “But you are.” Rourke shoved the Naugahyde ottoman with his foot until it was facing Gold, then sat on it and leaned forward, so close their knees were touching. “No poison or glass. That’s chickenshit, I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. Take him out clean.”

  “Christ, Tom.” Gold tried to laugh.

  “You can use my Remington, scope him in from the hill. Or if you want, get up close with the twelve-gauge or the forty-four Magnum. You ever fired a pistol?”

  “No.”

  “Better forget the Magnum, then.”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “They’ll know it was me. I’ve been raising hell about that dog all week. Who do you think they’re going to come after when it suddenly shows up with a hole in its head?”

  Rourke sucked in his cheeks. “Point taken,” he said. “Okay, you can’t do it. But I sure as hell can.”

  “No. Forget it, Tom.”

  “You and Mary go out for the night. Have dinner at Chez Nicole or Pauly’s, someplace small where they’ll remember you. By the time you get home it’s all over and you’re clean as a whistle.”

  Gold finished his beer.

  “We’ve got to take care of business, Brian. If we don’t, nobody will.”

  “Maybe if I did it. Maybe. Having you do it—that just doesn’t feel right.”

  “What about that dog still running wild after what it did to Anna? Does that feel right?” When Gold didn’t answer, Rourke shook his knee. “Did you really bite the mutt’s ear?”

  “I didn’t have any choice.”

  “You bite it off?”

  “No.”

  “But you drew blood, right? You tasted blood.”

  “I got some in my mouth, yes. I couldn’t help it.”

  “It tasted good, didn’t it? Come on, Brian, don’t bullshit me, it tasted good.”

  “There was a certain satisfaction,” Gold said.

  “You want to do what’s right,” Rourke said. “I appreciate that. I value that. It’s your call, okay? But the offer stands.”

  Rourke produced the crack about Nazis and dogs not from deep reflection, Gold knew, but because to call people Nazis was his first response to any vexation or slight. Once he’d heard Rourke say it, though, Gold couldn’t forget it. The picture that came to mind was one he’d pondered before: a line of frenzied dogs harrying Jews along a railway platform.

  Gold was Jewish on his father’s side, but his parents split up when he was young and he’d been raised Catholic by his mother. His name didn’t suit him; to his ears it had an ironical ring. When you heard “Gold,” what else could you think of but gold? With that name he should be a rich sharpie, not a mackerel-snapper with a dying business. The black kids who came into his video store were unmistakably of that opinion. They had a mock-formal way of saying “Mr. Gold,” drawing out the word as if it were the precious substance itself. Finding themselves a little short on the rental fee, some of them weren’t above asking him to make up the difference out of his own deep pockets, and acting amazed if he refused. The rusty Toyota he kept parked out front was a puzzle to them, a con
versation piece; they couldn’t figure out why, with all his money, he didn’t get himself a decent set of wheels. One night, standing at the counter with her friends, a girl suggested that Gold kept his Cadillac at home because he was afraid the brothers would steal it. They’d been goofing on him, just messing around, but when she said this everyone went silent as if a hard truth had been spoken.

  Cadillac. What else?

  After years of estrangement Gold had returned to the Catholic Church and went weekly to Mass to sustain his fragile faith, but he understood that in the eyes of the world he was a Jew. He had never known what to make of that. There were things he saw in himself that he thought of as Jewish, traits not conspicuous among the mostly Irish boys he’d grown up with, including his cousins. Bookishness, patience, a taste for classical music and complicated moralizing, aversion to alcohol and violence. All this he found acceptable. But he had certain other tendencies, less dear to him, that he also suspected of being Jewish. Corrosive self-mockery. Bouts of almost paralyzing skepticism. Physical awkwardness. A disposition toward passivity, even surrender, in the face of bullying people and oppressive circumstances. Gold knew that these ideas of Jewishness were held as well by anti-Semites, and he resisted their influence, though without much success.

  In the already familiar picture that Rourke had conjured up, of Jews being herded by dogs, Gold sensed an instance of that resignation he so disliked in himself. He knew it was unfair to blame people for not fighting an evil that their very innocence made them incapable of imagining, yet, even while admitting that they were brutalized and starving and in shock, he couldn’t help but wonder: Why didn’t one of them hit a guard—grab his gun—take some of the bastards with him? Do something? Even in his awareness of the terrible injustice of this question, he’d never really laid it to rest.

  And with that old image vivid in his thoughts, it seemed to Gold that the question had now been put to him. Why didn’t he do something? His own daughter had been savaged by just such a dog, a flinch away from having her face torn off. He had seen its insanity, felt its furious will to hurt. And it was still out there, lying in wait, because no one, himself included, would do what needed to be done. He could not escape the consciousness of his own inaction. In the days following his conversation with Rourke, it became intolerable. No matter where he was, at home or in the store, he was also on that hill, unable to move or speak, watching the dog come at Anna with murder in its heart and the chain gliding behind like an infinite black snake.

  He drove by the park late one day and stopped across the street from the house where the dog’s owners lived. It was a Colonial with a line of dormer windows, a sprawling, expensive house like most of the others around the park. Gold thought he could guess why the police had been so docile. This wasn’t a shooting gallery, a crib for perpetrators and scofflaws. The deep thunk of the brass knocker against the great green door, the glittering chandelier in the foyer, the Cinderella sweep of the staircase with its monumental newel post and gleaming rail—all this would tell you that the law was among friends here. Of course a dog needed room to roam. If people let their kids go tearing off every which way, they’d have to live with the consequences. Some folks were just natural-born whiners.

  Though Gold despaired of the police, he believed he understood them. He did not understand the people who’d allowed this to happen. They had never called to apologize, or even to ask how Anna was. They seemed not to care that their dog was a killer. Gold had driven here with some notion of sitting down with them, helping them see what they ought to do—as if they’d even let him in the door. What a patsy!

  He called Rourke that night and told him to go ahead.

  Rourke was hot on the idea of Gold taking Mary out for dinner—his treat—on the big night. He had a theatrical conception of the event, which seemed to include the two of them toasting him with champagne while he did whatever he meant to do.

  Gold refused the offer. Mary didn’t know what they were up to, and he couldn’t sit across a table from her for three hours, even as the deed was being done, without telling. She wouldn’t like it, but she wouldn’t be able to stop it; the knowledge would only be a burden to her. Gold employed a graduate student named Simms who covered the store at night, except for Tuesdays, when he had a seminar. Though Rourke was disappointed by Gold’s humdrum dramaturgy, he assented: Tuesday night it was.

  More snow fell that morning, followed by an ice storm. The streets and sidewalks were still glazed by nightfall and business was slow. Gold had a new release playing in the monitor above the counter, but he couldn’t follow the plot through the frantic cutting and ugly music, so he stopped it halfway through and didn’t bother to put in another. That left the store oddly quiet. Maybe for this reason his customers didn’t hang around as usual, shooting the breeze with Gold and one another. They made their selections, paid, and left. He tried to read the paper. At eight-thirty Anna called to say she’d won a poster contest at school. After she hung up, Gold witnessed a fight in front of the Domino’s across the street. Two men, drunk or drugged, had a shouting match, and one of them took a clumsy swing at the other. They grappled and fell down together on the ice. A deliveryman and one of the cooks came outside and helped them up, then walked them off in different directions. Gold microwaved the chili left over from Sunday dinner. He ate slowly, watching the sluggish procession of cars and the hunched, gingerly trudge of people past his window. Mary had laid on the cumin with a free hand, which was just how Gold liked it. His forehead grew damp with sweat, and he took off his sweater. The baseboard heaters ticked. The long fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.

  Rourke called just before ten, when Gold was closing up. “Scooter has buried his last bone,” he said.

  “Scooter?”

  “That was his name.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me.”

  “I got his collar for you—a little memento.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Tom.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re clear.”

  “Just don’t tell me any more,” Gold said. “I’m afraid I’ll say too much when the police come by.”

  “They’re not gonna come by. The way I fixed things, they won’t even know what happened.” He coughed. “It had to be done, Brian.”

  “I guess.”

  “No guessing about it. But I’ve gotta say, it wasn’t anything I’d want to do again.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom. I should’ve done it myself.”

  “It wasn’t any fun, I’ll tell you that.” Rourke fell silent. Gold could hear him breathing. “I about froze my ass off. I thought they’d never let the damned beast out.”

  “I won’t forget it,” Gold said.

  “De nada. It’s over. Go in peace.”

  In late March, Rourke called Gold with a story of his own. He’d been gassing up on Erie Boulevard when a BMW backed away from the air hose and put a crease in his door. He yelled at the driver, a black man wearing sunglasses and a knit cap. The guy ignored him. He looked straight ahead and drove off across the lot into the road, but not before Rourke got a good look at his license plate. It was a vanity tag, easy to remember—SCUSE ME. Rourke called the police, who tracked the driver down and ticketed him for leaving the scene of an accident.

  So far, so good. Then it turned out the driver didn’t have insurance. Rourke’s company agreed to cover most of the bill—eight hundred bucks for a lousy dent!—but that still left him with the three-hundred-dollar deductible. Rourke figured Mr. SCUSE ME should make up the difference. His insurance agent gave him the man’s name and particulars, and Rourke started calling him. He called twice at reasonable hours, after dinner, but both times the woman who answered said he wasn’t in and gave Rourke the number of a club on Townsend, where he got an answering machine. Though he left clear messages, he heard nothing back. Finally Rourke called the first number at seven in the morning and got the man himself, Mr. Vick Barnes.

  “That’s V-I-C-K,” Rourke said. “Ever notice ho
w they do that with their names? You shorten ‘Victor,’ you get ‘Vic,’ right? V-I-C. So where does the fucking k come from? Or take Sean, S-E-A-N. Been spelled like that for about five hundred years. But not them, they’ve gotta spell it S-H-A-W-N. Like they have a right to that name in the first place.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Gave me a lot of mouth. First he gets indignant that I woke him up, then he says he’s already been through all this shit with the police and doesn’t believe he hit anybody anyway. Then he hangs up on me.”

  Rourke said he knew better than to call back; he wasn’t going to get anywhere with this guy. Instead he went to the club, Jack’s Shady Corner, where it turned out Mr. Vick Barnes worked as a deejay, and no doubt retailed dope on the side. All the deejays did. Where else would he get the dough for a new Beamer? But Rourke had to admit he was quite the pro, our Mr. Barnes, nice mellow voice, good line of patter. Rourke had a couple beers and watched the dancers, then went looking for the car.