NIGHT DOGS

PORTLAND, OREGON MAY 1975

IT HAD BEEN raining all week, spring drizzle, almost a mist, and neither of the two cops who got out of the patrol car bothered to wear a raincoat. The dispatcher had sent them to “check on the welfare” of an old man who lived alone, to see if he was dead. One of the neighbors had called. She hadn’t seen him in a week and she was worried. She was afraid to answer her door, she said, what with all this crime.

Just above his gold police badge, Hanson wore a yellow “happy face” pin that he’d noticed in the bottom of his locker before roll call that afternoon. He’d picked it up back in December, off the body of a kid who’d OD’d in a gas station bathroom, sitting on the toilet. The needle was still in his arm, half-full of the China White heroin that was pouring in from Southeast Asia, through Vancouver, B.C., and down the freeway.

As the two cops walked around to the back of the old man’s house, Hanson kept an eye on the windows and checked the safety snap on his holster, out of habit, as he did dozens of times during the shift.

The ragged hedge of rose bushes bordering the back yard had been battered by a freak thunderstorm the night before, and the yard was covered with rose petals, pink-veined and translucent as eyelids on the wet grass. The whole yard smelled of roses.

Dana, the big cop, knocked on the door with his flashlight and shouted, “Police.” Hanson picked up a rose petal, smelled it, then put it on his tongue. “Police,” Dana shouted.

The windows were locked and warped and painted shut, but they managed to break one free and force it open an inch or two.

“I guess he isn’t just away on a trip,” Hanson said when the smell drifted out.

When Dana kicked the back door, the knob fell off and the little window shattered, sucking a greasy curtain out through the splinters. He kicked again and the door shuddered. A shard of glass dropped onto the concrete stoop.

“Maybe you’re too old for this,” Hanson said.

Dana smiled at him, a little out of breath, took half a step back and drove the heel of his boot into the door. The frame splintered and the door swung open in a spray of dust and paint chips.

A burner on the electric stove in the kitchen glowed sullenly, its heat touching Hanson’s cheek through the hot sweet air. Dirty dishes were piled by the sink where gray dishwater rippled with mosquito larva.

“Police,” Hanson called, “police officers,” breathing shallowly as they walked into the living room.

Thousands of green flies covered the windows like beaded curtains, shimmering in the gray light as they beat against the glass.

The old man was in the living room, lying on his back. His chest and belly had ballooned, arching his back in a wrestler’s bridge, as if he was still struggling to raise up off the floor. His eyes and beard and shaggy hair sparkled silver-white, boiling with maggots, and broken capillaries shadowed his face like brutal makeup. He was wearing a set of one-piece long underwear that buttoned up the front, and he was so swollen that all the buttons had torn out, ripping open from neck to crotch.

The old man’s chest and belly were waxy, translucent, mottled with terrible blue bruises where the blood had pooled after he died. One foot had turned black as iron. The two cops stood over him, breathing through their mouths. The furnace hummed beneath the floor, pumping out heat. Flies droned and battered the windows. Something brushed Hanson’s leg, and he spun around, reaching for his pistol.

It was a small dog, his muzzle gray with age, the fur worn off the backs of his legs. He looked up at them without fear, with the dignity that old dogs have. Both blind eyes were milky white.

“Look here,” Dana said. “It’s just the po-lice.” He knelt down and slowly moved his hand to stroke the dog’s head. “Been hot in here, hasn’t it?” He went into the kitchen and brought back a bowl of water that the dog lapped up slowly, not stopping until it was all gone.

They turned off the furnace, then beat the flies away from the front windows and opened them. Hanson saw the envelope taped to the wall above the telephone. Where the address should be were the words, “When I die please see that my daughter, Sarah Thorgaard, gets this envelope. Her phone number is listed below. Thank you.” It was signed, “Cyrus Thorgaard.” Beneath his signature he’d written in ink, “I’d appreciate it if you’d look after my dog Truman.”

Hanson called the number and a man answered. “Hello,” Hanson said, “this is Officer Hanson from the police bureau. Could I speak to Sarah Thorgaard, please?”

“That’s my wife’s maiden name. She’s not here.”

Out on the sidewalk, a man wearing a black vinyl jacket and plaid bell-bottom pants stood looking at the house.

“What’s the problem?”

“I’m afraid her father is dead. At his house on Albina Street?”

The man on the sidewalk started to walk away, then stopped and looked at the house again. The phone droned in Hanson’s ear.

“Looks like a natural death. There’s an envelope here addressed to your wife. We could bring it by your house if you’d like, Mr. . . .?”

“Jensen. I’ll come and get it.”

“He’s been dead for quite a while, sir. Maybe …”

“I’d rather not have a police car in my driveway. I can be there in ten minutes.”

“That’ll be fine,” Hanson said, watching the man out front walk away down the block. He hung up the phone and went into the bedroom. The covers on the bed had been thrown back, and he wondered if the old man had gotten up just so he wouldn’t die in bed. Books filled the wall-to-wall glass-fronted bookcases, and magazines were stacked on the floor beneath them–Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, something called Science and Design, published in England, many of them dating back to the thirties. Hanson picked one up and thumbed through it. The old man had bracketed paragraphs and underlined sentences in pencil. Down the margin of one page he’d written, “This kind of easy ambiguous conclusion is the heart of the problem. They’re afraid to make the difficult decisions.”

Some of the books went back to the 1800s. Hanson picked up one with the word “STEAM” embossed in gold letters across the leather cover. A golden planet Earth spun beneath the word STEAM, powered through its orbits by two huge elbow pipes, one sticking out of the Pacific Ocean, the other rising from North Africa, both of them pumping golden clouds of steam. The book was filled with flow charts and numerical tables, exploded diagrams of valves and heat-return systems, fine engravings of steam boilers. It was as if the book contained all the rules for a predictable steam-driven universe, a world of order and dependability.

Photographs covered one wall, old photographs where the hands and faces of people passing in the background were streaked and blurred by their movement. The old man, alive, looked out at Hanson from them, his age changing from twenty to fifty, a mustache there, a beard in one, looking out from the beams and pipes of a power plant, standing by a Ford coupe on a dirt road, holding a stringer of trout, looking out from each one as if he had something to tell him, something that Hanson had been trying to figure out for a long time. A double-barrelled Winchester shotgun with exposed hammers stood propped in the corner next to the bed. Hanson picked it up, brought it to his shoulder, then lowered it and thumbed it open. Brass-cased buckshot rounds shone in the steel receiver.

Hanson looked out through the bedroom door at the old man. He thought of the thunderstorm the night before, and imagined lightning, like flash powder for old photos, blazing through the house, lighting the room for an instant, freezing it in time. The old man, the dog, and the green-and-gold curtains of flies swarming the windows.

Dana’s voice came up through the floor, calling him down to the basement.

“He made this,” Dana said, spinning the chrome-silver wheel of a lathe. “Hand-ground those carbon steel blades. Look,” he said, slapping the cast-iron base, “the bearings, the bed, everything. The best craftsmen make their own tools.

“That’s a forge over there,” he said, pointing. “He could melt steel in that. In his basement. And come on over here,” he said. “Look at this work bench …”

“Hello?” It was the Medical Examiner at the top of the stairs, his face flushed, wearing a wrinkled gray suit. He looked like a salesman down on his luck. “It’s a ripe one all right.”

The sun had come out and the grass was steaming. Dana helped the ME unload the gurney from his station wagon, and Hanson pulled out the body bag, the acrid smell of rubberized plastic, like the dead air leaking from a tire, stunning him with memories for a moment.

They tucked the body bag under and around the old man, like a rubber sleeping bag, and zipped it closed. Hanson slipped his hands beneath the bloated shoulders and the ME took the feet.

“Real easy now,” the ME said, “easy …”

It sounded almost like someone sitting up suddenly in the bathtub. The weight shifted, pulling the body bag out of their arms and onto the gurney where it shuddered and lurched from side to side.

The ME said, “Damn.”

“Damn,” he said again. “What a week. Monday I had to police up a skydiver whose chute didn’t open. That’s a stupid so-called ‘sport,’ if you ask me. And the next day there was the son of a bitch–pardon my French–out in the county, who shot himself in the kitchen and left the stove on. The body popped, exploded, before I got there. One hundred and nineteen degrees in that trailer house. That’s official. I hung a thermometer. I mean, is that some cheap, thoughtless behavior, or what? People just don’t think. If you want to kill yourself, fine. That’s your business. But show a little courtesy to others. The world goes on, you know.”

A supervisor had to cover any situation involving a death, even if it was a natural, and Sgt. Bendix was out in front of the house, standing by his patrol car, nodding and listening to the man in khaki trousers and blue dress shirt who had driven up in a grey Mercedes. The ME drove off in his county station wagon as Dana and Hanson walked over to them. Hanson’s wool uniform was still damp, heavy and hot in the sun. It would be another month, he thought, before the department switched over to short-sleeve shirts. Bendix watched them come, tapping his own chest as he looked straight at Hanson. “The happy face,” Dana said.

Hanson glanced down at the yellow face that smiled from his shirt. “Mister Happy Face says, ‘If you like everybody, everybody will like you.’” He took it off and dropped it in his breast pocket.

They nodded to Mr. Jensen as Bendix introduced him.

“He was a smart man,” Jensen said. “An engineer. I guess you could call him an inventor. Not that he ever made much money.

“This used to be a nice neighborhood,” he said, looking at Hanson. “My wife grew up here.”

Hanson nodded.

“We had the money to move him out of this neighborhood and put him in a home. I mean a nice place. Where he could be with people his own age. He wouldn’t even talk about it,” Jensen said, looking at the house where a seedy robin in the front yard cocked his head and studied a patch of dead grass.

“In denial,” Sergeant Bendix said.

The robin pecked the grass.

“A refusal to come to terms with his own mortality,” Sergeant Bendix said. “Quite common at his age.”

The bird flew off when Aaron Allen’s blood-red Cadillac pulled out of an alley down the block, stolen radio speakers duct-taped inside all four doors booming through the neighborhood. It sat there shuddering, the tinted windows rolled up, then crossed the street and disappeared into the mouth of the opposite alley.

“He said he’d shoot anyone who tried to move him,” Jensen said.

“What about the dog?” Dana said.

“What?” Jensen said.

“An old dog, about this big.”

“That dog’s still alive?”

“Correct. Sir.”

“Well, what about it?”

“Sergeant,” he said, turning to Bendix, “can your people take care of that for me?” He looked at his watch. “I have a funeral to work out. And I’m going to have to think of something to do with that house and all the shit in it …”

“We’ll take care of it, Mr. Jensen,” Sgt. Bendix said.

“Can we do that?” he said, turning to Dana and Hanson.

“Sure,” Dana said.

“I’ll get the envelope,” Hanson said.

The envelope was taped to the wall just below a large framed document that declared Cyrus Thorgaard to be a member of “The International Brotherhood of Machinists.” It was printed in color with gilt edges. The fine engraving in each corner showed men at work–turning a silver cylinder of steel on a lathe, measuring tolerances with calipers, others standing at a forge, yellow and gold clouds of heat and smoke rolling over them. The center of the document was dominated by a huge black and silver steam engine tended by powerfully built men wearing engineer’s caps.

“Do me a favor and get the rest of that asshole’s information? I’m afraid I’ll say something that’ll get me some time off.”

“You’re gettin’ awful sensitive in your old age,” Hanson said, peeling the envelope off the wall.

“You know what’s gonna happen to that?” Dana said, looking at the document. “You know what he’s gonna do with that, and the tools, and the books? All of it? If the neighborhood assholes don’t set the place on fire first. After ripping off anything they can trade for dope.”

He looked out the door at Jensen and Bendix. “He’s gonna shit-can it. He won’t even take the trouble to give it away. He’ll just pay somebody to haul it to the dump.”

The dog stood staring up at the cops, listening.

“You come on with us,” Dana said, kneeling down to stroke the dog’s head. “It’ll be okay.”

After Jensen and Sergeant Bendix left, Dana took a hammer and a handful of nails from the basement and went around back to nail the door shut and board up the window.

Hanson walked through the house turning off lights and closing the windows. He pretended not to hear the dog following behind him, trying to keep up. He took another look around the bedroom, kneeling at the bookcases to read the titles on the lower shelves, touching the spines. He looked one more time at the photos, half hoping for some revelation, but the sun had moved, throwing them into shadow, and it would only get darker. It was too late now to do anything but finish closing the house up.

After several false starts, the dog hopped stiffly onto the bed, found his place at the foot and curled up.

“I guess you think it’s all gonna be okay again tomorrow morning,” Hanson said to the dog. “One more night and when you wake up Mr. Thorgaard will be asleep there just like always.” If the dog heard him, he didn’t open his eyes.

“You’re on your own now,” Hanson said, then looked away, as if he’d heard something in the other room.

“It’s a hard world out there,” he said slowly, as if he was just now remembering the words, “for dogs, too.”

Tendrils from the overgrown shrubbery covered the front window, snaking through the wooden frame into the room, jamming the window open, and Hanson had to pull the brittle vines free with his fingertips. His eyes went wide for a moment when he gashed his knuckle on the weather stripping, but that was his only reaction and he continued to clean the dead shrubbery free. He worked his hand farther into the frame and pulled out a nest of leaves, rotten sash cord, and cotton mattress stuffing. The three desiccated baby mice looked like they were wearing Halloween masks. Insects had eaten through their eyes into the tiny skulls, and the empty sockets were huge, inscrutable mummy eyes.

Hanson tossed the nest out the window, and through a gap in the shrubbery saw the man again. He had a nappy, half-assed afro. The bell-bottoms covered his shoes, cuffs ragged from scraping the sidewalk, and the vinyl jacket was buttoned up to his neck, the cuffs snapped. To hide needle marks, Hanson thought.

The man looked up the street and took a half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear. “Just looking,” Hanson said, trying again to close the window.

“Always looking,” he said over his shoulder to the dog. “For something easy they can walk off with. Or a purse to snatch, or some old man they know they can knock down for his social security check. Whatever. The old guy eats dog food and day-old bread for the rest of the month.”

The dog listened now, his cloudy blind eyes serene in the face of Hanson’s anger.

“Unless he breaks his hip falling on the sidewalk and dies of pneumonia. Dumped in some fuckin’ charity ward. All alone. Lying there till his lungs fill up and he drowns,” he said, pulling on the window, then slamming it with the heel of his hand. The man on the sidewalk flipped the cigarette onto the yard and turned to walk away.

“Fuckin’ lookers,” Hanson grunted, “waiting for it to get dark. Walking around or sitting in their junk cars. Waiting …” he said, straining to close the window.

“God damn,” he said, spinning and stalking across the room to the doorway where he looked back at the dog.

“I’ll be right back.”

“Hey,” Hanson called. “You!” pushing through the screen door. “C’mere.”

“You looking for somebody, my man?” Hanson said, walking up on him. “You lost?”

“I ain’t doing nothing.”

He had a poorly repaired harelip that gave him a slight lisp.

“New in town?”

“I’m …”

“Maybe I can help you find an address.”

“I’m takin’ a walk.”

“I know what you’re doing. What’s your name?”

“My name?”

“Yeah. What do your buddies call you?”

“Curtis, man. They call me Curtis. But you’re not …”

“Curtis what?”

His throat worked like he was going to throw up, choking up his own name, “Barr.”

“Let’s see some ID.”

“ID?”

Dana’s hammering, at the back of the house, echoed through the neighborhood. Hanson stepped in closer until their chests were almost touching, smelling marijuana smoke, old sweat, and a sour stink like rancid meat, an odor that rides the air in prison. “You want to show me some ID,” Hanson said, his eyes on him now, “or you want go to jail?”

“Jail?”

Hanson glared at his head as if he was trying to set the lopsided afro on fire with his eyes. The hammering stopped.

“Why you always gotta fuck with somebody,” he said, pulling up one leg of his bell-bottoms. “I mean … shit.” He unzipped his boot, pulled down his sock, and took out a wallet.

“Photo ID,” Hanson said.

He peeled off a sweaty driver’s license.

“This is expired,” Hanson said, holding it with the tips of two fingers. “What’s your current address?”

“Same as it says there.”

“Lemme see that,” Hanson said.

“See what?” Curtis said, closing the wallet. “I done showed you …”

“The property receipt,” Hanson said, indicating the yellow piece of paper just peeking out of the wallet. “Let’s see it.”

“Oh, man …”

“Let’s see it.”

The city jail had issued him the receipt the night before. He’d been released that morning.

“This says your name is Quentin Barr. Which is it, then? Curtis or Quentin?”

“Curtis is, you know, my nickname.”

“What were you arrested for, Quen-ton?”

“It wasn’t, they said. You know. Burglary, but I didn’t …”

“Where’s your hat?” Hanson said, studying the receipt. “It says here you had a ‘brown suede cap.’”

“I don’t know, officer. They lost it.”

“You should file a complaint,” Hanson said, handing the yellow receipt back to him. “Don’t walk on this block any more.”

“Say what?”

“Look at me,” Hanson said softly.

The hammering started again, louder, the echo ringing off houses across the street. Quentin looked at Hanson’s ear, over his shoulder, down at his chest.

“I said, look at me.”

Finally, he did, with the eyes of a whipped, limping animal that will bite if you show any weakness.

“Not this block,” Hanson said. “If there’s a burglary, or attempted fucking burglary, anything, on this block I’m gonna look for you. Quentin.”

Quentin opened his mouth, his throat working silently.

“That jacket must be awful hot,” Hanson said. “Seems like you’d want to roll up the sleeves.”

Quentin tried to smile, his upper lip twitching.

“Good-bye,” Hanson said. “Have a nice day. Sir.”

• • •

The old dog seemed unconcerned when they put him in the patrol car, as if he had been expecting them all those days and nights alone in the house with the body.

The dog sat up in the back seat of the car, behind the cage, as they drove through the ghetto, past the porno movies and burned-out storefronts, the winos passed out in doorways, junkies wandering, dreamlike, in the sun.

Hanson took the happy face out of his pocket and smiled down at it. “Mister Happy Face says, ‘If you keep smiling everything will turn out fine.’”

He pinned it back on his shirt.

“Jesus,” he said, gesturing out the window where black and red graffiti spooled along the broken sidewalks and the windows of abandoned stores, “It’s all going to shit Like, faster than before.”

“Since that China White started coming down the freeway,” Dana said.

“Sometimes I wonder what’s gonna happen. You know? What’s gonna happen next?”

“Just gonna get worse,” Dana said, eyes on the street.

“Yeah,” Hanson said, as they passed a bag lady screaming at the sky, “I know. But then what happens?”

“Then it’s the end of the world. The cockroaches take over.”

• • •

Zurbo, his foot in a cast, was working the desk at North, watching the little TV he’d brought from home. As Hanson reached to open the precinct door, he saw Zurbo’s eyes in the silver convex mirror down the hall. Like all good cops, Zurbo watched everything, all the time.

“You looking for the Animal Control office?” Zurbo said, his back still to them, as they walked in with the dog. “This is North Precinct. We just shoot ’em up here,” he said, pulling the sawed-off double barreled shotgun from beneath the desk.

Hanson heard the sound of distant helicopters, the unmistakable shudder of Hueys.

“Zurbo, that broken toe’s got to be healed by now. I think you’re milking disability,” Dana said.

“Hey, the doctor knows best. I’m just a dumb cop.”

“Getting paid eleven dollars an hour to watch TV. My tax dollars at work,” Hanson said, glancing at the TV.

“What’s with the mutt?” Zurbo said.

“How about taking care of him till end of shift?” Dana said, setting the dog down on the dark red tile.

“He better not shit on the floor.”

“If he does, I’ll clean it up.”

The TV volume was turned down, almost drowned out by radio traffic from North and East Precinct patrol cars. The early news was on, footage of helicopters rising from the American Embassy in Saigon, Vietnamese civilians in white shirts trying to hang onto the skids, dropping back to the roof, one by one, as American soldiers, shadows in the chopper doors, drove rifle butts down on their hands.

Zurbo raised up and looked over the counter.

“Fuckin’ dog’s blind,” he said.

“I think that’s against the Geneva Convention,” Hanson said, nodding at the shotgun.

“Over there, in-country maybe, but back here in The World you can use it on civilians. No problem. Why don’t I call Animal Control to come and get him?”

“We’ll pick him up at the end of the shift.”

“Okay. If you can handle the desk for a minute, in a professional fucking manner, I’ll see if I can find a blanket for Barko there.”

On the TV, a reporter looked into the camera, shouting over the roar of helicopters.

“Been showing that all fucking night,” Zurbo said.

Delicate women on the roof raised their arms to the departing helicopters, the rotor blast tearing at the folds of their silk ao dai, whipping their long black hair.

“Shit,” Zurbo said. He punched the TV off with the muzzle of the shotgun and limped out from behind the desk. He bent down to look at the dog, and shook his head. “He’s gotta be over a hundred, in dog years.”

“Helen’s not gonna let me keep that dog,” Dana said as they pulled out of the lot to cover Larkin at a family fight, on the way to their district. “You, on the other hand …”

“I don’t need a dog. You’re the one who told him, ‘it’ll be okay’, not me …”

Five Sixty Two, Larkin said over the radio, people screaming in the background, can you step it up a little?

Hanson snatched up the mike. “On our way,” he said, flipping on the overheads and the siren as Dana accelerated through a red light.

Hanson smiled, his eyes bright, as if remembering some childhood prank. “They eat ’em,” he said. “In Hong Kong.”

“What?” Dana said, rolling his window up against the siren.

“Dogs. People eat ’em in Hong Kong.”

That was the week there were so many moths, millions of them. Word at the precinct was that they swarmed that way only once every seven years, though someone else said it was because of the new nuclear plant up north. A long stretch of road back to the precinct was lined with a monotonous, evenly spaced row of new street lights, those big brushed aluminum poles that rise, then bend over the road like a hand on a wrist. The moths covered those lights like bee swarms, throwing themselves at the yellow bulbs again and again until they crippled a wing and fell to the street so that the puddles of light on the asphalt below the street lights were heaped with thousands of dead and dying moths.

Each time the patrol car passed beneath one of the lights that night, on the way back to the precinct at the end of shift, the tires made a fragile ripping sound, as though the street was still wet with rain. The sweet stink of the old man’s corpse hung in Hanson’s wool uniform the way cigarette smoke hangs in the hair of the woman you’re sleeping with. Dana kept their speed steady, and the ripping sound continued as regularly and softly as breathing.

Hanson looked out at the night. He adjusted his handcuffs where they were digging into the small of his back, then reached down and touched the leather-bound book he had slipped beneath the seat of the patrol car, the one that showed the earth spinning itself through golden clouds of steam.

“I can take the dog,” he said.

TWO