lower floor and then footsteps on the stairs. The house remained quiet, but this was a tremulous silence like the surface tension on a pond.
The dog wasn’t moping in Dad’s bedroom or bathroom. Not in the walk-in closet, either.
Second by second, I grew more worried about the mutt. Whoever had put the 9-millimeter Glock pistol on my bed might also have taken or harmed Orson.
In my room again, I located a spare pair of sunglasses in a bureau drawer. They were in a soft case with a Velcro seal, and I clipped the case in my shirt pocket.
I glanced at my wristwatch, on which the time was displayed by light-emitting diodes.
Quickly, I returned the invoice and the police questionnaire to the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop. Whether it was more evidence or merely trash, I hid it between the mattress and box springs of my bed.
The date of purchase seemed significant. Suddenly everything seemed significant.
I kept the pistol. Maybe this was a setup, just like in the movies, but I felt safer with a weapon. I wished that I knew how to use it.
The pockets of my leather jacket were deep enough to conceal the gun. It hung in the right pocket not like a weight of dead steel but like a thing alive, like a torpid but not entirely dormant snake. When I moved, it seemed to writhe slowly: fat and sluggish, an oozing tangle of thick coils.
As I was about to go downstairs to search for Orson, I recalled a July night when I had watched him from my bedroom window as he sat in the backyard, his head tilted to lift his snout to the breeze, transfixed by something in the heavens, deep in one of his most puzzling moods. He had not been howling, and in any event the summer sky had been moonless; the sound he made was neither a whine nor a whimper but a mewling of singular and disturbing character.
Now I raised the blind at that same window and saw him in the yard below. He was busily digging a black hole in the moon-silvered lawn. This was peculiar, because he was a well-behaved dog and never a digger.
As I looked on, Orson abandoned the patch of earth at which he had been furiously clawing, moved a few feet to the right, and began to dig a new hole. A quality of frenzy marked his behavior.
“What’s happened, boy?” I wondered, and in the yard below, the dog dug, dug, dug.
On my way downstairs, with the Glock coiling heavily in my jacket pocket, I remembered that July night when I had gone into the backyard to sit beside the mewling dog….
His cries grew as thin as the whistle-hiss of a glassblower shaping a vase over a flame, so soft that they did not even disturb the nearest of our neighbors, yet there was such wretchedness in the sound that I was shaken by it. With those cries he shaped a misery darker than the darkest glass and stranger in form than anything a blower could blow.
He was uninjured and did not appear to be ill. For all I could tell, the sight of the stars themselves was the thing that filled him with torment. Yet if the vision of dogs is as poor as we are taught, they can’t see the stars well or at all. And why should stars cause Orson such anguish, anyway, or the night that was no deeper than other nights before it? Nevertheless, he gazed skyward and made tortured sounds and didn’t respond to my reassuring voice.
When I put a hand on his head and stroked his back, I felt hard shudders passing through him. He sprang to his feet and padded away, only to turn and stare at me from a distance, and I swear that for a while he hated me. He loved me as always; he was still my dog, after all, and could not escape loving me; but at the same time, he hated me intensely. In the warm July air, I could virtually feel the cold hatred radiating off him. He paced the yard, alternately staring at me—holding my gaze as only he among all dogs is able to hold it—and looking at the sky, now stiff and shaking with rage, now weak and mewling with what seemed despair.
When I’d told Bobby Halloway about this, he’d said that dogs are incapable of hating anyone or of feeling anything as complex as genuine despair, that