they cared, they would have made a more direct effort to get me. They set the fire to cover up Angela’s murder. That was the reason, nothing more.”
Sniff, sniff, sniff-sniff-sniff: out with the remaining bad air of the burning house, in with the revitalizing scent of squirrel, out with the bad, in with the good.
“God, she was such a good person, so giving,” I said bitterly. “She didn’t deserve to die like that, to die at all.”
Orson paused in his sniffing but only briefly. Human suffering. Terrible. Terrible thing. Misery, death, despair. But nothing to be done. Nothing to be done about it. Just the way of the world, the nature of human existence. Terrible. Come smell the squirrels with me, Master Snow. You’ll feel better.
A lump rose in my throat, not poignant grief but something more prosaic, so I hacked with tubercular violence and finally planted a black oyster among the tree roots.
“If Sasha were here,” I said, “I wonder if right now I’d remind her so much of James Dean?”
My face felt greasy and tender. I wiped at it with a hand that also felt greasy.
Across the thin grass on the graves and across the polished surfaces of the granite markers, the moonshadows of wind-trembled leaves danced like cemetery fairies.
Even in this peculiar light, I could see that the palm of the hand I had put to my face was smeared with soot. “I must stink to high heaven.”
Immediately, Orson lost interest in the squirrel spoor and came eagerly to me. He sniffed vigorously at my shoes, along my legs, across my chest, finally sticking his snout under my jacket and into my armpit.
Sometimes I suspect that Orson not only understands more than we expect a dog to understand, but that he has a sense of humor and a talent for sarcasm.
Forcibly withdrawing his snout from my armpit, holding his head in both hands, I said, “You’re no rose yourself, pal. And what kind of guard dog are you, anyway? Maybe they were already in the house with Angela when I arrived, and she didn’t know it. But how come you didn’t bite them in the ass when they left the place? If they escaped by the kitchen door, they went right past you. Why didn’t I find a bunch of bad guys rolling around on the backyard, clutching their butts and howling in pain?”
Orson’s gaze held steady, his eyes deep. He was shocked by the question, the implied accusation. Shocked. He was a peaceful dog. A dog of peace, he was. A chaser of rubber balls, a licker of faces, a philosopher and boon companion. Besides, Master Snow, the job was to prevent villains from entering the house, not to prevent them from leaving. Good riddance to villains. Who wants them around, anyway? Villains and fleas. Good riddance.
As I sat nose-to-nose with Orson, staring into his eyes, a sense of the uncanny came over me—or perhaps it was a transient madness—and for a moment I imagined that I could read his true thoughts, which were markedly different from the dialogue that I invented for him. Different and unsettling.
I dropped my bracketing hands from his head, but he chose not to turn away from me or to lower his gaze.
I was unable to lower mine.
To express a word of this to Bobby Halloway would have been to elicit a recommendation of lobotomy: Nevertheless, I sensed that the dog feared for me. Pitied me because I was struggling so hard not to admit the true depth of my pain. Pitied me because I could not acknowledge how profoundly the prospect of being alone scared me. More than anything, however, he feared for me, as though he saw an oncoming juggernaut of which I was oblivious: a great white blazing wheel, as big as a mountain, that would grind me to dust and leave the dust burning in its wake.
“What, when, where?” I wondered.
Orson’s stare was intense. Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of tombs, weigher of the hearts of the dead, could not have stared more piercingly. This dog of mine was no Lassie, no carefree Disney pooch with strictly cute moves and an unlimited capacity for mischievous fun.
“Sometimes,” I told him, “you spook me.”
He blinked, shook his head, leaped away from me, and padded in circles among the tombstones, busily sniffing the grass and the fallen oak leaves, pretending to be just a dog again.
Maybe it wasn’t Orson who had spooked me. Maybe I had spooked myself. Maybe his