George Pelecanos - Drama City

Lorenzo went to the front door of the warehouse and knocked. He could hear the deep, insistent barks of large dogs coming from behind the door.

He waited, then knocked again. The woman was in there, he knew. She rarely ventured outside.

Lorenzo stood on the stoop for five minutes, sweating, waiting, and rapping his fist on wood. Eventually the woman, a stocky, milky-eyed Korean with wildly unkempt hair, opened the door. She recognized him immediately, as he had visited her the previous week. Through the open door, he smelled ammonia.

“I did!” she said, stamping her foot petulantly, like a child. She wore sneakers without backs.

“I’m just checking up on you to see you did,” said Lorenzo, careful to inject no animosity into his voice, but raising it some so she could hear him. The barking had intensified.

“No dogs outside,” she said. “All inside. I clean!”

“Where are they now?”

“Right there!” she said, pointing to a hallway. In the center of the hall, set in a cut-out of the drywall, Lorenzo could see a large interior window, glass streaked with saliva and clouded by breath. The barks were coming from behind the glass. The barking, teeth-bared heads of dogs appeared, disappeared, and appeared again.

“Can I come in?” said Lorenzo.

“I did!”

“Need to do my job and confirm that, ma’am.”

The woman shook her head and stepped aside.

“They all in that room?”

“All, yes.”

Lorenzo entered the hall. His eyes burned immediately from the ammonia. His lungs burned too. He went to the window and looked through it. Had to be twenty, twenty-five dogs in that room, running around, sniffing at one another, barking at him, wagging their tails at the woman who stood beside him. All were large long-haired shepherd mixes. All had similar brown-black coats. Some appeared to be inbred through generations.

There was some sort of portable kitchen hookup along one wall in there, a trashed, barely cushioned chair and a sofa, looked like it had lost a firefight. Set against another wall was a bed, its sheets rumpled and dirty with grime and hair. This, he guessed, was where the woman slept.

Lorenzo walked down the hall to the open warehouse. Stand-up industrial-sized fans were situated around the warehouse floor, drying the concrete, which had been hosed down. The last time Lorenzo had been here, the floor had been littered with feces. She had taken care of it, as he’d asked her to do.

“I clean shit,” said the woman.

“I see that,” said Lorenzo, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his eyes. He was sickened from the ammonia and could not stand to breathe it much longer. “You can’t have those dogs in here with this ammonia. It’s poison.”

“Ammonia for clean,” said the woman, who seemed entirely unaffected by the fumes.

“But it’s poison. Do you understand?”

“Yes, poison. That why dogs in room. When no smell, I let dogs out.” The woman looked at Lorenzo with a smile in her eyes. “Okay, police?”

“You need to keep this place free of clutter and feces,” said Lorenzo, ignoring her remark. “Let those dogs outside, but not too long in the middle of the day.”

“Too hot.”

“That’s right. And put water out in those cages when they’re out there too.”

“Okay.”

“I’m gonna leave now,” said Lorenzo. “But I’ll be back.”

“I clean,” said the woman tiredly, looking around the warehouse, making a limp sweeping gesture with her hand.

“Right,” said Lorenzo.

Out in the van, he dry-swallowed two ibuprofens. The ammonia fumes had hastened the return of his headache.

The Korean woman was one of several “hoarders” he had been introduced to on the job. Generally they were decent people who seemed to love their animals and want to do their best to give them good care. They often lived in filth and maintained little contact with other humans, preferring the company and security of animals. Like the Korean woman, they focused on one breed or mix of animals and sought them out. They considered themselves to be rescuers. Lorenzo was convinced that these people had some sort of mental illness. Mark said it was a form of agoraphobia, and when Lorenzo had asked him what that was, Mark said, “Fear of the marketplace. You know, from the Greek.”

“From the Greek?” said Lorenzo. “ What Greek?”

“The Greek language,” said Mark. “The market, as in the agora.”

“So, like, these hoarders, they afraid of goin’ out to the Safeway, that’s what you’re saying?”

“In a way,” said Mark. “More like they’re afraid of seeing people at the Safeway.”

“But if they was to see a bunch of dogs, up on two legs, pushing those shopping carts around the supermarket, they’d be all right with that.”

“Precisely,” said Mark.

Precisely. Mark talked funny, all that extra schooling he’d had. But Mark was all right.

On the way back to the office, Lorenzo stopped at a residence on Kennedy Street, in Northwest, at 6th and Longfellow. The old woman there had been leaving messages on his machine about her cat.

He entered the house and had a seat on the living-room couch while the woman, nearly bald and wearing a housedress, explained the situation to Lorenzo. As she did, an equally old man, wearing a sweater despite the heat, sat beside her, intently watching bare-knuckled Tibetan fistfights on the cable channel that was playing on the Sony. The curtains had all been drawn, shutting out the afternoon light. A fan blew warm air and dust across the room.

“I figured it was time to do this,” said the woman. “Queen been slippin’ out in the alley and visiting her boyfriends again.”

“Past time,” said the man, his eyes focused on the fights.

“Now, John,” said the lady. “That little girl is just frisky.”

Lorenzo looked through the screen of the travel box at the green-eyed cat. “She’s a calico, right?”

“Through and through,” said the old lady. “I appreciate you pickin’ her up. I don’t have a car and if I did I couldn’t see to drive it.”

“I’ll take her to the spay clinic,” said Lorenzo. “It’s right next door to my office. They’ll do it tonight, and you can have her tomorrow morning.”

“Will you bring her back?”

“Someone will.”

“I want you to bring her back, young man.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m gonna need a twenty-five-dollar check for the procedure.”

“Shoulda done this a while back,” said the old man. “Way that cat likes to spread her love around.”

“John,” said the old lady, reaching into her purse for her checkbook.

Five minutes later, Lorenzo went out the door, crossed the concrete porch, and headed down the steps of the row house with the travel box in his hand. He heard two old men on an adjoining porch discussing his presence.

“Why Miss Roberts got police calling on her for? Her great-grandson done somethin’ wrong again?”

“That boy already payin’ his debt. Anyway, that’s no police. That’s the dog man, come to take her cat.”

“Take it for what?”

“To fix its privates.”

“’Bout time.”

“You should have it done your own self.”

“You should too.”

“I’d be disappointin’ a lot of women.”

“Not as many as me.”

Lorenzo placed the box in the back of the van.

After dropping the Calico off at the clinic, Lorenzo entered the lobby of the Humane Society office, greeting a couple of his coworkers, Jamie, attractive and gay, and Luanne, plain and straight. A tough white girl, Cindy, sat behind the dispatch desk, radioing a call to a field operative, an ever-present cup of Starbucks before her. Lorenzo rubbed the head of the latest house pet, a previously abused border collie mix named Tulip, who had gotten up out of her bed to greet him.