Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"So admit it," said Marlene sensibly. "It's true, isn't it?"

"Let's go to bed."

After a pause, she said, "Yes, let's. I assume you'll want to bother me with your disgusting lusts, as usual."

"Not at all. I got a very satisfying blow job from Big Albertine the transvestite on my way to Penn Station. I'm quite depleted."

"We'll see about that."

Karp was awakened just after dawn the next morning by gunfire. Bang. He jumped wildly out of bed. Bang bang.

And thumped his head against the narrow, sloping ceiling. Cursing and crouching, he went to the window, raised the roller shade, and peered down at the farmyard below, which was rose-gray and longshadowed in the early light. He saw in extreme foreshortening a wiry, yellow-haired man in a white T-shirt and jeans: Ireland, the trainer. One of the mastiffs stood by his left side. The dog was wearing a training harness and a long lead. Ireland led the dog slowly toward the chicken house. As they reached about ten feet from it, its door flung open violently and a man Karp had never seen before leaped out. He was big, unshaven, wore a dirty raincoat and a black cowboy hat, and had a small black pistol in his hand. He yelled something incomprehensible and fired two shots into the air. The mastiff barked and heaved against the lead as the man vanished back into the building. Ireland said something to the dog and walked away with it. A minute later the man came out of the chicken house carrying his hat and coat. Karp saw Marlene come into view and walk off with him. Some kind of dog test, Karp imagined. He knew nothing about dog training and had no interest in learning anything about it. He thought the dog farm a dubious enterprise, rich in possibilities for torts and tax trouble.

He showered and dressed in cutoffs and an old, faded Hawaiian shirt, a member of a large collection he owned, as it was the family joke to give him one every birthday. This one showed big, tan pineapples and green palm fronds against black. He went down to the kitchen, where he found coffee in the Braun and a box of doughnuts open on the table, together with the Times. Karp poured, selected a cinnamon, and sat down to peruse. The house was quiet except for the thudding of the elderly refrigerator. From outside he could hear faint sounds of barking, a boy's call, the distant rumble of a large engine.

The back screen door popped open and the unshaven man came in. He stopped short when he saw Karp.

"Oh, sorry. I didn't know anyone was here. Marlene said I could get some coffee and… "

"Help yourself," said Karp. The man did, and Karp was not pleased to see that he intended to take his coffee break at the table. He was a younger man than Karp had first thought, midtwenties at most, big and athletic, with a round face that the stubble made look older. After a short silence, Karp said, "And you are…?"

"Oh, sorry!" The man wiped powdered sugar off his hand and stuck it out. "Alex Russell. I'm the agitator."

"Excuse me?"

"The agitator. One of them."

"I caught your act from the window, with the pistol."

"Oh, yeah. That's the first test. If they won't stand up to an attack like that, you can forget training. Some of them pee and whine-I mean rotties, big Dobes. It's pathetic, really. But all of your dogs so far came through great."

"They're her dogs," said Karp in an undertone, and picked up his paper again in a way that suggested an end to the conversation. But Russell, sensing the void in the dog-training part of Karp's brain, and wishing to fill it, resumed. "Yeah, I never worked with mastiffs before. Great dogs. Billy's a great trainer, too, but I'll tell you, and you can ask anybody in the business, the agitator makes the dog. You mess up, you don't drop the sleeve just right, you're a little too aggressive with a beginner, you're a little too slack with a varminty dog, hell, you can totally throw him off. It's all in the timing. And the acting. I mean, you got to act like a slimeball, you know? I mean really feel like you're up to bad shit. The dogs can tell if you're not sincere. Hi, Marjorie."

Karp looked up as the screen door banged open again. A pretty woman of about thirty with a big mop of dark curls walked directly to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. She sat down in an empty chair and poured in cream and sugar. "That Jeb is a handful," she said.

Russell said, "I know it. I got bruises up and down my arm."

The woman seemed to notice Karp for the first time. "You're the husband."

"I am. Who are you?"

"Marjorie Rolfe."

"Don't tell me. You're an agitator, too."

"You can tell, huh?"

"Uh-huh. My first clue was that you're wearing quilted bib overalls made out of leather. Unless that's a fashion statement."

"Oh, no," she said straight-faced, "that's part of the gear. The dogs are trained to go for the arm. We got sleeves, you know, to protect the arm. But some of them get excited, especially if you're down and they could bite you someplace else. See, that's why we have to wear these scratch pants."

"I think I'm following you," said Karp, putting down his paper. "So this is how you guys make a living, as dog agitators?"

They both laughed. Karp saw that the woman had a canine tooth missing. "Heck, no," said Russell. "I mean we get paid good money by the hour, but it ain't no living. No, I work down at the Safeway. Marjorie's a groomer."

"And, what? You answered an ad?"

"Oh, no," said Marjorie cheerfully. "We know Billy from the NA at St. Malachy's. We're all three junkies together. Recovering junkies."

The other two started talking about dogs and cars and the various afflictions that arose in the marginal life, and Karp finished his Times browse and his coffee and went outside. The sun was up over the barn now and already warming the air. Karp had been out to the dog farm a number of times since Marlene had purchased it, but never before when dog training was going full blast. He had always wanted a summer place on the Island; they had spoken of it often when they had both been struggling ADAs, but Karp had imagined a little cottage in Quogue, not this sprawling, crumbling spread at the end of the North Fork. Nor the felon, nor the huge dogs, nor the junkies in the kitchen, either. On the other hand, if you were married to Marlene Ciampi, you had to expect a little louche in your life. Marlene was not a Quogue-cottage person.

On the other other hand, this feeling was real, the one he had nearly all the time, of things out of control, of impending disaster, of entering the scratchy borderlands of the crazy country, and it was not good, he did not want to live the rest of his life feeling this way. If work had been going well-that was another thing, that remark about how he should quit and do something else. Guys worked and supported their families, they did an honest day's work and took what shit they had to and put something away to send the kids to college and to retire on, that was what guys were for. It had never occurred to Karp that he would be in a situation where no sacrifice would be necessary. He had made a bundle once himself, working as a private litigator, but he had not liked it much, suing faceless enterprises or defending them. What was the point? Whereas when you stood up for the People, there was something real behind it. Or not, as it seemed recently. And now he could no longer see himself as a… martyr was too strong, he would never have said that, although he was in fact the kind of man who would take a bullet for a short list of causes, his family one, his friends, and a certain vision of what the law was meant to be, a vision that apparently was not broadly shared in his profession, and hardly at all within his own office. It was not like it was on the TV. So why get out of bed and go to work? To feed the kids to keep the wolf from the door. But the kids had trusts now, the college taken care of, the little nest egg afterward, and the wolf was…