Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

“Needs some work,” Chris said. The puppy had his shoelace loose and was tugging on it. He reached down and picked her up. She lapped frantically at anything she could reach.

“I’m going to peel it back to the studs first, see what I’ve got. Then I’ll start the rehab.”

Chris nodded.

“Want some help?”

“Sure.”

The puppy began to chew on Chris’s wrist.

“What’s this one’s name?” he said.

“The brown one’s Patty,” Gus said. “The other two I can’t tell apart yet.”

They took their beer and went out and sat on a couple of folding chairs in the yard and watched the dogs dash around. The land was overgrown with wild grass and evergreens; only a small area around the house was mowed. The generational additions on the house made it ramble idiosyncratically. The foundation plantings needed pruning. At one corner some desolate roses clung tiredly to a sagging trellis.

“Lot of work,” Chris said.

“Yeah.”

“Be nice when it’s done,” he said.

“Nice to do,” Gus said. “Even if I don’t finish.”

“I was thinking that,” Chris said.

There was a little wind. It brought the smell of the river up to them. Gus got up and went to the kitchen, stepping over the lath and plaster that littered the floor. He got two more beers and brought them back and handed one to Chris. The puppies were out of sight in the tall grass, which moved as they rummaged through it.

“Whole place is fenced,” Gus said. “So I don’t have to worry about them.”

The road that curved by Gus’s house was empty of traffic. Where they sat they could see no other houses, only the overgrown fields, and the ragged evergreens, and the narrow gleam of the river at the foot of the hill.

“I can help you with this on weekends if you’d like,” Chris said.

Gus nodded. Across the sloping meadow, beyond the river, the sky was dark.

“That’d be good,” Gus said.

“I won’t have as much time as I used to,” Chris said. “I’m going to be police commissioner.”

Gus stopped with the beer can nearly to his lips.

“Boston?”

“Boston.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gus said.

Far to the east, lightning flickered against the sullen sky, so far away that they couldn’t hear the thunder. Where they sat the pale spring sunshine was still on them. Light, but not much warmth. Gus put his left hand out and took Chris’s right hand and held it for a moment. It wasn’t a handshake. Then he let go and leaned back in his chair.

“That’s the balls,” Gus said.

Chris grinned at him. “A touch of the poet,” he said, “in every word you speak.”

Gus smiled and drank some more beer.

“Well, it may be inelegant, but it is, in fact, the fucking balls,” Gus said.

The lightning flickered again and one of the puppies picked it up, or picked up the sound of thunder still inaudible to Chris and Gus. She scuttled under Gus’s chair. The other two ignored her and continued to snuffle through the grass, bumping frequently into each other. Two were ticked chocolate-white, one was nearly all chocolate.

“Piper wants to be mayor on his own.”

“So he hires Flaherty’s heroic prosecutor,” Gus said.

“Yeah. He figures I appeal to the Micks, being Irish, and to the Goo Goos, being Harvard.”

“Piper’s too stupid to have thought that up.”

“I think Mary Alice put it together.”

“Probably,” Gus said.

“She’s a hell of a woman,” Chris said.

“I know.”

“I gave her your address.”

“Yeah. She’s been out here.”

Chris waited. Gus said nothing more. Chris didn’t press.

“I’m seeing Grace tonight,” Chris said.

“I hope it’s all right,” Gus said.

“Either way, I’ll be all right,” Chris said.

“Good,” Gus said. He stood and walked with Chris to the car.

“I’ll be over this weekend, if you want, to help.”

Gus nodded.

“Good luck tonight,” he said.

“Thanks,” Chris said.

The lightning flickered again, and now for the first time they could hear, faintly and long after the flash, the sound of the thunder. All the puppies heard it and scrambled trying to get under Gus’s feet.

He bent and scooped them up in his arms, and held them, squirming and scared.

“We’ll be fine,” Gus said.

“Yes, we will,” Chris said.

He and his father stood silently for a moment, then his father put a free arm around Chris’s shoulder and hugged him. Chris hugged him back for a moment and pressed his cheek against his father’s face, feeling the day-old stubble of his father’s beard. Then he got in the car and drove away.

After he was gone Gus took the puppies inside and fed them and, when they had eaten, followed them outside. The thunder had stopped for the moment, and so, no longer hearing thunder, they forgot that there had been thunder. He stood on the porch watching them as they made their final run of the day across the meadow. It was evening and he could no longer see the river. All he could see were the three dogs, against the now darkening grass, running, sniffing the ground, tracking, jostling one another, occasionally stopping to roll in the grass, and jumping up again to run free across his land, where his house stood that he was building with his son. There were a few wide slow flakes of snow beginning to spiral down. The thunder sounded louder, and the dogs turned and started back, away from the river, like horses for the barn, picking up speed as they came, running full out their still uncoordinated, ambling puppy run, only white showing now, in the grass-scented darkness, running toward home, toward him. He could see them so brightly and then they blurred and he realized he was crying... And though he tried as hard as he was able, he couldn’t remember when he’d done it last.

The snow had stopped and there was a faint milky hint of dawn outside Grace’s window.

“Two sleepy people,” I said. “By dawn’s early light...”

“I’m not sleepy,” Grace said.

“I was sort of implying the next lines of the song.”

“I know,” Grace said.

I stood and went to the window and looked out. The cars in the parking lot were shapeless with snow. We’d have to dig to get out of here. A big plow came slowly down Grace’s street, the thick, wet snow peeling off the canted blade. There was no thunder anymore, no lightning. The mercury streetlights were still on, looking yellow in the encroaching morning. I turned back toward Grace.

“I’m done,” I said. “I don’t have anything else to say.”

“How do you feel about this police-commissioner thing?” Grace said.

“Scared.”

“Of?”

“Of the responsibility. Of facing the men, when I’ve never even been a cop. Scared I’m not tough enough.”

“Why’d you take the job?” Grace said.

“All the reasons I took the special prosecutor job.”

“And?”

I took my hands from my pockets and locked them behind my head and pressed my neck back against them.

“There’s more?” I said.

“I think so.”

“Yeah. There is.”

“Gus,” Grace said.

“Yeah. When I saw him this afternoon, actually I guess it’s yesterday afternoon, now, I... there was a point where he picked up all three of the puppies — they were scared of the thunder — and held them in one arm. And they sort of squirmed in against him. It haunts me. That image of him... he has an arm like a tree limb, you know? and these three little brown heads peering out. It’s my father. I wanted to sit in his lap.”

“You did it for Gus?”

“No, not quite. I did it because of Gus. Because of who he is and was and what he is and did, and because Gus never got it straight with his father, and who the hell knows what my grandfather had going with his father. And because... I don’t know. Just because.”