Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

“Let’s not go over that dent business again. I am so tired of hearing about that famous dent. And about trusting me? I guess you were wrong. The dog is bigger than that.”

“Agatha, is Harold there?”

“Nope, he’s down at the barbershop. It’s Saturday morning. Busy time for haircutting.”

I heard Bradley barking. I sensed that he knew I was on the line, that I wanted him back. “I’m going to call Harold.”

So I hung up on her and called Harold’s barbershop.

“Harold,” I said, “I want that dog back.”

“Hey, bro,” he said in his friendly way. “Whassup? I’m kinda busy right now.”

“It’s about my dog,” I said. “I just talked to Agatha. She’s being stubborn. She won’t give me Bradley back, she says.”

“Oh, that. Well, I know, but, understand, she’s real insistent and everything, and she does have a point. She’s pretty hard to fight with when she has a point.”

“She gave me her word.”

“Yeah, well. Your sister does that,” he said with a sigh.

“Harold, I’ve got to have that dog. Kathryn left me and I’m a wreck.”

“You sound like a wreck, I agree with you about that. But listen, Bradley, the kids have gone all crazy about that animal, and I don’t think I can return him to you. It’s not all that easy, taking a pet away from children.” He waited. “You don’t have kids. You don’t know about how kids scream at you. I mean, they really scream at you. They know how. It’s like their job.”

I heard a sound from someone who was presumably in the barber chair.

“What’s that?”

“Oh,” Harold said, “that’s my customer. Guy named Saul. He says I should return the dog.”

“He’s right. A deal is a deal.” I waited. “There’s honor at stake here.”

“There is? Whose honor?”

In the background, I could hear the customer named Saul saying, “ Your honor, Harold.”

“Listen,” Harold said, “it’s a busy morning and I have to go.”

“Harold, you and Agatha promised —”

“Good-bye, Bradley. I’m sorry. I truly am.”

And he hung up on me.

I HAD NEVER REPOSSESSED a dog before. But that was what I would have to do. First I had to go down to Jitters for several hours to supervise and manage the staffing and work on the books. Also, we were still training Chloé — she’d left Dr. Enchilada’s, as I said, to do bookkeeping for us at the main downtown Jitters. But by two in the afternoon I thought everything was under control in the place, the customers jabbering away on their caffeine highs, spraying bagel crumbs in every direction, and so I changed clothes in the back room and hopped in my car and headed up toward Five Oaks. I had taken along Bradley’s old leash, some Milk Bones and kibble, a bowl for water, and some squeak toys, including a squeak cat I thought he’d like to chew on.

The trouble was that I had lingered over a bit too much caffeine myself, with the result that my nerves were on fire, and I was pulled over and ticketed on I-75 just north of Bay City for driving eighty-five miles an hour. Mr. Toad is a fast driver, I’ll admit that right now. The patrolman was a squat, bullet-headed youth with a mean and forthright expression of contempt. When I pulled out my wallet from my sport coat, several nuggets of dog kibble cascaded out. The cop, seeing this, intensified his expression of scorn. His face looked as if it had been made of concrete.

“Officer, everyone was driving that speed,” I said, sounding authoritative, like a war correspondent. “We all were. I don’t see why you singled me out.”

“Sir?” he said. Even his voice sounded concretelike. “Let me ask you a question. Have you ever gone hunting? Up north?”

“Hunting? Once or twice. But I don’t see what —”

“ — Duck hunting?”

“No. Maybe once.”

“Well,” he said, “if you’ve gone duck hunting, and you were there in the marshes, let’s say in the early morning, you know, at first light? When you aimed your gun, would you shoot at the individual duck, or would you shoot at the whole flock? You’d aim at one of them, wouldn’t you? That’s what I did. I aimed at you. And it seems I landed you.”

So he opened his book and wrote out the ticket. But I explained to him as he wrote that I had been in a hurry to get a dog, my dog, and I explained about my wife leaving me — the caffeine still had me in its grip — but he seemed quite unsympathetic, and unmoved, and certainly not about to eat the ticket on my behalf. He was a callow youth with a simple idea of lawbreaking and had suffered no setbacks in the wars of love. He wore no wedding ring, I noticed. He said to me, after I had finished my presentation, “Things will go very ill for you if you are caught speeding again soon.” Where do they find phrases like that? He was still trying to act the part.

Also, to compound my difficulties, it had started to snow, and the snow reminded me of Kathryn and of how we had once stood in front of a window hand in hand after going to the Humane Society, and how she had betrayed me, and her betrayal got mixed up in my head with Agatha’s, with the result that the dog started to seem like the solution to just about every aspect of my life. How pathetically low the stakes had fallen. So after getting ticketed the first time, I forgot about how fast I was going, with the result that about thirty miles north of my previous encounter with the law, I was pulled over again, about half a mile south of an outlet mall, but this time by a different guy, a better guy, though not Highway Patrol fortunately, but a local cop this time. He was a cop with soul, a midwestern rural African-American cop I’m talking about now, married this time, who was more sympathetic to my story, and who, with a downcast expression, issued me a warning.

APPROACHING FIVE OAKS, I took the Oak Street exit off the freeway and drove past Bruckner Buick and crept past the WaldChem plant where Agatha worked as an administrative assistant to the CEO, this guy Schwartzwalder. There was a smell in the air of slightly rancid cooking oil mixed with the odor emanating from the paper plant near the river, an odor of cardboard and vanilla, a numbing upsurge of profitmaking industrial aerosols. I turned off the car radio so no one would know I was coming. I drove into town on little cat feet.

Unlike the cat, however, my car was slipping and sliding. My helplessness had lost its sense of comedy. It had become inane. I saw my reflection in the rearview mirror, and the expression on my face, of outraged innocent depraved desperation, frightened me. My car skidded and slipped onto a sidewalk. Fortunately, no one was walking there or I might have killed somebody. I threw the car into reverse and resumed my undertaking, my car yawing down the avenue.

I arrived in due course on their block, Agatha and Harold’s. It’s actually a nice enough neighborhood, tree-shaded, large old houses, solidly middle-class, lawns spray-painted with herbicidal chemicals in the summer. This being late fall, they already had their Christmas decorations assembled and displayed outside, with an enormous plastic sleigh and eight plastic electrified reindeer desecrating the roof. The noses on these reindeer blinked sequentially, and below them the MERRY CHRISTMAS sign burned brightly even in the daytime. The sleigh was cluttered with tinfoil gift paraphernalia. I think Harold put this up in September, a foible of his. Despite what you might think, I am not a cruel man, and I realized insightfully that I could not knock on the door and take Bradley the dog by stealth or force during the Christmas season. In front of the children, Tom and Louie, the event would be traumatic, it would spoil their holiday memories forever — Christmas would from this day onward be the time of year when they had lost the family dog — and I would eternally be the monstrous ogre uncle.