T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

Gretchen had pinned her hair up so that all the contours of her face stood out in sharp relief. There were lines everywhere suddenly, creases and gouges, frown marks, little embellishments round her eyes, and how could Nisha have missed them? Gretchen was old — fifty, at least — and the realization came home to Nisha now, under the harsh sun, with the taste of the beer and of Erhard still tingling on her lips. “I don’t care,” Gretchen was saying, and she was standing beside Nisha now, like a figurine the gardeners had set down amid that perfect landscape.

“But I thought we were going to go for everything, the complete behavior, good or bad, right? Because otherwise—”

“That was how the accident happened. At the dog park. He got through the gate before Cliff or I could stop him and just ran out into the street after some idiot on a motorcycle …” She looked past Nisha a moment, to where Admiral was bent over the pool, slurping up water as if his pinched triangular head worked on a piston. “So no,” she said, “no, we’re going to have to modify some behavior. I don’t want him drinking that pool water, for one thing. Too many chemicals.”

“Okay, sure,” Nisha said, shrugging. “I’ll try.” She raised her voice and sang out “Bad dog, bad dog,” but it was halfhearted and Admiral ignored her.

The cool green eyes shifted to meet hers again. “And I don’t want him eating his own”—she paused to search for the proper word for the context, running through various euphemisms before giving it up—“shit.”

Another shrug.

“I’m serious on this. Are you with me?”

Nisha couldn’t help herself, and so what if she was pushing it?

So what? “Admiral did,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t know that.”

Gretchen just waved her hand in dismissal. “But this Admiral,”

she said. “He’s not going to do it. Is he?”

Over the course of the next two weeks, as summer settled in with a succession of cloudless, high-arching days and Admiral steadily grew into the promise of his limbs, Erhard became a fixture at the house. Every morning, when Nisha came through the gate with the dog on his leash, he was there waiting for her, shining and tall and beautiful, with a joke on his lips and always some little treat for Admiral secreted in one pocket or another. The dog worshipped him. Went crazy for him. Pranced on the leash, spun in circles, nosed at his sleeves and pockets till he got his treat, then rolled over on his back in blissful submission. And then it was the dog park, and instead of sitting there wrapped up in the cocoon of herself, she had Erhard to sustain her, to lean into her so that she could feel the heat of him through the thin cotton of his shirt, to kiss her, and later, after lunch and the rising tide of the beer, to make love to her on the divan in the cool shadows of the pool house. They swam in the afternoons — he didn’t mind the five pounds she’d put on; he praised her for them — and sometimes Frankie would join them, shedding the maid’s habit for a white two-piece and careering through a slashing backstroke with a bottle of beer her reward, because she was part of the family too, Mama and Papa and Aunt Frankie, all there to nurture little Admiral under the beneficent gaze of the sun.

Of course, Nisha was no fool. She knew there was a quid pro quo involved here, knew that Erhard had his agenda, but she was in no hurry, she’d committed to nothing, and as she lay there on the divan smoothing her hands over his back, tasting him, enjoying him, taking him inside her, she felt hope, real hope, for the first time since she’d come back home. It got so that she looked forward to each day, even the mornings that had been so hard on her, having to take a tray up to the ghost of her mother while her father trudged off to work, the whole house like a turned grave, because now she had Admiral, now she had Erhard, and she could shrug off anything. Yes.

Sure. That was the way it was. Until the day he called her on it.

Cloudless sky, steady sun, every flower at its peak. She came down the walk with Admiral on his leash at the appointed hour, pulled back the gate, and there he was — but this time he wasn’t alone. Beside him, already straining at the leash, was a gangling overgrown Afghan pup that could have been the twin of Admiral, and though she’d known it was coming, known the plan since the very first day, she was awestruck. “Jesus,” she said, even as Admiral jerked her forward and the two dogs began to romp round her legs in a tangle of limbs and leashes, “how did you—? I mean, he’s the exact, he’s totally—”

“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

“But where did you find him?”

Erhard gave her a look of appraisal, then his eyes jumped past her to sweep the street. “Let’s go inside, no? I don’t want that they should see us here, anyone — not right in the front of the house.”

He hadn’t talked her into it, not yet, not exactly, but now that the moment had come she numbly punched in the code and held the gate open for him. What he wanted to do, what he was in the process of doing with her unspoken complicity, was to switch the dogs — just for a day, two at the most — by way of experiment. His contention was that the Strikers would never know the difference, that they were arrogant exemplars of bourgeois excess, even to the point of violating the laws of nature — and God, God too — simply to satisfy their own solipsistic desires. Admiral wouldn’t be harmed — he’d enjoy himself, the change of scenery, all that. And certainly she knew how much the dog had come to mean to him. “But these people will not recognize their own animal,” he’d insisted, his voice gone hard with conviction, “and so I will have my story and the world will know it.”

Once inside the gate, they let the dogs off their leashes and went round back of the house where they’d be out of sight. They walked hand-in-hand, his fingers entwined with hers, and for a long while, as the sun rode high overhead and a breeze slipped in off the ocean to stir the trees, they watched as the two dogs streaked back and forth, leaping and nipping and tumbling in doggy rhapsody.

Admiral’s great combed-out spill of fur whipped round him in a frenzy of motion, and the new dog, Erhard’s dog — the imposter — matched him step for step, hair for glorious hair. “You took him to the groomer, didn’t you?” she said.

Erhard gave a stiff nod. “Yes, sure: what do you think? He must be exact.”

She watched, bemused, for another minute, her misgivings buried deep under the pressure of his fingers, bone, sinew, the wedded flesh, and why shouldn’t she go along with him? What was the harm? His article, or expose or whatever it was, would appear in Switzerland, in German, and the Strikers would never know the difference. Or even if they did, even if it was translated into English and grabbed headlines all over the country, they had it coming to them. Erhard was right. She knew it. She’d known it all along. “So what’s his name?” she asked, the dogs shooting past her in a moil of fur and flashing feet. “Does he have a name?”

“Fred.”

“Fred? What kind of name is that for a pedigree dog?”

“What kind of name is Admiral?”

She was about to tell him the story of the original Admiral, how he’d earned his sobriquet because of his enthusiasm for the Strikers’

yacht and how they were planning on taking Admiral II out on the water as soon as they could, when the familiar rumble of the driveway gate drawing back on its runners startled her. In the next moment, she was in motion, making for the near corner of the house where she could see down the long macadam strip of the drive. Her heart skipped a beat: it was Gretchen. Gretchen home early, some crisis compelling her, mislaid papers, her blouse stained, the flu, Gretchen in her black Beemer, waiting for the gate to slide back so she could roll up the drive and exert dominion over her house and property, her piss-stained carpets and her insuperable dog. “Quick!” Nisha shouted, whirling round, “grab them. Grab the dogs!”