Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

So I started walking Blister by myself. I took him to the park, where he fell briefly in love with a Jack Russell named Zelda, and became fast friends with a lumbering Rottweiler named Chekhov. I teased him that he had a weakness for the literary types. Without Phil, the industrial avenues behind the shopping center seemed ominous and lonely, so I avoided those and paraded him around the neighborhood instead. In the dark late afternoons, with a prancing, curious black dog by your side, you can see straight into people's houses and lives: families arguing around dinner tables, children staring gape-mouthed at television sets, couples getting drunk by candlelight. During those walks the world seemed to me pitiful and exposed, lacking in some critical defenses. I tried explaining this to Phil a few times, at breakfast, but he was tired and hurried, gulping down cereal while trying not to spill milk on his tie, and I never felt he understood exactly what I was talking about, although I'm sure, I really am, that he tried.

March goes in like a lamb and out like a lion, or the other way around, but this particular March was roaring and hostile from start to finish. We'd been hit by the worst kind of weather: hours of snow one day, and then it would warm up and turn sleety, with ice storms that caused power outages and car accidents. Being outside made my skin feel raw and itchy, the air like a thousand pricking needles. My walks with Blister got shorter, and he'd stare at me reproachfully as we turned toward home. I found a new route, a short loop through an apartment complex whose height cut the wind a little, and I'd let him poke around its small yard while I huddled beneath a fire escape. This is where we were when it happened. I've gone over it a million times in my head since then, thinking of how I might have prevented it, but my memory never varies: the rush of wind; the muffled sounds of traffic through my wool hat; the appearance, as if from nowhere, of another dog.

I'm no expert on breeds, but I know what a pit-bull mix looks like. I hate those big, strong snouts of theirs, which remind me of a dinosaur's jaws, made for chomping other forms of life. This dog and Blister stood nose to nose, immobile, tails straight to the sky. I had Blister on the long, retractable leash, but was afraid to tug because I didn't know what the other dog would do if he moved. Everything was terribly quiet.

Then, from the shadows at the edge of the apartment complex, a man materialized in a red Gore-Tex jacket, his face hidden by the hood. “Sweetpea,” he called in a singsong voice. “Come here, Sweetpea.”

If I could have searched in my mind for the most unlikely name on earth for this dog, Sweetpea would probably have been the one I chose. This dog was staring at Blister as if contemplating which limb he was going to tear off first, but Blister was holding his ground. I was standing there paralyzed, which I will regret for the rest of my life.

When Sweetpea lunged, the leash lurched and took me with it, like a fisherman at the mercy of a monstrous fish. I heard snarling and a howl like a baby's, ghostly and keening, and then a sick crunch of teeth meeting flesh, and I saw the red of the Gore-Tex jacket, and both names, Blister and Sweetpea, were being yelled repeatedly, then something tripped me and I landed on the ground, the breath was knocked out of me, like it hadn't been since I was a little kid, all the air pushed from my lungs, the atmosphere of the world collapsing. The dogs were fighting, snapping at each other's throats.

“Sweetpea! Sweetpea!”

He finally got control of his dog and put it, still snarling, on a leash. Blister was lying on the ground. I breathed in, painfully, and crawled over to him. When I put my hand on his fur, it came away wet with blood. I said his name over and over, like a prayer, and his tail flapped lazily like it did when he was half-asleep. I turned to the guy in the red Gore-Tex and screamed, “Help me!” at the top of my lungs.

“I'll get my car,” he said. He took off running with the dog and I stayed there with Blister, watching him breathe, willing him to keep breathing. It seemed like hours later when a car pulled up and Sweetpea's owner got out. He carried Blister to the backseat of the car and said, “Tell me where you want to go.”

At the animal hospital they took Blister away and made me stay in the waiting room. I was crying — hysterically, I'll admit — and couldn't stop. I was also trembling and shaking. I didn't care who saw. Self-control was not a thing to be considered. The guy in the red Gore-Tex took off his coat and folded it carefully on the plastic seat beside him, and I hated him for that, for taking so much care with a goddamn coat after his dog tore mine to pieces.

“You should've had your dog on a leash,” I finally said between sobs, and had to repeat it several times to make myself understood. We were surrounded by photos on the walls and photos on magazine covers: all images of healthy, glossy dogs and cats, and they hit me like reproach.

“She got out,” is all he said. His singsong voice was actually an accent — Haitian, I guessed. He was in his forties, and neatly dressed in a blue shirt and chinos; he had high cheekbones and a trace of a beard and a compact, athletic build. “She belongs to my niece. I am sorry.”

“You'd better be fucking sorry,” is what I had to say to that.

He nodded. Then he leaned forward, his hands clasped over the knees of his neatly creased chinos. “You are bleeding,” he said.

“It's from the dog. It's from Blister.”

“No, I think it's from you.”

There was a dark splotch on my pants, below my knee. He knelt down in front of me, without asking, and quickly unlaced my boot and rolled up my corduroys and there it was: a rip in the fabric of my calf, jagged and bloody. My white sock was red. He touched his fingers to my leg and I swatted him away.

“Your dog bit me! Your fucking dog bit me, too!”

“She belongs to my niece,” he said, still kneeling in front of me.

I started to wail. “I'm going to be late for work,” I said.

His name was Jean-Michel and he came from Port-au-Prince. He worked in a hotel downtown, nights, like me. He'd come here five years earlier and lived with his brother, who was a doctor, and his brother's wife and their daughter, who was nine years old. The niece, Mireille, was beautiful and intelligent, but she was growing up wild. Her parents both worked and were very busy, and they did nothing to discipline her, and instead they bought her too many gifts, including new clothes all the time, earrings, CDs, and the dog. Jean-Michel told me all this in the waiting room at the animal hospital while my bloody calf throbbed and dripped onto the floor. His voice was low and melodic, and he seemed to think that he could soothe me with it, and he was right. I sat there listening to him while they worked on Blister, and I said nothing. Every once in a while I blew my nose into the cuff of my sweatshirt.

I interrupted him once, to ask him to call Phil and my supervisor at work. He took a notepad out of his pocket, wrote down the numbers, nodded, then did it. When he came back I said, “Thanks,” and he shook his head and said, “No. Nothing to thank.”

A veterinary assistant, looking all of nineteen, her hair in two long braids, came out and examined my leg. “Ooh, that's gotta smart,” she said, bending down. Her braids flapped around my ankles.

“Blister,” I said, “how is he?”

“You should get that looked at as soon as possible.”

I was in no mood for advice.

“If you aren't here to talk to me about Blister,” I told her, “get your fucking braids away from my leg.” I rolled down my pant leg over the bite.

Jean-Michel smiled weakly at her. “She's very upset,” he said.