Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

“Speaking about the truth tends to annihilate truth, doesn’t it?” Paul Thompson said to me.

“Yes,” I answered. “I’m certain you’re right.” And then for a sudden instant it seemed like it had been the puppy who’d spoken Paul’s words. I could see his little mouth moving after the words were already spoken. Then the dream faded and became a different dream, which involved the millennium fireworks display from New Year’s Eve, and didn’t stay in my mind like the Paul Thompson dream did, and does even to this day.

I make no more of this dream than I make of Sallie’s dreams, though I’m sure Merle Mackey would have plenty to say about it.

When I arrived back in the city the next afternoon, Sallie met me at the airport, driving her red Wagoneer. “I’ve got it in the car,” she said as we walked to the parking structure. I realized she meant the puppy. “I want to take it to the shelter before we go home. It’ll be easier.” She seemed as though she’d been agitated but wasn’t agitated now. She had dressed herself in some aqua walking shorts and a loose, pink blouse that showed her pretty shoulders.

“Did anyone call,” I asked. She was walking faster than I was, since I was carrying my suitcase and a box of brief materials. I’d suffered a morning of tough legal work in a cold, unfamiliar city and was worn out and hot. I’d have liked a vodka martini instead of a trip to the animal shelter.

“I called Kirsten and asked her if she knew anyone who’d take the poor little thing,” Sallie said. Kirsten is her sister, and lives in Andalusia, Alabama, where she owns a flower shop with her husband, who’s a lawyer for a big cotton consortium. I’m not fond of either of them, mostly because of their simpleminded politics, which includes support for the Confederate flag, prayer in the public schools and the abolition of affirmative action — all causes I have been outspoken about. Sallie, however, can sometimes forget she went to Mount Holyoke and Yale, and step back into being a pretty, chatty southern girl when she gets together with her sister and her cousins. “She said she probably did know someone,” Sallie went on, “so I said I’d arrange to have the puppy driven right to her doorstep. Today. This afternoon. But then she said it seemed like too much trouble. I told her it wouldn’t be any trouble for her at all, that I’d do it or arrange it to be done. Then she said she’d call me back, and didn’t. Which is typical of my whole family’s sense of responsibility.”

“Maybe we should call her back?” I said as we reached her car. We had a phone in the Wagoneer. I wasn’t looking forward to visiting the SPCA.

“She’s forgotten about it already,” Sallie said. “She’d just get wound up.”

When I looked in through the back window of Sallie’s Jeep, the puppy’s little wire cage was sitting in the luggage space. I could see his white head, facing back, in the direction it had come from. What could it have been thinking?

“The vet said it’s going to be a really big dog. Big feet tell you that.”

Sallie was getting in the car. I put my suitcase in the back seat so as to not alarm the puppy. Twice it barked its desperate little high-pitched puppy bark. Possibly it knew me. Though I realized it would never have been an easy puppy to get attached to. My father had a neat habit of reversing propositions he was handed as a way of assessing them. If a subject seemed to have one obvious outcome, he’d imagine the reverse of it: if a business deal had an obvious beneficiary, he’d ask who benefited but didn’t seem to. Needless to say, these are valuable skills lawyers use. But I found myself thinking — except I didn’t say it to Sallie — that though we may have thought we were doing the puppy a favor by trying to find it a home, possibly we were really doing ourselves a favor by presenting ourselves to be the kind of supposedly decent people who do that sort of thing. I am, for instance, a person who stops to move turtles off of busy interstates, or picks up butterflies in shopping mall parking lots and puts them into the bushes to give them a fairer chance at survival. I know these are pointless acts of pointless generosity. Yet there isn’t a time when I do it that I don’t get back in the car thinking more kindly about myself. (Later I often work around to thinking of myself as a fraud, too.) But the alternative is to leave the butterfly where it lies expiring, or to let the big turtle meet annihilation on the way to the pond; and in doing these things let myself in for the indictment of cruelty or the sense of loss that would follow. Possibly, anyone would argue, these issues are too small to think about seriously, since whether you perform these acts or don’t perform them, you always forget about them in about five minutes.

Except for weary conversation about my morning at Ruger, Todd, Jennings, and Sallie’s rerouting victory with the AIDS race, which was set for Saturday, we didn’t say much as we drove to the SPCA. Sallie had obviously researched the address, because she got off the Interstate at an exit I’d never used and that immediately brought us down onto a wide boulevard with old cars parked on the neutral ground, and paper trash cluttering the curbs down one long side of some brown-brick housing projects where black people were outside on their front stoops and wandering around the street in haphazard fashion. There were a few dingy-looking barbecue and gumbo cafés, and two tire-repair shops where work was taking place out in the street. A tiny black man standing on a peach crate was performing haircuts in a dinette chair set up on the sidewalk, his customer wrapped in newspaper. And some older men had stationed a card table on the grassy median and were playing in the sunlight. There were no white people anywhere. It was a part of town, in fact, where most white people would’ve been afraid to go. Yet it was not a bad section, and the Negroes who lived there no doubt looked on the world as something other than a hopeless place.

Sallie took a wrong turn off the boulevard, and onto a run-down residential street of pastel shotgun houses where black youths in baggy trousers and big black sneakers were playing basketball without a goal. The boys watched us drive past but said nothing. “I’ve gotten us off wrong here,” she said in a distracted, hesitant voice. She is not comfortable around black people when she is the only white — which is a residue of her privileged Alabama upbringing where everything and everybody belonged to a proper place and needed to stay there.

She slowed at the next corner and looked both ways down a similar small street of shotgun houses. More black people were out washing their cars or waiting at bus stops in the sun. I noticed this to be Creve Coeur Street, which was where the Times-Picayune said an unusual number of murders occurred each year. All that happened at night, of course, and involved black people killing other black people for drug money. It was now 4:45 in the afternoon and I felt perfectly safe.

The puppy barked again in his cage, a soft, anticipatory bark, then Sallie drove us a block farther and immediately spotted the street she’d been looking for — Rousseau Street. The residential buildings stopped there and old, dilapidated two- and one-story industrial uses began: an off-shore pipe manufactory, a frozen seafood company, a shut-down recycling center where people had gone on leaving their garbage in plastic bags. There was also a small, windowless cube of a building that housed a medical clinic for visiting sailors off foreign ships. I recognized it because our firm had once represented the owners in a personal-injury suit, and I remembered grainy photos of the building and my thinking that I’d never need to see it up close.