Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

The old man had been too strict with his children when they were younger. Now they resented him. He knew this, but he could not go back into the past and change the way he had been. He was even alone on Christmas Day. Each year, he sat in front of the one channel that he got, waiting for the Charlie Brown special to come on. “It’s starting!” he would call out and then he would realize that no one was there.

In this world, there was no one, other than dogs, who could love him now. Putting aside his preconceptions, he talked to all the aggressive-looking young men about getting a new dog. Those guys had a way of making just about anything happen. One of the old man’s neighbours, a twenty-year-old guy who wore a shiny silver track suit, said he had a cousin who wanted to unload some Rottweiler puppies.

“They usually go for eight hundred dollars. But it so happens that he’s worried that the girl he broke up with is going to tell the police he had a puppy mill. So I can get you a dog for two hundred.”

At first the old man was completely taken aback by the price and couldn’t speak. That’s the way he got when he was faced with almost any amount these days. He still couldn’t get over the fact that things weren’t five cents and a dime anymore. Still, he surprised himself when he went into his old Chinese tea box, where he hid all his money, and took out two hundred dollars. The money in the tea box was for a rainy day, and there had been a storm cloud following him around for a month. The tea tin rattled like a Gypsy’s tambourine, as he was off for a new adventure.

He named the dog Ferdinand after a man who had sat next to him in a cubicle at work. They had worked together for twenty-four years. It was the only job that he’d ever had and he had felt so lucky to get it too. His father had been a construction worker, so for him there was something so elite and classy about working in an office. He and Ferdinand had been friends, eating lunch and talking about politics in the park together. It seemed strange to remember that he had had a friend once.

Ferdinand the dog grew bigger and bigger each day. But he also grew gentler. Mothers would move their babies away from him even though the old man would swear over and over again that the dog wasn’t violent. If Ferdinand pulled, he would be able to knock the old man over and drag him down the street. But he never pulled. A grey striped cat, looking like a skinny British aristocrat in a topcoat, gave Ferdinand his sourest, most conceited look. But Ferdinand didn’t growl or make any aggressive motion. He followed the cat’s drama as though it were a late-night foreign film on television, having nothing to do with him really.

That year the old man found himself getting older and more tired than ever before. He couldn’t hear anything at all.

He found it too difficult to go to the corner store to get groceries. He would settle on eating out of an old peanut butter jar for dinner. He didn’t change his clothes. The old man went to get his mail wearing a sweater vest and his underwear. He came down to make conversation with the mailman but he wasn’t sure he was making any sense.

“Do you know that my father built the funeral home around the corner? No kidding. Of course he did. He painted it too. It wasn’t there since the beginning of time, you know? Don’t you believe me? Yes or no, man? Yes or no?”

He couldn’t walk the dog much anymore. Sometimes he wasn’t able to take the dog out on time and it would pee on the floor. The neighbours called the health inspector because of the smell. The old man answered the door in a dirty sweater and his jogging pants and with his white hair looking greasy. The inspector was surprised to see a giant dog that looked the picture of health, standing behind the man. He didn’t seem to be the right sort of dog for a man his age at all. He had expected a blind Shih Tzu or a toy poodle with Alzheimer’s.

To appease the health inspector, the old man looked for a dog walker. The dog was so gentle that he was able to pay the four-year-old boy who lived next door a dollar to walk it around the block. Four-year-olds were always good if you were looking to hire someone under the table. The little boy strolled in nothing but his slippers and jean shorts next to the dog, making it look like a giant from some place like the bowels of hell. He ran into his cousin — a troublemaker — on the corner. The older boy had a handkerchief tied on his head and was wearing a terry cloth baby-blue track suit. He was always on the lookout for dogs for fights that he organized in secret spots for interested gamblers. He had a gold eye tooth that you could see as he smiled at Ferdinand.

“Not this dog,” the little boy said. “He’s a good dog.”

The old man would simply open the door and let the dog spend the day in the small back courtyard of the building. There were flies and bees everywhere from the garbage in the alley. Ferdinand liked to lie and watch the little patterns that they made, even though they were too complicated for him to understand. The flies were like mathematicians at Harvard standing on ladders and drawing wild equations on enormous chalkboards.

One day Ferdinand was sitting in the yard, but he was restless now because he was hungry. The old man had no sense of time passing by anymore and Ferdinand hadn’t had anything to eat in almost two days. When a tenant from the third floor dropped a garbage bag out the window into the lawn, the dog started to root through it immediately, smelling a hot dog somewhere in the great darkness of the sack.

When the bee stung Ferdinand, he was suddenly filled with a terrible pain that flooded through his skull. He tore around the yard, trying to make the pain go away, terrified that it would happen again. Who could be so angry with him? He had always minded his own business and now someone was trying to kill him. He didn’t know where the invisible villain had come from, so he didn’t know in which direction he should flee. He was like the old man when the bank teller asked him too many questions instead of just cashing his cheque. He smashed his head against the fence.

Coming down the alleyway, the little boy’s cousin and his friends could hear Ferdinand barking and growling before they even saw him. The alley was filled with garbage and old furniture that people had thrown out. The young men spotted a pile of vinyl kitchen chairs with giant green hothouse flowers exploding on them. They pulled the chairs over to the fence so that they could get a look at this dog.

The men stood perched on the chairs, wild and hyperactive and excited, their eyes opening wider when they saw Ferdinand. All they saw was a dog shaking his face wildly like a fist. Its muscles heaved like lava coming down a mountain. They could see all its enormous teeth and black gums and they could smell its angry breath. The men looked at one another happily, thinking that fortunes were about to change on their block. The little boy’s cousin opened the door of the fence slowly, whispering for the dog to chill out and that no one was going to hurt him.

3.

All the women in Isabelle Ferdinand’s family were loud. Her father had left when she and her sister were both still in diapers. Her aunts were always over, because there were no men to toss them out or put them in their place. They would fight with the kitchen windows open, and everyone in the neighbourhood could hear their business. They didn’t care. They put the TV out on the sidewalk and ate their dinner with their plates on their laps, screaming at the game show.

Even their style was loud. Her mother wore high-heeled slippers and tight jeans that had patterns of roses on them. Her sister would walk to the store to buy a carton of milk wearing a striped bikini. Her sister was attracted to all the boys, especially the ones that made a lot of noise. When a car of boys slowed down next to her on the sidewalk, she leaned in the window and wiggled her butt back and forth as she talked to them, like a bumblebee getting nectar out of a flower. She and her mom liked talking to everyone, popping into different doors, pollinating the neighbourhood with fantastic gossip.