YOU ARE son of Mizz Steele?”
Wilson felt perturbed when recognized—by shopkeepers and former students, let alone cabdrivers whom he had never once seen before.
He narrowed his eyes.
Sharif Yusry climbed out of the driver’s seat and hurried to the back door.
“De door, sir, it sometimes sticks.”
The driver clattered with it for a moment, then managed to get the door open.
“I say son of Mizz Steele. I recognize dog. I drive Mizz Steele to animal place. I wait and she arrives out with de black dog.”
That makes sense. He doesn’t know me. He knows the dog.
Thurman growled and wiggled and shoved his nose at the cabdriver’s hand.
“He is an appropriate dog, sir. Most friendly.”
Thurman hopped into the backseat.
“Indeed. Friendly. I suppose that is an admirable trait.”
“Oh, yes indeed, sir,” Sharif repeated. “For a dog, most noble.”
Wilson had considered walking back to his house, but with his briefcase, a half-consumed bag of dog food, two dog bowls in a plastic Giant Eagle supermarket bag, and a blanket that “Thurman just loves to sleep on,” Wilson knew that the two-mile walk would be fraught with danger.
The dog could lurch out into traffic. He could attack a toddler. He could…relieve himself in someone’s yard. No. The only solution was a cab ride.
Sharif pulled out of the Heritage Square Senior Apartments and Retirement Village.
Thurman braced himself on the seat beside Wilson, grinning as only a happy dog can grin, sniffing the air through the half-open window and turning back to Wilson every quarter block.
“I know your mother,” Sharif said from the front seat.
At least he had waited for a red light before he started chattering.
“Sorry,” Wilson replied.
“No, sir. I like her. Full of life. Tasty. Is that correct word?”
Wilson grinned in spite of his horrible mood.
“You mean testy, I think.”
“Testy?”
Wilson smiled at the absurdity of it all.
“Yes. Testy is the right word for her.”
Yes indeed.
Wilson paid the cabdriver, gathered up everything he carried, and escorted Thurman to the front door of his house, a tidy midcentury brick house, built in the manner of a Cape Cod style, but not really, more like Pittsburgh’s interpretation of a Cape Cod house. Thurman sniffed at everything and paid close attention to every stone and bush and nuance of the front walk.
“Yes, this is where I live. And where you will live. For a day or two. So don’t get comfortable. Because you are not staying.”
Thurman warbled a reply.
“I mean it,” Wilson replied, and he jangled out his house key. “You may have bamboozled my mother, but she is old and much easier to bamboozle. She is a bamboozle-lite, as it were.”
Thurman warbled again, as if to say, We’ll see.
Wilson stared down at the dog, who was now seated on the front stoop.
Not as if. It really sounded like We’ll see.
Wilson unlocked the door and slowly opened it, Thurman craning his neck to peer inside, not wanting to precede his host and lunge inside like a normal canine would probably do. Thurman did not do normal.
Wilson set all his parcels down on the long table in the front hall, carefully placing the folded blanket so it would not slip off and knock something else when it fell.
“You can follow me, Thurman. And pay attention.”
Thurman growled a reply.
“I know you’re a dog, Thurman. No matter. You can still listen.”
Wilson led him to the tidy tile-and-steel kitchen; the only modern touches were a new stainless steel refrigerator and a stove.
“This is the kitchen. I imagine that I will feed you in here. I haven’t decided yet.”
He walked into the small, wood-paneled “rumpus room,” which held a newer flat-screen TV, a couch that looked pristine even though it must have been fifteen years old, a leather recliner next to a towering stack of books, and an old gooseneck lamp with a hundred-watt bulb in it.
“The living room and dining rooms are that way—but we never use them.”
Thurman peered in that direction and nodded.
“Upstairs are the two bedrooms and bathroom. The door leads to the basement. We don’t go down there either. And this door leads to the backyard.”
Wilson stepped outside himself for a moment and realized how ridiculous, how absurd this all was—him leading a dumb animal around the house as if the dumb animal understood what he was saying—but even so, he gamely pressed on, aware or not aware.
He opened the back door.
Thurman’s snout puckered as he drew in a large nosey breath.
The backyard was fenced, but no one could tell for sure, since the thickets of bushes and pines all but concealed the stockade fence along the property’s perimeter.
And in the middle of the modest backyard ran a long reflecting pool, some thirty feet long and six feet wide and five feet deep at the far end, gradually sloping up to a depth of two feet nearest the house. The pool was lined with slate and granite with a small fountain at the far end, spouting a steady stream of water into the air and back into the pool with a dignified hiss.
Wilson, upon his return to peace and civilization, and after his stint in rehab so many decades earlier, had spent his first summer back home, back in America, back in a land devoid of the scarring realities of war. He spent it—the entire summer—digging the pool and reinforcing the walls with rebar, mixing cement, setting the stone, installing the piping, and bringing the water supply out from the house through a trench he had dug by hand from the basement.
He wasn’t sure then why he had felt compelled to create such a massive serenity pool, all he knew was that he had to do it. Perhaps he was serving penance. For what he had done and what he had seen done. And even now, years and years later, he sometimes wondered why he had worked so hard to build it. And how hard he worked to forget.
Yet there were moments, slivers of moments, when he stepped outside and stared at the water and the ripples and listened and the sun caught the water just so and the noise of the outside world was muted and stilled by the gurgling water, when all else disappeared save this long, narrow strip of water lined with flinty slate and black granite—there were those slight glimpses into the why of all this.
He could smile for that brief second and feel balanced, or more precisely, feel nothing at all—nothing hidden, nothing looming, nothing lurking in the shadows.
For that one, brief pellucid moment, Wilson felt at peace, his soul and his heart and all the rest at total, restful peace.
The absence of all care.
For that one moment.
Then the world and his awareness of it would come upon him, like an unbidden wave against the shore, and he would be standing there with fists clenched.
But those small moments of peace were enough. Those moments were what kept him together.
When Thurman caught scent of the water, he tore off in pursuit and launched himself from the closest end, leaping, flying, charging into the air and coming down a full fifteen feet farther with a huge, collapsing splash.
It all happened so fast that Wilson did not even have time to sputter and curse his outrage at this horrid canine intrusion into that serenity.
“Thurman!” he shouted.
Thurman might have growled, but if he did, his splashing drowned it out. He kept dog-paddling to the far end, under the spouting water, then turned around, as if he had been practicing serenity pool turnarounds for years, and dog-paddled back toward Wilson, grinning more like a maniac this time, and less like a lunatic.
“Thurman! Get out of there. Now!”
Thurman’s nails scrabbled at the slick slate surround, but he managed to get a pawhold and hauled himself out, an immense grin on his face.
Retrievers and water. Why didn’t he consider that before he let him out?
“Stay.”
Thurman stayed put but shook himself off, water spreading up and out in splayed rainbows as the droplets arced into the afternoon sun.
Wilson returned with two towels, old towels, from a stack of them he kept in the garage for emergencies. This was the very first time he had come upon an emergency that required two towels.
And at that, he smiled to himself, just a little, but much less than Thurman was grinning.
Wilson knelt down next to Thurman and began to towel off the excess water. The coats of retrievers and water dogs appeared to be designed to shed water quickly, so a single towel was all that was really required. But he took the second towel and grabbed at Thurman’s feet, making sure the bottoms of the paws were dry.
Thurman leaned into him, his head against Wilson’s shoulder, growling and rumbling as he tolerated Wilson’s attentions.
Wilson stopped and leaned back.
“What?”
Thurman turned his head and re-growled.
“You like my pool?”
Thurman smiled.
“Really?”
Thurman nodded this time and tried to widen his grin.
“Really,” Wilson said, his tone dry and tending to the ironic and definitely to unbelief.
As he listened, that is exactly what Thurman’s growls sounded like: I like your water.
Thurman turned back toward the pool, and if Wilson had not held on to his collar, Thurman most likely would have launched himself back into the water to prove that he meant what he said.
“You expect me to believe that you understand?”
Thurman appeared a bit offended, or as much as an oddly grinning dog can look offended, and growled.
I understand.
Wilson stared at Thurman.
“I’m going senile,” he said, “just like my mother. Two peas in a pod.”
And when Thurman growled in reply, Wilson tried not to pay attention to him. But if asked, he would have said that Thurman had said that he shouldn’t worry about things like that, since other things were going to happen to make all of it make sense.
Or something like that.