“Trevor?” Hilary called through the mail slot, having pushed open its tarnished little door. When he opened up to let her in there were so many strays jostling that he didn’t see her crouched there among them at first. But he knew it was her by her voice and the crazy magnetic pull on his heartstrings. The dogs continued to lay claim until she whistled and growled, “Laikas, sit!” Then they all lowered, panting, some cocking their heads, some not.
Laika was the Russian dog that went up in a space rocket and Hilary had named the pack collectively in memoriam. To some of them she had given individual names but as a group they were always Laikas. Now, Monday, at 7:15 a.m., seventeen strays stared at Trevor. And there was Hilary in sweet profile.
“Smoke?” Trevor handed her the thin cigar he had already lit.
“I was in the neighbourhood,” she said, smiling, turning her face to him.
In fact, Trevor had texted, called and finally begged her to stop by. He was slumming at this present address on Fair view. He’d moved out of home to share an apartment with three delinquent acquaintances, something his wealthy parents lauded as potentially character-building. But because the roommates were usually out and/or stoned, Trevor was often lonely. Plus, he was experiencing lovesickness. Now that Hilary had finally arrived, he knew the jealous dog pack would give them an hour—maybe—and then she’d be laughing at his fabulous attempts to keep her there.
“I don’t know why you tolerate them,” he said. Hilary had scars where she’d been bitten and an oozing wound that she wouldn’t let Trevor tend. “Those dogs are feral, Hilary!” They were tucked to the hips under an old red velvet curtain on the sofa. An ashtray he’d liberated from his parents’ place was nestled into the concave of his belly.
“I don’t tolerate them,” she argued. The ashtray, Hilary saw, was one of those Greek black-figure-vase replicas. She leaned over and twisted her cigarette softly on Orpheus’s leg, watched his skin peel off. “I have no idea about them, at all,” she said. “They like me. They lick and nip. It’s just play that goes too far.”
Trevor could hear the dogs outside, whimpering, beckoning. He flexed his pectoral muscles tight and tried to look naturally hot. He pouted elegantly, desperately. He proffered more Cuban cigarillos. He exhaled earthen smoke into her ears, her mouth, whatever opening he could think of.
When he went too far, Hilary giggled and pushed his face away from down there. Then, getting serious, she said, “In the old stories there is always a door through which the hero must never pass.” she was thinking specifically about Orpheus leading Eurydice out of Hades, and how he had looked back, and lost her forever.
“Death’s door?”
“It’s a portal to this truly marvellous place.”
She drew on the cigarillo so deeply it almost disappeared, then jabbed the stub in a strange random way into the air. He tried to make sense of the action but couldn’t—she was sometimes so mysterious to him, he felt undone.
“Sometimes,” she continued, “It can be a real door, or a closet, or just an abstraction—you know, the threshold of maturity. It can be a willingness to acknowledge and live with your fears. Yeah?”
He mulled over what she might mean by threshold. He had thought they were talking about her body. Well, he had been talking about her body. God, it sounded as if the dogs were mauling the porch screen. A howling set up in response to a siren off in the Junction. Threshold of maturity, he thought, and grabbed Hilary’s ankle; he noticed a long scratch, like on torn nylons, only raw, fresh skin.
“Damn dogs,” he moaned. “They’ll eat you one of these days.”
“It’s something stupid I did,” she said, holding his ashtray in one hand now. She could see he wouldn’t dare ask what stupid thing she might have done.
The dogs began jumping onto the windowsill, drooling on and worrying the glass pane.
“I have to go,” she said. “I have a new job.”
“Job?”
“Well, I have to pay for school somehow.”
“But Hilary—”
He stood in the doorway—damned threshold—while she left. The dogs were whirling outside, anticipating her. They worried and nibbled one another’s ears, and showed their gums in undeniable grins. Trevor counted them as they followed her receding sway. There were now twenty-nine strays.
She walked away from Trevor’s place along Fairview Avenue, and into the Sunny Cafe for some sour keys. Sucking, then chewing the candy, she headed down to the subway at High Park. The dogs trailed politely behind.
No pets below in peak hours,” said the ticket guy. Hilary could hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” seeping out of his earbuds and felt herself moved by the arguably manipulative orchestration.
“They’re not mine.” she smiled at the guy and walked through the turnstile. “And they certainly aren’t pets.”
A few of the dogs sat, then lay down, possibly to await her return, but the rest went under the bars, or over (the dog she called Snot took pride in her immense leap), and Hilary pretended like she didn’t know, or see, or even sense them. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was looping in her mind now, the best part of the song.
The ticket guy whimpered, “Hey,” but what could he do, and did he get paid well enough for this shit? A queue of folks wanting tokens and passes and information was forming, so he finally gestured something between goodbye and whatever, and hoped for the sake of his job that no one was videotaping him.
Chick had awesome babe swagger, he thought. His eyes followed her until she turned the corner. He would like a chick so hot the dogs followed her ass down the subway and . . . where? Heading east. Heading downtown. “Hey, scram,” he said to the strays that had stayed behind. “Get outta here. Out!”
He looked up and saw the terrorist dude who ran the concession stand staring right the fuck at him, and barked, “Jesus!” as he realized he would have to leave his booth—which he did—in order to lunge at the dogs until they took the hint and skulked back up the escalator.
The car was pretty full but there were seats, so Hilary sat down, the dogs finding space among the legs and backpacks of commuters, one leaping up and nestling in between two men, both of whom appeared to be examining something invisible in the mid-distance. Perhaps they did not notice the basset hound sprawled out there.
During the difficult economic years, things had gone from merely bad to an almost clichéd worse. Thousands of dogs had lost their owners and many people were appalled by the feral packs. Still, sympathetic media had reported dogs with routes—clever dogs who maximized their panhandling, who had figured out where to find kind humans, places to crash on cold nights. These reports had resulted in a sort of rebranding of the animals, making the dogs seem intelligent in ways humans could relate to. There were now stray-dog activists.
Hilary was not one of them.
She was heading to her new job—a half-time position at a downtown recreational facility. Snot and Mangy were taking turns licking her wound. When she noticed, she leaned over, whispered,
“That’s enough, you two.”
Once out of the subway, she decided she would walk down Dovercourt. The dogs kept pace, only stopping here and there to nuzzle the pavement or urinate on spindly trees they passed. At Dewson, she halted and had them sit and stay, then headed in for day one.
The front desk had no knowledge of a new hire. Hilary put more weight on one leg and raised her eyebrows. “I dunno,” she said.
“Today is supposed to be my first day. A guy named Danny hired me last week. To wipe down machines.”
“Oh, yeah. I overheard something, now you mention it. Hi, I’m Judy,” Judy said, extending her hand to shake. Judy pulled her hair back and Hilary saw she had a tattoo behind her ear. It was one of those tats done with white ink so they look like scar tissue build-up.
“Is that a mongoose?”
“No. But that’s funny. I’ve heard it looks like one from a few people.”
“What is it?”
“It’s actually the word “strife” shaped like a fish. Do you like it? It’s my favourite word.”
“Yeah, it’s awesome.”
“Mongeese are cool, too,” Judy said. “I buzzed for Danny. He should be a minute.”
Hilary rolled mongeese around all day after that. The job was a cinch. She only had to wipe down machines with a spray bottle and cloth, recalibrate resistance trainers, replace the weights in the right order and smile at people. Twice that day she cleaned out the ladies’ toilets and checked the shower, steam and whirlpool area, and reported back to the main janitor. Easy minimum wage plus she got a free membership, so after work, she used the facility to clean herself up. She smiled and waved at Judy on the way out the door, 5:30 sharp, and Judy waved back. “Hey,” Judy called, “how’d it go?” Hilary gave her the thumbs up.
The dogs were waiting in different places along the route and had attracted more strays. It was hard to count them as they jockeyed for position, smelling her crotch, jumping on one another. Eventually Hilary gave up. Back to the subway, through to High Park, Hilary detoured to Sunny Cafe for a slice of pizza and another sour key or two. She loved the way the candy chemical gave over to sweet just too late, so that right when her mouth puckered, it began to soften.
Trevor called just as she got inside her apartment. She had a hard time concentrating with the dogs anxious in the small space, vying for her attention. “No,” she said, into the phone, then “Hi, yeah!” then “No, I don’t think so,” and “Well, I’m really sorry.” Snot had her paws on Hilary’s feet and was stretching, bum up, tail wagging wildly. Mangy and Perk were into the garbage already. Hilary needed to get better at sealing that. “OK, but don’t expect conversation,” she was saying. “I’m a working girl now.”
By the time he got there she was asleep; the dogs tumbled in and around her, using her face and neck and legs as pillows. Trevor had a key. Seven dogs came in with him, having scented Hilary out from High Park once dusk reminded their stomachs of her.
She was a curl of pink, a half-moon face partially obstructed by the scruff of a labradoodle. Trevor gasped. He’d never seen anything as breathtakingly beautiful. It reminded him of those baby portraits with the newborn in a flower or a bunny suit, and he wanted to cry or, alternatively, make love.
He got down on all fours and pushed the dogs out of the way until he was snuggled in with her. He tried to wake her with a few loud sighs but she wouldn’t move. “Honey?” he said, right into her ear.
“Honey? Can I?” already he had his hand rotating around her nipple but as he pleaded with her to wake up, he slid his fingers down her tracksuit pants and into that damn portal.
“Let me ravage you in your sleep, baby.”
He took the faint grimace that crept on her face, and the tiniest shift towards him in body language, to mean yes. Snot and Perk looked on while he pulled her pants down, gently turned and mounted her.
“Fuck off,” he muttered guiltily, but the dogs only edged in closer and looked up at him. It turned out OK, though, because Hilary woke up and got into it. He was exonerated! It was the first time they’d done it all the way since this dog manifestation started the week before and Trevor had been increasingly jealous and temperamental about it—not at all philosophical as she’d suggested he be.
Now he was actually enjoying the proximity of the pack, their hot breath around him, the encroachment, the wildness of it. A pugbeagle licked their toes metronomically through the entire lovemaking. Trevor had never been to an orgy and wondered if this counted.
“Hilary?”
“So tired—”
“It’s coming up to the end of the month.”
“Trevor, can this not wait?”
“I’ve been thinking of moving in, actually.”
“What?”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty much here all the time, anyway.”
Day two went reasonably well. The TTC guy managed to stop most of the dogs from entering the system. But then they refused to leave the main area, and hounded the Sikh who sold chips and newspapers, essentially ruining his morning, until he finally grabbed a Mr. Big, tore the wrapper down, waved it out at the pack and then turned and ran screaming up the escalator, the dogs giving chase.
“Hey, dude,” said the ticket guy when the Sikh returned, and then when he got no response, “Dude! Osama!”
The seller only shook his head in disbelief, or mock disbelief, and went on looking at the floor of his booth, trying to catch breath.
“Dude. Osama! Yo!”
That finally elicited a glare.
“What? Wha’d I do?” The ticket guy looked over to make sure his booth was locked. He’d recently bought a Kevlar vest and was wearing it now. Dude had been freaking him out since he’d won the concession. Dude could be from, like, anywhere. No one could expect to feel safe any more. “Why don’t you never talk? For Christ sakes. Dude never talks to no one.”
“I talk.”
“You never talk.”
“I am talking with you right this second. And why do you call me Osama? My name is Yusef. Call me Yusef.”
“It’s no big deal, dude.”
“Yusef! It’s a deal. No big deal. My name is Yusef.”
“It’s friggin’ slang.” People had become too soft-skinned. “It’s a joke. You don’t have humour where you come from?”
“Yusef!” and here Yusef raised his right arm high above his head and pointed to the roof of his kiosk. He did not know the word slang.
“I come from Brampton.” He added, “We have humour.”
“Yusef,” the ticket guy said. Jesus, with all the conversation and the Kevlar, he had started sweating.
“Exactly.”
“Thanks for getting rid of those dogs.”
“You’re welcome. Now shut up.”
“Hey, pal!” He really wanted to make this good. He unlocked the booth and waddled out to find Yusef’s line of vision. “Yusef,” he said, then smiled. “I am Mike. You can call me Mike.” Yusef nodded and Mike waddled back towards the booth. He didn’t get paid for this, so he muttered, “I don’t get paid for this, Yusef. Maybe you do, but I don’t.” Then he turned back, fumbled in his trouser pocket for change, asked for and received a Coke and a Kit Kat. “Here,” Mike said, “keep the change.” Which he thought was hilarious, since he was actually short a couple of pennies.
There were thirty-five dogs by day’s end and Hilary, exhausted, found them sitting alert in the small park opposite the station at High Park. There was a new cur lounging on the park bench and another huge emaciated dog off behind the main grouping. It was tawny and scraggly and fierce—cold-looking. Wow, she thought, and then: kinda wolfish, though she’d never seen a wolf. But then she brushed the thought out of her mind, since it made no sense. Anyway, the new dog or whatever it was didn’t bother following her home when the rest did.
The next day, after work, Mike called out, “Hey, lady,” as she pushed through the turnstile. “Hey, dog-lady. I see that wolf down here again and I’m calling the cops.” She didn’t look his way at all, which left him with something to think about, but she had heard, he was pretty sure.
Hilary hadn’t wanted to acknowledge A: herself as dog-lady; B: any problems re wolves or whatever; C: Mike, period.
There were three “big dogs” in the pack when she got out the door.
“Well, holy fuck,” she whispered.
She could hardly hear above their clamour but she was pretty freaked about the pack coming in now there were these creatures amid them, so she bolted them outside the door and called Trevor.
“Probably not wolves, honey.”
“The TTC guy thinks they are.”
“Fat Mike? He grew up in Scarborough. He wouldn’t know a wolf from a— Hey, I bet that’s what you are dealing with.”
“Dealing with?”
“Yeah, Irish wolfhounds or else some mixture.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Totally. Tawny? Wiry hair? Big?”
“Yeah!”
“Totally wolfhounds.”
Hilary unbolted the door and let the dogs stream in. They appreciated this and let her know it by snuffling her and by smiling their lips back, showing their teeth without growling. This always made her laugh and it did now. These wolfhounds were the noblest dogs she had ever seen. They hung back and circled one another, yipped quietly, then sat on their haunches and watched the other dogs hump each other and rise up nipping and ear-chewing in gorgeous faux battles.
Every once in a while, for fairness, Hilary pulled the playing dogs apart and made them sit, and let other small groups of dogs clash together in these strange, seemingly ritualistic fights that she thought she might never tire of watching. Play-fighting dogs were beautiful. Even the wolfhounds seemed to be enjoying the arena.
But then, when she made space for two miniature schnauzers to play, things went awry. She wasn’t aware of the shift but in retrospect she would allow that there had been a stiffening in the posture of some of the dogs on the group periphery. Initially the schnauzers circled and turned, almost dancing, noses to asses, one licking, the other avoiding by curling its butt toward the ground and twirling away. And then, here, what she loved to watch, they rose on their hind legs and batted with front paws and teeth, swiped at one another. Oh, such verve and joy.
“Nice one!” Hilary clapped. “Yes! Clever!”
They looked like puppets of dogs to her, and she laughed at this thought, and while she was laughing, very suddenly, the Irish wolfhounds pounced upon the schnauzers, seizing them and flinging them to and fro, letting them free only to bite through their small backs. She could do nothing.
The schnauzers were shrieking. And then not shrieking.
The energy in the apartment was suddenly so clenched down that there was nothing to hear but the silky manoeuvring of the wolfhounds, and when it was over, such a baying and a yipping, as they hunkered and called out to the other dogs, warning of their territory and their kill, the meal they then set to licking and tearing apart.
Hilary was paralysed with fear.
And the blood, so quiet in its redistribution, splashed out across the kitchen, so that Hilary pressed up against the fridge in the far corner, suddenly shocked back to herself, and screamed.
“Ah, jeez.” it was Trevor, who had come in too late to do anything.
“Coyotes.”
Coyotes had had a presence in High Park for some time. The animal services entry, found through the obvious search engine, though dated, read:
Coyotes are extremely intelligent and they adapt and learn very quickly. Every encounter that isn’t scary may encourage the coyote to get closer next time. Ideally, park users would actively scare a coyote away at every sighting (suggestions on how to do this are attached).
The attached PDF pamphlet gave helpful hints like being mean, large, loud, etc. It also had directions for a coyote shaker, which Hilary promptly made by recycling an aluminum diced-tomatoes can and filling it with coins. The pennies made a loud but not unpleasant susurrus when she shook the shaker. The can didn’t have much of an effect on the coyotes, though. They just looked at her and seemed, in between yips, to snicker.
There were more and more each day. So, she took to dropping meat at the small park so they’d stay behind, which worked, but only sort of; it caused a lot of jealousy and consternation among the main pack of strays, and once they’d done ripping apart the meat and devouring it, the coyotes followed her scent back to the apartment anyway. Every dog in the city seemed to know how to intimidate or charm someone into opening the doors of buildings, and likewise, the coyotes would make their way up and bay and scratch at Hilary’s sixth-floor apartment door. But she wouldn’t let them in the apartment any more.
They’d burned their bridge on that account.
Judy locked eyes with Danny until he finally said, “What?”
“Don’t you think she’s the tiniest bit weird?”
“She’s a hard worker.”
In strained baritone, Judy said, “When asked by the police whether he had ever seen any unusual behaviour from the suspect, her boss, Daniel Grainger, declared, ‘She’s a hard worker.’”
“So what? She is.”
“Have you noticed the fur smell?”
On the morning of day six, there were three mismatched puppies prodding at Snot’s belly when Hilary and Trevor woke up. Trevor gleefully hugged Hilary and they stood there ogling the creatures so long that Hilary had to skip breakfast. While she showered, Trevor packed her a tuna fish wrap and a pickle. It was his favourite lunch.
“Nature is wondrous,” he exclaimed. “Oh my God, look at how cute they are.” Snot looked so loving, and no one would deny the puppies were—well, anyone’s heart would be shattered at the sight.
Hilary made her eyes big and smiled. “Yeah!” Then, “I better get going or I’ll be late.” she had to press herself to the wall and edge through the door to keep the coyotes out. Two of them had managed to get past the building security and there were a few—five, actually—just outside the main door. An elderly woman with a walker was coming up the street scolding them.
“In my day,” she said, “there weren’t all these animals.”
“Shoo,” said Hilary, and scattered them to let the woman by.
“They’re so BOLD!” said the woman.
Hilary thought about the schnauzers and nodded.
Judy was sick with a head cold so Danny spent ten minutes teaching Hilary the front desk and then left her to it. The job involved making people membership cards and taking their money and saying, “Of course,” as politely as a person can that many times a day. As in, “Of course, I’ll call the manager for you.” Or, “Of course, you are right. Let me take your phone number and I’ll have someone get back to you.”
And this wouldn’t have been brain surgery if she hadn’t looked through the front windows mid-afternoon to see the pack pressing up to the glass, licking it, pawing it, jumping upon or curling around one another so that it was difficult for patrons to get their frumpy bodies in on time for yoga chant class.
“There are these dogs trying to get into the foyer.”
One woman shrieked; it turned out she was “pathologically afraid of canines.” Hilary wondered if that pathology was terminal, but did not ask. She was finding herself increasingly anxious with all the dog attention. Why her? It felt metaphoric but she couldn’t fathom of what. At 3:35, Trevor showed up sweaty and half-naked from jogging over, and pranced in showing off his abs. He was wearing suspenders—over nothing.
“Scaramouche!” He struck a Freddie Mercury pose, lunging his hips out exactly right.
“All right, then. Wow.”
“What? You’ve been humming it all week.”
“I have?”
“Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!” he sang.
“Weird.” She shook her head, in a way Trevor interpreted as you awesome thing, and then she said, “How are the pups?”
“The whole pack is taking care of them.” Trevor looked back and acknowledged the dogs outside the window and added, “Well, except for those ones. The ones who stayed when I opened the door to leave are really great parents. I mean truly awesome.”
“And these guys?”
When they got back to the apartment, the door was ajar and one of the puppies was—well—no longer whole. Several of the dogs were still whimpering. Trevor let out a shrill “Nooo!” Then, “How the hell did the door get opened, for Christ’s sake?”
“You must have accidentally left it open.”
“No,” Trevor said. “No fucking way was it left open.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m getting a goddamned gun. No one should be coming into the apartment like that.”
“You think someone did this?”
“I mean those animals did this.”
Hilary cleaned the mess up and Trevor couldn’t even help, he was so angry. He just sat up on the kitchen counter and lit a smoke and shook his head, trying with his foot to keep Snot from licking the blood off the rug. “Oh, man! Oh, MAN!” Eventually he got down and went to Hilary’s computer and typed “Guns” and “Toronto” and came up with Al Flaherty’s Outdoor Store, the last remaining gun shop in the city, and said, “Honey, I’m going for a walk.”
“Should I come?”
“Sure you can.”
“Forget it, I’m too tired from all this,” meaning the coyotes, the dead puppy, and all the YMCA front-desk generosity. But mostly it was the wanton cruelty that had made her tired.
While Trevor was gone she wondered whether she could care, really care, for a guy who had a gun, and she decided that any guy who was so infantile as to think that a gun would solve any of the world’s problems was not the kind of guy she would be able to see herself with long-term. But when he arrived some hours later, and woke her up by turning the lights on and standing Rambo-style with the wooden-handled, single-shot BB rifle, she saw him in a new light. He looked like the pissed-off cowboy of her dreams, and where before he had seemed a little effete and fey, now he seemed effete and fey in a sexy way. And Hilary thought, maybe.
They went outside the apartment building and Trevor levelled the gun toward the pack of coyotes circling an abandoned shopping cart and squinted to line up the sites, then pulled the trigger and screamed so loud a few lights went on and they had to make a run for it. His elbow was bleeding and, from the look of it, the BB had ricocheted off the shopping cart right back at him. They turned in time to see the coyotes scatter into the shadows. It was as if they were phantoms, as if they never existed except in the imaginations of Hilary and Trevor. But the elbow wound was real.
Trevor later joked, “You should have seen the other guy.”
On day seven, Yusef arrived early at his concession stand to have some quiet time before the morning rush. The subway was usually dead until around 6:30 and so he could sit and think and read the newspaper and eat the lunch his wife had packed for him before she went to bed. Often, eating the dhal and chapatti or egg salad sandwich was the first thing he did in the morning, right after he ate his breakfast.
Now, Yusef looked up and saw Mike on the other side also looking up, and between them were many, many, bristling, huge and possibly starving coyotes.
“What the fuck?” Mike was thinking how the Kevlar wouldn’t do dick in this situation and then regretted thinking dick.
“I’m dialling 911,” replied Yusef.
“Don’t you carry a piece?”
“What’s a piece?”
“A gun, yahoo.”
“Yahoo? My name is—”
“—Yusef.”
“Why would I carry a gun?”
“I thought all you guys carried weapons.”
“Shopkeepers?” Yusef felt the sandwich pressing up against his oesophagus, and regretted his indulgence. “It’s illegal,” he managed.
“Jesus wept,” said Mike.
The cops and the fire department showed up and made such an unholy racket running down the stairs that the animals jumped the turnstile and hid underground. The authorities shut the system down for two hours while they pretended to find and evacuate them. Fact: they never saw one coyote. This delay was especially annoying to Hilary who was one hour and twenty-six minutes late for work. Note: through the entire event Mike had “Bohemian Rhapsody” wailing into his left ear. He needed to hear the lyric in looping glory, so he’d put the song on continual repeat. How could one song carry so much truth?
When the cops and the press had finally dispersed, Mike looked over at Yusef, and said, “Sheesh! Yusef!”
“I know,” said Yusef. “We made the news.”
It was funny what let you really know a person, Mike thought. It was weird and uncanny and funny. He crossed the floor to give props to Yusef.
“Buddy!”
“Yusef,” Yusef reminded him again.
“Oh, yeah!” Mike hadn’t really smiled—really truly smiled—in years, and now he beamed.
Judy raised her eyebrows when Hilary recounted the subway debacle, but Danny took it in his stride. Hilary got busy wiping down the ellipticals. If she looked closely some of them seemed to have flakes of skin on them, so she tried not to look closely. As soon as she had the opportunity, she sidled into the change room, sat herself down where she wouldn’t have to witness the parade of denuded privates, took out her device, texted: Alleged coyotes in TTC.
Reply: OMG.
Alleged! Trevor put his cellphone down and danced around with the dogs. He loved that woman. Tonight, he thought, tonight would be the night.
“No pets,” said Mike. He had pushed the booth open and was coming out to stop Hilary. “You hear me? I don’t wanna tell you this again. I don’t wanna have to call the police again. Did you read the newspaper? We covered for you here. Me and Yusef over there—we covered for you.”
There were scores of dogs following Hilary from Dovercourt station, and these were the ones who had managed to break through the security at that end. The rest were probably on their way to her apartment door or waiting in the park. There were no coyotes as far as she could tell but if she was honest with herself there had been shadows and rank odours—wild rancid smells she could not account for. She stopped for Mike and asserted, “They aren’t mine. I’m telling you.”
“They come with you. They go with you. I’ve seen you feed them. I’ve seen them lick you. They’re yours. And they can’t come down any more.” Mike looked over at Yusef in the hope of getting some basic support and was pissed to see Yusef look away. “Yo, Yusef!” he said. “Support!” and then Yusef lifted his eyes and damned if he didn’t look scared before he dropped them again.
“They aren’t mine,” said Hilary. “I don’t even own a leash. These are city dogs. I can’t help it if they follow me. I can’t do anything about anything.” And Hilary pushed past Mike.
Mike held onto the sleeve of her jacket. “Admit you don’t like this,” he said.
“I have no opinion whatever.” Hilary pursed her lips, glared. “Call the city. Or the police.”
“Yeah, we’ve seen how well that works.”
“Open your eyes,” she quipped, and Mike thought he recognized something and shut up. She added, “Let me go.”
Mike gasped. Queen, he thought. No way. He let go of the fabric of her jacket, his eyes widened and he tilted his head like a dog for a bone. “Oh,” he said. “Oh!”
Hilary smiled, sang a few bars of the “Scaramouche” section until Mike nodded. She got him. Really got him. Cool. Nobody had ever got him.
Trevor led Hilary down Annette, through Baby Point—the swank houses had old money ivying around them—and then down an old rotten stairwell to the thin green belt along the Humber River. It smelled like mould and earth down there, and fish. The dogs followed, as did car horns honking, for the animals did not wait for lights.
“I thought you meant a walk in High Park.”
“The dogs know it so well, I thought I’d bring you all here.”
The sun was pressing the horizon when Trevor finally stopped in a treed dip in the landscape, the dogs edging them, their coats aflame with sunset and Hilary’s face turned up wondering.
“You’re stopping.”
He was standing very close to her, the dogs getting jealous, nuzzling her legs and pushing the two of them apart as well as they could. Mangy jumped up and tore a superficial line down Hilary’s cheek. “Down, Mangy. Laikas, sit!”
Then, briefly, except for the monkey jabber of squirrels, it was as quiet as it ever got in an urban park.
Trevor put something into her hand, too shy to even look at her, and when she saw it was a box—that famous Birk’s blue and velveteen that every girl but Hilary knew to yearn for and to covet—she opened it, and there nestled in a little pink velvet cleave was the prettiest ring she had ever seen.
“Trevor?”
“Gosh,” he said. “Gosh.” From now on, it would be this: Hilary, the dogs and him. He was so nervous! Trevor flung his arms up, in celebration, and asked, “What do you say?” He could hear the soft moaning of the coyotes, a kind of gorgeous, primal soundtrack to this moment.
She had the ring on and was marvelling at the way the diamonds glittered in the waning light. “I say thank you!”
His smile had dwindled; he’d never felt more serious. He said, “But will you marry me?”
“What?”
He raised his eyebrows, nodded. They would later walk out of this park, and either way, he thought, he would not look back. It was a promise he made to himself. Either way, she was his girl and he would not look back. So beautiful, she was; he only had to look at her. . . .
Hilary hadn’t thought about marriage before. She had neither considered what a wonderful covenant it might be, nor what an immense commitment and responsibility. She felt something dark and sober pressing in on her, and then she looked to the dully glinting precious stones encircling her finger. The sun was a smear of matte orange on the horizon, and the night air began to chill her to the bone.
The dogs, tired, or perhaps sensing her concern emptying out into the waning light, had all sat or lain down and were arranged around her, sentinels, panting, watching. From time to time they whined, or turned their heads toward the coyotes just outside the sight lines, lurking in shadows, their yips now accelerating toward strangled, deformed howls. Hilary looked around and down several times, the ring, the dogs, the ring, the dogs, and then she bit her bottom lip, looked up at Trevor and said, “OK, sure, why not?”