That was the year winter never arrived. The down tick in temperature from October to November was hardly noticeable, and the early crushing snowstorms that usually hit at least once or twice before the New Year never materialized. Thanksgiving Day was so mild we opened all our windows to let a temperate breeze blow through. It wasn’t foolish to suggest a walk coming out of a restaurant, when in previous years we would have rushed home grimly, taking the wind as an insult, too cold to curse the cold out loud. It was the winter one Indian summer followed another. People walked the streets of Brooklyn in shirtsleeves, choosing their Christmas trees from makeshift corner stands. Coats, not snow, drifted up against the fences of basketball courts where kids played after school on days the temperature reached into the fifties. It rarely dropped below freezing. We never woke to find the tree branches drooping with a fresh-fallen snow.

Nate took it badly. He could not enjoy it as a onetime reprieve from the punishing New York winters that made a third of the year unbearable. Not because he was convinced that this was it, global warming at last, here to wreak its revenge. He just couldn’t help feeling there was something wrong with so mild a winter. I tried to get him to relax a little, to concentrate less on what he knew in his head was coming, and more on what was before his eyes in the here and now: kids squealing in the park, parents standing in the noonday sun smiling and talking.

“I don’t mean to be a killjoy,” he said.

We were sitting on one of the wrought iron benches in the park near our apartment. I had suggested the outing.

“So just try to enjoy it,” I said.

“But what if the models are wrong? What if we’ve miscalculated, or there’s something we’re not seeing?”

“And you think that’s possible?”

He gave it a moment’s thought. “Highly improbable,” he said.

“So, hey. Sunlight. Children.” I gestured. “Take some delight.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sunlight, children.” He ground his shoe into a cobblestone.

I was trying to work up the courage to tell him that I was pregnant. Both of us were on the record: we wanted kids. But shortly after we married he had asked, and I had agreed, that we wait a few years, at least until he was fairly certain that he would make tenure and we had paid down some of my law-school loans. Those were, anyway, his ostensible reasons for holding off. My belief was that, in the three years since our marriage, his bleak forecast of the world had collided with the imminent possibility of a child, and he was reluctant. I felt pretty confident that when I finally told him, he would muster up something for my sake. He would not be unaware of how happy I’d be, or insensitive to my desire that the news make him happy too. But telling him was not proving easy. I suggested that we go home, open the windows, and make love. Maybe it would be easier to tell him afterward, I thought. But then we heard the howling, and I had to postpone my plans.

 

 

I put on my robe and Nate went for the pint glasses. “How can that be Edith?” he asked. “A little dog can’t make that kind of noise.”

I bent down to the hardwood floor and put my ear to the glass. The noise was terrible. It came in woeful, atonal waves, loud and strong even through the muffling slats, like a hound dog’s cry.

“She needs help,” I said.

“Do you hear Fat Archie down there?”

“I don’t.”

He walked into the bedroom and came back in a T-shirt, pulling on a pair of jeans.

“You’re going down there?” I said. “To do what?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

I dressed in a hurry and together we took the stairs. Nate said he didn’t intend to leave until he got a good look at the dog, and then, depending on what he saw, only if he was confident Edith hadn’t been beaten. If Fat Archie had laid a finger on her, he’d have to act. “Act how?” He didn’t answer. Nate wasn’t easily dissuaded once he set his mind to something. But if the dog had been hurt deliberately? Well, I thought, somebody probably should take her away.

We located the door by the sound of Edith’s cries. Nate knocked with his fist. We waited. Nate knocked a second time and finally we heard the heavy slap of unshod feet against the floor. I could feel the thunder of his steps vibrate the foundation. As he opened the door, Archie ran his hand over his face in a downward motion, and I could see that his eyes were puffed-up and red. I don’t think either of us expected that. He stood as wide as the doorway, wearing a pair of gaudy, faded orange and gray fatigues, and a green New York Jets sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up his forearms. For the first time I noticed the brutal ugliness of his bunched-up features. They crowded into one another—his beefy nose rose out of the two ruddy shells of his cheeks, while inside the dark caverns of his eye sockets, his small wet eyes blinked like something trapped. For an instant I forgot about Edith and felt as if I’d jumped inside him, as if I were moving around inside his dark and immense loneliness.

“Sorry to bother you,” said Nate, “but we’re hearing a bad noise.”

The fat man sighed tremulously. He let go of the doorknob and put his hand on the back of his neck. He looked to the right quickly and grimaced. Then he turned back to us. “It’s my dog,” he said.

He drifted away then, back into the apartment. It was strange: he left us standing in the open doorway. Nate and I looked at each other. Was he inviting us in? Nate seemed to think so. He took my hand and we entered. Archie’s apartment was laid out just like ours. A hallway led from the door past the kitchen into the living room. The fat man had taken a seat next to Edith on the living room couch. He had made a kind of nest for her of quilts and towels that stretched the length of the other two sofa cushions. A handful of dry dog food and a couple of squeeze toys had been placed nearby. She did not appear harmed in any obvious way. The man explained that his sister was a professional breeder, registered with the American Kennel Club, whose dogs had been shown at the Westminster Dog Show. She’d given him the dog, which he called Harry, as a birthday present. But about six months ago, his sister had started having trouble with some of the dogs born in Harry’s litter. They were dying young. She couldn’t say why, just that something had gone wrong—a bad pairing or something. The man couldn’t say either. He wasn’t an expert. He kept rubbing his stubby hands together nervously, looking from us to the dog and back again, while the dog moaned as if in heat, a constant, wavering, unendurable sound.

“Have you taken Harry to see a vet?” I asked.

The man rubbed the back of his neck again. “A vet?” he said. “What’s that bum gonna do? A vet can’t do nothing. My sister’s a breeder, she knows. She predicted this was going to happen. Poor Harry. You fucking stupid,” he said. “You stupid fucking dog.”

“I think what my wife is suggesting,” said Nate, “is that maybe there’s a vet out there who knows how to help him.”

The man kept his eyes on the dog and shook his head as if Nate were insane. “You don’t get it. It’s genetic. What’s a vet gonna do? Reassemble the dumb jerk’s genes?”

“Do you need money for a vet?”

The man looked up at us. “Who are you people?” he asked.

 

 

 

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