We’d walked down Brattle from her classroom and crossed over the river to let Clarence run wild for a bit on the grass. Vanessa hadn’t spoken for a long time. She’d been busy smoking.
When we began working our way west along the jogging path, she finally began to speak. We made slow progress because Clarence stopped to sniff every tree, chew every fallen branch, lick every discarded coffee cup or soda can. The squirrels, seeing he was on a leash, started fucking with him, darting in far closer than they’d normally dare, and I swear one smiled when Clarence lunged only to be jerked back against his leash, fell to the grass on his belly, and covered his eyes with his paws as if humiliated by it all.
Now, though, we’d left the squirrels behind, and he simply dawdled, chewing grass like a calf, while Vanessa was having none of it.
“Clarence,” she snapped, “here!”
Clarence looked at her, seemed to acknowledge the command, then started walking the other way.
Vanessa clenched the leash in her hand and seemed ready to yank back so hard she’d decapitate the dumb bastard.
“Clarence,” I said in a firm, normal tone I’d heard Bubba use a thousand times with his dogs, and then I followed it with a whistle. “Here, boy. Stop fucking around.”
Clarence trotted over to us and then fell into step a few feet ahead of Vanessa, his little butt wiggling like a Parisian hooker’s on Bastille Day.
“How come he listens to you?” Vanessa said.
“He can hear the tension in your voice. It’s making him nervous.”
“Yeah, well, I got reason to be tense. He’s a dog, what’s he got to be tense about-missing a nap?”
I put a hand on the back of her neck, kneaded the muscles and tendons between my fingers. It was as stiff and gnarled back there as one of the tree trunks.
Vanessa let out a long breath. “Thanks.”
I kneaded the flesh some more, felt it starting to loosen a bit. “Keep going?”
“As long as you can.”
“You got it.”
She gave me a tiny smile. “You’d be a good friend, Patrick. Wouldn’t you?”
“I am your friend,” I said, not sure it was true, but then, sometimes just saying something plants the seed that allows it to become truth.
“Good,” she said. “I need one.”
“So this guy who hit you?”
Hard pebbles sprouted under the skin at the back of her neck again.
“I was walking up to the door of a coffee shop. He was apparently waiting on the other side. The door was smoked glass. He could see out. I couldn’t see in. Just as I reached for the door, he slammed it open into my face. Then he just hopped over me as I was lying on the pavement and walked away.”
“Witnesses?”
“Inside the coffee shop, yeah. Two people remembered seeing a tall, slim guy wearing a baseball cap and Ray-Bans-they couldn’t agree on his age, but they both knew what kind of sunglasses he wore-who stood by the door, looking down at a leaflet in his hand.”
“Anything else they remember about him?”
“Yeah. He wore driving gloves. Black. Middle of the summer, guy’s wearing gloves, nobody finds him suspicious. Jesus.”
She stopped to light her third cigarette of the walk. Clarence took that as his signal to go off the path again and sniff a pile of shit left by another dog. Probably the primary reason I’ve never owned a dog is because of this colorful aspect of their personalities. Give Clarence another thirty seconds, he’d try to eat it.
I snapped my fingers. He looked up at me with that slightly confused, slightly guilty look that to me is the most defining characteristic of his species.
“Leave it,” I said, again relying on recollections of Bubba for my tone of voice.
Clarence turned his head sadly and then wiggled his butt away from it, and we all resumed walking.
It was another dull August day, humid and clammy without being particularly hot. The sun was somewhere behind slate clouds and the mercury hovered in the high seventies. The bicyclists and joggers and speed-walkers and Rollerbladers all seemed to be moving past us through a jungle of thin, transparent cobwebs.
Along this stretch of the river path, small tunnels cropped up every now and then. No more than sixty feet long and fifteen wide, they formed the bases of the footbridges that led pedestrians over from the other side of the Soldiers Field Road/Storrow Drive split. Walking through the tunnels, stooping slightly, felt like walking through a child’s fun house. I felt huge and a bit silly.
“My car was stolen,” Vanessa said.
“When?”
“Sunday night. I still can’t believe this has been only a week. You want to hear about Monday through Thursday?”
“Very much.”
“Monday night,” she said, “someone managed to slip past building security and throw the main circuit breaker in the basement. Power was off for about ten minutes. No big deal unless your alarm clock is electric and fails to go off in the morning and you end up being seventy-five minutes late for opening arguments in a fucking murder trial.” A small gasp escaped her lips, and she bit down on it and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.
“Tuesday night, I come home to a series of pornographic recordings on my answering machine.”
“Guy’s voice, I assume.”
She shook her head. “No. The caller had placed the phone up to a TV playing pornographic movies. Lots of moaning and ‘Take that, bitch,’ and ‘Come in my face,’ shit like that.” She flicked her cigarette into the damp sand to the left of the path. “Normally, I guess I’d have shrugged it off, but I was starting to get a feeling of dread in my stomach, and the message total was twenty.”
“Twenty,” I said.
“Yup. Twenty different recordings of porno movies. Wednesday,” she said with a long sigh, “someone pickpockets my wallet from my bag as I eat lunch in the courtyard of the federal courthouse.” She patted the bag slung over her shoulder. “All I have in here is cash and whatever credit cards I was smart enough to leave in the drawer back home because they’d made my wallet bulge.”
Just to my left, Clarence suddenly stopped and cocked his head high and to his left.
Vanessa stopped, too weary to pull him forward, and I stopped with her.
“Any activity on the stolen credit cards before you noticed they were gone?”
She nodded. “At a hunting and fishing store in Peabody. A man-the fucking clerks remember he was a man, but they never noticed he was using a fucking woman’s credit card-purchased several lengths of rope and a buck knife.”