The Cloud of Unknowing (19 page)

“Don't worry about it. I know what I'm doing.”

“You'll electrocute her!”

Isaac put down the screw gun. This was something that he could not stand: to be interrupted when he had a full head of steam. “I'm not gonna electrocute anyone,” he said patiently. “Look, see? It's only two thousand volts—just enough to give her a snootful. It isn't even for cattle. It's for ponies. Or, I don't know, sheep.”

It was true that Isaac had a much better grasp of popular science than she did. Still. “No, that can't be how you're supposed to keep a dog out of the trash.”

“Look, I know about dogs. How many dogs have you had? That's right, none. And how many dogs have I had? Counting this one, I've had four dogs.”

As it happened, Isaac got shocked by the electric fence before Mothra did—several times, in fact—and he decided on his own to take it down.

Kitty had been very interested in animals as a child. She'd read any book she could find about them. Her favorites were
Never Cry Wolf
and
Call of the Wild
. She'd been disturbed, especially
in the latter, by the undercurrent of need and violence that seemed to attend stories about people and dogs, and she felt it had put her off the idea of getting a dog herself. Yes, this was Isaac's dog. But after the cattle fence incident, she decided to take some training books out of the library.

“Dogs are pack animals.” It was something you heard all the time. The fact that Mothra was destined to form a pack with the people around her meant that the issue of dominance needed to be addressed early on. “Place your puppy gently on its side,” one book instructed. “Hold its front paws in one hand and its back paws in the other. Your puppy will not like this, and may even try to bite you.” Mothra submitted to the hold patiently. Kitty consulted the illustration to be sure that she was doing it correctly, and seeing that she was, decided to return the books. This was a good puppy.

Isaac took Mothra to the corner for cigarettes, on handyman jobs, for aimless drives; he taught her—or she naturally knew—to run alongside his bike, stopping to wait next to him at corners. But it seemed to Kitty that he treated Mothra too much like a sidekick and not enough like a pet. If he didn't feel like leaving the house, Mothra didn't get a walk. So Kitty started taking her to a churchyard half a mile from the house—an unexpectedly large expanse of grass and trees, hidden from the densely built South Philadelphia neighborhood by a high brick wall.

The church was of some historical significance, part of the national park that included Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. It was sometimes patrolled by rangers in Smokey the Bear uniforms, but not often enough to keep an unofficial dog park from taking root. From their first visits, Mothra and Kitty began making friends. The churchyard was a village, and the circumstances were socially liberating. Kitty had long conversations with cranks, yuppies, racists, conspiracy theorists,
daytime drinkers—all kinds of people she would normally have avoided.

Mothra was especially friendly with a white German Shepherd named Mandy, and because of the relationship between their dogs Kitty was often drawn together with Mandy's owner, Don. He was short, shorter than Kitty, with a grey Afro and mirrored cop glasses. His face was rough-hewn, like a boulder or a chainsaw sculpture, and he had a high, cigarette-shredded voice. Don was a truck driver, out on disability the whole time Kitty knew him, though the details of his injury were mysterious. He had a running prescription for Vicodin, which (he confided to Kitty) he almost always ended up trading in with his dealer for cocaine. He had an unpredictable temper. Some days he would just sit on a tree stump with his back to everyone, other days he was chatty, and either of those moods might disappear in an instant if he felt that Mandy was being in any way aggressed or even snubbed by another dog. Because of it he was not well liked among the other dog owners, but Kitty found him affecting.

Isaac was not as interested in the churchyard as Kitty was, perhaps because he didn't share her desire to be socially liberated. He liked playing with the dogs, but the conversations bored him. One evening when Isaac was with her, Kitty was talking with the owner of a mulish young basset hound, who mentioned that his dog wasn't housebroken. Kitty suggested crate training.

“It sounds mean but it's really not,” she said. “The crate is supposed to be like a den, so they feel safe in there. First thing in the morning you take him right outside and give him a treat when he pees. You'd be surprised how quickly they get the idea.”

“Tried it,” the basset's owner said. “He stood in there rocking the crate back and forth till it tipped over, and then when
I opened the door, he ran upstairs and took a shit on my bed.”

“The problem is,” said Isaac, “your dog is an asshole. He needs to get over himself.”

The bassett's owner was clearly offended. Isaac's world-view, in which a dog could be an asshole and could be called on it, was interesting to no one besides Kitty, so after a while she stopped trying to involve him in the society of the dog park.

At home, Mothra liked to keep Isaac company while he tinkered and experimented at his workbench in the basement. Isaac's workshop was a reliquary of antique hand tools and trash-picked chandeliers, lushly redolent of exotic solvents with names like naphtha, xylene, Japan drier. His basement stockpile was not, in fact, a pile but a collection from which he could always retrieve the correct size of cast iron hinge, or a certain shade of Minwax stain, or a Craftmatic bed motor, or an eight foot length of industrial roller track—or the electric-fence battery, which had been returned to its spot on the shelf until he could think of another use for it. Mothra found among Isaac's things a piece of egg crate foam and claimed it as her nest. Walking past the open door, Kitty heard snippets of onesided conversation.

“Now watch how I mix up the paint. You have to make sure you get all the goo off the bottom of the can.”

She imagined Mothra sitting at attention as he demonstrated, one ear standing up and the other bent forward at the tip.

The time came for Mothra to be spayed, but Isaac didn't see the need for it. “If she gets knocked up we can sell the puppies,” he said.

It hadn't occurred to Kitty that she would have to mount a defense of something so obviously correct. Isaac answered all her arguments with apocalypto-nihilism. Overpopulation?
Fine, when they let me spay a few people I'll spay my dog. It was a retread of their fight over recycling: Isaac acknowledged the problem but he said Kitty was delusional if she thought she could do any good.

Kitty eventually won the fight through attrition: Isaac didn't stop her from making an appointment and taking her in. When she brought Mothra home from the vet, all weak and dopey, and settled her next to Isaac on their napping couch, Mothra rested her head on Isaac's lap while he stroked her belly, which had been shaved for the operation.

“This feels so weird,” he said.

“I guess,” Kitty said cautiously, detecting a note of exploratory zeal.

He was silent for a moment. “Wouldn't it be intense if her fur was all shaved like this?”

As high summer approached, Kitty and Mothra spent longer hours at the churchyard. On warm evenings, someone might show up with a case of beer. They would linger way past dinnertime and into the gathering dusk watching bats swoop around the giant old trees. Kitty looked forward to this time as much as Mothra did. Sometimes everyone stood around silently, watching the dogs. The puppies ran around in circles big and small, circles within circles, figure eights and zigzags. Some, like Mothra, were chasers, and some wanted to be chased. Mothra was far from the fastest, but she had a stock herder's instinct for the cutoff. The old dogs, the ones with white muzzles and cloudy eyes who were content to stand near their owners or sniff around the tree roots, filled Kitty with existential sadness. As with the people, Kitty found that her sympathies ranged wider and farther than she had ever imagined. She didn't, as she'd always thought, like the little bug-eyed dogs any less, or
the fussy breed dogs with their strange haircuts. The delight of them, and the tragedy, was that they were as doggy as any others, bearing the yoke of human vanity with canine indifference.

The first real heat wave of the summer arrived, and the churchyard drew crowds of people avoiding the convective heat of their brick row houses. The dogs were lethargic and their owners cranky. Don was scrapping more and more with the others. He called one of the yuppies a fag and then refused to apologize. Everyone got involved. Kitty, who took it upon herself to smooth things over, learned that he was being evicted—along with Mandy, two cats, and a pet rat who shared his studio apartment with him. His disability case was headed to court, and soon he would be either homeless and broke or fifty thousand dollars richer. Kitty told him that maybe, in the meantime, he should switch from cocaine back to Vicodin if that was what it took for him to calm down a little.

There was no air conditioner in the house. The three of them—Isaac, Kitty, and Mothra—liked to sit outside on the cool marble stoop on hot afternoons. All up and down the block, people had the same idea. Radios played through open windows. Their neighbor ran a hose up from his basement through the sidewalk bulkhead and filled a kiddie pool. Children dragged their toys outside—Big Wheels, stuffed animals, tins of colored chalk.

Kitty balanced a bowl of green beans in her lap. She was snapping the ends off and dropping them into a pot on the step next to her.

“I'm going for a six-pack,” Isaac said. “C'mon, Mothra.”

“Leash.” Kitty snapped it to Mothra's collar and handed the end to Isaac.

Isaac took Mothra's leash off as soon as they rounded the corner. They ducked into Costello's. Mothra lay at the foot of Isaac's stool while he drank a short glass of beer at the bar, her
ears and fur riffling in the breeze from the industrial floor fan. The Brylcreemed bartender handed a pot of water over the counter without comment, and Isaac set it down next to her. She lifted her head in acknowledgement, then flopped back on the cool tiles.

Walking out of the bar half an hour later with the six-pack in a paper bag, they surprised two small boys on the sidewalk, who shrieked and hugged the wall as they passed.

“Wolf! Wolf!” yelled the older boy.

Isaac snorted. “That's right!” He and Mothra exchanged a sly glance and headed home. “She wouldn't be so hot if you let me shave her fur,” he said to Kitty when they got to the stoop.

“No, Isaac!”

Kitty woke early the next morning to the bounce of Mothra jumping onto the bed. Shielding her eyes against a harsh slant of sunlight, she reached over and felt not fur but stubble. Dropping her other hand, she saw that everything but Mothra's head and her paws had been clipped down to the blue-black skin. Her tail thumped hairlessly on the bed. Kitty ran downstairs and found Isaac in the bathroom, electric clipper in hand, standing in a pile of lustrous black fur. He smiled when he saw her.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“She was hot,” he said, suddenly glum.

Kitty learned that dogs can get sunburns. Mothra had to wear a T-shirt when she went outside, which delighted the neighborhood kids but made Kitty prickle with humiliation. Under the shirt her skin chafed and flaked and erupted in a rash. In the waiting room at the vet's office, a nice lady with a cat carrier on her lap asked Kitty what happened, and when Kitty explained, she said, “I hope you showed that fellow the door!”

But Kitty did not show Isaac the door. She even found herself in the position of defending him at the churchyard.

“If someone did that to Mandy, I'd kick his ass,” Don said.

The basset owner tried to convince Kitty that Isaac was dangerous. “They always start out on animals,” he said. “Gary Heidnik, Jeffrey Dahmer. Look it up.”

“No,” said Kitty, “he's not a sadist. He's just got an overactive imagination.”

“What's imaginative about shaving a dog?”

This was hard to explain. What she was thinking of was a kind of ecstatic tunnel vision, peculiar to Isaac. Once the possibility of the shaved dog had found its way into in his brain, she'd been unable to dislodge it. Now she tried to at least make him see why it troubled her, what he had done. They argued in circles. He admitted that he'd been curious about seeing Mothra without her fur, but he always came back to the same position: it was hot, and therefore, whatever caused the initial impulse, he was justified in shaving her. Anyhow, dogs got haircuts all the time, and Kitty was making way too big a deal of the whole thing.

Mothra wasn't angry. She still kept Isaac company in the basement and took naps with him. After all, she'd stood cooperatively for the entire twenty or thirty minutes it took him to buzz off her fur, and if she had any misgivings about the results she forgot them instantly, because that was the way of dogs.

Kitty, on the other hand, couldn't seem to let it go. Every time she looked at Mothra she found herself un-forgiving Isaac a bit more.

“I think I get it,” said he one day. “It's like when I was five, and I took my parents' alarm clock apart, and no one could figure out how to put it back together, and then they had to throw it out and buy a new one.”