The Wooden Sea (4 page)

What an understatement! No room freshener out of a can could have matched that deliciousness. Cloves now, the warm healthy smell of puppies. Pine, rain on pine trees.

The car was parked there looking friendly and cooperative. Hadn't the mechanic come yet? If so, why wasn't Magda using it now? The smell of new leather, a new book, lilacs, grilling meat. I kept a tool kit in the trunk. I

hadn't tried to start the car yet, but since I was standing right there, why not get out the tool kit just in case?

What registered first--what I saw or smelled? I opened the trunk. The intensity of the odor
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multiplied by ten. And lying in there was the body of

Old Vertue. Again. Under his red collar were the feather from the Schiavo house and the bone I had found in the hole I dug for him.

*Ape of My Heart*

George Dalemwood is the strangest person I know and one of my best friends.

He is not strange in a "lives in a treehouse, wears chipmunkskin underwear and a red crash helmet" way. He's just odd. I certainly would not like to live inside his head, but I love hearing what comes out of it so long as I am at a safe distance. And for all his eccentricities, the great paradox is what

George does for a living--he writes instructions for how to make things work.

How do you get that complicated new camera going after it's out of the box?

Read the instructions, George Dalemwood wrote. They are invariably clear, confident, and precise. Boot a computer program and get nothing but crashes?

Read George and you'll be rocking in no time.

Most important, as a friend, he was unjudgmental and carried no preconceived notions about anything. Because I could not deal with what had just happened, I got into the car without another thought and drove to his house, dead dog passenger and all. Yes, the car started immediately, but I was too dazed to give that any thought. I just wanted to talk to George.

His place is a few blocks from ours. Nothing special about it--one floor, four rooms, a porch that should have been fixed twenty years ago. When I

arrived his young dachshund, Chuck, was sitting on a porch step licking its balls. I stepped over it and rang the bell. No answer. Damn! Now what? Then I remembered the engine in my car was supposed to be dead. The dead dog that was supposed to be buried was in the trunk of the car that was supposed to have a dead battery.

Damn!

I looked up at the sky hoping for divine guidance, or something, and saw George sitting on his roof staring at me.

"What are you doing up there? Didn't you see me ring your bell?"

"Yes."

"Well get down here, man, I need help!"

In a toneless voice he said, "I would prefer not to." Which, in spite of everything going on, made me smile. Because George had been rereading

_Bartleby _over and over for the last two months and said he would continue until he understood it. Before _Bartleby _he had been reading and trying to figure out _Mount Analogue _and before that, all of the Doctor Doolittle books. Every fookin' one of them.

George hoped when he died if he went to heaven, it would be Puddleby on the Marsh--Doolittle's hometown. He was serious.

"Would you like a Mars bar?"

George ate three things and only those three: boiled beef, Mars bars, and Greek mountain tea.

"No. Listen, I'm begging you as a friend, please come down and listen to me."

"I can hear fine from up here, Frannie."

"What are you doin' up there anyway?"

"Deciding the best way to describe erecting a satellite dish."

"So you have to sit up there to see?"

"Something like that."

"Jesus! All right, if you're going to be that way about it--" I went back to the car, started it, and reversed onto his perfectly kept front lawn until I

was as close to the house as possible. I opened the trunk and pointed accusingly at the carcass.

George slid on his ass down the roof a ways so he could see better.

He was unimpressed. "Got a dead dog in there. So?"

Hands on hips, afternoon sun directly in my eyes, I described what had happened with Old Vertue the last two days. When I was finished he asked only about the feather and the bone. He wanted to see them. I handed them up. He leaned over the edge of the roof to get them and, stumbling, almost fell off.

"Goddamn, George! Why do you make life so difficult? Why don't you just come down for ten minutes? Then you can climb back up there and be an antenna for the rest of the day."

He shook his head. After settling himself into a comfy position, he touched the bone to his tongue. If I hadn't known him I would have protested, but my friend had his own way of doing things. If you were going to hang around with him you had to accept that. After a few licks, he delicately bit it with his front teeth but not enough to break it. Standing below, I could hear the high click of his teeth against it. Sort of like castanets. I got a shiver down my spine at the thought of putting that nasty thing in my mouth.

"What does it taste like?"

"I don't know if it's really bone, Frannie. It's very _sweet."_

"It's been _lying in the ground, _George! Probably soaked up a lot of--" I stopped when I saw he wasn't listening. No matter what you were saying, if George wasn't interested he stopped listening. It was a never-ending lesson in both humility and careful word choice.

Next came the feather. That piece of evidence he smelled a long time but gave it only a glancing swipe with his tongue. That was somehow more revolting than the bone, and I looked away. I noticed Chuck had stopped licking his plumbing and joined me in staring up at his master.

"You lick your nuts and George licks feathers. No wonder you two live together." I picked him up and kissed his head while waiting for the lab report from the roof.

George pointed the feather at me. "This has a great deal to do with what I was thinking about before you arrived."

"And what was that, pray tell?"

"Conspiracy theories."

"You're on the roof being an antenna and thinking about conspiracy theories?"

He ignored me. "On the Internet there are over ten thousand sites devoted to the different secret plots people believe led to the death of Lady Diana. The essential motivation behind all conspiracy theories is egotism--I am not being told the truth. The same thing applies here, Frannie. You're a policeman;

you're used to logic. But there is none here, at least not so far. You're not being told the truth.

Are you more upset at the dog's reappearance or the simple fact it happened in your trunk and not someone else's?"

"I hadn't thought about that."

"There are two ways of approaching this--as mischief or metaphysics.

The first is simple: Someone saw you burying the dog and decided to play a trick. When you left the forest they dug up the body and found a way to put it in your trunk when neither you nor your family were watching."

"What about the bone? I left that in my coat pocket. How'd they get it?"

He held up an index finger. "Wait. We're only theorizing now. They used the body to play a macabre clever trick on you. Which worked because look how upset you are.

"The _other _possibility is it's a sign from a greater power. It happened because you've been chosen for some reason. The dog reappears, the feather and the bone are together, and your car starts when it was supposedly broken. I'm assuming if this is the case, it wouldn't start for Magda because the dog was already back in the car, waiting for you to find it. All this is supposition; there will be no understandable logic here because our logic doesn't apply in matters like these.

Wait a minute." He moved to the far side of the roof and climbed down an old wooden ladder leaning against the house.

He came over to us and tickled the dog's nose with the feather. Chuck tried halfheartedly to bite it. "I want to show you something inside the house. But before that, I've got an idea I'd like to try. What would you say to burying

Old Vertue again, in my backyard this time?"

"Why?"

"Because I'm curious to see what will happen. If he does return again, I won't have to wait to hear the news from you." He took Chuck from me, and the small dog went nuts licking his face.

"Which do you think it is?"

"Probably mischief, but I hope it's the other."

"I don't need God putting dead dogs in my trunk, George."

"Maybe it's not God. Maybe it's something else."

"That kind of shit's off my Richter scale, bud. I have trouble enough living with a teenager.

Remember when I got shot? I was close for a couple hours.

Magda said they were thinking of calling a priest to give me the last rites.

But did I do out-of-body travel to the big light? No. Did I see God? No." I rubbed my face. "What about the smell?"

He looked at the ground. "I don't smell anything." _"What? _You can't smell that? Even now it's knocking me down!"

"Nothing, Frannie. I don't smell a thing."

Unlike George, his house is normal. Everything is in order; everything as uninteresting as possible. Magda and I once went over for a dinner of boiled beef and Mars bars for dessert. Afterward she said, "His house is so ordinary you keep thinking maybe it's creepy, but it isn't--it's just really dull." The only thing that stood out were all kinds of brand-new gadgets lying around, waiting for Mr.

Dalemwood to explain them to confused future consumers.

"What's this?" I picked up an object that looked like a mix between a CD

player and a small Frisbee.

"Don't touch that, Frannie. It's very delicate." He was searching a shelf packed full of large-format art books. "Just sit down. I'll be with you in a second."

"How come every time I come here you scold me for something?"

"Here it is." He pulled out a book as big as a door. Looking at his hand, he grimaced and wiped it on his pants. Then he opened the book and started flipping through the pages. "Wouldn't you rather be called than tricked?"

"Meaning what?" I picked up the CD Frisbee and put it down again.

"Wouldn't you like to have a metaphysical adventure rather than track down some bozo who's just trying to make you look stupid?"

"No. My family won't let me watch _The X-Files _or _The Outer Limits _with them because whenever the strange stuff starts happening, I laugh."

Judging by his expression, George had tuned me out after I said no.

But when he abruptly stopped flipping pages, a smile the likes of which I had never seen rose slowly up his face like a hot air balloon lifting off. Not only that. This was the second time in two days I had seen a look on anodier's face that announced something big was about to arrive and I'd better put on my seat belt for whatever was coming.

The first time happened right before Susan announced her separation.

But George's expression was stranger because he was not given to great emotional splashes. If you didn't know the guy you could easily have mistaken him for autistic. His response to things rarely arrived with a side order of exclamation marks.

" `Fear only two: God, and the man who has no fear of God.' That's from the Koran, Frannie."

Whatever _that _was supposed to mean, he came over holding the book open with two hands.

He put it on my lap and stepped back. I looked at him for some sign but he only pointed at the page, that bizarre smile still locked in place.

I looked down. My eyes widened to the size of planets. "No fuck-ing way!" I didn't lift my head. My eyes raced round and round the picture. I _couldn't _lift my head. "No fuck-ing way!"

"See the title?"

_"Yes, George, I see the title! _What am I supposed to do now? Huh?

What am I supposed to do with this? Did I see the title? Am I stupid?

I _can _read, you know--"

"Take it easy, Frannie." But he was smiling. The son of a bitch was still smiling.

On the page in the book on my lap was a reproduction of a painting by an unknown artist, circa 1750. Remember that-- seventeen hundred and fifty. It is a portrait of a dog. A three-and-a-half-legged, one-eyed, marble-cake-colored pit bull sitting facing us and looking peacefully off to the right. A white bird--a dove?--with wings spread is hovering over the dog's head. Behind them in a valley is a castle. Behind that is a bucolic landscape that includes rolling hills, a meandering river, farmers at work in their vineyards. It would be easy to replace the dog with a lord or wealthy landowner standing on a hill above all he owned, all he has achieved in life, his heaven on earth, all there for _us _to see and envy. But it is _not _a lord nor is it a human being; it is a pit bull. And a very familiar-looking one at that.

The title of the painting was "Old Vertue."

"How did you know about this, George?"

"I remembered the painting."

I closed the book and read the title. _Great Animal Portraits. _"Does the author say anything about the picture in the introduction?"

"Nothing."

"Why didn't you tell me about this after you saw the body and I told you his name?"

"Because first I wanted to hear how you felt about it."

I was so angry I wanted to hit him on the head with the book. I was so rattled I wanted to go into the second hole I was going to dig for the dead dog and hide. I dropped the book on the floor.

George started for it but when my body tensed, he froze.

"What am I supposed to _do _about this?"

He squatted down like a baseball catcher and put his hand on the arm of my chair to balance himself. Both of us remained silent. Chuck rolled over on his back and started doing that thing dogs do when they're happy or feeling goofy:

Back and forth-- flip flop.

"George, what would you do if you were me?"

"Bury the dog again. Then see what happens."

"Not much else I can do, is there?"

"You could have it cremated at the Amerling Animal Shelter, but I don't think that would end the problem."