A Multitude of Sins

Puppy

Early this past spring someone left a puppy inside the back gate of our house, and then never came back to get it. This happened at a time when I was traveling up and back to St. Louis each week, and my wife was intensely involved in the AIDS marathon, which occurs, ironically enough, around tax time in New Orleans and is usually the occasion for a lot of uncomfortable, conflicted spirits, which inevitably get resolved, of course, by good will and dedication.

To begin in this way is only to say that our house is often empty much of the day, which allowed whoever left the puppy to do so. We live on a corner in the fashionable historical district. Our house is large and old and conspicuous— typical of the French Quarter — and the garden gate is a distance from the back door, blocked from it by thick ligustrums. So to set a puppy down over the iron grating and slip away unnoticed wouldn’t be hard, and I imagine was not.

“It was those kids,” my wife said, folding her arms. She was standing with me inside the French doors, staring out at the puppy, who was seated on the brick pavements looking at us with what seemed like insolent curiosity. It was small and had slick, short coarse hair and was mostly white, with a few triangular black side patches. Its tail stuck alertly up when it was standing, making it look as though it might’ve had pointer blood back in its past. For no particular reason, I gauged it to be three months old, though its legs were long and its white feet larger than you would expect. “It’s those ones in the neighborhood wearing all the black,” Sallie said. “Whatever you call them. All penetrated everywhere and ridiculous, living in doorways. They always have a dog on a rope.” She tapped one of the square panes with her fingernail to attract the puppy’s attention. It had begun diligently scratching its ear, but stopped and fixed its dark little eyes on the door. It had dragged a red plastic dust broom from under the outside back stairs, and this was lying in the middle of the garden. “We have to get rid of it,” Sallie said. “The poor thing. Those shitty kids just got tired of it. So they abandon it with us.”

“I’ll try to place it,” I said. I had been home from St. Louis all of five minutes and had barely set my suitcase inside the front hall.

“Place it?” Sallie’s arms were folded. “Place it where? How?”

“I’ll put up some signs around,” I said, and touched her shoulder. “Somebody in the neighborhood might’ve lost it. Or else someone found it and left it here so it wouldn’t get run over. Somebody’ll come looking.”

The puppy barked then. Something (who knows what) had frightened it. Suddenly it was on its feet barking loudly and menacingly at the door we were standing behind, as though it had sensed we were intending something and resented that. Then just as abruptly it stopped, and without taking its dark little eyes off of us, squatted puppy-style and pissed on the bricks.

“That’s its other trick,” Sallie said. The puppy finished and delicately sniffed at its urine, then gave it a sampling lick. “What it doesn’t pee on it jumps on and scratches and barks at. When I found it this morning, it barked at me, then it jumped on me and peed on my ankle and scratched my leg. I was only trying to pet it and be nice.” She shook her head.

“It was probably afraid,” I said, admiring the puppy’s staunch little bearing, its sharply pointed ears and simple, uncomplicated pointer’s coloration. Solid white, solid black. It was a boy dog.

“Don’t get attached to it, Bobby,” Sallie said. “We have to take it to the pound.”

My wife is from Wetumpka, Alabama. Her family were ambitious, melancholy Lutheran Swedes who somehow made it to the South because her great-grandfather had accidentally invented a lint shield for the ginning process which ended up saving people millions. In one generation the Holmbergs from Lund went from being dejected, stigmatized immigrants to being moneyed gentry with snooty Republican attitudes and a strong sense of entitlement. In Wetumpka there was a dog pound, and stray dogs were always feared for carrying mange and exotic fevers. I’ve been there; I know this. A dogcatcher prowled around with a ventilated, louver-sided truck and big catch-net. When an unaffiliated dog came sniffing around anybody’s hydrangeas, a call was made and off it went forever.

“There aren’t dog pounds anymore,” I said.

“I meant the shelter,” Sallie said privately. “The SPCA— where they’re nice to them.”

“I’d like to try the other way first. I’ll make a sign.”

“But aren’t you leaving again tomorrow?”

“Just for two days,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

Sallie tapped her toe, a sign that something had made her unsettled. “Let’s not let this drag out.” The puppy began trotting off toward the back of the garden and disappeared behind one of the big brick planters of pittosporums. “The longer we keep it, the harder it’ll be to give it up. And that is what’ll happen. We’ll have to get rid of it eventually.”

“We’ll see.”

“When the time comes, I’ll let you take it to the pound,” she said.

I smiled apologetically. “That’s fine. If the time comes, then I will.”

We ended it there.

I am a long-time practitioner before the federal appeals courts, arguing mostly large, complicated negligence cases in which the appellant is a hotel or a restaurant chain engaged in interstate commerce, and who has been successfully sued by an employee or a victim of what is often some often terrible mishap. Mostly I win my cases. Sallie is also a lawyer, but did not like the practice. She works as a resource specialist, which means fund-raising for by and large progressive causes: the homeless, women at risk in the home, children at risk in the home, nutrition issues, etc. It is a far cry from the rich, arriviste-establishment views of her family in Alabama. I am from Vicksburg, Mississippi, from a very ordinary although solid suburban upbringing. My father was an insurance-company attorney. Sallie and I met in law school at Yale, in the seventies. We have always thought of ourselves as lucky in life, and yet in no way extraordinary in our goals or accomplishments. We are simply the southerners from sturdy, supportive families who had the good fortune to get educated well and who came back more or less to home, ready to fit in. Somebody has to act on that basic human impulse, we thought, or else there’s no solid foundation of livable life.

One day after the old millennium’s end and the new one’s beginning, Sallie said to me — this was at lunch at Le Perigord on Esplanade, our favorite place: “Do you happen to remember”—she’d been thinking about it—“that first little watercolor we bought, in Old Saybrook? The tilted sailboat sail you could barely recognize in all the white sky. At that little shop near the bridge?” Of course I remembered it. It’s in my law office in Place St. Charles, a cherished relic of youth.

“What about it?” We were at a table in the shaded garden of the restaurant where it smelled sweet from some kind of heliotrope. Tiny wild parrots were fluttering up in the live-oak foliage and chittering away. We were eating a cold crab soup.

“Well,” she said. Sallie has pale, almost animal blue eyes and translucently caramel northern European skin. She has kept away from the sun for years. Her hair is cut roughly and parted in the middle like some Bergman character from the sixties. She is forty-seven and extremely beautiful. “It’s completely trivial,” she went on, “but how did we ever know back then that we had any taste. I don’t really even care about it, you know that. You have much better taste than I do in most things. But why were we sure we wouldn’t choose that little painting and then have it be horrible? Explain that to me. And what if our friends had seen it and laughed about us behind our backs? Do you ever think that way?”

“No,” I said, my spoon above my soup, “I don’t.”

“You mean it isn’t interesting? Or, eventually we’d have figured out better taste all by ourselves?”

“Something like both,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Our taste is fine and would’ve been fine. I still have that little boat in my office. People pass through and admire it all the time.”

She smiled in an inwardly pleased way. “Our friends aren’t the point, of course. If we’d liked sad-clown paintings or put antimacassars on our furniture, I wonder if we’d have a different, worse life now,” she said. She stared down at her lined-up knife and spoons. “It just intrigues me. Life’s so fragile in the way we experience it.”

“What’s the point?” I had to return to work soon. We have few friends now in any case. It’s natural.

She furrowed her brow and scratched the back of her head using her index finger. “It’s about how altering one small part changes everything.”

“One star strays out of line and suddenly there’s no Big Dipper?” I said. “I don’t really think you mean that. I don’t really think you’re getting anxious just because things might have gone differently in your life.” I will admit this amused me.

“That’s a very frivolous way to see it.” She looked down at her own untried soup and touched its surface with the rim of her spoon. “But yes, that’s what I mean.”

“But it isn’t true,” I said and wiped my mouth. “It’d still be the thing it is. The Big Dipper or whatever you cared about. You’d just ignore the star that falls and concentrate on the ones that fit. Our life would’ve been exactly the same, despite bad art.”

“You’re the lawyer, aren’t you?” This was condescending, but I don’t think she meant it to be. “You just ignore what doesn’t fit. But it wouldn’t be the same, I’m sure of that.”

“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been exactly the same. But almost.”

“There’s only one Big Dipper,” she said and began to laugh.

“That we know of, and so far. True.”

This exchange I give only to illustrate what we’re like together — what seems important and what doesn’t. And how we can let potentially difficult matters go singing off into oblivion.

The afternoon the puppy appeared, I sat down at the leather-top desk in our dining room where I normally pay the bills and diligently wrote out one of the hand-lettered signs you see posted up on laundromat announcement boards and stapled to telephone poles alongside advertisements for new massage therapies, gay health issues and local rock concerts. puppy, my sign said in black magic marker, and after that the usual data with my office phone number and the date (March 23rd). This sheet I xeroxed twenty-five times on Sallie’s copier. Then I found the stapler she used for putting up the AIDS marathon posters, went upstairs and got out an old braided leather belt from my closet, and went down to the garden to take the puppy with me. It seemed good to bring him along while I stapled up the posters about him. Someone could recognize him, or just take a look at him and see he was available and attractive and claim him on the spot. Such things happen, at least in theory.

When I found him he was asleep behind the ligustrums in the far corner. He had worked and scratched and torn down into the bricky brown dirt and made himself a loll deep enough that half of his little body was out of sight below ground level. He had also broken down several ligustrum branches and stripped the leaves and chewed the ends until the bush was wrecked.

When he sensed me coming forward he flattened out in his hole and growled his little puppy growl. Then he abruptly sat up in the dirt and aggressively barked at me in a way that — had it been a big dog — would’ve alarmed me and made me stand back.

“Puppy?” I said, meaning to sound sympathetic. “Come out.” I was still wearing my suit pants and white shirt and tie — the clothes I wear in court. The puppy kept growling and then barking at me, inching back behind the wrecked ligustrum until it was in the shadows against the brick wall that separates us from the street. “Puppy?” I said again in a patient, cajoling way, leaning in amongst the thick green leaves. I’d made a loop out of my belt, and I reached forward and slipped it over his head. But he backed up farther when he felt the weight of the buckle, and unexpectedly began to yelp — a yelp that was like a human shout. And then he turned and began to claw up the bricks, scratching and springing, his paws scraping and his ugly little tail jerking, and at the same time letting go his bladder until the bricks were stained with hot, terrified urine.

Which, of course, made me lose heart since it seemed cruel to force this on him even for his own good. Whoever had owned him had evidently not been kind. He had no trust of humans, even though he needed us. To take him out in the street would only terrify him worse, and discourage anyone from taking him home and giving him a better life. Better to stay, I decided. In our garden he was safe and could have a few hours’ peace to himself.

I reached and tried to take the belt loop off, but when I did he bared his teeth and snapped and nearly caught the end of my thumb with his little white incisor. I decided just to forget the whole effort and to go about putting up my signs alone.

I stapled up all the signs in no time — at the laundromat on Barracks Street, in the gay deli, outside the French patisserie, inside the coffee shop and the adult news on Decatur. I caught all the telephone poles in a four-block area. On several of the poles and all the message boards I saw that others had lost pets, too, mostly cats. Hiroki’s Lost. We’re utterly disconsolate. Can you help? Call Jamie or Hiram at … Or, We miss our Mittens. Please call us or give her a good home. Please! In every instance as I made the rounds I stood a moment and read the other notices to see if anyone had reported a lost puppy. But (and I was surprised) no one had.

On a short, disreputable block across from the French Market, a section that includes a seedy commercial strip (sex shops, T-shirt emporiums and a slice-of-pizza outlet), I saw a group of the young people Sallie had accused of abandoning our puppy. They were, as she’d remembered, sitting in an empty store’s doorway, dressed in heavy, ragged black clothes and thick-soled boots with various chains attached and studded wristlets, all of them — two boys and two girls — pierced, and tattooed with Maltese crosses and dripping knife blades and swastikas, all dirty and utterly pointless but abundantly surly and apparently willing to be violent. These young people had a small black dog tied with a white cotton cord to one of the boys’ heavy boots. They were drinking beer and smoking but otherwise just sitting, not even talking, simply looking malignantly at the street or at nothing in particular.

I felt there was little to fear, so I stopped in front of them and asked if they or anyone they knew had lost a white-and-black puppy with simple markings in the last day, because I’d found one. The one boy who seemed to be the oldest and was large and unshaven with brightly dyed purple and green hair cut into a flattop — he was the one who had the dog leashed to his boot — this boy looked up at me without obvious expression. He turned then to one of the immensely dirty-looking, fleshy, pale-skinned girls crouched farther back in the grimy door stoop, smoking (this girl had a crude cross tattooed into her forehead like Charles Manson is supposed to have) and asked, “Have you lost a little white-and-black puppy with simple markings, Samantha. I don’t think so. Have you? I don’t remember you having one today.” The boy had an unexpectedly youthful-sounding, nasally midwestern accent, the kind I’d been hearing in St. Louis that week, although it had been high-priced attorneys who were speaking it. I know little enough about young people, but it occurred to me that this boy was possibly one of these lawyers’ children, someone whose likeness you’d see on a milk carton or a website devoted to runaways.

“Ah, no,” the girl said, then suddenly spewed out laughter.

The big, purple-haired boy looked up at me and produced a disdainful smile. His eyes were the darkest, steeliest blue, impenetrable and intelligent.

“What are you doing sitting here?” I wanted to say to him. “I know you left your dog at my house. You should take it back. You should all go home now.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the boy said, mocking me, “but I don’t believe we’ll be able to help you in your important search.” He smirked around at his three friends.

I started to go. Then I stopped and handed him a paper sign and said, “Well, if you hear about a puppy missing anywhere.”

He said something as he took it. I don’t know what it was, or what he did with the sign when I was gone, because I didn’t look back.

That evening Sallie came home exhausted. We sat at the dining room table and drank a glass of wine. I told her I’d put up my signs all around, and she said she’d seen one and it looked fine. Then for a while she cried quietly because of disturbing things she’d seen and heard at the AIDS hospice that afternoon, and because of various attitudes — typical New Orleans attitudes, she thought — voiced by some of the marathon organizers, which seemed callous and constituted right things done for wrong reasons, all of which made the world seem — to her, at least — an evil place. I have sometimes thought she might’ve been happier if we had chosen to have children or, failing that, if we’d settled someplace other than New Orleans, someplace less parochial and exclusive, a city like St. Louis, in the wide Middlewest — where you can be less personally involved in things but still be useful. New Orleans is a small town in so many ways. And we are not from here.

I didn’t mention what the puppy had done to the ligustrums, or the kids I’d confronted at the French Market, or her description of them having been absolutely correct. Instead I talked about my work on the Brownlow-Maisonette appeal, and about what good colleagues all the St. Louis attorneys had turned out to be, how much they’d made me feel at home in their understated, low-key offices and how this relationship would bear important fruit in our presentation before the Eighth Circuit. I talked some about the definition of negligence as it is applied to common carriers, and about the unexpected, latter-day reshapings of general tort law paradigms in the years since the Nixon appointments. And then Sallie said she wanted to take a nap before dinner, and went upstairs obviously discouraged from her day and from crying.

Sallie suffers, and has as long as I’ve known her, from what she calls her war dreams — violent, careering, antic, destructive Technicolor nightmares without plots or coherent scenarios, just sudden drop-offs into deepest sleep accompanied by images of dismembered bodies flying around and explosions and brilliant flashes and soldiers of unknown armies being hurtled through trap doors and hanged or thrust out through bomb bays into empty screaming space. These are terrible things I don’t even like to hear about and that would scare the wits out of anyone. She usually awakes from these dreams slightly worn down, but not especially spiritually disturbed. And for this reason I believe her to be constitutionally very strong. Once I convinced her to go lie down on Dr. Merle Mackey’s well-known couch for a few weeks, and let him try to get to the bottom of all the mayhem. Which she willingly did. Though after a month and a half Merle told her — and told me privately at the tennis club — that Sallie was as mentally and morally sturdy as a race horse, and that some things occurred for no demonstrable reason, no matter how Dr. Freud had viewed it. And in Sallie’s case, her dreams (which have always been intermittent) were just the baroque background music of how she resides on the earth and didn’t represent, as far as he could observe, repressed memories of parental abuse or some kind of private disaster she didn’t want to confront in daylight. “Weirdness is part of the human condition, Bob,” Merle said. “It’s thriving all around us. You’ve probably got some taint of it. Aren’t you from up in Mississippi?” “I am,” I said. “Then I wouldn’t want to get you on my couch. We might be there forever.” Merle smirked like somebody’s presumptuous butler. “No, we don’t need to go into that,” I said. “No, sir,” Merle said, “we really don’t.” Then he pulled a big smile, and that was the end of it.

After Sallie was asleep I stood at the French doors again. It was nearly dark, and the tiny white lights she had strung up like holiday decorations in the cherry laurel had come on by their timer and delivered the garden into an almost Christmas-y lumination and loveliness. Dusk can be a magical time in the French Quarter — the sky so bright blue, the streets lush and shadowy. The puppy had come back to the middle of the garden and lain with his sharp little snout settled on his spotted front paws. I couldn’t see his little feral eyes, but I knew they were trained on me, where I stood watching him, with the yellow chandelier light behind me. He still wore my woven leather belt looped around his neck like a leash. He seemed as peaceful and as heedless as he was likely ever to be. I had set out some Vienna sausages in a plastic saucer, and beside it a red plastic mixing bowl full of water — both where I knew he’d find them. I assumed he had eaten and drifted off to sleep before emerging, now that it was evening, to remind me he was still here, and possibly to express a growing sense of ease with his new surroundings. I was tempted to think what a strange, unpredictable experience it was to be him, so new to life and without essential defenses, and in command of little. But I stopped this thought for obvious reasons. And I realized, as I stood there, that my feelings about the puppy had already become slightly altered. Perhaps it was Sallie’s Swedish tough-mindedness influencing me; or perhaps it was the puppy’s seemingly untamable nature; or possibly it was all those other signs on all the other message boards and stapled to telephone poles which seemed to state in a cheerful but hopeless way that fate was ineluctable, and character, personality, will, even untamable nature were only its accidental by-products. I looked out at the little low, diminishing white shadow motionless against the darkening bricks, and I thought: all right, yes, this is where you are now, and this is what I’m doing to help you. In all likelihood it doesn’t really matter if someone calls, or if someone comes and takes you home and you live a long and happy life. What matters is simply a choice we make, a choice governed by time and opportunity and how well we persuade ourselves to go on until some other powerful force overtakes us. (We always hope it will be a positive and wholesome force, though it may not be.) No doubt this is another view one comes to accept as a lawyer — particularly one who enters events late in the process, as I do. I was, however, glad Sallie wasn’t there to know about these thoughts, since it would only have made her think the world was a heartless place, which it really is not.

The next morning I was on the TWA flight back to St. Louis. Though later the evening before, someone had called to ask if the lost puppy I’d advertised had been inoculated for various dangerous diseases. I had to admit I had no idea, since it wore no collar. It seemed healthy enough, I told the person. (The sudden barking spasms and the spontaneous peeing didn’t seem important.) The caller was clearly an elderly black woman — she spoke with a deep Creole accent and referred to me once or twice as “baby,” but otherwise she didn’t identify herself. She did say, however, that the puppy would be more likely to attract a family if it had its shots and had been certified healthy by a veterinarian. Then she told me about a private agency uptown that specialized in finding homes for dogs with elderly and shut-in persons, and I dutifully wrote down the agency’s name—“Pet Pals.” In our overly lengthy talk she went on to say that the gesture of having the puppy examined and inoculated with a rabies shot would testify to the good will required to care for the animal and increase its likelihood of being deemed suitable. After a while I came to think this old lady was probably completely loony and kept herself busy dialing numbers she saw on signs at the laundromat, and yakking for hours about lost kittens, macramé classes, and Suzuki piano lessons, things she wouldn’t remember the next day. Probably she was one of our neighbors, though there aren’t that many black ladies in the French Quarter anymore. Still, I told her I’d look into her suggestion and appreciated her thoughtfulness. When I innocently asked her her name, she uttered a surprising profanity and hung up.

“I’ll do it,” Sallie said the next morning as I was putting fresh shirts into my two-suiter, making ready for the airport and the flight back to St. Louis. “I have some time today. I can’t let all this marathon anxiety take over my life.” She was watching out the upstairs window down to the garden again. I’m not sure what I’d intended to happen to the puppy. I suppose I hoped he’d be claimed by someone. Yet he was still in the garden. We hadn’t discussed a plan of action, though I had mentioned the Pet Pal agency.

“Poor little pitiful,” Sallie said in a voice of dread. She took a seat on the bed beside my suitcase, let her hands droop between her knees, and stared at the floor. “I went out there and tried to play with it this morning, I want you to know this,” she said. “It was while you were in the shower. But it doesn’t know how to play. It just barked and peed and then snapped at me in a pretty hateful way. I guess it was probably funny to whoever had him that he acts that way. It’s a crime, really.” She seemed sad about it. I thought of the sinister blue-eyed, black-coated boy crouched in the fetid doorway across from the French Market with his new little dog and his three acolytes. They seemed like residents of one of Sallie’s war dreams.

“The Pet Pal people will probably fix things right up,” I said, tying my tie at the bathroom mirror. It was still unseasonably chilly in St. Louis, and I had on my wool suit, though in New Orleans it was already summery.

“If they don’t fix things up, and if no one calls,” Sallie said gravely, “then you have to take him to the shelter when you come back. Can we agree about that? I saw what he did to the plants. They can be replaced. But he’s really not our problem.” She turned and looked at me on the opposite side of our bed, whereon her long-departed Swedish grandmother had spent her first marriage night long ago. The expression on Sallie’s round face was somber but decidedly settled. She was willing to try to care about the puppy because it suited how she felt that particular day, and because I was going away and she knew it would make me feel better if she tried. It is an admirable human trait, and how undoubtedly most good deeds occur — because you have the occasion, and there’s no overpowering reason to do something else. But I was aware she didn’t really care what happened to the puppy.

“That’s exactly fine,” I said, and smiled at her. “I’m hoping for a good outcome. I’m grateful to you for taking him.”

“Do you remember when we went to Robert Frost’s cabin,” Sallie said.

“Yes, I do.” And surely I did.

“Well, when you come back from Missouri, I’d like us to go to Robert Frost’s cabin again.” She smiled at me shyly.

“I think I can do that,” I said, closing my suitcase. “Sounds great.”

Sallie bent sideways toward me and extended her smooth perfect face to be kissed as I went past the bed with my baggage. “We don’t want to abandon that,” she said.

“We never will,” I answered, leaning to kiss her on the mouth. And then I heard the honk of my cab at the front of the house.

Robert Frost’s cabin is a great story about Sallie and me. The spring of our first year in New Haven, we began reading Frost’s poems aloud to each other, as antidotes to the grueling hours of reading cases on replevin and the rule against perpetuities and theories of intent and negligence — the usual shackles law students wear at exam time. I remember only a little of the poems now, twenty-six years later. “Better to go down dignified / with boughten friendship at your side / than none at all. Provide, provide.” We thought we knew what Frost was getting at: that you make your way in the world and life — all the way to the end — as best you can. And so at the close of the school year, when it turned warm and our classes were over, we got in the old Chrysler Windsor my father had given me and drove up to where we’d read Frost had had his mountainside cabin in Vermont. The state had supposedly preserved it as a shrine, though you had to walk far back through the mosquito-y woods and off a winding loggers’ road to find it. We wanted to sit on Frost’s front porch in some rustic chair he’d sat in, and read more poems aloud to each other. Being young southerners educated in the North, we felt Frost represented a kind of old-fashioned but indisputably authentic Americanism, vital exposure we’d grown up exiled from because of race troubles, and because of absurd preoccupations about the South itself, practiced by people who should know better. Yet we’d always longed for that important exposure, and felt it represented rectitude-in-practice, self-evident wisdom, and a sense of fairness expressed by an unpretentious bent for the arts. (I’ve since heard Frost was nothing like that, but was mean and stingy and hated better than he loved.)

However, when Sallie and I arrived at the little log cabin in the spring woods, it was locked up tight, with no one around. In fact it seemed to us like no one ever came there, though the state’s signs seemed to indicate this was the right place. Sallie went around the cabin looking in the windows until she found one that wasn’t locked. And when she told me about it, I said we should crawl in and nose around and read the poem we wanted to read and let whoever came tell us to leave.

But once we got inside, it was much colder than outside, as if the winter and something of Frost’s true spirit had been captured and preserved by the log and mortar. And before long we had stopped our reading — after doing “Design” and “Mending Wall” and “Death of the Hired Man” in front of the cold fireplace. And partly for warmth we decided to make love in Frost’s old bed, which was made up as he might’ve left it years before. (Later it occurred to us that possibly nothing had ever happened in the cabin, and maybe we’d even broken into the wrong cabin and made love in someone else’s bed.)

But that’s the story. That was what Sallie meant by a visit to Robert Frost’s cabin — an invitation to me, upon my return, to make love to her, an act which the events of life and years sometimes can overpower and leave unattended. In a moment of panic, when we thought we heard voices out on the trail, we jumped into our clothes and by accident left our Frost book on the cold cabin floor. No one, of course, ever turned up.

That night I spoke to Sallie from St. Louis, at the end of a full day of vigorous preparations with the Missouri lawyers (whose clients were reasonably afraid of being put out of business by a 250-million-dollar class action judgment). She, however, had nothing but unhappy news to impart. Some homeowners were trying to enjoin the entire AIDS marathon because of a routing change that went too near their well-to-do Audubon Place neighborhood. Plus one of the original marathon organizers was now on the verge of death (not unexpected). She talked more about good-deeds-done-for-wrong-reasons among her hospice associates, and also about some plainly bad deeds committed by other rich people who didn’t like the marathon and wanted AIDS to go away. Plus, nothing had gone right with our plans for placing the puppy into the Pet Pals uptown.

“We went to get its shots,” Sallie said sadly. “And it acted perfectly fine when the vet had it on the table. But when I drove it out to Pet Pals on Prytania, the woman — Mrs. Myers, her name was — opened the little wire gate on the cage I’d bought, just to see him. And he jumped at her and snapped at her and started barking. He just barked and barked. And this Mrs. Myers looked horrified and said, ‘Why, whatever in the world’s wrong with it?’ ‘It’s afraid,’ I said to her. ‘It’s just a puppy. Someone’s abandoned it. It doesn’t understand anything. Haven’t you ever had that happen to you?’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘And we can’t take an abandoned puppy anyway.’ She was looking at me as though I was trying to steal something from her. ‘Isn’t that what you do here?’ I said. And I’m sure I raised my voice to her.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” I said from strangely wintry St. Louis. “I’d have raised my voice.”

“I said to her, ‘What are you here for? If this puppy wasn’t abandoned, why would I be here? I wouldn’t, would I?’

“‘Well, you have to understand we really try to place the more mature dogs whose owners for some reason can’t keep them, or are being transferred.’ Oh God, I hated her, Bobby. She was one of these wide-ass, Junior League bitches who’d just gotten bored with flower arranging and playing canasta at the Boston Club. I wanted just to dump the dog right out in the shop and leave, or take a swing at her. I said, ‘Do you mean you won’t take him?’ The puppy was in its cage and was actually being completely quiet and nice. ‘No, I’m sorry, it’s untamed,’ this dowdy, stupid woman said. ‘Untamed!’ I said. ‘It’s an abandoned puppy, for fuck’s sake.’

“She just looked at me then as if I’d suddenly produced a bomb and was jumping all around. ‘Maybe you’d better leave now,’ she said. And I’d probably been in the shop all of two minutes, and here she was ordering me out. I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I know I shouted then. I was so frustrated. ‘You’re not a pet pal at all,’ I shouted. ‘You’re an enemy of pets.’”

“You just got mad,” I said, happy not to have been there.

“Of course I did,” Sallie said. “I let myself get mad because I wanted to scare this hideous woman. I wanted her to see how stupid she was and how much I hated her. She did look around at the phone as if she was thinking about calling 911. Someone I know came in then. Mrs. Hensley from the Art League. So I just left.”

“That’s all good,” I said. “I don’t blame you for any of it.”

“No. Neither do I.” Sallie took a breath and let it out forcefully into the receiver. “We have to get rid of it, though. Now.” She was silent a moment, then she began, “I tried to walk it around the neighborhood using the belt you gave it. But it doesn’t know how to be walked. It just struggles and cries, then barks at everyone. And if you try to pet it, it pees. I saw some of those kids in black sitting on the curb. They looked at me like I was a fool, and one of the girls made a little kissing noise with her lips, and said something sweet, and the puppy just sat down on the sidewalk and stared at her. I said, ‘Is this your dog?’ There were four of them, and they all looked at each other and smiled. I know it was theirs. They had another dog with them, a black one. We just have to take him to the pound, though, as soon as you come back tomorrow. I’m looking at him now, out in the garden. He just sits and stares like some Hitchcock movie.”

“We’ll take him,” I said. “I don’t suppose anybody’s called.”

“No. And I saw someone putting up new signs and taking yours down. I didn’t say anything. I’ve had enough with Jerry DeFranco about to die, and our injunction.”

“Too bad,” I said, because that was how I felt — that it was too bad no one would come along and out of the goodness of his heart take the puppy in.

“Do you think someone left it as a message,” Sallie said. Her voice sounded strange. I pictured her in the kitchen, with a cup of tea just brewed in front of her on the Mexican tile counter. It’s good she set the law aside. She becomes involved in ways that are far too emotional. Distance is essential.

“What kind of message?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. Oddly enough, it was starting to snow in St. Louis, small dry flakes backed — from my hotel window — by an empty, amber-lit cityscape and just the top curve of the great silver arch. It is a nice cordial city, though not distinguished in any way. “I can’t figure out if someone thought we were the right people to care for a puppy, or were making a statement showing their contempt.”

“Neither,” I said. “I’d say it was random. Our gate was available. That’s all.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Does what?”

“Randomness.”

“No,” I said. “I find it consoling. It frees the mind.”

“Nothing seems random to me,” Sallie said. “Everything seems to reveal some plan.”

“Tomorrow we’ll work this all out,” I said. “We’ll take the dog and then everything’ll be better.”

“For us, you mean? Is something wrong with us? I just have this bad feeling tonight.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with us. But it is us we’re interested in here. Good night, now, sweetheart.”

“Good night, Bobby,” Sallie said in a resigned voice, and we hung up.

That night in the Mayfair Hotel, with the window shades open to the peculiar spring snow and orange-lit darkness, I experienced my own strange dream. In my dream I’d gone on a duck hunting trip into the marsh that surrounds our city. It was winter and early morning, and someone had taken me out to a duck blind before it was light. These are things I still do, as a matter of fact. But when I was set out in the blind with my shotgun, I found that beside me on the wooden bench was one of my law partners, seated with his shotgun between his knees, and wearing strangely red canvas hunting clothes — something you’d never wear in a duck blind. And he had the puppy with him, the same one that was then in our back garden awaiting whatever its fate would be. And my partner was with a woman, who either was or looked very much like the actress Liv Ullmann. The man was Paul Thompson, a man I (outside my dream) have good reason to believe once had an affair with Sallie, an affair that almost caused us to split apart without our even ever discussing it, except that Paul, who was older than I am and big and rugged, suddenly died — actually in a duck blind, of a terrible heart attack. It is a thing that can happen in the excitement of shooting.

In my dream Paul Thompson spoke to me and said, “How’s Sallie, Bobby?” I said, “Well, she’s fine, Paul, thanks,” because we were pretending he and Sallie didn’t have the affair I’d employed a private detective to authenticate— and almost did completely authenticate. The Liv Ullmann woman said nothing, just sat against the wooden sides of the blind seeming sad, with long straight blond hair. The little white-and-black puppy sat on the duckboard flooring and stared at me. “Life’s very fragile in the way we experience it, Bobby,” Paul Thompson, or his ghost, said to me. “Yes, it is,” I said. I assumed he was referring to what he’d been doing with Sallie. (There had been some suspicious photos, though to be honest, I don’t think Paul really cared about Sallie. Just did it because he could.) The puppy, meanwhile, kept staring at me. Then the Liv Ullmann woman herself smiled in an ironic way.

“Speaking about the truth tends to annihilate truth, doesn’t it?” Paul Thompson said to me.

“Yes,” I answered. “I’m certain you’re right.” And then for a sudden instant it seemed like it had been the puppy who’d spoken Paul’s words. I could see his little mouth moving after the words were already spoken. Then the dream faded and became a different dream, which involved the millennium fireworks display from New Year’s Eve, and didn’t stay in my mind like the Paul Thompson dream did, and does even to this day.

I make no more of this dream than I make of Sallie’s dreams, though I’m sure Merle Mackey would have plenty to say about it.

When I arrived back in the city the next afternoon, Sallie met me at the airport, driving her red Wagoneer. “I’ve got it in the car,” she said as we walked to the parking structure. I realized she meant the puppy. “I want to take it to the shelter before we go home. It’ll be easier.” She seemed as though she’d been agitated but wasn’t agitated now. She had dressed herself in some aqua walking shorts and a loose, pink blouse that showed her pretty shoulders.

“Did anyone call,” I asked. She was walking faster than I was, since I was carrying my suitcase and a box of brief materials. I’d suffered a morning of tough legal work in a cold, unfamiliar city and was worn out and hot. I’d have liked a vodka martini instead of a trip to the animal shelter.

“I called Kirsten and asked her if she knew anyone who’d take the poor little thing,” Sallie said. Kirsten is her sister, and lives in Andalusia, Alabama, where she owns a flower shop with her husband, who’s a lawyer for a big cotton consortium. I’m not fond of either of them, mostly because of their simpleminded politics, which includes support for the Confederate flag, prayer in the public schools and the abolition of affirmative action — all causes I have been outspoken about. Sallie, however, can sometimes forget she went to Mount Holyoke and Yale, and step back into being a pretty, chatty southern girl when she gets together with her sister and her cousins. “She said she probably did know someone,” Sallie went on, “so I said I’d arrange to have the puppy driven right to her doorstep. Today. This afternoon. But then she said it seemed like too much trouble. I told her it wouldn’t be any trouble for her at all, that I’d do it or arrange it to be done. Then she said she’d call me back, and didn’t. Which is typical of my whole family’s sense of responsibility.”

“Maybe we should call her back?” I said as we reached her car. We had a phone in the Wagoneer. I wasn’t looking forward to visiting the SPCA.

“She’s forgotten about it already,” Sallie said. “She’d just get wound up.”

When I looked in through the back window of Sallie’s Jeep, the puppy’s little wire cage was sitting in the luggage space. I could see his white head, facing back, in the direction it had come from. What could it have been thinking?

“The vet said it’s going to be a really big dog. Big feet tell you that.”

Sallie was getting in the car. I put my suitcase in the back seat so as to not alarm the puppy. Twice it barked its desperate little high-pitched puppy bark. Possibly it knew me. Though I realized it would never have been an easy puppy to get attached to. My father had a neat habit of reversing propositions he was handed as a way of assessing them. If a subject seemed to have one obvious outcome, he’d imagine the reverse of it: if a business deal had an obvious beneficiary, he’d ask who benefited but didn’t seem to. Needless to say, these are valuable skills lawyers use. But I found myself thinking — except I didn’t say it to Sallie — that though we may have thought we were doing the puppy a favor by trying to find it a home, possibly we were really doing ourselves a favor by presenting ourselves to be the kind of supposedly decent people who do that sort of thing. I am, for instance, a person who stops to move turtles off of busy interstates, or picks up butterflies in shopping mall parking lots and puts them into the bushes to give them a fairer chance at survival. I know these are pointless acts of pointless generosity. Yet there isn’t a time when I do it that I don’t get back in the car thinking more kindly about myself. (Later I often work around to thinking of myself as a fraud, too.) But the alternative is to leave the butterfly where it lies expiring, or to let the big turtle meet annihilation on the way to the pond; and in doing these things let myself in for the indictment of cruelty or the sense of loss that would follow. Possibly, anyone would argue, these issues are too small to think about seriously, since whether you perform these acts or don’t perform them, you always forget about them in about five minutes.

Except for weary conversation about my morning at Ruger, Todd, Jennings, and Sallie’s rerouting victory with the AIDS race, which was set for Saturday, we didn’t say much as we drove to the SPCA. Sallie had obviously researched the address, because she got off the Interstate at an exit I’d never used and that immediately brought us down onto a wide boulevard with old cars parked on the neutral ground, and paper trash cluttering the curbs down one long side of some brown-brick housing projects where black people were outside on their front stoops and wandering around the street in haphazard fashion. There were a few dingy-looking barbecue and gumbo cafés, and two tire-repair shops where work was taking place out in the street. A tiny black man standing on a peach crate was performing haircuts in a dinette chair set up on the sidewalk, his customer wrapped in newspaper. And some older men had stationed a card table on the grassy median and were playing in the sunlight. There were no white people anywhere. It was a part of town, in fact, where most white people would’ve been afraid to go. Yet it was not a bad section, and the Negroes who lived there no doubt looked on the world as something other than a hopeless place.

Sallie took a wrong turn off the boulevard, and onto a run-down residential street of pastel shotgun houses where black youths in baggy trousers and big black sneakers were playing basketball without a goal. The boys watched us drive past but said nothing. “I’ve gotten us off wrong here,” she said in a distracted, hesitant voice. She is not comfortable around black people when she is the only white — which is a residue of her privileged Alabama upbringing where everything and everybody belonged to a proper place and needed to stay there.

She slowed at the next corner and looked both ways down a similar small street of shotgun houses. More black people were out washing their cars or waiting at bus stops in the sun. I noticed this to be Creve Coeur Street, which was where the Times-Picayune said an unusual number of murders occurred each year. All that happened at night, of course, and involved black people killing other black people for drug money. It was now 4:45 in the afternoon and I felt perfectly safe.

The puppy barked again in his cage, a soft, anticipatory bark, then Sallie drove us a block farther and immediately spotted the street she’d been looking for — Rousseau Street. The residential buildings stopped there and old, dilapidated two- and one-story industrial uses began: an off-shore pipe manufactory, a frozen seafood company, a shut-down recycling center where people had gone on leaving their garbage in plastic bags. There was also a small, windowless cube of a building that housed a medical clinic for visiting sailors off foreign ships. I recognized it because our firm had once represented the owners in a personal-injury suit, and I remembered grainy photos of the building and my thinking that I’d never need to see it up close.

Near the end of this block was the SPCA, which occupied a long, glum red-brick warehouse-looking building with a small red sign by the street and a tiny gravel parking lot. One might’ve thought the proprietors didn’t want its presence too easily detected.

The SPCA’s entrance was nothing but a single windowless metal door at one end of the building. There were no shrubberies, no disabled slots, no directional signs leading in, just this low, ominous flat-roofed building with long factory clerestories facing the lot and the seafood company. An older wooden shed was attached on the back. And a small sign I hadn’t seen because it was fastened too low on the building said: YOU MUST HAVE A LEASH. ALL ANIMALS MUST BE RESTRAINED. CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR ANIMAL. IF YOUR DOG BITES A STAFF MEMBER YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE. THANKS MUCH.

“Why don’t you take him in in his cage,” Sallie said, nosing up to the building, becoming very efficient. “I’ll go in and start the paperwork. I already called them.” She didn’t look my way.

“That’s fine,” I said.

When we got out I was surprised again at how warm it was, and how close and dense the air felt. Summer seemed to have arrived during the day I was gone, which is not untypical of New Orleans. I smelled an entirely expectable animal gaminess, combined with a fish smell and something metallic that felt hot and slightly burning in my nose. And the instant I was out into the warm, motionless air I could hear barking from inside the building. I assumed the barking was triggered by the sound of a car arriving. Dogs trained themselves to the hopeful sound of motors.

Across the street from the SPCA were other shotgun houses I hadn’t noticed. Elderly black people were sitting in metal lawn chairs on their little porches, observing me getting myself organized. It would be a difficult place to live, I thought, and quite a lot to get used to with the noise and the procession of animals coming and going.

Sallie disappeared into the unfriendly little door, and I opened the back of the Wagoneer and hauled out the puppy in his cage. He stumbled to one side when I took a grip on the wire rungs, then barked several agitated, heartfelt barks and began clawing at the wires and my fingers, giving me a good scratch on the knuckles that almost caused me to drop the whole contraption. The cage, even with him in it, was still very light, though my face was so close I could smell his urine. “You be still in there,” I said.

For some reason, and with the cage in my grasp, I looked around at the colored people across the street, silently watching me. I had nothing in mind to say to them. They were sympathetic, I felt sure, to what was going on and thought it was better than cruelty. I had started to sweat because I was wearing my business suit. And I awkwardly waved a hand toward them, but of course no one responded.

When I had maneuvered the cage close up to the metal door, I for some reason looked to the left and saw down the grimy alley between the SPCA and the sailors’ clinic, to where a round steel canister was attached to the SPCA building by some large corrugated aluminum pipes, all of it black and new-looking. This, I felt certain, was a device for disposing of animal remains, though I didn’t know how. Probably some incinerating invention that didn’t have an outlet valve or a stack — something very efficient. It was an extremely sinister thing to see and reminded me of what we all heard years ago about terrible vacuum chambers and gassed compartments for dispatching unwanted animals. Probably they weren’t even true stories. Now, of course, it’s just an injection. They go to sleep, feeling certain they’ll wake up.

Inside the SPCA it was instantly cool, and Sallie had almost everything done. The barking I’d heard outside had not ceased, but the gamy animal smell was replaced by a loud disinfectant odor that was everywhere. The reception area was a cubicle with a couple of metal desks and fluorescent tubes in the high ceiling, and a calendar on the wall showing a golden retriever standing in a wheat field with a dead pheasant in its mouth. Two high-school-age girls manned the desks, and one was helping Sallie fill out her documents. These girls undoubtedly loved animals and worked after school and had aspirations to be vets. A sign on the wall behind the desks said PLACING PUPPIES IS OUR FIRST PRIORITY. This was here, I thought, to make people like me feel better about abandoning dogs. To make forgetting easier.

Sallie was leaning over one of the desks filling out a thick green document, and looked around to see me just as an older stern-faced woman in a white lab coat and black rubber boots entered from a side door. Her small face and both her hands had a puffy but also a leathery texture that southern women’s skin often takes on — too much sun and alcohol, too many cigarettes. Her hair was dense and dull reddish-brown and heavy around her face, making her head seem smaller than it was. This woman, however, was extremely friendly and smiled easily, though I knew just from her features and what she was wearing that she was not a veterinarian.

I stood holding the cage until one of the high-school girls came around her desk and looked in it and said the puppy was cute. It barked so that the cage shook in my grip. “What’s his name?” she said, and smiled in a dreamy way. She was a heavy-set girl, very pale with a lazy left eye. Her fingernails were painted bright orange and looked unkempt.

“We haven’t named him,” I said, the cage starting to feel unwieldy.

“We’ll name him,” she said, pushing her fingers through the wires. The puppy pawed at her, then licked her fingertips, then made little crying sounds when she removed her fingers.

“They place sixty-five percent of their referrals,” Sallie said over the forms she was filling out.

“Too bad it id’n a holiday,” the woman in the lab coat said in a husky voice, watching Sallie finish. She spoke like somebody from across the Atchafalaya, somebody who had once spoken French. “Dis place be a ghost town by Christmas, you know?”

The helper girl who’d played with the puppy walked out through the door that opened onto a long concrete corridor full of shadowy metal-fenced cages. Dogs immediately began barking again, and the foul animal odor entered the room almost shockingly. An odd place to seek employment, I thought.

“How long do you keep them?” I said, and set the puppy’s cage down on the concrete floor. Dogs were barking beyond the door, one big-sounding dog in particular, though I couldn’t see it. A big yellow tiger-striped cat that apparently had free rein in the office walked across the desk top where Sallie was going on writing and rubbed against her arm, and made her frown.

“Five days,” the puffy-faced Cajun woman said, and smiled in what seemed like an amused way. “We try to place’em. People be in here all the time, lookin’. Puppies go fast ’less they something wrong with them.” Her eyes found the cage on the floor. She smiled at the puppy as if it could understand her. “You cute,” she said, then made a dry kissing noise.

“What usually disqualifies them?” I said, and Sallie looked around at me.

“Too aggressive,” the woman said, staring approvingly in at the puppy. “If it can’t be house-broke, then they’ll bring ’em back to us. Which isn’t good.”

“Maybe they’re just scared,” I said.

“Some are. Then some are just little naturals. They go in one hour.” She leaned over, hands on her lab-coat knees and looked in at our puppy. “How ’bout you?” she said. “You a little natural? Or are you a little scamp? I b’lieve I see a scamp in here.” The puppy sat on the wire flooring and stared at her indifferently, just as he had stared at me. I thought he would bark, but he didn’t.

“That’s all,” Sallie said, and turned to me and attempted an hospitable look. She put her pen in her purse. She was thinking I might be changing my mind, but I wasn’t.

“Then that’s all you need. We’ll take over,” the supervisor woman said.

“What’s the fee?” I asked.

“Id’n no fee,” the woman said and smiled. “Remember me in yo’ will.” She squatted in front of the cage as if she was going to open it. “Puppy, puppy,” she said, then put both hands around the sides of the cage and stood up, holding it with ease. She made a little grunting sound, but she was much stronger than I would’ve thought. Just then another blond helper girl, this one with a metal brace on her left leg, came humping through the kennels door, and the supervisor just walked right past her, holding the cage, while the dogs down the long, dark corridor started barking ecstatically.

“We’re donating the cage,” Sallie said. She wanted out of the building, and I did, too. I stood another moment and watched as the woman in the lab coat disappeared along the row of pens, carrying our puppy. Then the green metal door went closed, and that was all there was to the whole thing. Nothing very ceremonial.

. .

On our drive back downtown we were both, naturally enough, sunk into a kind of woolly, disheartened silence. From up on the Interstate, the spectacle of modern, southern city life and ambitious new construction where once had been a low, genteel old river city, seemed particularly gruesome and unpromising and probably seemed the same to Sallie. To me, who labored in one of the tall, metal and glass enormities (I could actually see my office windows in Place St. Charles, small, undistinguished rectangles shining high up among countless others), it felt particularly alien to history and to my own temperament. Behind these square mirrored windows, human beings were writing and discussing and preparing cases; and on other floors were performing biopsies, CAT scans, drilling out cavities, delivering news both welcome and unwelcome to all sorts of other expectants — clients, patients, partners, spouses, children. People were in fact there waiting for me to arrive that very afternoon, anticipating news of the Brownlow-Maisonette case — where were things, how were our prospects developing, what was my overall take on matters and what were our hopes for a settlement (most of my “take” wouldn’t be all that promising). In no time I’d be entering their joyless company and would’ve forgotten about myself here on the highway, peering out in near despair because of the fate of an insignificant little dog. Frankly, it made me feel pretty silly.

Sallie suddenly said, as though she’d been composing something while I was musing away balefully, “Do you remember after New Year’s that day we sat and talked about one thing changing and making everything else different?”

“The Big Dipper,” I said as we came to our familiar exit, which quickly led down and away through a different poor section of darktown that abuts our gentrified street. Everything had begun to seem more manageable as we neared home.

“That’s right,” Sallie said, as though the words Big Dipper reproached her. “But you know, and you’ll think this is crazy. It is maybe. But last night when I was in bed, I began thinking about that poor little puppy as an ill force that put everything in our life at a terrible risk. And we were in danger in some way. It scared me. I didn’t want that.”

I looked over at Sallie and saw a crystal tear escape her eye and slip down her soft, rounded, pretty cheek.

“Sweetheart,” I said, and found her hand on the steering wheel. “It’s quite all right. You put yourself through a lot. And I’ve been gone. You just need me around to do more. There’s nothing to be scared about.”

“I suppose,” Sallie said resolutely.

“And if things are not exactly right now,” I said, “they soon will be. You’ll take on the world again the way you always do. We’ll all be the better for it.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry about the puppy.”

“Me too,” I said. “But we did the right thing. Probably he’ll be fine.”

“And I’m sorry things threaten me,” Sallie said. “I don’t think they should, then they do.”

“Things threaten all of us,” I said. “Nobody gets away unmarked.” That is what I thought about all of that then. We were in sight of our house. I didn’t really want to talk about these subjects anymore.

“Do you love me,” Sallie said, quite unexpectedly.

“Oh yes,” I said, “I do. I love you very much.” And that was all we said.

A week ago, in one of those amusing fillers used to justify column space in one of the trial lawyers’ journals I look at just for laughs, I read two things that truly interested me. These are always chosen for their wry comment on the law, and are frequently hilarious and true. The first one I read said, “Scientists predict that in five thousand years the earth will be drawn into the sun.” It then went on to say something like, “so it’s not too early to raise your malpractice insurance,” or some such cornball thing as that. But I will admit to being made oddly uncomfortable by this news about the earth — as if I had something important to lose in the inevitability of its far-off demise. I can’t now say what that something might be. None of us can think about five thousand years from now. And I’d have believed none of us could feel anything about it either, except in ways that are vaguely religious. Only I did, and I am far from being a religious man. What I felt was very much like the sensation described by the old saying “Someone just walked on your grave.” Someone, so it seemed, had walked on my grave five thousand years from now, and it didn’t feel very good. I was sorry to have to think about it.

The other squib I found near the back of the magazine behind the Legal Market Place, and it said that astronomers had discovered the oldest known star, which they believed to be 50 million-light years away, and they had named it the Millennium Star for obvious reasons, though the actual Millennium had gone by with hardly any change in things that I’d noticed. When asked to describe the chemical makeup of this Millennium Star — which of course couldn’t even be seen — the scientist who’d discovered it said, “Oh, gee, I don’t know. It’s impossible to reach that far back in time.” And I thought — sitting in my office with documents of the Brownlow-Maisonette case spread all around me and the hot New Orleans sun beaming into the very window I’d seen from my car when Sallie and I were driving back from delivering the puppy to its fate — I thought, “Time? Why does he say time, when what he means is space?” My feeling then was very much like the feeling from before, when I’d read about the earth hurtling into the sun — a feeling that so much goes on everywhere all through time, and we know only a laughably insignificant fraction about any of it.

The days that followed our visit to the SPCA were eventful days. Sallie’s colleague Jerry DeFranco did, of course, die. And though he had AIDS, he died by his own dispirited hand, in his little garret apartment on Kerelerec Street, late at night before the marathon, in order, I suppose, that his life and its end be viewed as a triumph of will over pitiless circumstance.

On another front, the Brownlow appellants decided very suddenly and unexpectedly to settle our case rather than face years of extremely high lawyers’ fees and of course the possibility (though not a good one) of enduring a crippling loss. I had hoped for this, and look at it as a victory.

Elsewhere, the marathon went off as planned, and along the route Sallie had wanted. I unfortunately was in St. Louis and missed it. A massacre occurred, the same afternoon, at a fast-food restaurant not far from the SPCA, and someone we knew — a black lawyer — was killed. And, during this period, I began receiving preliminary feelers about a federal judge-ship which I’m sure I’ll never get. These things are always bandied about for months and years, all sorts of persons are put on notice to be ready when the moment comes, and then the wrong one is chosen for completely wrong reasons, after which it becomes clear that nothing was ever in doubt. The law is an odd calling. And New Orleans a unique place. In any case, I’m far too moderate for the present company running things.

Several people did eventually call about the puppy, having seen my signs, and I directed them all to the animal shelter. I went around a time or two and checked the signs, and several were still up along with the AIDS marathon flyers, which made me satisfied, but not very satisfied.

Each morning I sat in bed and thought about the puppy waiting for someone to come down the list of cages and see him there alone and staring, and take him away. For some reason, in my imaginings, no one ever chose him — not an autistic child, nor a lonely, discouraged older person, a recent widow, a young family with rough-housing kids. None of these. In all the ways I tried to imagine it, he stayed there.

Sallie did not bring the subject up again, although her sister called on Tuesday and said she knew someone named Hester in Andalusia who’d take the puppy, then the two of them quarreled so bitterly that I had to come on the phone and put it settled.

On some afternoons, as the provisional five waiting days ticked by, I would think about the puppy and feel utterly treacherous for having delivered him to the shelter. Then, other times, I’d feel that we’d given him a better chance than he’d have otherwise had, either on the street alone or with his previous owners. I certainly never thought of him as an ill force to be dispelled, or a threat to anything important. To me life’s not that fragile. He was, if anything, just a casualty of the limits we all place on our sympathy and our capacity for the ambiguous in life. Though Sallie might’ve been right — that the puppy had been a message left for us to ponder: something someone thought about us, something someone felt we needed to know. Who or what or in what way that might’ve been true, I can’t quite imagine. Though we are all, of course, implicated in the lives of others, whether we precisely know how or don’t.

On Thursday night, before the puppy’s final day in the shelter, I had another strange dream. Dreams always mean something obvious, and so I try as much as I can not to remember mine. But for some reason this time I did, and what I dreamed was again about my old departed law partner, Paul Thompson, and his nice wife, Judy, a pretty, buxom blond woman who’d studied opera and sung the coloratura parts in several municipal productions. In my dream Judy Thompson was haranguing Paul about some list of women’s names she’d found, women Paul had been involved with, even in love with. She was telling him he was an awful man who had broken her heart, and that she was leaving him (which did actually happen). And on her list — which I could suddenly, as though through a fog, see — was Sallie’s name. And when I saw it there, my heart started pounding, pounding, pounding, until I sat right up in bed in the dark and said out loud, “Did you know your name’s on that goddamned list?” Outside, on our street, I could hear someone playing a trumpet, a very slow and soulful version of “Nearer Walk with Thee.” And Sallie was there beside me, deep asleep. I of course knew she’d done it, deserved to be on the list, and that probably there was such a list, given the kind of reckless man Paul Thompson was. As I said, I had never spoken to Sallie about this subject and had, until then, believed I’d gone beyond the entire business. Though I have to suppose now I was wrong.

This dream stayed on my mind the next day, and the next night I had it again. And because the dream preoccupied my thinking, it wasn’t until Saturday after lunch, when I had sat down to take a nap in a chair in the living room, that I realized I’d forgotten about the puppy the day before, and that all during Friday many hours had passed, and by the end of them the puppy must’ve reached its destination, whatever it was to be. I was surprised to have neglected to think about it at the crucial moment, having thought of it so much before then. And I was sorry to have to realize that I had finally not cared as much about it as I’d thought.