The Hand That Feeds You: A Novel Read online

  The closer I got to the water, the more the cold wind picked up. I walked out onto the pier where men fish, but no one was fishing. My eyes watered and my face stung. I surrendered to numbness. That surrender allowed me to surrender also to what I had just learned, that Libertine had been in my apartment the morning Bennett had been killed.

  Is that what had ignited the dogs? Being locked in the bathroom and hearing the sounds of Bennett and this woman in my bed? It would certainly ignite me. I found myself suffused with heat. I didn’t feel the cold anymore; the blood was rushing to every cold part of me. Confusion fell away, and I felt a clear, piercing understanding move through me. Another word for this feeling was anger. Normally, anger blinded me, but this time it allowed me to see. It was bracing, and welcome. It was stronger than fear. I valued this clarity; I did not want to blur it. Libertine had been in my bedroom with Bennett.

  Boss died during the night. The call came in the morning from Alfredo at For Pitties’ Sake. Now there was room for Cloud. Alfredo said he’d be ready to do an intake for Cloud that afternoon.

  Finally, something clean. I had been able, just barely, to protect a creature I loved until I could lead her to safety. I was filled with joy that my dog was going to a place where she would be cared for with love.

  Before I reserved a Zipcar, I called Billie. We’d been working toward this moment for nearly six months. I asked her if she wanted to go with me, and she told me she would pick me up. When she arrived, she had coffee and scones for the drive. Plus a rawhide chewie for Cloud. For my part, I had packed sliced ham in my tote bag.

  “We did it!” Billie said.

  She was right to use the plural, we. I could not have gotten this far without her help, and I told her so. She raised her hand to give me a high five, and I met it with my own. I noticed then that her arm, her face, was as pale as mine. She had no tan at all though she had just come back from the Caribbean. Billie didn’t strike me as one to wear a big hat and gloves in the sun, but what did I know. Even people who stay out of the direct sun get tan in the Caribbean.

  “I thought you’d have some color.”

  “I was only there for forty-eight hours. I didn’t go there to tan on the beach.”

  “Did they finish the new shelter? Did you meet Lesley?”

  “Lesley was off island. I picked the dogs up at the old one.”

  But every time I had gone down to pick up these dogs, Lesley, the director of the Humane Society, had brought them, paperwork completed, to the airport.

  I realized I was testing Billie and I suspected she knew it. I still wanted to know if she’d gone away with McKenzie.

  I asked if she had any sugar packets in the car for the coffee.

  “Look in the glove.”

  I found several lipsticks—though I’d never seen her wear any—but no sugar. I picked up a tube of lipstick in a shade called Tiramisu. “Why don’t I just eat this?” I asked in a lame attempt to joke away the tension I felt between us.

  “That’s hard to come by. Been discontinued.”

  We had been making good time on the FDR Drive north. Joggers ran along the riverside, wearing extra gear against the cold. Few boats were out on the river in the afternoon, just a single barge being pulled along by a tug. The booze cruises were a spring and summer phenomenon. These were working boats doing their best in the icy water, navigating the famously difficult currents in the inlet known as the East River.

  We took the Ninety-Sixth Street exit and passed the many discount stores with merchandise displayed on the sidewalk even in the cold, and the cut-rate grocery, the White Castle, the projects, and gas stations packed with cabs. A frosted-over community garden interrupted a row of tenements just before we turned onto 119th Street.

  “Have you got her leash?” Billie asked.

  We had just pulled into a parking space (no meter) just short of the iron gates in front of the nearly windowless, concrete structure. My dog had been imprisoned since September, and we were about to break her out.

  “Leash and collar,” I said. The nylon web collar had peace signs in a rainbow of colors printed on it. Her name tag, her license, her rabies tag. Billie must have sensed my going soft because she said, “Act as if you come here all the time.”

  She steered me past the intake desk after waving to a kennel worker she knew. The woman at intake had recognized Billie and buzzed us in. The noise assaulted us immediately, combined with an overpowering smell of urine and feces. I followed Billie on slippery linoleum—she moved with the purpose of a soldier. It should have inspired strength in me, but I felt disequilibrium.

  The occasional wall-mounted sanitary dispensers would have held antibacterial gel had they ever been filled. We passed door after door leading into the wards. Each ward contained about two dozen dogs, the large ones housed in a row of cages, the smaller dogs inhabiting smaller cages stacked three high. Overflow made it necessary to place a wall of these stacked cages in the main hallway. I saw that frightened cats in carriers were mixed in with the dogs. Fluorescent lights in the hallway pulsed and crackled, an instant headache. The ward doors were on one side of the hallway; on the other was a door marked MEDICAL.

  “Don’t go in there,” Billie said.

  I glanced in when a vet tech opened it as we passed. I saw blood on the linoleum floor.

  “Told you,” Billie said.

  Food storage was on the same side of the hallway down a ways from Medical. There, a deep sink was filled with aluminum water bowls and opened cans of dog food under a leaking faucet.

  “Eyes right,” Billie said, noting my wandering gaze. But I looked anyway. Each ward door had a narrow panel of glass at about eye level, and I looked in at the dogs. Some were clearly depressed—they sat in the back of their cage facing the wall. Others, as soon as they made even passing eye contact with a potential rescuer, began to perform tricks that someone had once taught them—a lifted paw to shake, though no one was there to shake it. I felt as though I would disintegrate. I must have gasped because Billie turned to me and said, “This is why I come here.”

  Adoption hours were still in effect, and we had passed clusters of people looking at dogs behind bars. Dogs cleared for adoption were in the first two wards, with small dogs in a separate room. The small dogs always had more visitors looking for a pet. I saw children holding trembling Chihuahuas and miniature poodles, as well as big-eared mutts. I saw families walk from cage to cage in the big-dog adoption wards, debating the merits of one over the other, which dog was cuter, which would require less exercise. I paused while Billie walked ahead for a moment. I’d overheard a grungy-looking guy around twenty or so gauging the likelihood of a young male pit bull’s chances in the ring. I caught up to Billie to tell her about him, and she said, “We know all about that guy. Intake knows not to release a dog to him.”

  But the public was not allowed in the ward we were headed for.

  I would not last an hour in this place. I had known this all along, but I could only now acknowledge it fully, since I was getting my own dog out. The only thing that went in the face of this horror was the generosity shown the animals by the kennel staff and volunteers, other women like Billie, for she had told me the volunteers were nearly all women. She had also told me that most of the kennel workers, there to do a difficult and distressing job, were kind to them, called the dogs by their names, even though those names were usually assigned to them at intake.

  “At the end of the hall, that door goes into a backyard,” Billie said. “It’s the one place where dogs can be off leash. Though yard isn’t really accurate—it’s not as if there’s any grass.”

  We were nearly to the ward where Cloud was confined when Billie said, “If the elevator were working, you’d see all of this replicated on the second floor.”

  When that fact washed over me, I was stricken with guilt at not being able to take more than just Cloud out of here. But where did that lead, and where would it stop?

  “I can see what you’re t
hinking,” Billie said. “You can’t save them all. For me, it’s a matter of translation, always translating what I spend money on into what it would pay for in this place. That pair of shoes would inoculate twenty-five dogs against bordetella. Those sunglasses would spay ten dogs.”

  Billie took out a key ring and unlocked the door to Ward 4A, where the Dangerous Dogs were kept. In this ward, on each kennel card affixed to the top of a cage were the red-inked words CAUTION—SEVERE. This was their temperament rating. On the concrete wall facing the row of cages were thick steel rings hanging from exposed screws—tie-outs that these strong dogs had pulled clean out of the wall. Propped against the wall in one corner was a catchpole, next to the industrial, coiled black hose.

  Cloud was not where I had last seen her, the first cage near the door. Instead of Cloud, that cage held a large white dog with cropped ears and pink eyes; it sat coolly facing the front bars.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “She’s been moved to the end of the row.”

  I felt a moment’s guilt at not tending to the dogs in the cages I raced past to find my own. When I saw my girl, her white coat defiled, I cried out her name and then just cried. She moved to the front bars as Billie opened the door just enough to attach her collar and leash. Billie told me to let her walk Cloud out of the ward, Cloud to the left of her, Billie’s body between Cloud and the caged dogs. When we reached the entrance to the ward, I saw the white dog with cropped ears, but it was not in the first cage by the door. It was in the second cage from the door, where George had once been next to Cloud but unable to see her. I realized that there were two white dogs with cropped ears and pink eyes, mirroring each other’s stance in their respective cages. The dogs had short hair and broad, muscular chests. They were not pitties, but seemed to be Molossers, the predecessors of the bully breeds. The dogs looked to be about 130 pounds, larger even than Cloud.

  “Are they Presas?” I asked Billie. Years before, when Steven had lived in San Francisco, a pair of untrained Presa Canarios had gotten out of their owner’s apartment into the hallway of a tony apartment building in Pacific Heights and mauled a young woman who could not get the key to her apartment out fast enough. The woman had died from her injuries, which included nearly eighty wounds, with only her scalp and feet unharmed. The resulting trial sent the dogs’ reckless owners—one of them a lawyer—to jail for fifteen years for second-degree murder.

  “They’re Dogos Argentinos,” Billie said. “But really they’re scapegoats, brought in last night.”

  “What’s their story?”

  “Same old story.”

  Either she was giving me credit for knowing or she was blowing me off.

  As we passed their cages, the Dogos rose and circled their quarters; their movements were identical, like synchronized swimmers. Yet they could not see each other to know what the other was doing. Each dog looked at me, growling and curling its lip.

  Once out of the ward, I dropped to my knees and hugged my dog. Her ears were still flattened in fear, but her tail began wagging, and she leaned into me, shoving her massive head into my chest.

  “You’re safe now,” I said.

  As happy as she was to see me, she caught a whiff of the ham awaiting and dug her nose into the tote bag.

  Billie waited just long enough for Cloud to get a big mouthful, then slipped a muzzle on her and fastened it. “Let’s sign her out.”

  In the crowded lobby, a young Hispanic boy came over and asked why my dog was wearing a cage on her nose and what I was going to name her.

  “Her name is Cloud.”

  “Cool. Can I pet her?”

  I went to the desk while Billie stood with Cloud, but I heard her tell the little boy not to pet the dog, because it was dangerous. Coming from Billie, that comment spun me around. She believed that? Or she was following the rules.

  A young man with a frightened-looking chow mix stood beside me, furious at the woman behind the desk, who told him that the fee to surrender a dog was $35. “Fuck that. I’ll tie the dog up outside.”

  Billie told him to leave the dog, that she would pay the fee.

  “Not again,” said the woman behind the desk. Because Billie knew her, she expedited the process, and in just minutes we were walking out the door with a freed Cloud. After the din inside, noisy East Harlem seemed welcoming. I waited for Cloud to relieve herself at the curb. Distracted by the world of normal smells, she seemed overcome with the information she received from the sidewalk, the fire hydrant, the occasional city tree. We say someone has “come to her senses” to mean that person has come around to acknowledge reality, but here a creature was literally coming to her senses, and it was deeply moving. I was in no hurry to pull her along; I took my cue from Cloud. I could see that she was torn between her interest in what was around her, and her desire to be in my arms. I crouched and Cloud simply leaned against me. Billie bent down and scratched Cloud’s ears and took off the muzzle, which earned her a lick and a lean.

  I realized that I was laughing. Then Billie was, too, trying to stay upright while my enormous dog toppled us.

  Billie started toward the car, but I said we should give Cloud a walk first. We turned east to walk to the river. The wind had died down, and there was a feeling of the coming spring, or so I imagined in my happiness. It wasn’t as if early crocuses had appeared, just that the air had a softness that had been absent before. A slight breeze off the river reached Cloud and her head lifted. I realized that my dog had not set foot on grass since the temperament test five months ago. A scabby park around the corner would do for now. It also had a long sand pit for broad-jumping. Billie found a stick and threw it, but Cloud was no retriever. She stayed in the pit and rolled on her back in the sand.

  I opened my tote bag and took out her celebration dinner, the pound of Polish sliced ham. After she swallowed it in a couple of gulps, Billie offered her one of our scones. I brought out a bottle of water with a squirt top, and Cloud drank from the arc of water I squeezed for her.

  A police boat was patrolling the river alongside us. Across the river was Wards Island, which housed the Manhattan Psychiatric Center and Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center. The light brown brick buildings were forbidding, with long rows of barred windows and the look of inherent desolation. They seemed a monument to suffering and despair, but they could not take the shine off this day.

  We walked to the car and put Cloud in the backseat, which Billie had covered with a clean quilt. But Cloud insinuated herself into the front by pushing between the bucket seats until I could not see Billie at the wheel. Before she started the car, she took out her phone. “I know someone else who would like to be in on this.” She pointed the phone at Cloud, virtually in the front seat, and took a couple of photos. “McKenzie will appreciate these.”

  And she would know.

  We buckled in and headed up the FDR to the Willis Avenue Bridge—the way to beat the toll—to get out of the city.

  Billie turned on the radio—Lolawolf.

  “You know,” Billie said, “you ask yourself what you want. And you try your first choice first. If you can’t get away with that, then you go to the next thing you want, and try that. But you must try the first choice first.”

  “I’ve taken risks. Just a different kind. I used to write poetry.”

  Billie howled with laughter. “You make me think of what that guy said, that if it weren’t for poetry, eighth-grade girls in corduroy jumpers and black tights would have to make some friends.”

  “I wasn’t that bad. I just liked to read, and I tried to write now and then. I tried it, is my point. When I saw that I wasn’t getting anywhere, that’s when I started the work I do now.”

  “You’ve never told me what your research is about.”

  “Pathological altruism.” Just saying it aloud centered me. It reminded me that I was working on something worth the attention, that I had a life that included work worth doing.

  “Sounds like an oxymoron. How can altr
uism be pathological?”

  “It doesn’t just do damage to others, it also damages oneself. Think: the tireless worker for others who doesn’t care for herself and gets sick. I think I have found a statistical link between excessive volunteerism and victimology, the pairing of accomplished, intelligent, motivated women who are preyed upon because of the depth of their compassion. It blinds them to a type of predator who is keenly aware of that trait; it predisposes the woman to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think predators seek out women with an overabundance of exactly what they lack. Predators feed off compassion.”

  I looked to see how Billie had registered all that I had said. She did not say something flippant; rather, she looked as though she was thinking it over. Then she asked if I thought that she was a pathological altruist. Did I feel that she set herself up for being victimized in this way?

  “It’s hard for me to see you as anyone’s victim.”

  “Is this what Bennett saw in you?”

  Could I give her an honest answer? But what would that be? I’d been turning the question over since Bennett’s death. “Maybe I’m not the best judge of that.”

  She veered off onto the exit ramp for Cross River and Katonah.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ve got time. There’s a really nice spot about three miles up where we can give Cloud another walk. Off leash.”

  Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. We passed the reservoir right off the exit, and when we made the turn to take the walk, we saw no other cars parked at the entrance. Cloud was delirious in her discoveries of country scents; we let her drink from the stream. I thanked Billie for letting Cloud have this intermission between shelter and sanctuary.

  “There’s a part of me that wants to take her and keep driving,” I said. “Take her to some other state and start life over, away from everything that’s happened in New York.” I let my guard down just that much.

  “But you would never do that.”