Blaze

“Ask me if I give a shit. Or a shirt, for that matter. All I’m proposing is that we dispense with the ego that usually allows the lawyers to swallow the cream. There’s plenty for all of us, if we’re reasonable.”

He drank some of his Coke, never taking his eyes off me. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re the same man I used to work for,” he said.

“That man died in his pickup truck,” I said.

If you’ve been picturing my convalescent retreat as a lakeside cottage standing in splendid isolation at the end of a lonely dirt road in the north woods, you better think again — this is suburban St. Paul we’re talking about. Our place by the lake stands at the end of Aster Lane, a paved street running from East Hoyt Avenue to the water. In the middle of October I finally took Kathi Green’s advice and began walking. They were only short outings up to East Hoyt Avenue, but I always came back with my bad hip crying for mercy and often with tears standing in my eyes. Yet I also almost always came back feeling like a conquering hero — I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit it. I was returning from one of these walks when Mrs. Fevereau hit Gandalf, the pleasant Jack Russell terrier who belonged to the little girl next door.

I was three-quarters of the way home when the Fevereau woman went past me in her ridiculous mustard-colored Hummer. As always, she had her cell phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other; as always she was going too fast. I barely noticed, and I certainly didn’t see Gandalf dash into the street up ahead, concentrating only on Monica Goldstein, coming down the other side of the street in full Girl Scout uniform. I was concentrating on my reconstructed hip. As always near the end of these short strolls, this so-called medical marvel felt packed with roughly ten thousand tiny points of broken glass. My clearest memory before the scream of the Hummer’s tires was thinking that the Mrs. Fevereaus of the world now lived in a different universe than the one I inhabited, one where all sensations were turned down to half-strength.

Then the tires yowled, and a little girl’s scream joined them: “GANDALF, NO!” For a moment I had a clear and unearthly vision of the crane that had almost killed me filling the right window of my pickup truck, the world I’d always lived in suddenly eaten up by a yellow much brighter than Mrs. Fevereau’s Hummer, and black letters floating in it, swelling, getting larger.

Then Gandalf began to scream, too, and the flashback — what Dr. Kamen would no doubt have called a recovered memory — was gone. Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn’t known dogs could scream.

I broke into a lurching, crabwise run, pounding the sidewalk with my red crutch. I’m sure it would have appeared ludicrous to an onlooker, but no one was paying any attention to me. Monica Goldstein was kneeling in the middle of the street beside her dog, which lay in front of the Hummer’s high, boxy grille. Her face was white above her forest-green uniform, from which a sash of badges and medals hung. The end of this sash was soaking in a spreading pool of Gandalf’s blood. Mrs. Fevereau half-jumped and half-fell from the Hummer’s ridiculously high driver’s seat. Ava Goldstein came running from the front door of the Goldstein house, crying her daughter’s name. Mrs. Goldstein’s blouse was half-buttoned and her feet were bare.

“Don’t touch him, honey, don’t touch him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She was still holding her cigarette and she puffed nervously at it. “He could bite.”

Monica paid no attention. She touched Gandalf’s side. The dog screamed again when she did — it was a scream — and Monica covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. She began to shake her head. I didn’t blame her.

Mrs. Fevereau reached out for the girl, then changed her mind. She took two steps back, leaned against the high side of her ridiculous yellow mode of transport, and looked up at the sky.

Mrs. Goldstein knelt beside her daughter. “Honey, oh honey please don’t…”

Gandalf began to howl. He lay in the street, in a pool of his spreading blood, howling. And now I could also remember the sound the crane had made. Not the meep-meep-meep it was supposed to make, because its backup warning had been broken, but the juddering stutter of its diesel engine and the sound of its treads eating up the earth.

“Get her inside, Ava,” I said. “Get her in the house.”

Mrs. Goldstein got her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and urged her up. “Come on, honey. Come inside.”

“Not without Gandalf!” Monica screamed. She was eleven, and mature for her age, but in those moments she had regressed to three. “Not without my doggy!” Her sash, the last three inches now sodden with blood, thwapped the side of her skirt and a long line of blood spattered down her calf.

“Go in and call the vet,” I told her. “Say Gandalf’s been hit by a car. Say he has to come right away. I’ll stay with him.”