CAMBRIDGE, NEW YORK — JULY 1980
Robert took the track down into the holler, and the cabin came up gray at the bottom of it, in the last of the light. Carl was in the bed with the basket.
Robert turned the key off. He had the intake worked out — where the five of them would go in the kennels, what went down first, one at a time on the table. Mixed breed, and young, and nobody could tell him the mother. He had experience with mixed litters. The plan would hold, with an adjustment here or there.
He got out. Carl and the pups were in conversation behind him. He watched and listened to it go on while he got to the tailgate and dropped it. He was enjoying it. He had things to do, though, and maybe he hoped the drop would break it up. It didn’t.
“Carl. Carl — time to unload.” The conversation stopped. “Let’s get this stuff unloaded and get you situated.”
Carl stood up in the bed and stepped over the side, and the basket started up the moment he was out of its sight — all five, every sound a pup can make. Two were trying to climb the basket. One was trying to jump it. The basket was deep enough. Robert was sure of that, and watched anyway.
Carl came back and looked down into it.
“Hang in there, you littles. Slumber party tonight.”
It went quiet for a second or two. Then it started again, at a lower level.
Robert felt the tinge from the road that morning again.
They unloaded. Carl tossed the mattress over his shoulder, grabbed the jug and lamp, and headed to the door. Robert was still at the tailgate with his eyes on the basket. The upper half of the door hit the outside wall of the cabin, and he heard it over the pups. He stacked the bedding on the food box and headed for the cabin.
Inside, Robert stopped.
The lamp was lit on the counter, and the first thing he saw by it was Carl, finishing with the mattresses. The ratty mattress had gone up to the top bunk, which hadn’t had one. The one from the truck, used but decent, was going down on the bottom bunk.
Robert set the box down. He took the bedding off the top and set it on the counter. He looked around. The room was organized. Not the way a room is usually organized — it was part work shed and part home, mostly work shed, tools hung on the walls, a few makeshift shelves that had not been there in the morning, things grouped in a way that looked haphazard. Robert was beginning to suspect it wasn’t.
While he was looking, Carl went out the door and came back with the basket.
Before Robert could say anything, Carl dropped to his knees in the middle of the floor, where an old wool rug lay, and tipped the basket, and poured the puppies out onto it, and then rolled over onto his back among them and began to talk to them as they swarmed on top of him.
Robert stood caught between watching and stepping in to get things back on the plan. He gave it up for now, leaned back against the doorframe, and watched.
Carl gave each pup a minute or two of undivided attention — examining, asking questions, probing with those big careful hands, listening to whatever came back. One of them, scratched along the belly, produced a low purring sound.
“What’s that?” Carl said. “Almost like a cat. You’re not a cat, are you?” He moved a finger up her belly to the underside of her chin, and the purr changed to a low grumbling mmrrr, and then climbed up out of the grumble — high, then lower, then a small high pinch at the end. He tried it himself and worked it around in his mouth. “Mmm . . . emmee. Okay. M.” He set her down. She stayed where he put her and looked up at him, and did not look satisfied. “M too short for you? How ’bout Emmy. For now, anyway.”
Another one was airborne. She had been airborne, off and on, since the pouring — springing onto and off of two of her siblings with total commitment. “Hey. You. You maniac. What’s all that jumping about?” He held his open hands down on the rug a few feet away, and the pup noticed, and shifted out of jumping mode, and strutted to him. “Oh, I see,” Carl said, picking her up, holding her at eye level. “Jumpy girl. But you think you’re tough too, don’t ya. A jaunty girl?” Eyes to eyes. “Jay Jay. Or JJ, for short.”
The pups had scattered somewhat by then, and he looked around the room for the next, and found a tail — just a tail, sticking straight up from behind the box in the open corner. The box had moved. It had been moved.
“Hey, you over there,” Carl said. “I see you. Come out with your hands up.”
A head popped up to go with the tail, dusty to the ears.
“Whose head just popped up over there? You’re lucky that rat didn’t get you.” He went and collected her out of the corner, and she came up still looking back down at the hole. “You lucky . . . lucky . . . lucky Penny. Lucky I found you before that rat did.”
He looked for the last of them and didn’t have to look far. The plumpest pup was over at the food box, in it to the shoulders, munching. Robert, who had not noticed, bent for the pup, and before he got there — “I got it” — Carl had scooped him up. “Hey. You. That’s not for you.” Then “whoa,” as his arms registered something, and he lifted him once, twice, short up-and-downs, confirming. “Oh yeah. You’re a chunker.” He set the pup down and gave him a long confirming look. “No more scarfing my food, Slim.”
That left the fifth, and Carl looked for her, and Robert already knew where she was, because she had given up on the evening somewhere during the ceremony and gone to sleep against his boot, and he had spent the last several minutes standing unnaturally still.
Carl came over and collected her — up out of sleep in those big hands — and held her at his face, and blew a soft breath across her nose.
She woke up interested. Her legs began working before her eyes did.
Carl moved her in a slow circle, out away from his face and back in, and blew again, harder, and got the same results with more conviction — the whole pup participating now. Then he brought her in close, pressed his lips together, and pushed out a few short raspberries.
She was answering. Robert could see it, in between one yawn and the next — the pup getting herself organized toward the sound, and nothing coming out that he could hear. Carl gathered himself and delivered a long, wet, disgraceful one, spray included.
The pup chirped.
A chirp. Then a louder chirp, right in his face, pleased with itself.
“Okay,” Carl said. He considered her. “But you’re no eagle. Not yet, anyway, I think.” He set her down on the rug. “Birdie.”
—
Slumber party, and then what he had just watched. Robert added it up and put himself at sixty-forty for the kennels, and knew the sixty was generous.
“Carl. Let’s gather these guys up and get them loaded.”
Carl was sitting on the rug now, legs crossed, with Birdie and Emmy climbing him — noses first, into every crease and fold of him, as if there were a way in and they meant to find it.
“All of them?”
It was not a helpless look.
“They’re probably old enough to be split up. But they’ve been through a lot today, and we don’t know what they went through before today. They need to stay together.”
“Right. So they can stay together here. Have some fun.”
Robert stood there with it. He had just said it himself — what they had been through, and what they had been through before that, which nobody knew. He took it one step further than he had meant to. Nobody knew what the man on the floor had been through either.
“Okay. You guys can have some fun tonight.” He looked around the room. “Let’s see if we can puppy-proof this place.”
They picked up what was on the floor, which was not much. The place had been gone over. That left paper for in front of the door. Robert had seen magazines in the cabin that morning, and some newspaper, and now he could not see them anywhere. He was starting to be annoyed about it when Carl reached a box down off one of the new shelves and started pulling paper out of it. Newspaper. A Saturday Evening Post, older than the pups by a long way. Nobody had told him to.
Carl was laying paper down in front of the door. Robert started shooing a couple of pups off the rug so it could be rolled up. Penny had taken the middle of it and was not giving it up. Robert looked at the rug. It was worn through in places and it was dirty, and he wanted to get going. He let it go. The rug stayed down.
Robert went out to the truck for the chow, came back in, and ran off his list. Water down, food box up. Out before bed and out first thing. Nothing on the floor small enough to swallow. The door stays shut. The lower half, anyway.
“I’ll be back in the morning.”
“See you in the morning.”
Robert got in the truck and sat a minute before he turned the key.
He was leaving five pups with a man he had met at the market that morning. He did not like that part. Against it he had the room he had walked into that morning and the one he had just walked out of — livable now, barely — and the box of paper coming down off the shelf before he had finished the sentence.
He was in a decent mood. Then his mind turned to tomorrow, and then to the rest of the week, and the lists that would have to be thought out and put on paper.
But when he turned the key, what came back was Carl on his back on the rug with all five of them on top of him. Robert smiled. He drove back to the monastery in the dark, and did not sort out what he had watched, except to note that the puppies had arrived that morning with no names and now had them, and that the names were correct.
