Man Bites Dog
L.B.’s new mother lived at 971 Hope Street on the East Side of Providence. He had written it down on a slip of paper in his pocket, in case he forgot. But for the first time in months, he found it practical to remember his home address, and even his telephone number. Without thinking about it, he started to memorize other details: the date of his arrival; his sixth grade class schedule; Ms. Gray’s license plate number; her cel phone; email. She was beginning to imprint herself on his memory, the way he had never let the others do.

So when Ms. Gray saw L.B. actually open the refrigerator, take out some bread, cheese, deli meat, and condiments to make himself a sandwich, she joked, “Don’t get too comfortable— you never know when I’m gonna get tired of you.” For some reason, the ease of her threat made him feel even more settled there.

Anila Gray didn’t carry herself like other moms: her figure was bony and sharp; her expressions were puppy-like and exaggerated; her sweater was always two sizes too large in the winter, as though she wished someone bigger than her could fill it; and in the summer, she wore a paint-splattered noodle-strap blouse that didn’t fully cover her midriff, with fringy cut-off jeans.

She didn’t carry herself like other moms, and in fact Ms. Gray was a single girl who spent half the year taking care of stray cats, lost dogs, and other kids just like L.B., and the other half working as a travelling nurse. L.B. thought she didn’t act much like a nurse either.

“Hey,” she called out to L.B., snapping her fingers in front of his face. From anyone else, this would have been rude, but coming from her, it was only further evidence of their familiarity. To him, it meant that she saw him as imaginative, almost other-worldly. “Spaced out,” is the word she used over the phone. “Hello-o? Don’t you have school today?”

L.B. popped to attention, after a delay sufficient enough to establish his remoteness from the world. “I think I should stay home again,” he said, “I mean, all we’re doing today is this assembly meeting, and I could just sit around and study all day instead.”

Ms. Gray laughed in a way that looked like she’d lose her cereal. “The weird thing about you is you’re serious,” she said. “You would sit around and study all day.”

She shook her head, laughed again. L.B. waited.

“Sorry,” she said, “I have to go over to Paul’s house and watch TV today, and I can’t have you here in the house by yourself. You’ll just have to live through another day of school.”

“Duh, we have TV. Why doesn’t Paul come over here, and I’ll stay in my room?” L.B. suggested.

“I thought you didn’t like Paul,” she said, with half a smile on her face.
“No, he doesn’t like me,” he replied with a pleading look. She wasn’t like the other moms in this way either: he could always persuade her with an argument. With Ms. Gray, there was never a because I said so.

~

L.B. was a big kid with loose brown hair and cheeks that looked like they’d just been slapped. He wore shirts with collars, pants with pleats, and a belt with a horn-buckle. Paul complained that Ms. Gray’s new son dressed like a Waldo. Ms. Gray thought his look was more ironic: a remark on 1950s reruns.

L.B. watched Paul pull up in his cream-colored Jetta, and grab a worn-out backpack from the passenger side, yanking the door open with a squeak, slamming it, and jogging up to the door. L.B. had never seen someone that age with a backpack, with the exception of Paul. The dogs barked at him from behind the garage door.

Paul walked in before L.B. had a chance to duck into his room. He was sitting on the sofa with his biology textbook.

“Hey, L.B.,” Paul said, with a glossy smile, “Your mom said you were sick.”

“Um… yeah,” he said, not wanting to be inconsistent, but not wanting to commit to a lie either.

“You look about fit enough to go ten rounds with Tyson,” Paul said. Kids like L.B. are always getting groomed for boxing or football by men like Paul, who look at children and see only the potential for physical prowess.

L.B. mumbled incoherently. Paul didn’t notice. He was listening to the sound of the shower running.

“That your mom in the bathroom?” he asked. L.B. nodded, and went back to his reading.

Paul stared hard. “Don’t people talk in this house?”

“Yes,” L.B. said, startling himself to attention. “Sorry. I was reading about photosynthesis and stuff.”

Paul smiled. “Smart kid.”
L.B. thought that, the way Paul said it, smart sounded like something you did not want to be. He suddenly wished that he had Ms. Gray all to himself today. She would revel in his distraction.

“I’m gonna go to my room,” L.B. announced. Closing the door behind him, L.B. sat against the window. The walls were blank except for spots of glue and tacky— remnants of the room’s past occupants. In the garage, the dogs’ aggressive snarls subsided into a whimper, and their paws scraped gently on the heavy aluminum door.

From his room, he heard the TV shriek to life on the other side of the wall. Talk show bedlam ensued. But over the volume, L.B. could still hear the creak of Ms. Gray’s bed, and Paul’s low moans of pleasure or triumph through the plaster.

~

She and Paul were three years in when Anila felt easy enough with their relationship to make demands. For longer than she cared to admit, Paul represented the kind of man that had always snubbed her in her youth: bold to the point of recklessness, charming to the point of deviousness, and irrepressibly sexual. Like a Kennedy, she thought. Though Anila could never cast herself as the trophy wife, sitting atop a float with the other bluebloods in a campaign season parade, her hand waving as on a turnstile. So she met his presence in her life with equal measures of wariness and gratitude, and alternately hoarded his company and spurned it.

She found that six months was the perfect length of time for this kind of indulgence, after which she would fly away to Nevada, to treat victims of brush fire, or to Florida, for hurricane relief. Most jobs were not so dramatic, but each one had, in a small way, its own nobility.

When she began to ask Paul, tentatively, to water her plants every week and dust every month she was gone, he was relieved. He had no time to take on extra assignments, but Anila’s hesitation to oblige him in anything had always seemed to suggest her lack of debt to him; while the thousands of hot meals and clean dishes and laundry loads that passed from her hands to his could have been so many silver dollars accumulating over the years into bagsfull of change, whose weight he had now begun to feel.

They lay together in the bed watching People’s Court, a show that neither of them cared for particularly. Paul grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand. As he lit one up and sat there leaning on the headboard, Anila was a little disappointed with him for being so cliché. “What time do you have to be back?” Anila asked, turning toward him slowly.

Paul looked out on the room through a haze. He looked more serious than usual, more human in his nakedness. “One,” he said absently.

“Do you want lunch or something?” she asked, but he was in a thinking mood, and did not reply. Men, Anila noticed, stagger in their lives between depletion and renewal, like housecats. Now he was enervated, but if they stayed in bed together long enough, he would be invigorated soon and want to start up again. “I’ll make you a sandwich,” she said, hopping to her feet and out the door.

~

Paul worked in local news, and he raced cars on weekends. He was a town personality, and most people around Providence knew and liked him. He didn’t know what it was with L.B. Foster kids always came a little bit screwed up, he figured.

He blamed her neighbors for planting the seeds. They’d adopted kids from all over the place, and seemed to be growing their own little United Nations over there. They had a girl from Ghana, and one from China; they had boys from Romania, Cambodia, and Peru. Paul was a man who believed in charity, but taking strangers into your house to appease your sense of guilt made you a sucker in his book. There were better ways to give to the community that are harmonious with personal gain, which do not involve sacrificing one’s own time or sanity.
Broadcasting was Paul’s way of giving back. Whenever his team broke open a political scandal (which Rhode Island was full of), or exposed some so-called business for the fraud it perpetrated on the public, he felt a rush of adrenaline that he came to associate with civic pride. The two were coincident. So he never felt the need to drain himself with unnecessary burdens, as did Ms. Gray. Yet he always found himself having to deal with the consequences of her wide open heart, such as those stray dogs she kept, which she insisted he care for when she took off for three months to work as a travelling nurse. And then there were the kids.

This weekend Paul was charged with taking L.B. to the Red Sox game in Boston. He’d agreed to it because some months ago the thought of playing father—complete with matching baseball caps, cute conversation, and stadium philosophy— appealed to him. They hopped an afternoon train and spent an hour bumming around the shops near Fenway before the event. Now he and L.B. were sitting only a sprint away from the action on game day; the younger watching with quiet veneration, the older with patient restraint, broken only occasionally by the mania of the crowd when a line drive would leave the fate of the game in doubt, or an unexpected bunt would cause a mad rush for the ball, and Paul would let out an idle cheer, out of nothing more stirring than home-team feeling.

Instead of sports talk, Paul engaged L.B. in a Q&A about his new mom. What did he think of her? Did she go anywhere during the day? Does she get a lot of phone calls? Do other men ever come to the house? Not wanting to be inaccurate, L.B. said that sometimes Ms. Gray did talk on the phone, and that he saw other people at the door sometimes, even if they never came inside. Sensing that the kid was getting uncomfortable, Paul quit asking questions, and seethed quietly until the game went into a tenth inning.

“She’s gonna leave, you know,” he said finally.

L.B. nodded his head as though he already knew. He wanted Paul to believe that Ms. Gray told him everything.

“Yup,” he said, affecting a southern drawl, with a fake-funny curl in his lip, “She gonna fly the coop. Kick up the dust. Get the hell out of Dodge… It’s gonna be just you and me here for a while. This whole baseball thing is a test. She wants to see if we can get along together… and we do, right?”

L.B. got the distinct feeling that Paul meant the opposite of what he was saying. A few years before, L.B. was at a school where they played the opposite game every Friday. One kid broke out crying when he asked to go to the bathroom, and the teacher kept saying “No, you may not.” In opposite world, she was really saying “yes, go ahead,” but he couldn’t get over the word “no,” so he just sat there until a dark spot began to form on the leg of his corduroys.

~

On Monday afternoon, in the middle of eighth period math, L.B. screamed. When Mrs. Jenkins went over to see what was wrong, he screamed again— a shrill, agonizing sound, nothing like an animal howl. The bell rang by the time they got him calmed down and out of the classroom, and Mrs. Jenkins sat down with Ms. Willis, the guidance counselor. Once they decided to get his mother involved, L.B. began to scream again, and wouldn’t stop until Ms. Willis promised to talk with him alone.

In private session, Ms. Willis didn’t learn much about L.B. except that, if she tried to contact Ms. Gray, he would get uneasy. She could see in his file that he was a new student, and a foster, and she suspected from his behavior that it was some kind of abuse— a situation potentially beyond the scope of her experience, and probably a case for state social workers. Luckily, Mrs. Jenkins had the presence of mind to call Ms. Gray anyway and get her to the school before L.B. knew about it. Anila walked into the room looking like a girl being sent to the principal’s office, and gave L.B. a quick hug. She got the story three different times from three different people, then brought L.B. home.

Ms. Willis did manage to get a couple words out of him before he left though. She had asked him where he slept at night, and he said “I live at 971 Hope Street on the East Side of Providence.”

On the way home, Anila shook her head, adjusting the driver’s side window every now and then with nervous intensity. Then she started making digs at the teachers and administrators of Providence Public School. How could they make such a big stink about a kid letting off a little steam? Anila sure as hell felt like crying out at the end of a twelve-hour shift, and the more she thought about it, the more she admired L.B. for not giving a shit what other people might think about a boy who screams his head off in school.

~

Paul felt pathetic following his girlfriend around in the middle of the day. It introduced all kinds of uncomfortable questions about the direction his life was taking. In general, he preferred being in the field, making news, but Anila’s recent distance from him, and her choice to take a six-month break to go work on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, was maddening. Then, when he was pulling up for a lunch visit and saw her drive away in the old Volkswagon, he had to know where she was going. Still, he felt like the bad guy on daytime soaps who followed women from a distance, rather than the guy who took her in his arms and owned her, the way he’d always thought of himself.

Anila only left after Paul promised he’d get the kid off to school in the mornings, and pick him up in the afternoon. Other than that, she said, he was pretty self-sufficient. He was the most independent kid she’d ever known, and as long as he had plenty to eat, and got outside every now and then, he could withstand a nuclear blast. “Like a cockroach,” Paul said, earning him a scowl from under her hair.

Two hours earlier, she sat in the parking lot of the school, explaining to L.B. how much the Lakota tribes needed good nursing help, and what a good thing it would be for her to answer the call. She didn’t want to send him back to the foster home, she said. He was too old now to keep shuttling from home to home, and if he only stuck around while she was doing her job, then he could be adopted officially. Paul would take good care of him in the meantime. She’d be home by the summer.

L.B. scoffed. “Pff… Paul,” he said.

“Honey,” she said, laying her hand protectively over his knee. “Honey,” she repeated, “Paul is not the enemy.”

~

L.B. could not stay focused on his book, Of Mice and Men. There was a character, Lennie, who was real big and strong, but simple-minded. All he wanted to do in the world was tend rabbits, but whenever he got a hold of one, he’d wind up killing it, or hurting it badly. At one point he breaks a woman’s neck by accident, and the rest of the men try and hunt him down. With only a couple pages left, L.B. couldn’t concentrate; eyes tired, ears distracted by dogs scratching on the door.

Outside, he saw Gian and Paco, his neighbors, switching pitches and at-bats. Whenever Paco made a hit— because he was the better player— he’d run at full speed, as if it were a true game, and after landing on a base he’d call out, “ghost man on first,” or “ghost man on third.” The sun was setting over the forest, shared by their backyards. After watching for almost an hour, L.B. began to see what they saw: a sandy field; a team of men, serious about play, standing at the ready, or cheering them on from the stands. Then, as the light waned, and it was no longer possible to track the ball as it flew at you, Gian and Paco took their bat, ball, and glove inside with them where, L.B. imagined, a full table awaited them.

~

The dogs had gone missing. Paul had heard them barking into the night, then they suddenly went quiet, but he was already halfway asleep and hadn’t thought much of it. But in the morning, when he found the garage empty except for the bags of dog food and stacks of bottled water, he started cursing himself for his negligence. He hated to give Anila another reason not to trust him.

Paul went next door and pounded. Don, the serial adopter, answered in his robe. “What’s the occasion, Paul?” Don asked.

“Our dogs are missing,” he said.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Don replied. “Should I have the boys help you look for ‘em?”

Paul gave a bitter smile— a smile that said, you wish it were that easy. “I think it was your boys that did it,” he ventured, prodding the lapel of his robe with an accusatory finger.

“Excuse me?” Don said. “The kids were in bed long before your dogs were. We could hear them barking all night, practically.”

“Well, apparently someone over here thought they’d have a little fun with my noisy dogs, eh?” Paul said. He had a residual feeling that a cameraman was filming the encounter from over his shoulder.

“I think you’d better calm down, and then come talk to me, okay Paul? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get the kids ready for church.” Don tried shutting the door, but Paul’s experienced foot came between it and the doorjamb.

He put his best game face on. “Look. Don. I know you want to think the best of your kids and all, but you’ve got people here who come from places where dog is on the menu, am I wrong?”

“If you don’t take your foot out of this door, Paul, I swear I’ll call the police,” Don said.

Paul knew where a confrontation ended. He used the P.A.L. system: Police, Assault, or Lawsuit. Anything short of being arrested, attacked, or sued, was just another fence to be hurdled.

From his bedroom window, L.B. watched Paul storm back toward the house, slamming the screen door. Winter had started to show on the eaves: frost edged inward on the tile, and the gutter-drip froze in mid-leak. Outside, a light snow dusted everything, settling into the fallen leaves like milk in cups.

~

There was a rule of thumb that Paul used to determine whether a story went to press, or died in development: “ ‘Dog Bites Man’ is not a story. ‘Man Bites Dog’ is a story.” This simple equation helped him dodge all the marshmallow stories that other outlets were covering, and focus on the protein-rich items that put muscle into the daily news. That Monday he was covering an abuse story at the senior citizen’s center, which involved several employees on the government dole. They’d shot the bit early in the morning, and finished cutting it, and were about to send the clip out to the network, when he got a call from the school. It seemed that a student had broken into the school last night and let loose three dogs in the guidance counsellor’s office.

A part of Paul wanted to punish L.B. for being so screwed up in the head that he would do that. The sick part of him was impressed that an eleven-year old could carry off such a project on his own; though he thought it would have worked better if it weren’t his dogs. But the part that won out was denial.

“Why are you calling me to tell me you picked up a few stray dogs?” Paul said.

“I think you know, Mr. Gray,” the principal said.

“The name’s Tibbets. There is no Mr. Gray,” he said, “and no I don’t know why you’re calling me at work to tell me this.”

“Can you guess?”

A silence ensued. Telephone silence.

“I dunno. You’re lonely?” he said.

~

Anila came home early when she learned she was pregnant, a couple of weeks after L.B. freed their dogs and quit the school. The administration agreed not to inform the police— which would have put a blot on his record for the rest of his juvenile years— as long as he did not continue to attend PPS. The first thing Anila said when she got home was, “Looks like you get to stay home and study all the time now, huh L.B.?” He smiled and shrugged. Paul’s expression was flat as a skipping stone.

At home in bed, Paul and Anila celebrated the coming of the baby with Chinese food delivery. She hadn’t begun to feel the full-on cravings yet, but Anila wanted to establish the pattern of unorthodox eating— it was one of the strange charms of burgeoning life. They talked as they ate, about Anila’s time in South Dakota, about Paul’s last assignment, about the baby-to-be, and about L.B. When Anila thought she sensed Paul hinting at sending him back to foster care, she dropped her chopsticks into the mu-shu delivery box.

“You can’t be serious, Paul,” she said. “Just because he mucks up a little bit now and then? From what you tell me, you weren’t always mister do-right in your adolescence.”

“He’s eleven,” Paul emphasized, “eleven. If a kid tortures cute little animals at eleven years old, what do you think he’s gonna be up to at seventeen?”

“You don’t know that he tortured them, Paul; you’re exaggerating. Besides, here’s a kid who has been without real parental guidance for most of his life. If you want him to do something dangerous, send him back to foster care.” They shared a pained silence.

“I’m not talking about foster care,” Paul said, “I’m talking about Don and Rebecca next door. Those guys will take in anybody, and they haven’t heard about the dogs yet… At least, they don’t know L.B. is responsible.”

Anila had been ready to leap at any foolish suggestion and deflect it with her practiced indignity and overweening sense of righteousness. But she paused, surprised at how appealing the idea seemed at first— to have L.B. live so near by, a friend and neighbor, without having to be his constant ward and master.

“It’s a tough choice to make, I know,” Paul said, putting his hand on the slight curve of her belly, “but…”

At that, he let the nobility of her imagined sacrifice insinuate itself.

~

The thin walls leaked only this much intelligence into L.B.’s bedroom: that he could be sent back. It did not matter whether or not a decision had been made; if the topic were open, it was only a matter of time. He felt no particular remorse upon having this revelation, only a calm resolve to do what needed to be done. And as soon as he felt it, his body submitted to sleep.

The next morning, a Tuesday, L.B. left the house in his usual button-down and pleated pants, his pocket stuffed with a wad of cash from Ms. Gray’s top drawer. He walked down College Hill to the canal, then crossed the bridge downtown, passing the public library on his way to Power street. At the corner of Washington, there was a streetlight, a newspaper dispenser, a post office mailbox, and a two-headed parking meter, all bolted to the sidewalk. Across the street was a gun store called, simply, “Guns N’ Ammo,” and next to it, a tattoo parlor with a busy front-window display with a neon sign reading “Voodoo Tattoo.”

In his fantasy, he saw himself walking into the gun store, putting all the cash down on the counter, and walking away with a hand-sized pistol. Of course he knew that fantasy was no good, so as an alternative he imagined walking in as soon as the clerk was away from the front register, and running behind the counter to grab one of the display pieces, and hopping the desk to make his escape. But every scenario he imagined had consequences that he couldn’t quite stomach. Inwardly, he abused himself for having the ability to see the eventual outcome of things. If only he could act, without anticipation, without consideration, he would make things right again for him and Ms. Gray.

The streetlight winked its red eye, and the walking-man symbol appeared below it. L.B. shuffled slowly across the street, his shoes feeling suddenly tight in their laces. When he reached the curb, he had the inexplicable feeling of having undergone some severe trial, like flood, or famine. He stood there while the traffic light turned from green to yellow to red to green again, then walked through the jangling door of the tattoo parlor.