The Darkest Evening of the Year

If Purgatory had formal parlors for the waiting multitudes, they might be as ordered and cheerless as this room.

“Crippled Mazie,” Janet repeated. “Four months later, he …” She glanced down at her daughter. “Four months later, Mazie died.”

Having begun to close the front door, Brian hesitated. He left it half open to the mild September night.

“Where is your dog?” Amy asked.

“In the kitchen.” Janet put a hand to her swollen lip and spoke between her fingers. “With him.”

The child was too old to be sucking her thumb with such devotion, but this habit of the crib disturbed Brian less than did the character of her stare. A purple shade of blue, her eyes were wide with expectation and appeared to be bruised by experience.

The air thickened, as it does under thunderheads and a pending deluge.

“Which way to the kitchen?” Amy asked.

Janet led them through an archway into a hall flanked by dark rooms like flooded grottoes. Her daughter glided at her side, as firmly attached as a remora to a larger fish.

The hall was shadowy except at the far end, where a thin wedge of light stabbed in from a room beyond.

The shadows seemed to ebb and flow and ebb again, but this phantom movement was only Brian’s strong pulse, his vision throbbing in time with his laboring heart.

At the midpoint of the hallway, a boy leaned with his forehead against a wall, his hands fisted at his temples. He was perhaps six years old.

From him came the thinnest sound of misery, like air escaping, molecule by molecule, from the pinched neck of a balloon.

Janet said, “It’ll be okay, Jimmy,” but when she put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he wrenched away from her.

Trailed by her daughter, she proceeded to the end of the hall and pushed the door open, and the stiletto of light became a broad-sword.

Entering the kitchen behind the two women and the girl, Brian could almost have believed that the source of the light was the golden retriever sitting alertly in the corner between the cooktop and the refrigerator. The dog seemed to shine.

She was neither pure blond nor the coppery hue of some retrievers, but clothed in many shades of gold, and radiant. Her undercoat was thick, her chest deep, her head beautifully formed.

More compelling than the dog’s appearance were her posture and attitude. She sat erect, head lifted, alertness signified by a slight raising of her pendant ears and by the ceaseless subtle flare-and-quiver of her nostrils.

She didn’t turn her head, but she shifted her eyes toward Amy and Brian—and at once refocused on Carl.

The man of the house was at the moment something less than a man. Or perhaps he was only what any man eventually might become when guided by no hand but his own.

When sober, he probably had a neighborly face or at least one of those faces that, seen by the thousands in city streets, is a bland mask of benign indifference, with lips compressed and eyes fixed on a distant nothing.

Now, as he stood beside the kitchen table, his face was full of character, though of the wrong kind. His eyes were watery with drink and blood, and he looked out from under a lowered brow, like a bull that sees on every side the challenge of a red cape. His jaw hung slack. His lips were cracked, perhaps from the chronic dehydration that afflicts an alcoholic.

Carl Brockman turned his gaze on Brian. In those eyes shone not the mindless aggression of a man made stupid by drink, but instead the malevolent glee of a chained brute who had been liberated by it.

To his wife, in a voice thick with bitterness, he said, “What’ve you done?”

“Nothing, Carl. I just called them about the dog.”

His face was a snarl of knotted threats. “You must want some.”

Janet shook her head.

“You must really want some, Jan. You do this, you know it’s gonna get you only one thing.”

As though embarrassed by the evidence of her submissiveness, Janet covered her bleeding mouth with one hand.

Crouching, Amy called to the dog. “Here, cutie. Come here, girl.”

On the table stood a bottle of tequila, a glass, a salt shaker in the shape of a white Scottish terrier, and a plate holding slices of a fresh lime.

Raising his right hand from his side and high above his head, Carl revealed a tire iron. He gripped it by the pry end.

When he slammed the tool down hard upon the table, slices of lime leaped from the plate. The bottle of tequila wobbled, and the ice rattled in the glass.

Janet cringed, the little girl stoppled a cry with her thumb, Brian winced and tensed, but Amy just continued to coax the retriever to come to her. The dog was neither startled nor made fearful by the crash of iron on wood.

With a backhand swing of the tool, Carl swept everything off the table. At the farther end of the kitchen, tequila splashed, glass shattered, and the ceramic Scottie scattered salt across the floor.

“Get out,” Carl demanded. “Get out of my house.”

Amy said, “The dog’s a problem. You don’t need a problem dog. We’ll take her off your hands.”

“Who the hell are you, anyway? She’s my dog. She’s not yours. I know how to handle the bitch.”

The table was not between them and Carl. If he lurched forward and swung the tire iron, they might be able to dodge a blow only if the tequila made him slow and clumsy.

The guy didn’t look slow and clumsy. He seemed to be a bullet in the barrel, and any wrong move they made or wrong word they spoke might be the firing pin that sent him hurtling toward them.

Turning his malevolent gaze upon his wife, Carl repeated, “I know how to handle the bitch.”

“All I did,” Janet said meekly, “was give the poor thing a bath.”

“She didn’t need a bath.”

Pleading her case but careful not to argue it, Janet said, “Carl, honey, she was filthy, her coat was all matted.”

“She’s a dog, you stupid skank. She belongs in the yard.”

“I know. You’re right. You don’t want her in the house. But I was just, I was afraid, you know, afraid she’d get those sores like she did before.”

Her conciliatory tone inflamed his anger instead of quenching it. “Nickie’s my dog. I bought her. I own her. She’s mine.” He pointed the tire iron at his wife. “I know what’s mine, and I keep what’s mine. Nobody tells me what to do with anything that’s mine.”

At the start of Carl’s rant, Amy rose from a crouch and stood staring at him, rigid and still and moon-eyed.

Brian saw something strange in her face, an expression he could not name. She was transfixed but not by fear.

Pointing the tire iron at Amy now, instead of at his wife, Carl said, “What are you staring at? What’re you even doing here, you dumb bitch? I told you Get out.”