My watchmaker’s dog, a stud Chow named Tiger, had torn the grill out of the crate at PetSmart (over on the south side of the mall, the cheap seats) and chased all of the customers and the employees up on the countertops. He had seized the store. It came over the wires as clearly as if the manager had called me on the phone. He had managed to run and lock the front door, but was bitten in the calf in the process — and in his desperation and helplessness, was presently thinking of me. “I’m bleeding everywhere, man, it’s like a geyser. The customers are freaking out and I’m feeling a little dizzy. You have to get Javier over here.”
The manager and I knew one another from the mall coffee shop. We had this connection because my three-year-old daughter liked to go to PetSmart after her mother dropped her off on Wednesday afternoons. He was a cuddly baseball-playing kind of kid, maybe twenty-two years old; you wanted to take care of him and I felt badly for him, but I had a crush of customers waiting in the showroom and two Highland Park ladies at my desk looking at Tsavorite garnets — and these were two-thousand-a-carat green garnets, not your ordinary orange-red fake-ruby stone, big glossy cushion cuts. You wanted to put them in your mouth and suck on them. Eight, ten, twelve grand a stone.
Plus, I was on a streak, I had booked over a hundred grand and we were barely halfway through the month of July. You interrupt that and it’s just like at a craps table. One wrong move and the river dries up. I had been playing these ladies off each other the way you ought to, letting them upsell one another, back and forth, showing off for me, and they kept asking to see larger and larger stones and were now talking about bracelets and necklaces instead of rings. Eighteen carat pink and green gold. I could make five, six grand on the labor alone. Meanwhile Javier, my watchmaker, was at home watching his kids because a few weeks ago his old lady had wanted a day off — she was a court clerk at the Federal Court downtown, the bankruptcy court we knew very well from our old stores — so she filled a big picnic ice chest full of books and left it in the parking lot with a sign on it that read “BOMB.”
They cleared the courthouse, it made CNN, and she got the day off — but now she had plenty of free time while Javier chased five kids around the house and looked at her million-dollar bail bond magnet-ed to his refrigerator. But my ears were burning and I’d break out in hives if I didn’t act, so I called Javier who, of course, did not answer the phone. He had managed to get his oversized misshapen wolverine to the groomer but he couldn’t come to work to clean up three weeks of backed up Rolex repairs. While I’m on the phone listening to it ring, my customers are starting to stamp outside the door and the two women at my desk — “old friends of mine,” really — are inspecting me with that wealthy woman’s ready-to-buy impatience. It was a flagrantly sexual look, I suddenly realized, a get-your-face-between-my-legs look. Frightening as preying mantises. Focus, I told myself. This is not a moment to abandon your faculties.
Suddenly I had dark forebodings. The problem was I could never sort my usual unreliable dark forebodings from my warranted dark forebodings, so they were worse than useless to me, because they might also be self-fulfilling prophecies. You can’t hope to solve problems expecting the worst. I asked my best salesman to babysit my lunch ladies. Their eyes iced but I had them laughing at the dog story before I left. “Ten minutes,” I said, and opened a box of Christopher Elbow chocolates on my desk. I had actually bettered the sale — now they had an excuse to eat the chocolate and they’d get drunk on them in my absence. While they were distracted, I slipped my nine-millimeter out of the desk drawer and into my jacket pocket.
I did not know if I had the heart to shoot a dog. Even if it was Javier’s dog and he wasn’t at work or answering the goddamn phone. And the only time I had fired the pistol was twice at retreating robbers and once when I first bought it and the retired FBI man who sold it to me (also a customer) took me out to the range. I worried about what they call “the elephant effect”: the bull charges, tusks wagging and trunk in the air, and who can actually stand his ground no matter how vital it is not to flee? It’s like in Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with that fellow whose wife sleeps with the game hunter after he runs from the giant black-maned lion which bursts from the grasses.
In the story, the hunter’s wife shoots him at the end, come to think of it. If my ex-wife had slept around, I don’t know how that might’ve affected me. Like the elephant charge, you don’t know how you’ll respond until it actually happens. This situation was a bit like how my divorce turned out, and that was badly. The fact is, if she had slept around I would have gone running straight back to her. And the marriage would have been saved. My point is this: self-knowledge is limited, you cannot predict how you’ll react, and that’s an odd way to feel as you are walking across a long steaming parking lot in Dallas, Texas, with a gun in your pocket, your hands and your back all sweaty, head buzzing like you’ve fingered the hot spot on your fuse box, winding between the Porsches and the Bentleys and silver Mercedes and Audis with the round red sun following your every step. All that hot expensive steel and fiberglass was releasing nitrous oxide or some other gas of dangerous hilarity. Dog killer, I thought. I ought to call animal control or my friend who worked with the gorillas at the zoo. But no, I wasn’t going to shoot Tiger; the pistol was back-up. I was going to talk him down. This is a hostage situation.
* * *
Outside the pet store a small crowd had gathered. “Excuse me, excuse me!” I shouldered my way through with my hands up in the air as though I were a responsible party. Several people were laughing. Once you got to the glass, that was the natural response. There was Tiger, patrolling the floor, his long golden tail curved over his back like a battle standard, or like that well-known Mapplethorpe with the cock in the hand curving up to touch the belly-button. Masculinity at its most sure. On display cases and tables, on a birdbath in the middle of the koi pond, on a macaw cage with the indigo macaw standing unflappable beside one wide-eyed blonde in red-soled shoes (Louboutin’s or knockoffs, hard to say at this distance), customers. I wanted to take Tiger by the fur of both shoulders and give him a good rubdown, like a big dog loves. Why hadn’t we let him loose in the jewelry store long ago? “Someone should take a picture,” I said, smiling happily but restraining myself from laughing. Many people were doing just that, with their cell phones.
Someone pulled on my shoulder. I turned around. It was Susan from the bagel store.
“I called security,” she said. She had her black hair curled underneath in a sixties style today, I wanted to compliment her on it but she was too young.
“Did they answer?”
“No,” she said. “I left a message.”
I knew the two guys from security had taken one look at this situation, from a distance with binoculars, and immediately gone to lunch. Night-time security was an old military guy and he would have taken action. But the two pothead kids they used during the day were smarter than that. “I’m not getting my ass turned into hamburger for eight bucks an hour.” Rational reaction.
“What do you think we should do?” Sue asked me. “Are there any kids in there? Those people are terrified.”
“He’s a mean dog. That’s Javier’s big breeding dog.”
“I didn’t know he raised puppies,” she said. “That’s nice. I’d like to have a puppy farm one day. I think I’d raise Great Danes, though. That’s sweet. I thought he just sold those watches of his. And worked for you.”
Sold watches? I thought. What kind of watches was he selling and where was he getting them? You think, wouldn’t it be great to be able to read other people’s minds and see slices of the future now and then? Uh-huh. Like when you’re a kid you think, Won’t it be great to be all grown up?
For example, I knew Sue was presently thinking, a bit wistfully, that I was kind of sexy because I seemed so together, so take charge, but that I was “just as confused and useless as the rest of us.” Then she started singing in her head the refrain to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” You could see her lips barely moving.
The door was locked. The manager saw me — he was standing on the counter next to the register, instinctively guarding the cash, I suppose — half-smiled, waved pathetically, and made as though to throw his keys. I gestured to stop him. First, what good are keys on the other side of a locked door? Second, Tiger might take it as a game of fetch, and we’d be down one set of keys and worse off than we already were. It was shocking to see how much blood had pumped out of his leg before he had tourniqueted it. There was a blood trail — something I hadn’t seen before in real life — from the door to the register (the counter itself was a gory sight), and Tiger had paced large pink pawprints throughout the store, making his rounds, securing the perimeter. I don’t think he had any further plans. He would wait until Javier arrived, and then show him the spoils.
“I don’t see any kids,” I told Sue.
She was still singing in her head, and also wondering if she should eat half a bagel today and a whole bagel tomorrow, or half a bagel with low-fat cream cheese today and then half a bagel plain tomorrow. Cream cheese, she decided. Then Tiger saw me. He recognized me, came to the glass — “Here boy,” I said, recognizing that this accomplished nothing — and urinated on it at about the level of my knee. A good long piss. With his penis three times the size it ought to be. Chimpanzees have the same advantage on us. Women must look at these male animals and ask, What is wrong with our men? I keep female dogs at home for this very reason. He finished his pissing and gave me a pleased look. An understanding passed between us. My hand went into my pocket.
“Everyone, stand back,” I said.
No one moved. They were still laughing and pressing to the glass. The crowd was growing. I took out the gun. The response was immediate and wholly unexpected: screams, people scattering, suddenly someone tackled me from behind, another man grabbed my arm, BANG, the gun fires, it echoes three or four times around the courtyard, a fact I had not previously noticed about the design of this part of the mall. I never kept the safety on my gun because when a criminal comes into the store with his mask over his head — we had been robbed twice — you don’t have time to think. Silence. Tiger starts barking. My eyes are open, I am on my back, the man who has tackled me has rolled away, and both my arms are free though my head may be bleeding from where it struck a low tiled flower box that fronted the length of the pet store. All was still, except for the barking from Tiger. A Chow’s bark is an eerie and musical thing, it sounds like heavy rain in the slate courtyard of an Ancient Chinese palace, it sounds like the boom and roll of the Imperial gong, it has an historical resonance that comes from the belly of the dog and hits you in the belly, too, when you hear it, especially if you are lying on your back on hot flagstones wondering if you have just manslaughtered someone.
The quiet was encouraging. I stood. There was a sharp, wet pain in the middle of the back of my head. Everyone was low, watching me.
“The owner of this animal works for me,” I declared. Tiger continued his gonging.
I surveyed the crowd: no one was dead. The shot had not even skinned the two men who took me down, who were both seated, now, curiously, on their behinds. The mood had changed. They all expected something from me. There was a great collective pressure, like a long ocean wave that will not stop. It was that bad taste, under my tongue, I knew intimately from my ex-wife, my customers, my teachers in school. I glanced at Sue and saw that she was eager, disturbed and sexually interested. I thought, Perhaps I’ve had it all wrong. These people admire me. It is only for that reason I often disappoint them. It is they, and not I, who supplicate. My next move was easy. I placed the barrel of the pistol close to the glass Tiger was now attacking — snarling and slobbering — and shot him.
The glass shattered. Tiger leapt over the flowerbed, shards of crystal limning him like a mythological beast, and chased down a blue-suited man with a briefcase who was scrambling for the door of his car. More screams, and now sirens. The man was down on the ground, Tiger had him by the hip, he was shaking him like a can of whipped cream. His fingers were still wrapped around the handle of his closed convertible. How had I missed at that range? That animal ought to be slumped peacefully on his side. I tucked the gun into my pocket and hurried down the sidewalk.
Sue ran after me, hitting me on the back. “You asshole! You asshole!” I stopped without turning and she paused, for a moment, and then walked quickly away.
* * *
When I returned to the store, people were milling about, including my two Highland Park Tsavorites. They came to me with quick questions. Then I saw Javier; he was in his Camaro in front of the store, and all of his kids were with him. We looked at each other. I smiled. I told him, “It’s Tiger,” the car door flew open and he took off at a run. I took his kids into the store and personally showed them how to stretch a ring on the mandrel.
