ALBERT E. COWDREY

The Dog Movie

“SO,” SAID DETECTIVE SGT. Schmidt to Detective Dorsey. “I seen your report on that Cavallo thing. It was short and sweet. Anyway, it was short.”

Dorsey raised his eyebrows. “So watchoo wanna know?”

Schmidt thoughtfully swallowed a mouthful of Abita Amber beer. In midafternoon Ya Mama’s Bar & Grill, otherwise known as Cop Heaven, was quiet; Pete the bartender was polishing glasses; muted laughter emerged from the kitchen where somebody was chopping onions.

Schmidt said, “I like to know what really happened.”

They exchanged a brief shifty glance, like two button-eyed strays meeting in an alley that was home ground to neither.

Dorsey mouthed his own beer and said, “Nothin’ I could put in no report. You won’t believe it neither.”

“Try me.”

Dorsey sighed. “You know anything about that neighborhood out by Fig Street?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s old fashioned. Lots of little houses, yards with sunflowers. One choich, Saint Michael the Archangel. Plenty old folks, not many young ones. Mostly poor, but some people like Mr. Cavallo own their own cottages. He had a big dog name of Ice. When the crimes started, people said, ‘Won’t nobody bother Mr. C. He got him a serious dog.’ But they were wrong.”

I got involved (said Dorsey, waving at Pete for another beer) when a string of neighborhood robberies begun to look like a pattern. Some bastard was targeting the seniors. Busting into their houses after midnight, beating them, stealing their stuff.

He raped a seventy-six-year-old woman. She told the interviewer from Sex Crimes that he wore a stocking mask and dark clothes and gloves and she wouldn’t reckanize him again. Even as rapists go the perpetrator was rough, and she almost bled to death.

I went back over the crime scenes and of course the guys had done the usual stuff, dusting for prints and so on, but the perp was smart, he never left nothing behind they could find. Couldn’t even get his semen from the rape victim — guy had slipped on a rubber before he did the dirty deed.

I talked to the members of the Fig Street Improvement Association, and all I found out was they were Olympic-class gossippers. Lot of talk, no real facts. So I begun going from door to door — community po-leecing, you know? One evening I went to see Cavallo, among others, and he invited me in.

We sat down in his living room. The walls were covered with a kind of yellowish-brownish paper. One old lamp didn’t put out much light, but sure made lots of shadows. The room smelled like the armoire where my grammaw used to keep her clothes. The TV had rabbit ears instead of a cable connection, and Cavallo had added a wire coathanger to improve reception. Over the mantel was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a photo of Cavallo’s dead wife, Margaret, plus a couple of stuffed ducks.

He had square shoulders and big hands, so I could see he’d been a strong guy when he was younger. His dog Ice was laying beside the old man’s chair. Nothing but a mutt, a New Orleans fence-jumper, but he had lots of Catahoula hound in him — whitish-brownish fur and eyes that were pale pale blue, almost silver. Probably a hell of a hunter when he was young; I could see him bringing in those ducks. He raised his great big head and checked me out, and then laid it down again. He was a lot like Cavallo, a strong animal that had seen better days.

Cavallo let one arm hang over the arm of the chair and stroked his fur with the tips of his fingers while we talked, and Ice gave a very lazy wag to his tail, like thump, thump. It was a dry, cool kind of evening, lots of ‘lectricity in everything, and now and then a little spark would jump from the dog’s fur to his fingers.

I ascertained that Cavallo didn’t know nothing useful about the crimes, so I went right into my spiel — use caution, check the door locks and so on, and he listened politely and said he had always taken care of himself and expected to keep on doing so. He showed me around the house, just four rooms, kitchen and bath, and every one except the bathroom was full of statues of saints. There was the Little Flower, St. Rita, St. Christopher, St. Expedite, St. Joseph, and Christ only knows what else. Wherever you turned, there was eyes looking at you. You mind if I smoke?

Schmidt shrugged. “Be my guest.”

While Dorsey lit up a cigarillo, Schmidt pulled a big stinky black pipe out of his own pocket. They were sitting under a sign that said THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING, but they were cops and used to ignoring signs and Pete the bartender, who knew them well, ignored their ignoring.

After sucking on his pipe, Schmidt said, “Them saints, you know — Eyetalians are like that. My wife’s Eyetalian and all her family are, too. Out on her Dad’s front lawn there’s an old bathtub standing on end with a Voigin inside of it. The house is likewise — everywhere you look, statchoos and pitchers. Her Mama give her an Infant Jesus of Prague for our bedroom and every time we screw, I gotta cover him up with my shoit.”

He grunted an apology (“Didn’t mean to interrupt”), and Dorsey nodded and went on:

My main interest was whether the house was secure, and of course it wasn’t. No alarm system, and old sash windows with catches a child could open. The doors had no deadlocks, just ordinary locks, and the doors were hollow, too, the kind ought to be sold under the trademark The Burglar’s Friend.

We stepped into the back yard and ducked under some laundry hanging on a wire clothesline — Cavallo explained that his drier had gone on the blink three or four years ago, and he’d never gotten around to having it fixed — and I could see the yard was wide open to an alley. Anybody could walk up the alley out of sight of the street and step into the back yard and open that hollow door with one good kick.

We went back to the living room and sat down and discussed the problem. Cavallo was in his same chair, and it had taken his shape like a mold, and he was stroking Ice the same way as before, and I wondered how many days and nights those two had spent like that.

I told the old man what I thought about his house, and I also mentioned some things I’d heard when I was walking around the neighborhood. Like, Cavallo didn’t believe in credit cards and paid for everything with cash, so he must keep a bunch of it at home. Word had gotten around. I told him frankly that I thought his house was a crime scene waiting to happen. But he just smiled, kind of superior, like he knew something I didn’t, and said:

“I don’t think I’m in danger. I got Ice here, and I’ll tell you something, Dorsey” — we’d gotten kind of chummy by then — “my wife, she knows all the saints. She’s met them all since she died, and she’s told me they’ll protect me.”

I said, “She told you that? How?”

“The television set,” he said, pointing. “Sometimes she talks to me through it.”

Well, what do you say to a seemingly intelligent guy tells you something like that? I thought maybe Cavallo’d seen Poltergeist and got confused about what was real and what wasn’t. I left him sitting there in his little old house, with his little old TV, and his big old dog, and a couple dozen saints, and I figured I’d be coming back there, more likely sooner than later.

However, when the perp struck again it was about two and a half blocks away. He broke into a house belonging to an elderly couple, beat them so bad the lady was in a coma for a week, robbed them and only just missed burning the house down with them in it because some neighbors heard the commotion and called the cops and the firemen, who put it out before it really got started.

The newspaper started screaming about a crime wave, and for once it had every right to. The superintendent, he set up a task force and called a meeting at Headquarters. We spent a couple hours listening to a bunch of bozos saying how the perp had low self-esteem and an immature sex life and how he was targeting parental figures and had probably been abused in childhood. As if anybody gave a shit— all I wanted to do was abuse him some more.

Finally one of the experts stated the obvious, that each crime was worse than the one before, and there was like a cresh — crest — um —

“Crescendo?” Schmidt asked.

YEAH, RIGHT. A crescendo was like building up and you could see what it was building up to. And the crimes were coming closer together, too. Just three nights later the perp entered Cavallo’s back yard exackly the way I said he would. He had a twenty-four-inch blue-steel wrecking bar and went through that hollow back door in roughly ten seconds. The old dog, Ice, jumped him and the guy beat the dog to death there in Cavallo’s kitchen.

Well, all the noise, the dog barking and growling and then screaming, brought an avalanche of 911 calls. A car got there within five minutes, then a bunch more showed up, and even a SWAT team was sent by HQ because of a mistaken report that the perp had been cornered in the house. Actually, the sumbitch’d got away again — only this time he got away with nothing but his skin. And he left plenty behind.

First of all, Ice had put up a good fight before dying, and we got from his mouth a torn glove that was soaked with what turned out to be human blood. So we got the perp’s DNA, only this goddamn backward State of Louisiana don’t have a DNA registry of felons yet, so we didn’t have nothing to compare it with. Then we got something better. He’d dropped his wrecking bar and because he’d lost his glove we were able to recover prints from it — good clear bloody prints on the steel.

“So,” said Schmidt, nodding his satisfaction like a big bird drinking, “who was the mutha?”

“His name was Steven Mark Bozeman. One of these characters like Manson, the usual background, junkie mama, string of foster homes, started his jail experience as a child and over time turned into a totally institutional man, at home only in prisons, where he shoulda stayed. A seriously mean sumbitch. He was twenty-eight, with a rap sheet six feet long, and crime against seniors was kind of like a theme of his career”

“Why was he out of prison?” asked Schmidt.

“Because his last conviction, the prosecutor didn’t think the cops had found enough evidence to convict and so he planted some evidence on Bozeman. Then it all come out and he was set free.”

Schmidt grunted, “So what happened then?”

“Something I never expected.”

“Cavallo started taking precautions at last?”

“Nuh uh. He started taking fewer precautions than before.”

I paid my second visit to his house (Dorsey went on) on the afternoon of the day after all the excitement.

The old man had already buried Ice in the garden; he insisted on taking me out back to see the grave, and we ducked under the clothesline like before and walked to a fair-sized pile of fresh dirt with a garden spade standing up on it.

“Think I’ll plant firethorn here,” he said. “Every time a thorn sticks me I’ll think about him.”

We returned to the house, and I noticed that Cavallo didn’t even bother to push the busted back door to. I urged him to get it fixed pronto, but he only said, “I will later.”

I couldn’t make him out. Old guy like that-hell, any guy— after what had happened the night before, he ought to have been shaky, swallowing tranquillizers, crying over his dog …. I don’t know. Something. Cavallo was looking somber, ! guess the word is, but he was calm. His eyes were kind of distant was all. I said he was taking it good, but maybe he should watch out for delayed shock. He shook his head.

“Margaret talked to me last night,” he said, gesturing at the TV. “She told me Ice’s over on that side now. The saints, they’ve got a special job for him.”

I said, “Well, that’s nice, I guess.”

He said, “Yeah, they’re all over there except me, and that’s why I’m not afraid.”

I began to get the idea. Ice had been his last connection on this side, you might say. Now he was gone, and Cavallo wanted to go too, and that was why he wasn’t locking up or anything. You hear about people committing suicide by cop, but I figured this guy was planning suicide by robber.

So I tried to brace him up. Reminded him the kind of things Bozeman had done to people he knew, and also to Ice. Asked if he wanted to make things any easier for a piece of shit like that.

He said, “I won’t make things easier for him,” and that was all I could get out of him.

Well, I try not to worry about people, you go nuts that way, but Mr. Cavallo sort of reminded me of my own old man in his last days. Sitting alone in an empty house, frying himself an occasional egg when he got hungry, hanging out his own wash, and waiting to die.

My old man never talked to Mama through a TV set, but every once in a while when I used to visit him, he’d say suddenly, “Check and see if your Mama’s come back from the mall. I thought I heard her in the bedroom.” I’d have to say, “Pop, she’s been dead for five years,” and he’d kind of blink and say, “Oh yeah. I remember now.”

So I took to dropping in on Cavallo. I badgered him into getting the busted door fixed, but then he’d forget to lock it. Or say he forgot. When the weather turned hot he’d sit with a fan on and the windows wide open to catch a breeze, so I brought him an old window unit A/C I had in my garage and plugged it in for him. He bitched about that, said it gave him sinus headaches, you know how old people are, but all the same he got used to being cool and dry when the air outside was like a pile of wet socks. And of course now the house could be shut up tight.

We kind of got to be friends, even had a beer now and then. I heard a lot more about the saints, and they sounded like the Fig Street Improvement Association. Margaret told him the Little Flower was a snip, and St. Rita meant well, but was terribly nosy. The Pope was wrong about St. Christopher, he really did exist, and the Vatican taking him off the Calendar of Saints made him real unhappy. St. Joseph had been hard to get to know, but she managed it at last, and he told her that he and Mary had six kids, Jesus being the oldest, and where did that hooey about her being a virgin come from, anyway?

Well, a month went by with no more crimes, and I began to think maybe the perp had moved on.

One evening I dropped by on my way home, just to say hello, and Cavallo was sitting in his nice cool living room in his usual chair, with one old lamp in the middle of one little puddle of light, and all the rest in shadows. We talked about this and that and he asked if we’d had any luck finding Bozeman, and I said no, we’d had some leads but they all petered out. Maybe he’d left town. Cavallo shook his head.

“No,” he said, “he’s still around.”

By now I knew him pretty well, so I said, “Margaret tell you that?”

He nodded. “She says he’ll be coming back here. He needs money to run on and he figures I’ve got some hidden around the house.”

“So, do you?”

He didn’t answer. That was his way when I got too nosy about his life. He didn’t tell me to butt out, he just closed his mouth and didn’t say nothing at all.

I can see him now, sitting there with his right arm hanging over the side of the chair as usual. All at once I realized he was automatically moving his hand, like he used to when Ice would lie there to have his back scratched. And then I heard a soft thump thump. I stared, and something was laying in the shadow beside the chair. The shadow was too I don’t know. Rounded, like. It wasn’t exactly the shadow of the chair.

I stared at it, forgetting to breathe, and suddenly a little spark jumped to Cavallo’s fingertips.

Schmidt was staring too.

“You crazy as hell,” he declared, adding at once, “No insult intended.”

Dorsey nodded. “You see why I left some stuff outta my report. If I put something like that in, I’d either be laying on the couch of some tame shrink or else riding a scooter through the Desire Housing Project. All depending on whether they decided I was going nuts or trying to be funny.”

“But,” Schmidt argued uneasily, “say you did see something like a spark, who knows what it was? It probably wasn’t nothing after all.”

“No,” said Dorsey, “it was something real. You know how I know? Because the next time I saw Cavallo, it was the morning he called me to say there was a dead man in his back yard.”

BOZEMAN (Dorsey said) was there, hanging on the wire clothesline. He must have been running like mad when he hit it, because it had practically taken his head off.

The coroner’s report later said it had cut clean through the trachea and when he sank down the weight of his body had driven it up behind his lower jaw. His mouth was open and his eyes were bugging out and the pupils were dilated and looked like they were painted on eggs with stove paint. A uniform cop come in with me, a young guy. He looked Bozeman right in the face and then went over by the fence and puked.

Bozeman wasn’t wearing his usual stocking mask, and he had a Saturday night special in his pocket, so I think he intended to kill Cavallo after robbing him. The crimes had been getting more and more violent, so murder was logically next on the list. The ground was damp from a shower the day before, and the only tracks were his. Toes deep, in fact mostly no heelmarks at all, so he was running hard, not that I needed anybody to tell me that.

The question was, what was chasing him?

“Whoa,” said Schmidt. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don’t believe that, right? You just puttin’ me on, right?”

Dorsey smiled. “You know what I said at first? You wouldn’t believe me. And you said, Try me. So I have. And you don’t believe me.”

“Nobody would,” said Schmidt, signaling for another beer. “That’s the insanest notion I’ve listened to since the last time I seen the Louisiana Legislature in session.”

“Wait,” said Dorsey, continuing to smile. “There’s more.”

I checked the back door (he went on), and it wasn’t busted. It had been left unlocked, probably to lure Bozeman in. Some uniform cops were standing around inside with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. I asked where Mr. Cavallo was.

Oh, they said, he’s in the front room sleeping. Old guy’s all tuckered out from the excitement.

I went into the living room, and it was just like before, except it was daytime. The light was off and no dark shadows, but the yellow-brown wallpaper was the same, and the smell like the inside of an armoire full of old, clean, folded clothes. Cavallo was dressed in PJ’s and a terrycloth robe and ratty felt slippers. He was sitting on the couch with his head thrown back and he wasn’t breathing. For a second I thought he was dead, but then he kind of snorted and his chest started to move again.

I was just about to wake him up when I noticed that the TV was on It was running an old black-and-white movie, what my twelve-year-old son calls dog movies, because dogs can’t see color, you know. A guy was running through knee-deep mist, and at first I thought it was an old-time horror movie and pretty soon Lon Chaney, Jr., would lope into view wearing a faceful of fur.

The camera work was sort of Blair Witch style, going up and down, side to side, so that sometimes the running man was out of focus. It was well done, too, because without anything being said or any sound at all, you knew the tracker was following his prey by the scent trail, losing it, picking it up again. Little by little the distance shrunk, and the running guy turned and stared over his shoulder. His jaw was dangling and his eyes were bugging out, and it was the same face I’d just seen hanging over the clothesline in Cavallo’s back yard

I don’t know how long I stood there, kind of paralyzed, looking at that. Whatever was tracking him got closer and closer, and he looked over his shoulder twice more. And yeah, it was Bozeman, and he was dying, dying from fear, running and stumbling and gasping and dying. But never falling — no rest for the wicked. And then the picture flickered and dimmed and went out.

“Good morning,” said Cavallo, and I turned around. He was awake, rubbing his eyes.

I asked him, “Pleasant dreams?”

And he said, “Yeah. I had a real nice dream.”

I pointed at the TV and said, “How long you think that hunt’ll go on?”

He said, “Margaret says forever. And the saints told her, so it’s probably true.”

Schmidt finished his last beer. His eyes avoided Dorsey’s.

“So watchoo think, I’m nuts?” asked Dorsey, somewhat urgently, as if he had doubts himself.

“Maybe. Maybe not. How’s life on Fig Street these days?”

“Real quiet. Cavallo had this condition — apnea, they call it— where you stop breathing in your sleep. Well, one night about six months after Bozeman’s death, he stopped and didn’t start again. Some young folks bought his place, as a starter house, you know. They’re fixing it up real nice. Life goes on.”

“So does death,” said Det. Sgt. Schmidt, rising. “We better get back to headquarters.” He added, “I hope to Christ you ain’t told this story to nobody else but me.”

“Whatchoo think, I’m nuts?”

“You asked me that before,” said Schmidt.

They paid Pete for the beers, and as they were leaving Ya Mama’s, crowding each other in the doorway— both men were built on the general plan of a side of beef — Dorsey added, “Cavallo left me his TV set in his will.”

“You tried playing it yet?”

“You do think I’m nuts,” said Dorsey glumly, and they set off, back to Headquarters.