Paws before dying

cruisers blocked the street, and a third, doors open, headlights glaring, idled about halfway down the driveway. Mitch was standing at the bottom of the drive staring at the shattered windshield of his Corvette, which had never even reached the street. One cop was holding the Browning, and another two kept Dale upright between them. His hands were in cuffs. There was blood on his face, and he was screaming at the cops: “I’m bleeding! Look what you did! I’m bleeding! You bastards shot me! You shot me !”
    What choice did they have? Dale had been aiming the Buck Special directly at them. They had to defend themselves. The bullet had nicked his ear.
     

Chapter 29

     
    “Ever,” Rita emphasized. “This was a family in which no one could ever leave home. That was one meaning of Mother’s symptom.”
    “Would you not call her Mother?” I said. “Her name is Edna.”
    “Sorry,” Rita said. “It’s kind of a professional tic.”
    Dale had been in custody for two days. Leah was at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital visiting Jeff, and Rita and I were sharing a dinner of take-out Chinese food in her kitchen.
    “Anyway,” she went on, “the agoraphobia was like a family banner she carried, a cross, if you will, and it was a heavy one. She made a big sacrifice to make sure everyone got the message: Don’t leave home. Her role was to act that rule out, to make it highly explicit. And, of course, the others supported her in it. They made it possible for her to make that contribution to the family.”
    “Doing the shopping.”
    “And everything else. And when the others leave home, go to work, where do they go?”
    “Home away from home. The family business. And the names, right? I mean, how many families are there where three People all have the same name?”
    “In itself,” Rita said, “it isn’t necessarily pathological, but in this context?”
    “Rita, you want to know the weirdest thing? After everything Dale did, it’s weird, but I feel sorry for him, because of Buddy. That’s what started it. You know, Jack Engleman knew about that? So did Rose. The incredible thing is that the dog, Buddy, Was supposed to be therapy for him. When Dale was whatever, seven or eight, he was already in trouble, and some counselor at school talked the parents into buying him a dog. As therapy, right? He was bullying the other kids around and getting in fights and stuff. And the dog was supposed to socialize him.”
    “Only nobody looked at the family,” Rita said.
    “Right. So these monsters get him the dog, but what do they do? They make him promise that he has to take total care of it. He’s a little kid, right? And he’s supposed to be a hundred percent responsible. So, naturally, he isn’t. He can’t be. He’s too young, and he’s a screwed up kid, anyway. So his doting parents decide that here’s the chance to give him a good lesson in responsibility, keeping his promises, all that. I heard this from Willie and Mitch, that night. Anyway, the parents take the dog to some shelter, and then they come home and tell Dale all about Buddy being gassed to death, and they actually tell him that it’s his punishment, because he didn’t keep his promise. Is that unbelievable?”
    “No,” Rita said sadly.
    “You mean you...?”
    “In my business, you’ve heard everything before,” Rita said. “When he talked about Buddy, honest to God, Rita, it was the only time he was real, in a way. The rest of the time, he was yelling and storming around and everything, but it felt hollow, I guess. And when he aimed at his father? And even when he shot him? His face was totally empty. Blank. He could’ve been aiming the remote control at a VCR. Except he definitely liked aiming that remote trainer at Kimi. He liked causing pain, all right.”
    “Giving what he got,” Rita said.
    “But when he talked about Buddy, there was real pain. You could hear it in his voice. He was like a little kid. It was as if it’d just happened.”
    “For him, it had,” Rita said. “That’s the point. It was always still happening, over and over again. Everyone was someone taking his dog away. Rose Engleman? And Leah? And you? You were all the same person, gassing his dog.”
    “That’s the other thing,” I said. “About the gas. His parents actually told him all about the gas chambers at the shelter or wherever it was. Shelter, right. And somehow he got it hooked up with the... the holocaust. I heard that from Kevin. I mean, the