The Dogs of Babel Read Online Free PDF Page A

tongue, would speak the truth?
    I had never owned a dog before I married Lexy; to be honest, I was rather afraid of them. When I was a child, I knew a great mammoth of a dog named Rufus who was angry all of his days. His owner was a bitter and reclusive man named Bucky Jones who used to terrify neighborhood children by gutting deer carcasses in his yard and throwing bits of bloody viscera in our paths as we walked by on our way to school. I’m quite sure he abused the dog on a regular basis, but even so, Rufus was devoted to him. The same dog who spent his days tied to a tree, leaping and snarling bloody murder, would whimper with sweet puppy joy whenever his owner came into the yard. On summer evenings, when Bucky used to climb up onto the roof to sit and drink beer and say wild things to no one, he’d hoist Rufus up there with him, and the strange silhouette they made against the night sky is something I see in my dreams to this day.
    The first time I met Lorelei, apart from the wary once-over we gave each other the day of the yard sale, was when I arrived to pick up Lexy for our first date, a date that, as it turned out, would last a full week. As soon as I rang the bell, I could hear the enormous noise of Lorelei’s bark beginning at some distant corner of the house and moving with alarming speed toward the other side of the door. I took an involuntary step backward and cowered against one of the porch posts as Lexy opened the door. Lorelei bounded out and leaped toward me, landing with her paws just below my shoulders. I stood rigid as she peered up into my face for a long moment, no longer barking, and I felt an unexpected calm run through me as I met her eyes. For one strange moment, my anxieties about the evening ahead of me faded, and without even thinking about it, I reached out and rested my hand gently on her head. This is the beginning of
our
story, mine and Lorelei’s, a story separate in many ways from the one Lexy and I would begin to create that night. For the first time, I looked into those earnest eyes and touched that rough-soft fur. For the first time, I felt a hint of tenderness for this dog who has, through time and the earthly miracle of canine trust, come to be my own. All that we are together now, the sum of our grief and our play, the daily movement of man and dog through an empty house, following the passage of sun from room to room until it’s gone, all of it began that moment on the porch, with Lexy standing in the background.
    When she stepped forward then, my Lexy, and I turned finally to look at her for the first time that day—she was pulling the dog off me and apologizing, chiding Lorelei in low tones as she maneuvered her into the house and shut her inside—I felt nothing of the rapt nervousness, the deep-bone stage fright, I had felt on all the other first dates of my life. Lexy had kept our plans for the evening deliberately vague, which had left me with some uneasiness, an unfamiliar tilting feeling of not knowing where I might end up, but now as I watched her negotiate all of the everyday hubbub of calming the dog, putting on a jacket, locking the door, I knew that somehow, without even realizing it, I had made the decision to follow her wherever she wanted to take me.
    “Hi,” she said, turning to face me and relaxing into a smile. “I’m sorry about Lorelei. She’s really a sweetie, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
    “Oh, I could tell,” I said.
    She looked lovely. She was wearing a kind of silky black T-shirt and a long slim skirt, and she had pulled her hair back from her face. In the week since we had met, it seemed as if I had spent my time doing nothing else but conjuring her image in my mind, but I saw now that I had remembered everything wrong. I saw now that the brown of her eyes was lightened with flecks of amber and that the heart-shape of her face was more round than angular. I saw the complex layering of pale gold and dark honey in her hair and the