The Safe Haven(Barry) If Screwie Louie was human, he would have dropped out of elementary school by tenth grade, picked his way to North Africa via the port city of Algeciras in Southern Spain and joined the French Foreign Legion. Preferring to stick closer to home, he might have sought out the ‘cafones’, uncouth lowlifes on Rhode Island’s Federal Hill district, and settled into a comfortable life as a Mafioso street thug. But, unfortunately, Louie was a fourteen-pound Lhasa apso with a shaggy coat of tan and white fur and wiggly, cavity-prone teeth. At fifteen the canine was considered ancient, one step away from geriatric diapers and an aluminum walker with yellow tennis balls fixed to the metal feet.

“I’m taking the dog to the park,” Eighteen year-old Otis Sanders hollered from the bottom of the stairwell, where he had carried the pooch. Since milky-white cataracts emerged, Louie’s vision was a myopic blur and the dog could no longer judge distances, especially stairs.

Mrs. Sanders was standing in the hallway with a basket of dirty laundry. “Don’t forget the plastic bags.”

“Yeah, I got them right here.” He held up a small container. “Does Jason want to come?” Fourteen year-old Jason was Otis’ younger brother.

“He’s been waiting for you in the den.” Mrs. Sanders wagged a finger authoritatively in the air. “Don’t chat with Louie when other people are around. It looks weird.”

Since the dog’s impaired vision, Otis had gotten into the habit of talking, sometimes quite vigorously, when they were out in public. The dialogue was decidedly one-sided. “I only do it because he needs to know where I am or if we’re approaching walkways and he has to jump up or down.”

“Yes, well, not everyone is aware of the dog’s limitations and might think you’re slightly addled-brained.” “The other day,” Mrs. Sanders continued, “I heard you discussing the New England Patriots’ prospects for making the division one football playoffs with Louie.”

* * * * *

The following day when it was time for his morning run, the Louie refused to lift his head. “Something’s wrong with the dog.” Otis announced in a somber tone.

Jason, who was nibbling at his French toast, looked up from the kitchen table. “What’s the matter?”

“He hasn’t eaten much of anything in two days, and when I tried to get him up just now, he growled and bared his fangs.” Mrs. Sanders followed Otis into the hallway where Screwie Louie was crumpled up on his bed. “Come on, sleepyhead, time to face a new day,” Mrs. Sanders cooed. The dog never budged, made no effort to rise even when she scratched him behind the ear. “He’s got to see the vet,” Mrs. Sanders noted. “I’ll call the clinic to let them know we’re bringing a sick dog.” The woman turned to Jason. “Finish your breakfast. We shouldn’t be long.”

“I’m coming, too,” the tow-haired youth blustered.

“Not a good idea!” Over the year, several of Louie’s canine friends from the walking trail became ill and passed away. A month earlier, Nora, a Great Dane with a gentle spirit, bought the farm.

“It’s my dog. I’m coming,” Jason persisted.

Mrs. Sanders shrugged and fixed her younger son with a severe expression. Jason tended to put up a hard-nosed front, but once his topsy-turvy emotions seized the upper hand, he turned to mush. “Get a worm jacket. The sun’s out but with the wind blowing it’s still a bit chilly.”

* * * * *

After much pleading and prodding they negotiated Louie outdoors where he lifted his hind leg to pee and promptly toppled over like a drunken sailor. “Cripes!” Jason noted humorlessly.

At the animal clinic the receptionist ushered them into a cramped examining room. Jason was clutching the lethargic dog on his lap. “I’ll be in the front if you need me,” Otis said and retreated to the entrance area where a cluster of pet owners was waiting. From his vantage point, he could see the doctor, a chubby Hispanic with wire-rimmed glasses, briskly hurrying from one examining room to the next.

Ten minutes passed. An elderly, bearded man entered with a Siberian husky. Limping badly, the dog could just barely make it across the clinic threshold. The receptionist hurried over and relieved the man of his pet, handing the leash to a coworker. “We’re quite busy today but, under the circumstances, Dr. Hernandez will be with you shortly.” The haggard looking man took a seat next to Otis, lowered his head and blew all the air from his lungs.

The vet clinic, Otis mused, was beginning to assume the morbid stench of a funeral parlor with multiple, open-casket wakes in progress. The veterinarian emerged from an examining room midway down the hall and approached the front desk. “Mr. Pierce?” He led the bearded gentleman into a room next to the one where Mrs. Sanford and Jason were waiting. After a moment, a prolonged, grief-stricken moan filtered through the clinic. The man who brought the Siberian husky was sobbing inconsolably.

Otis rose to his feet and meandered into the foyer where a young girl was giggling and gesticulating theatrically while jibber-jabbering on a cell phone. “A guy just got some bad news about his dog. Maybe you could take your conversation outside in the parking lot.” The girl apologized profusely and left the building.

Twenty minutes later Mrs. Sanders and Jason emerged from the exam room. “We’re all set.”

“Where’s Louie?”

“Louie’s dehydrated and got a terrible ear infection,” Jason replied. “The clinic’s keeping him overnight with an IV drip to build up fluids.”

“We can pick the dog up first thing in the morning,” his mother explained, “but Louie will be on antibiotics for the next month until the ear infection clears.”

“The way his head tilted to one side and the dog careened to the left when he tried to move about were the telltale signs,” Jason added.

“Poor pooch!” Otis muttered. “Bad enough he can hardly see anymore and now this.” As they made their way out to the car, an image of the heartbroken, elderly man and his dying dog flitted across Otis’ mind, but he thought better than to mention anything.

* * * * *

Later that night after showering Otis climbed into bed and shut the lights. It seemed strange that Louie was hunkered down in a metal cage five miles away with an IV drip of electrolytes and antibiotics. Just the other night the dog roused him from a warm bed at three in the morning, making weirdly feral sounds – a combination of half-hearted growls and high-pitched whines.

“Gotta pee?” Otis slid off the side of the bed and threw on his clothes. Once outside, Louie made a beeline for the cul-de-sac at the far end of the street, where the dog regularly did his business under a street lamp. “The Syrian immigrants,” Otis observed with mild irritation, indicating a split-level ranch house with turquoise shutters, “still don’t seem to be adjusting to their new life in America.” Louie was far too busy studying the aurora borealis to offer an opinion about the new neighbors.

The Syrians, a husband, wife and three young children emigrated from a refugee camp in Turkey. Working long hours, the husband was hardly ever home. When he did return in the late afternoon, the bearded man rushed up the back stairs without ever looking to right or left. He clearly had no use for the neighbors, terms like ‘melting pot’ or assimilation being utterly incomprehensible, abstruse concepts.

The wife, Aisha, spoke little English and constantly held a cell phone epoxied to her ear while speaking nonstop Arabic. In her early twenties the woman was pretty, with dark hair and plump lips. She was also terribly lonely. One time when the woman accidentally locked her keys in the house, Otis cracked the mesh screen on a basement window and climbed into the lower level. Much relieved that the front door was open and she didn’t need to bother her husband at work, the woman flashed a charming smile. “Tankyoutankyoutankyou!” Aisha gushed, running the garbled syllables together as though they were all part of the same, convoluted term.

A young girl in her late teens with close-cropped blonde hair, Danica Whitfield, was approaching from the far end of the street. Otis raised his hand and waved when she passed by and she responded in kind. “Is boy or girl?” Aisha asked.

“Girl,” he replied, “at least for now.” Rumor had it that, with the mother’s blessing, Danica was transitioning to ‘Dan’. She would be starting hormone blockers in the fall and receive breast reduction surgery shortly thereafter.

“Pretty girl.” Aisha waved her dainty hands in the air. “Beeeyootiful blond hair. Should let grow long, long, long, long to here.” The Arabic woman indicated the small of her back a smidgen above the buttocks.”

“Yes. That certainly would be nice.”

Jason, who was in the same grade, shared several classes with Danica. Most of her female classmates stood in solidarity with her decision to cross the great divide, but among the boys it was a wholly different matter. They viewed Danica as an unadulterated freakazoid, a mental defective, and would tacitly have nothing to do with her following the mastectomy and formal name change. The newly-minted boy, who only a short while ago had been a demure, young girl, would find herself socially isolated, cut adrift in an emotional vacuum, a desolate no-man’s-land of her own choosing.

When Danica finally disappeared down the street, Otis pointed to a blue, plastic barrel pushed up against the side of the house. “You shouldn’t leave the lid to your garbage barrel open. Rotten food attracts rats.”

The Arabic woman was in the habit of propping the lid wide open and dumping her refuse into the container from the upper deck. “What means rats?”

Otis thought a moment. “A furry rodent that brings terrible disease.”

The woman cocked her head to one side and tapped her cheek with a poised index finger. “How spells rrrrat?” Aisha drew the consonant out with a rough-edged, guttural inflection.

“R A T,” Otis replied.

Whipping her cell phone from a rear pocket, Aisha fingered the digital keyboard a half dozen times. “Rrrats! Fa’ara.” She seemed overjoyed, delirious with the sense of accomplishment. “Now I know rrrats is what means fa’ara.” She turned back to Otis. “You say now.”

“Fa’ara,” he repeated. “You don’t want an ugly hoard of fa’ra turning the neighborhood into a disease-ridden hell.” Otis gestured with a flick of his eyes at a charcoal grille resting on the top of the deck near a side rail. “Any problems with the grille?”

The woman’s dark eyes sparkled and her dainty lips coalesced into an enthusiastic smile. “Grille is wonnnerful! No problem.”

A week earlier while walking the dog Otis had noticed orangey flames shooting up from the Arab’s deck. When he rushed over, the Syrian woman was standing next to a small charcoal grille, a tin of lighter fluid dangling from her left hand. “How much lighter fluid did you use?”

“Is goot fire, no?” The woman didn’t seem the least bit concerned about the acrid flames dancing several feet in the air. On the outdoor table a platter of teriyaki steaks strips sat next to a bowl of garden vegetables.

“Your grille is much too close to the house. If the wind shifts, it could blow sparks up against the shingle and burn your house down.”

Aisha held a taut index finger up in the air. “Is no wind, see?”

“Yes, but you still must be careful.”

The woman pointed at the house diagonally across the street. “They have grille. Is no problem.”

The neighbors owned an ultra-deluxe, chrome grille with dual propane tanks. “Yes but they have heat-control knobs and a sturdy cover.” The Syrian woman, who was struggling with English as a second language, flashed an agreeable smile. “Must get barbecue sauce,” she said before retreating back into the house. Reveling in the freedom and fresh air, Louie, who was staring pensively into space, had nothing to say about the incident.

A week later, when Otis brought Louie down the street for an afternoon stroll, the lid on the garbage container was still wide open with a pile of gristly steak bones and watermelon rinds sticking out from the top. “The Arabic woman will surely have an epiphany,” Otis prattled, despite the dog’s indifference to the topic at hand. “Realizing the error of her ways, she will learn how to properly use a charcoal grille and cover her smelly garbage.”

Nonplussed by his master’s strident monologue, Screwie Louie plopped down on his haunches and sniffed at a warm breeze skirting the weed-pocked lawn. “Her husband will greet the neighbors with a toothy grin and in rich ‘melting pot’ tradition rush to shake everyone’s hand and belatedly introduce himself.” Louie’s head sagged precipitously at a cockeyed angle as though he was having a difficult time grasping Otis meandering thoughts. At any rate, the dog held his ground, refusing to give credence, one way or the other, to his master’s rhetorical speculation.

* * * * *

“Are you sleeping?” Later that night Mrs. Sanders stood just outside Otis’ bedroom door. She seldom bothered him after nine o’clock unless there was some urgent, unfinished business to attend to. “I called over to the clinic and Louie’s doing fine. He ate his evening meal and is snoring away.”

“When can we bring him home?”

“First thing in the morning,” Mrs. Sanders returned. “By the way, I ran into the new neighbor when she was taking her children for an early morning stroll.”

“Aisha, the Syrian woman?”

His mother nodded. “She’s got her citizenship test next month, and I’m going to help her prepare for the exam.”

“Her English is awful.”

“Yes, I know, but I got a handbook that covers all the basic questions they might ask so that’s what we’ll concentrate on. Poor woman… she’s so isolated, living in a strange country without family for moral support.” Mrs. Sanders approached the bed. She had closed the bedroom door upon entering and the room was shrouded in opaque darkness. Outside in the street a neighbor who worked the night shift started up his car, revving the engine several times.

“I saw Danica Whitfield a few days ago when I was walking the dog,” Otis said, shifting gears

“Poor creature,” his mother replied. “I pray for that lovely girl.”

The darkened room was drenched in stilted silence. “Soon to become a not-so-lovely young man,” Otis corrected with a bitter inflection.

“Everything seemed to go downhill when the father ran off,” Mrs. Sanders observed. Mr. Whitfield disappeared the day after New Years, vanished into thin air. If anything, the skinny bean pole of a wife with the acrid smile seemed relieved to be rid of her spouse. No mention was ever made of his abandoning the family.

“Danica’s mother has only one facial expression,” Otis observed, “a demented smile.”

“Yes, there’s no range of emotion,” Mrs. Sanders agreed. “Mrs. Whitfield is a hideous creature.”

“What did you just say?”

“I misspoke.” Mrs. Sanders cleared her throat of a non-existent obstruction. “The woman’s probably living out her own delusional fantasies through her defenseless daughter.” Reaching down she adjusted the covers up over Otis’ shoulders then kissed his cheek. “If so, then it’s pure sacrilege, a profanation of everything decent in this world.” “What Danica needs,” the woman continued, “is a safe haven, a sanctuary of sorts where she can sort out her miserable youth without her mother’s deranged influence, but I fear it’s too late for that.”

For a second time the room fell silent. Otis’ mother showed no great inclination to leave and the boy sensed that there might be something else on her mind but she was hesitant to broach the issue.

“I recently ran into Mrs. Whitfield in the market,” Otis’ mother finally confided. “Beverly and her daughter are no longer on talking terms.”

“What happened?”

“Danica feels things are moving too fast and wants to take a break from transitioning.”

“My daughter’s being very unreasonable,” Mrs. Whitfield confided testily as she reached for a head of iceberg lettuce. Putting the vegetable back on the refrigerated rack she grabbed a bag of Romaine. “The doctors want to move ahead.”

“But if she’s not sure.” Otis’ mother had the distinct impression that Mrs. Whitfield enjoyed the mayhem; she was energized, revitalized by the domestic pandemonium.

“Danica needs to be on puberty blockers to pause the physical changes that can be difficult if not impossible to reverse later on,” Mrs. Whitfield insisted petulantly.

Physical changes… The girl was developing into a perfectly lovely woman with a personality to match. Mrs. Sanders glanced briefly at Danica’s mother. The resentment had faded away, her features cloaked in the signature, ghoulish grin. No matter that she had lived peacefully in the community for twenty years, paid her taxes, served on the school committee, volunteered at the town library and had never run afoul of the law, Beverly Whitfield was a certified lunatic.

*****

Only now did Otis’ mother finally rise and wandered slowly toward the door but Otis’ voice brought her up short. “When we were at the clinic, did you hear the elderly man sobbing in the adjacent exam room?”

Mrs. Sanford’s eyes narrowed. “No, I heard nothing.”

“The guy apparently got bad news about his Siberian husky.”

“An older man?”

“In the room next door to where you were waiting.”

After an awkward pause, Mrs. Sanders said, “That was your brother, Jason. I warned him that, if there was nothing the veterinarian could do, we might need to put Louie to sleep. That’s when your brother lost it big time!”

“But I thought -”

“Your brother went bonkers,” his mother interjected. “Only after the doctor delivered the good news did Jason manage to pull himself back together.” Mrs. Sanders left the room. After pondering the irrefutable fact that life was ever so strange, a kaleidoscopic amalgam of emotional bedlam, Otis finally rolled over on his side, closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.

*****

In the morning two days later Otis found his mother in the kitchen putting away the dishes and cutlery from the evening meal. “Last night you said Danica needed a safe haven, a sanctuary where she could sort out her miserable youth away from her mother’s toxic influence.”

Mrs. Sanders was patting down a metal colander before storing it away on an upper shelf. “Yes, what of it?”

“We have a spare bedroom no one uses. What if Danica came to live with us while she was sifting through all the details about transitioning.” “I see her in the park almost every day when I walk the dog. I could float the idea.”

Mrs. Sanders put the damp dish towel aside and gawked at her son. “The thought of her living here never occurred to me.”

“Which doesn’t answer my original question.”

His mother hesitated before responding. “Danica may have no desire to leave home.”

“Or she may want to leave in the worse way imaginable but feels trapped.” Otis couched his response in a somber, low-keyed tone. “No one can know what she’s thinking without asking.”

Mrs. Sanders wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulders and pulled him close just as Louie, who had been waiting patiently by the rear door with his leash strapped to the collar, let out an insistent whine. “And how, in God’s name, do you intend to broach the issue?”

“I’ve a plan.”

*****

Otis brought Louie to the park. The dog’s head was now habitually cocked to one side, and he careened at perverse angles when trying to move in a straight line. The doctor warned the head tilt might be permanent, but they wouldn’t know for a few months yet. Ten minutes later as they reached a bend in the road alongside the soccer field Otis spotted Danica Whitfield sitting on a metal bench watching the boys’ practice squad chasing balls. “What’s the matter with your dog?”

Otis told her about the trip to the vet clinic. Louie had settle on the grass alongside a lime, sideline marker and was sniffing a dandelion that had gone to seed, sending porcelain tufts out in search of a new home.

The gods had played a devilish trick on Danica Whitfield, because, even with her hair cropped short and androgynous, tomboyish clothes, there was no denying that the girl was a classic, feminine beauty. “My mother once said you were far and away the prettiest girl in elementary school.” “With your wide cheekbones, pearlescent skin and pale blue eyes you reminded her of the women in a Vermeer painting.”

“Who’s Vermeer?”

“A Dutch painter from the seventeen hundreds.”

Danica’s lips coalesced in a faint grin. “What a sweet thing to say!”

“I didn’t necessarily agree, but what the hell did I know. I was still trying to identify subjects and predicates in simple sentences and locate common denominators in math class.”

“I saw you talking to the Arab woman.” Danica noted shifting gears.

“Aisha was greatly admiring your blonde hair.”

Danica ran a set of feathery fingertips over the side of her skull. “There’s not much left.”

When Otis told her about the incidents with the charcoal grille and garbage container she responded, “Its just a matter of settling in and learning how we do things here in America.”

“Yes, but she’s terribly isolated, alone all day with hardly anyone to share her innermost thoughts and feeling.”

Danica shook her head vehemently and laughed bitterly. “The next time you talk with her ask Aisha if she wouldn’t mind trading places with me.”

Otis opened his mouth momentarily but let the comment pass. Reaching out, he grabbed her hand. “Six years ago Marjorie Hallstead had a birthday party.”

“Yes, I remember.” She stared at the hand, which Otis now held captive and resting comfortably on his lap. “We were entering middle school, fifth grade and I was all of eleven years old.”

“Call it puppy love, adoration, infatuation… I had a crush on you dating even further back to elementary school.”

Danica patted his topmost wrist with her free hand and cracked an ephemeral smile. “This is all new to me.”

A huge cheer erupted from the playing field as a soccer player scampering along the sideline launched a shot which bounced off the goalpost and landed inside the opponent’s net. “Midway through the birthday party we played spin the bottle.” “You spun the bottle and it pointed directly at me.” “When we kissed all hell broke loose; my brains imploded, turned to mush.”

“I hope you’re not looking to pick up where we left off at the outset of middle school.”

Otis finally released the grip on her hand. Louie had begun pawing at a floppy ear with his hind leg. He waited until the dog finished his personal hygiene. “No, but I’ve a different proposition altogether.”

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