Animal Appetite

half-naked in a garter belt. I wore heavy boots to split wood because I’d once seen my father drive the blade of an ax through his foot. Rita, I remembered, had once worked herself into a frenzy trying to track down the source of a quotation she’d heard attributed to Freud. “Sometimes,” Freud was supposed to have said, “a cigar is just a cigar.” I couldn’t remember whether Rita had succeeded in her quest, but I knew that in my case an ax was just an ax, and boots were just boots, no matter how Randall Carey might view them. Excluding a couple of sets of lace underwear, the only thing I owned that could possibly be construed as sexual paraphernalia was a cream-colored silk bed jacket that Steve had bought for me at Victoria’s Secret.
    As for Hannah Duston, almost from the moment she returned to Haverhill, she had become a symbol of everything from Motherhood Revenged to the triumph of Puritan Christianity over popish heathenism to the European devastation of Native Americans. But a sexual symbol? The prospect of running the gauntlet naked had obviously been a sexual threat. In 1821, Timothy Dwight had described Hannah Duston as “threatened with torture and indecency more painful than torture.” The Boscawen statue—both the original and the gaudy reproduction on the Jim Beam bottle—had, I realized for the first time, a weirdly erotic element. The clinging drapery revealed Hannah’s buxom body and drooped low over her right breast. But the drapery was a convention of the times, wasn’t it? And the breast an allusion to motherhood?
    Dogs were obviously a symbol, too, but, for me, a symbol of the redeeming power of simple love in a world of violent complexity. All dogs and especially all malamutes were like Attla: strength and honesty made manifest. My own dogs were my dispellers of demons and my shelter from the maelstrom of human enigma: In times of overwhelming pain and chaos, there is no greater comfort than the rediscovery that sometimes a dog is just a dog.
    Scrubbing my feet with a loofah, I told myself that flowing down the drain with the soap and the water and the sweat I’d worked up splitting wood was whatever irrational sense of responsibility I’d felt for Randall Carey’s aberrant misreading of me and everything about me. Only then did I let myself feel deep relief that I’d been foolishly and wonderfully wrong about Randall Carey’s surprise gift.
    When I’d finished drying my hair and getting dressed, I took Rowdy and Kimi for a quick walk, during which, I might add, we encountered neither rats nor madmen—nor anything or anyone else to upset or worry me. When we returned home, Kevin Dennehy’s car was still missing from his driveway. Where was he? He’d left for the stress-reduction and lifestyle-change workshop, or whatever it was, last Friday, a week ago today. In my experience, which admittedly was limited to obedience-training seminars, summer camp for dogs and owners, and other such canine-centered events, a week meant that you arrived on the first day and left on the seventh. Even if Kevin’s week at this retreat in the
    Berkshires ran from Friday to Friday, shouldn’t it have ended early this morning? Didn’t its organizers need to prepare for the next week’s group? The trip from the Berkshires to Cambridge should have taken Kevin two or three hours. If, as I suspected, he’d broken the journey home from this rice-and-tofu haven by stopping for a roast beef sandwich or ham and eggs with home fries, English muffins, and a side of caffeine, he should still have been here by now. Was it possible that the soles of Kevin’s feet were too charred and sore to let him drive? Worse yet, had he done a beer-to-Buddha about-face in his outlook on life, donned a turban, quit the force, and decided to stay?
    The blinking light on my answering machine signaled what proved not to be a message from Kevin proclaiming his permanent retreat from the Cambridge PD. Rather, the message was from Leah. She announced that she had Randall Carey’s dissertation on Hannah Duston. She was calling from a pay phone in the library and would call back in a few minutes.
    As I waited, a connection came to me, one I’d missed in my panicked effort to piece together a meaningful whole from pieces that had fit together here and there, but refused to lock in place. The material Leah had brought still lay on the counter. I quickly doublechecked her list of references. As I’d remembered, Randall