Watchers

was shaken by it until she thought her teeth would chatter.
    “I never do stay too long in a job. Man like me, full of so much energy, gets bored easy. I need to move around. Besides, life’s too short to waste all of it working, don’t you think? So I keep a job for a while, till I’ve got some money saved, then I coast as long as I can. And once in a while I run into a lady like you, someone who has a powerful need for me, someone who’s just crying out for a man like me, and so I help her along.”
    Kick him, bite him, go for his eyes, she told herself.
    She did nothing.
    Her hand ached dully. She remembered how hot and intense the pain had been.
    His voice changed, became softer, soothing, reassuring, but that frightened her even more. “And I’m going to help you, Nora. I’ll be moving in for a while. It’s going to be fun. You’re a little nervous about me, sure, I understand that, I really do. But believe me, this is what you need, girl, this is going to turn your life upside down, nothing’s ever going to be the same again, and that’s the best thing could happen to you.”
     
     
2
    Einstein loved the park.
    When Travis slipped off the leash, the retriever trotted to the nearest bed
    of flowers—big yellow marigolds surrounded by a border of purple polyanthuses—and walked slowly around it, obviously fascinated. He went to a blazing bed of late-blooming ranunculuses, to another of impatiens, and his tail wagged faster with each discovery. They said dogs could see in only black and white, but Travis would not have bet against the proposition that Einstein possessed full-color vision. Einstein sniffed everything—flowers, shrubbery, trees, rocks, trash cans, crumpled litter, the base of the drinking fountain, and every foot of ground he covered—no doubt turning up olfactory “pictures” of people and dogs that had passed this way before, images as clear to him as photographs would have been to Travis.
    Throughout the morning and early afternoon, the retriever had done nothing amazing. In fact, his I’m-just-an-ordinary-dumb-dog behavior was so convincing that Travis wondered if the animal’s nearly human intelligence came only in brief flashes, sort of the beneficial equivalent of epileptic seizures. But after all that had happened yesterday, Einstein’s extraordinary nature, though seldom revealed, was no longer open to debate.
    As they were strolling around the pond, Einstein suddenly went rigid, lifted his head, raised his floppy ears a bit, and stared at a couple sitting on a park bench about sixty feet away. The man was in running shorts, and the woman wore a rather baggy gray dress; he was holding her hand, and they appeared to be deep in conversation.
    Travis started to turn away from them, heading out toward the open green of the park to give them privacy.
    But Einstein barked once and raced straight toward the couple.
    “Einstein! Here! Come back here!”
    The dog ignored him and, nearing the pair on the bench, began to bark furiously.
    By the time Travis reached the bench, the guy in running shorts was standing. His arms were raised defensively, and his hands were fisted as he warily moved back a step from the retriever.
    “Einstein!”
    The retriever stopped barking, turned away from Travis before the leash Could be clipped to the collar again, went to the woman on the bench, and Put his head in her lap. The change from snarling dog to affectionate pet was so sudden that everyone was startled.
    Travis said, “I’m sorry. He never—”
    “For Christ’s sake,” said the guy in running shorts, “you can’t let a vicious dog run loose in a park!”
    not vicious,” Travis said. “He—”
    Bullshit,” the runner said, spraying spittle. “The damn thing tried to bite me. You enjoy lawsuits or something?”
    don’t know what got into—”
    Get it out of here,” the runner demanded.
    Nodding, embarrassed, Travis turned to Einstein and saw that the woman had coaxed the retriever onto the bench. Einstein was sitting with her, facing her, his forepaws in her lap, and she was not merely petting him but hugging
    him. In fact, there was something a little desperate about the way she was holding on to him.
    “Get it out of here!” the runner said furiously.
    The guy was taller, broader in the shoulders, and thicker in the chest than Travis, and he took a couple of steps forward, looming over Travis, using his superior size to intimidate. By being aggressive, by looking