Appreciate my help.

  Well, that was that. I shut up.

  But he’s right, of course. He’s developed or adapted a system based on statistics—or rather, he uses statistics to hone his intuition—that he learned working with Brooks. And looking at these pups, the results speak for themselves. Not the ten-week-olds—if anything, they’ve regressed at that age. But the yearlings, my God. I watch them train one another. Trudy puts them in a circle to proof differential recalls, and if one breaks a stay, the others complain with moans and huffs.

  Do you remember how we used to work and work and work on differential recalls? How hard that was for them? Now it’s elementary. I think I already told you about the mimic exercise, where one dog has to do what another dog does, just by watching. That’s more their speed.

  So I really can’t argue with Gar. Or Trudy for that matter. The whole time we were at dinner, Almondine sat studying little Edgar in his crib. Oh, and this was with eight yearlings in downstays all throughout the house.

  They’re magnificent, Mary.

  July 11, 1958

  Mary,

  I realize I’ve hardly told you anything about this place, and here it is almost a year.

  The view out my windows would be familiar, since this “unit” occupies the upstairs south corner of the house, just like your room did. That means I see very little of town, but very much of Mt. Whittlesey and, depending on the atmosphere and how the breezes are blowing, brief glimpses of the highway out toward Cozy Valley. What’s strange is that because the road is almost but not quite obscured, my eye is drawn more regularly to it than to the things I can look at anytime I like, like the elm tree out back, or Mt. Whittlesey.

  Sometimes, when the foliage parts, I can see a pickup truck or a sedan going along, or one of the local kids riding a bicycle, or a logging truck. It’s like being handed single frames out of all these long movies that happen to all intersect on that patch of road.

  If I tried to list all the things that have changed since you stayed here, it would turn into a trivia parade, so I’ll only tell some of the big differences. For example, the kitchen is something else. There’s the small but very modern refrigerator, a white enamel monolith with fins and lines and indentations as if to guide air smoothly over its body. The handle, too. It looks like a chrome icicle shaped by a strong wind. The whole thing reminds me of that fluted glass butter dish we once had, only stood up on its end. Do you know the one I’m thinking of?

  This refrigerator wakes with a click, the compressor hums for a while, then it clicks again and goes back to sleep, very satisfied with itself.

  Yesterday morning I stood in the kitchen for forty-five minutes drinking my coffee and trying to puzzle out why someone at Frigidaire thought a refrigerator needed to be aerodynamic.

  Inside the refrigerator is a special freezer compartment, and inside the freezer is a tin tray divided into sixteen squares, which I fill with water and freeze to make ice cubes. You park the ice cube tray in a little tin garage in the freezer.

  A tray filled with ordinary tap water freezes solid in three hours and fifteen minutes. Or longer if you keep opening the freezer door to check.

  And here’s something clever: there’s a handle on the top of the ice cube tray that tilts the dividers between the cubes. All you do is wrench the handle back and with a crrrrack! all the ice cubes break loose.

  Do you remember back in Hartford, when Elbow was delivering ice? Those enormous blocks that he would tong and heft up the stairs while So Jack and Granddaddy waited on the street? I want to show this to him. He would appreciate the irony of it. Maybe I should be writing this letter to him.

  A person can dump all the ice cubes out of the tray no problem, but getting just one out is difficult. It rattles in its little pen but there’s no way to pick it up. And if you tip the tray, always more than one cube comes tumbling out and skitters across the linoleum, usually all the way to the wall.

  Oh yes: Have I told you? The kitchen floor is covered with linoleum with a design pressed into it to make it look like granite, though no one is fooled. It’s an open secret: we’ve agreed to pretend that the floor is granite. Near the sink there’s a nail that squeaks in the floorboards, so we also have to pretend that granite squeaks.

  I have a refrigerated spaceship and a squeaky granite floor.

  One thing: linoleum is easy to clean. A dropped ice cube melts and forms a blobby puddle, then evaporates and disappears. It will never soak in. Never. Linoleum is completely waterproof.

  From the time an ice cube hits the linoleum until its puddle has completely evaporated is five hours and forty-five minutes, give or take, depending on temperature, the time of day, whether the windows are open, wind speed, relative humidity, and so on. Call it six hours on an ordinary day. Though I’ve seen it happen in less than four. And if you drop a cube at the beginning of a cool evening, its puddle could still be there when you wake up in the morning. There are just too many variables to say anything more precise about the matter.

  July 12, 1958

  Mary,

  I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about that pup. I kept imagining taking him up into the mow and running the tests with him again, just to prove to myself those scores were a fluke. I know he would do fine.

  It must have been two o’clock in the morning before I finally fell asleep.

  That pup has a black face and white socks, and he’s built like a little tank. His ears are still down, of course.

  Why didn’t we take a pup for ourselves after Ocky? I’m going to put that into Familiaris, how we kept waiting for one to be just right, and there never was one.

  Okay, I was the one who never could pick, not you.

  I was the one who always said we’d take a pup from the next litter.

  I have to be careful with questions like these. Every one is a door into the cave where the gorgon If Only sleeps.

  July 13, 1958

  Mary,

  If you crank up the freezer so that it stays very cold, as cold as possible, you can get a single ice cube out of the tray by wetting your finger under the tap and pressing it against the top of the cube. It freezes to your finger and lifts right out every time.

  Neat, eh?

  You have to shake the cube off your finger, or pry it off with your other hand. If you just wait for it to fall off, it will take anywhere from five to ninety-five seconds, depending.

  Mistake: taking the ice cube tray out with a wet hand. (All fingers freeze to tray.)

  Ditto on operating the cube-loosening handle with your wet hand.

  July 14, 1958

  Mary,

  A couple of weeks back I found chunks of ice floating in my milk, and the lettuce was frost-burned unto death. Obviously, I’d turned up the cold too far.

  This is not as easy to fix as you might imagine. There’s one big knob inside the refrigerator that claims to control the temperature—but the temperature of what? The refrigerator or the freezer?

  Beside that knob is a different kind of knob that slides back and forth. Beside that knob is a little picture of a ramp, and the word “Temperzone.”

  Every one of these apartments has the same spaceship for a refrigerator, and no one knows how to work it. I’ve asked around. No one has an instruction manual either. But with a little experimentation I’ve discovered that the circular knob is a thermostat, while the slider controls how the cold blast is split between the refrigerator and the freezer. It’s a damper. Or maybe a valve—I’m not sure I know the difference.

  The upshot is, if you move the slider without changing the thermostat, you’re stealing from Peter to pay Paul. You get a warmer freezer in order to have a cooler refrigerator. But if you change the thermostat without changing the position of the slider, then you heat or cool both compartments by the same amount, which is pretty much never what a person wants.

  As a public service, two Thursdays ago I herded all the tenants up to my kitchen for a lecture and demonstration on the operational principles of our refrigerated spaceships, which at the time I thought would solve a lot of problems in one fell swoop. I felt good about it, too, I have to tell you. But on Monday Martha McLanny from the unit below opened her door as I was going out and said that she’d followed my instructions to the letter, but now her milk had spoiled, though all she’d meant to do was stop her lettuce from freezing. I had to go in and make adjustments. I assured her it would be fine by tomorrow.

  The next day she caught me in the hall. “Mr. Sawtelle, there’s been a hard frost in the crisper.”

  “Missus McLanny,” I said. I josh her every chance I get because she refuses to use my first name. “Did you change the settings since I was here yesterday?”

  “Oh, no! Not at all,” she said. She was lying, and she’s not very good at it.

  “It was Heck, wasn’t it?”

  She covered her mouth to hide a smile and nodded.

  “You can’t just fiddle with these things. You’ll never get it right that way. You’ve got to have patience. You change one thing at a time, make a record of it, then wait a day and see if it’s better. Then you make another change.”

  “Shoot,” she said. “I don’t see why these things have to be so complicated.”

  I said, “Me neither. I mean, did they even ask someone how it ought to work? Or did they just do whatever they felt like?”

  “I can’t see how they did,” she said.

  “Give me a pencil,” I said. Maybe I was a little abrupt, but I was in a hurry. I nudged the Temperzone slider and made a mark on the plastic where the thermostat and the slider were set. “There. I’ll check in tomorrow. If something needs adjusting, we’ll adjust it then, together. Okay?”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Tell Heck to keep his confounded fingers off the controls.”

  “I will, Mr. Sawtelle.”

  “It’s the scientific method. I refuse to believe in voodoo.”

  It took three days to get the McLannys’ spaceship sorted out, but by then they were the least of my worries. Everyone was coming to me with stories of woe. I have to tell you Mary, I was sorry I’d opened my mouth in the first place. It’s been two weeks since my seminar, and only today did I finally do rounds and find that everyone’s refrigerator was holding steady at thirty-eight degrees and their freezer at twenty-eight. I had to buy a pair of thermometers at the hardware store. I’ve pencil-marked the magic position on every unit’s knob and slider, because every one is different.

  Oh by the way: Martha McLanny is pregnant. About four months along.

  I predicted that, if you’ll recall.

  July 16, 1958

  Mary,

  I just can’t understand how Gar could score that pup so low. I don’t mean to take anything away from what he accomplished with the kennel and the dogs, but I trust my intuition. He’s wrong—I just know it. As wrong as he could be. He was even talking about outplacing the pup, which these days they do with one out of twenty, maybe one out of thirty pups.

  I lay awake last night thinking about it, until an idea came into my head.

  I told myself, forget it, Sawtelle. That’s childish.

  Then I thought: actually, it’s kind of a good idea.

  How I wish I could talk to you about it right now.

  No—what I wish is that I could listen to you right now.

  I’m just going to hold this idea in my mind for another day or so. If I still think it’s good, I’ll tell you about it. So be patient, would you?

  July 19, 1958

  Mary,

  I woke up again last night at eleven thirty. By midnight I was ready to give up on sleep, so I went to make coffee. Coffee at midnight, bad idea, I know. But as long as I was up, I thought I’d add a few pages to Familiaris. In fact, I’d come awake thinking about Vi’s pups, back in Hartford. Remember how surprised you and I were when we understood we could see that they had different personalities even before their eyes opened? Just by how they curled up and slept, squirmed around to latch on to a nipple, complained or not when Vi washed them with her tongue?

  I had the typewriter on the table and the water boiled and I was about to spoon in the Maxwell House when I stopped, and all alone in the apartment, I said out loud, “I’ve got to try.”

  So I dressed and got in the Wayfarer. These past few weeks of summer have been downright beneficent, Mary. The trees are lush. At night the wind is cool. Last night there were small storms all over the place. Downpours one mile, the windshield fogged, bright moonlight the next. The clouds looked fantastic—all pale with feathered holes writhing at the edges, going up and up into the sky and out to the stars.

  When I got to the farm, I was careful to park just behind the hill. I turned off the headlights and waited for my eyes to adapt. It takes longer now than it used to. I listened to the all-night radio station out of Chicago. The moon was shining down between storms, and the world was wet and black and silver.

  When I could count the birch trees in the field, I started the Wayfarer again and drove—without turning on the headlights—to the top of the hill. From there I walked down through the field. All the lights were out in the house and the barn, but that big yard light they’ve put in was beaming away like a moon of its own. A whole globe of light, like a little fairy-tale place almost. Is that what we made, Mary? A fairy-tale place?

  Whatever it was, I came in a thief. I unlatched the doors at the back of the barn, shushing the dogs. Not that it matters much, but the kennels with the ten-week-olds were close to the back, so after moving through the whelping rooms, I just stopped and shone the flashlight I’d brought along into the pens.

  It was possible that Jug wouldn’t be there at all. Gar might have rotated him into the house for the night. But I got lucky. There he was, in the second pen I checked.

  I said, “Shhhhh,” and put the other pups into a sit and opened the pen door and poked Jug in the chest.

  “Come on, you,” I said. He bumbled out. I buckled one of the spare puppy collars around his neck and tied it to some clothesline I found in my kitchen drawer. Then we slipped out the back barn doors and across the field and got into the Wayfarer and left.

  I’m a robber, Mary. A bandit. A bandito. A pretty good one, too, if I do say so myself. It would have been a perfect withdrawal, except I couldn’t resist leaving a note behind, safety-pinned to the pen door:

  Dear People,

  You are fine folks and I appreciate all you’ve done. This has been a warm place with my mama and my littermates and all of you. But as you know, I have to evaluate you based on strict rules and criteria. I’m sorry to say, you didn’t make the cut. This is all very scientific, there’s nothing personal about it. Please don’t have hurt feelings. I’m sure you’ll make some other dogs very happy.For myself, I’ve selected a place better suited to my gifts.

  Don’t try to find me. I will be far away by the time you read this. I will remember you fondly, always.

  But I’m not yours.

  -Jug

  On the way back to town, Jug sat on the seat and panted and kind of bounced around watching me. We sang a song. Pretty soon he fell asleep on the seat. I meant to go straight back to my apartment, but somehow I found myself out at Loon Lake, and I parked there and looked out over the water and pretty soon I fell asleep, too.

  I woke just after sunrise with Jug standing with both front feet on my leg, licking my face. I took him out on his length of clothesline to pee. We stood shivering together in wet grass, looking at the lake. He was suddenly daunted about getting back into the Wayfarer, and I had to coax him in. Maybe what seemed like an exciting adventure in the night suddenly looked like a mistake in the morning light, but I told him, “You’ll see. Don’t worry so much.” And he hopped into the wheel well, all except for one scrabbling back leg, which I helped along. And the wheel well is where he stayed, panting and looking at me, until I pulled up in front of the boardinghouse.

  Durand has a strict no-dogs policy.

  We’ll figure that out later.

  July 20, 1958

  Mary,

  Getting Jug into the apartment without being seen wasn’t so easy. If we’d come back in the night, everyone would have been asleep—maybe not Rufus; I see the light from his window cast out into the darkness all night sometimes—and Jug and I could have just slipped up the steps. But it was broad daylight by the time we left Loon Lake.

  I parked next to Jim Blue’s little sports car and sat thinking. I didn’t know who I might run into in the hallway. All I knew was that I didn’t want anyone to know about Jug yet.

  I looked over at him. “You ready for this?” I said.

  He tipped his head and looked at me. I zipped up my jacket halfway and got out of the Wayfarer and called him. He toed his way to over to my side, and I wrestled him into my jacket. Jug’s a big boy, twenty pounds already, maybe more. He fit in my jacket, but barely. I had to tuck his tail back inside twice. I walked into the boardinghouse with my hands supporting what looked like a gigantic paunch.

  I was halfway up the stairs when Martha McLanny leaned out her door, which opens onto the hallway just a few feet past the base of the stairs.

  “Mr. Sawtelle?” she said. “Is that you?”

  “Martha,” I said, turning only my head. I’m sure it looked odd. Martha was dressed in her nurse’s whites. About to head off to work, I suppose. “What’s cooking?”

  “Sorry to bother you, but our freezer has gone all frosty inside. I think we need to change the settings, but you said talk to you first.”