Chapter 14- Doggy Gripes
Who do you bring to the stand when you want to prove something as a fact?
That was his way with explaining things to her- whether they had to do with her future as a lawyer or not. Sometimes, it felt as though he was always patronizing her, never taking her seriously. She had heard the way he addressed more than a few of the other people who came to him for help. Never once had she gotten the impression that he ever talked the way he did to her to anybody else.
She was hoping that he would offer some warmth and reassurance, but again, it was all about her learning from him and practically nothing else, let alone any crises going on in her life.
When she left, she had been left with a job of sorts. She had been given the address of some man who lived in a part of the city she had never gone through before, and was told that she would get an appointment with who Nick referred to as the only person he would pay his time to in listening and learning things about with the afterlife.
Hearing that Nick had actually had his own source for something like psychics and ghosts had been a strange experience for Molly. She had known that the man was more open-minded than anyone- even those who were close to him- would have ever believed, based on his no-nonsense presence that he had. But knowing a person that was what he referred to as his source for the afterlife was going a little further than the usual open-minded person.
It was two days following what had, to Molly, amounted to a lecture that she was riding in a taxi, sitting in the back seat next to her large dog after begging the driver and promising fifteen dollars more than she would have had to pay for the ride. She was not on good terms with the dog at the time, actually. She had not planned on taking the dog for what was summing up to be one expensive car ride. The dog had been acting strange- heck, he had actually barked at her for the first time since the day she had encountered him back in the junkyard. And he did not stop barking, all the way from when she came out of her shower earlier that afternoon and up to the time she had her hand wrapped around the door knob. It was not his incessant barking that had worried Molly, although it was, admittedly, a concern for her to have to deal with a few people bugging her down the line for her dog's barking.
What had brought Molly to the decision that she could not leave Behemoth in her apartment was when he suddenly stood on his hind legs as she was about to open the front door and he pinned her to the door.
It was the single most frightening moment that Molly had experienced with the large and normally docile dog since she had brought him with her back home. The dog was so large that his upper legs rested against her shoulders- and she was muzzle-to-face with the unbelievably large rottweiler.
It did not matter to Molly then that she had spent two relatively issue-less seasons with the animal. Her fear that she had experienced upon meeting the dog in the junkyard came back in full force with the pressure of the dog pinning her against the door. Molly's heart beat a rapid, mad beat in her chest, and for a moment, she feared that she would have a heart attack at the shock of it.
She didn't know what to expect after the initial shock of the dog pinning her- but she couldn't help but assume that the dog would do something. Maybe gnaw her face off, or something equally as unexpected . The thought that he would do what most big dogs would do when jumping up on their owners- licking their owner's face- was one of the last things on her mind at the time.
The dog, however, seemed content to stare at her, almost as a person would. To say it unnerved her would've been like explaining what a Christmas tree looks like to somebody who's never seen one as a twig with a single light bulb attached to its top.
The dog's brown eyes seemed almost endless in their depth, and always seemed to be, impossible, she knew, but full of a complete understanding of what was going on inside of her mind. She tried to push the dog off of her, but she was quickly halted by the sound of a soft growl coming from the powerful animal's throat.
Molly had no idea as to what to do- and was often the case with her, no matter how great her fear was, her annoyance, or anger with her inability to take care of the situation she was in, took hold and gave her the strength to overpower her fear. Gritting her teeth, the memory of their first encounter in her head, Molly stared the dog down.
"You have to get off of me. Now, Beh."
The dog didn't move. Which was alright- she had not expected the dog to understand her in the least. She tried reaching for the door knob behind her again, tried trying to get the dog off-balance so she could try to break for the door, then tried, again, to reason with the animal. None of it worked in the least.
Fed up, she angrily asked the dog what it was it wanted. In her mind, she was trying to think of exactly how late she was going to be for her mentor's psychic friend's appointment. It was silly, to be sure, but the thought of not showing up to something for her on time made Molly bristle up in rage.
It was after she asked the dog what it wanted that she was aware that it was no longer looking up at her. His head was pointed downwards. At first, Molly looked down at the floor, trying to see what it was that the dog was looking at. There was nothing on the floor.
Tired of it, Molly opened her mouth to tell the dog to get off of her for perhaps the millionth time, or, perhaps, curse at him. As she did, however, her mind finally registered the sight of the deep green of his leash trailing out from his great neck to hang down, almost like a long tail. He was wearing his leash.
It was a bit of a battle for Molly to remain calm in the taxi. She had paid more than she should have for a single taxi ride, and all because of yet another quirk that her dog seemed to have developed- and when she had checked the time on her cell phone, she realized that she was fifteen minutes late from when she had planned on getting a taxi. She was so angry that she could barely stand to look over at the dog- who was sitting on the other side of the seats, looking, for all of the world, like any other normal passenger with the way he was staring out of the window. He was sitting on his ass, his lower body facing the driver's seat, while he looked out the window with a look of almost bored indifference. Molly wanted, for the twentieth or thirtieth time that afternoon, to land a hit on the beast, if only because of its gall to behave bored after what she had had to go through.
They arrived at the address that Molly had told the driver almost exactly a half an hour later. To her surprise, she actually lived closer to the mysterious psychic's home- and the particular cul-de-sac he lived in- than she had known or realized.
She had expected something straight from the spiritualist camps of the early nineteen hundreds- odd looking homes, trees everywhere, a séance or two on the grass and under the shade of a porch or a tall willow tree. She was let down when she saw the houses and the (she could barely believe it) white picket fences. In fact, the only thing that was worthy of any attention as anything that was differing from the norm of the white houses with their black shingles, their meticulously kept, perfectly manicured lawns, and near matching cars was the troupe of small boys walking down one of the sidewalks, the last trailing a new-looking Radio Flyer behind him.
Just the sight of the white houses was enough to make Molly feel uncomfortable in the place, as though she had fallen smack dab into the nineteen fifties vision of the American dream- complete with laughing children, the same house exterior over and over again, and perfectly maintained picket fences. Just to be sure that she was still in the two-thousands, she reached her hand into her purse and flipped open her cell phone. The house the taxi parked itself in front of was no different whatsoever from the ones around it, unless one counted the fact that its shutters were a slightly lighter shade of slate gray than the ones the houses around it had.
Molly had left the car alone- or, at least, tried to, before the combined noise of Behemoth snarling like some animal in a zoo display and the taxi driver yelling at her to come get her dog before he tasered it. That lead to Molly having to walk up to the beautiful one-story that was 2002 West Cordell with what was most likely the most sinister-looking rottweiler that the neighborhood had ever seen walking next to her.
Molly walked up to the door, adjusted the strap of the leash on her left wrist, the purse's own on her shoulder, and, trying to stop herself from scowling, jabbed the doorbell with her middle finger.
A moment of silence- was anybody home? Had he gotten fed up with waiting, and, as was more her own mentor's speed, did he go off somewhere just to spite her?- then she heard someone yelling from the back of the house. Molly could scarcely make out the words that were yelled out, but the voice was coming closer to the front door. As it did, she could finally make out that it was a male's voice yelling out, "I'm coming- stay on the stoop! I'm coming!"
The door finally opened to the face of somebody who Molly felt as though she had, astonishingly, seen before. She had to blink rapidly a few times before she could believe that she could, yes, recognize him from somewhere. But there was something off...
The man gave her what could best be described as an overly polite smile, one that seemed to stretch back all the way from the hollows of both of his cheeks. Then his gaze turned down to the rottweiler. His grin disappeared.
"Are- are you, uh," he said, still staring at Behemoth as though he could not believe what he was seeing on his doorstep. "Molly Christmas?"
"Molly Christoe, yes." she shifted uncomfortably in her tennis shoes. "I'm sorry about my dog. He's, uh..." it was then that Molly realized how stupid it would sound to anybody else that her dog had refused to allow her to leave without him. She thought, as quickly as she could, something that could possibly sound reasonable. "...he's been sick. I couldn't hire a dog sitter, so, uh..."
Oh, lord, could I possibly sound more like an unprofessional troglodyte?
The man never rose his gaze to Molly's face. He kept looking down at the dog, his face transforming into a look of distaste. He was silent for a moment before he, with his somehow recognizable face, finally turned to look at Molly's. Still looking as though he was not a fan of the situation, he licked his lips and said, "I hate dogs."
Molly's heart felt as though it had taken a free fall into her stomach. What would this man tell Nick once he got the chance? "I'm sorry. I had no other choice. Can you please find it in your heart to understand?"
The man's face remained unchanged as he stared at her. Then, as though trying to convey a point he had previously been unable to with the same words, he slowly repeated himself. Molly looked down at Behemoth, anger a living thing in her as the dog turned his deep eyes up at her.
Finally, the end of her awkward misery came when the man spoke again. "Can you tie the thi- the dog, up?"
Molly looked around her, then sighed, feeling like whacking her head against the cement of the sidewalk. "To what? He's so big, I'm sure he'd rip anything out when he wants to go somewhere." She was well aware that she had said when and not if.
The man swallowed, his Adam's apple bouncing in his pale throat. "Well, we can't stay out here. What we're talking about... just trust me when I say that if the neighbors find out what I'm into, then my wife'll never hear the end of it. I'd rather you just bring the dog in- he won't wet the floor or make a, uh, mess?- You sure about that?... Well, alright, I hope he's gone out today. Come on in." --