The Water's Edge

Abstract

It seemed to ride in on a dark wave and get washed ashore with the plastic bottles and the seaweed, showing up one night along a rutted stretch of beach in front of a seafood restaurant with a blond wooden deck that overlooked the bay. Ashok, one of the waiters working the deck’s outdoor tables, saw something moving at the water’s edge, not sure what he was seeing but guessing it was a living thing struggling to stay afloat. He took a blind hop onto the hard-packed sand and ran down to the cold frothy surf where he scooped up whatever it was and wrapped it in his black cotton waiter jacket. He started back up the beach with the dog—by then, he could see that it was a dog, a tiny terrier type that seemed to weigh nothing—and went straight into the employees’ break room and laid it on the white chenille couch that was already so soiled and stained it wouldn’t matter if more refuse was dumped on it. The waitress on break, who always liked to know what was going on, had followed him down the hallway and now hovered expectantly in the doorway. The dog was one of those skeletal lapdogs that you don’t ever see out loose. It looked like it had been through a cyclone, a gash over its right eye and a white strip below its right ear, like a skid mark, where the fur had been scraped away. The padding of its paws was bruised reddish-purple. Now and then, it lazily licked at one of its wounds, the ones it could reach, but otherwise it just sat there vibrating with the cold. Particles of sand and odd scraps of ocean detritus, mostly little shards of shell and angel hair wisps of sea moss, still clung to parts of its body. It smelled like garbage. One of the bus boys dragged in a plastic tub from the kitchen, the one normally used to soak the big pans. It was filled partway with warm water. Ashok asked the waitress, whose name was Vita but who liked to be called V, to slowly lower the dog into the tub and hold onto it while he gently soaped up its chest and back and underbelly. The wa-