The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne Page A

other reason than somebody’s sick fantasy of what a park should be like. Is this the kind of town we want for our children? Do we want to be driven by fear, not even knowing who we’re afraid of?”
    Several people stood to applaud. “Who’s sick?” Steven Karpinski could be heard asking. Mrs. Beale felt light-headed and found herself squinting as if through smoke.
    Alicia Rabb, her neighbor from two doors down, took command of the microphone. Alicia was small and sharp-featured, with black, spiky eyes and a blond pageboy; she was given to what Mrs. Beale thought of as “ethnic accessories.” Tonight she wore a white chinchilla vest over her turtleneck, tight denim pants, and long feather earrings. Alicia leaned too close to the microphone and, through a painful squeal of feedback, said that because of the poisonings, her children were afraid to visit the park, which was why, after a lot of soul-searching, she had decided to support the ban on dogs.
    â€œChildren have a right to their games.” Her quavering voice boomed through the microphone. “They have a right to feel safe in the world and to wonder at nature. Native Americans have a phrase for childhood, it’s the Time of Awe.”
    â€œOr the awful time,” said a disrespectful person, quite audibly, from near the front row.
    It sounded like George. That was the sort of thing he would say. Mrs. Beale was sure it was George. What a boor. A narcissist. Tina was right. Perfectly understandable why she’d left him. At that moment Mrs. Beale was visited by an image of Tina splayed naked on a bed wearing her reading glasses, pointing instructively at the dark figure of a man poised above her. The nausea quivering in the pit of Mrs. Beale’s stomach took a lurch.
    â€œWe are all children in this world.” Alicia turned and gave the hall a black, spiky look. “Please.” She turned back and took hold of the microphone with both hands. “Protect the park. Protect us all. Give our children back their childhoods.”
    Very moving, thought Mrs. Beale faintly. She began to feel sorry for the Rabb children, until she remembered who they were: a pack of skinny, blue-eyed youngsters with chaff-colored hair and scabby legs, who were often barefoot, regardless of the weather, and wore expressions of malevolent innocence that frightened even the postman. They threw pine cones at bicyclists and squirted them with squirt guns, and one of them, the oldest boy, had been sent to counseling for something to do with a gerbil. Neighborhood cats avoided their yard. In September two of the Rabb girls ran through the neighborhood stealing flowers and ferns from people’s gardens, then tied them into sloppy bouquets to sell for five dollars each at the Harvest Fair—in some cases hawking flowers to the very people from whom they had stolen them—before being apprehended by Sybil, whose entire bed of dahlias had been decimated.
    Alicia sat down, looking proud and saddened in her chinchilla vest. The two people in line ahead of Mrs. Beale, both members of the Off-Leash Advisory Group, each spoke, but she was too preoccupied with her own increasing physical discomfort to listen.
    â€œHave we had dinner?” Steven Karpinski was asking.
    Mrs. Beale was the final speaker.
    She gazed at the microphone with distaste. A long, thrusting metal thing with a dark, globular foam knob.
    â€œLittlefield is being overrun by dogs,” she heard herself say in a thready, amplified voice, “and we seem to feel there is nothing we can do about it. That is why this terrible person is acting in such a dreadful fashion. But we can do something.”
    A good start. The crowd, which had grown restive after Alicia Rabb’s speech, now settled down and seemed to be listening. Her energy returning, Mrs. Beale went on to outline her proposal for a general ban on dogs in the park, enumerating the various ways in which dogs had