Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin

recognizing the need to balance decisive action with the possibility of escape. In the eighth grade, just before we entered the war, I was molested by a pederast, the so-called dean of men, who pushed me down and grabbed for my private parts. Though we were alone in a deserted hallway, we were not quite alone, for the school dog, an old Labrador named Cabot, lay in the corner like a shadow.
    In our biology class we had been studying muscle power, and as an illustration the instructor had used Cabot to bite upon a compression-meter. Evolution, he explained, had favored those dogs who could crack the bone and get the marrow. The compression-meter had been the handle of Lewis Teschner's tennis racquet, sliced in half, with a stiff spring between the two parts. To hold the apparatus together, the biology instructor had used the tape that we wrapped around our wrists in boxing class. Cabot was a sweet-tempered and unassuming dog who had never bitten anyone in his life, but for several years he had been rewarded with kisses, pats, and dog biscuits for sinking his teeth deeper and deeper into the compression-meter. As the object was to increase the force and tighten the hold, he had been trained to bite, to bear down, and never to give up.
    I thought I had had it. The dean of men was 6'5" tall, 250 pounds, a natural-born fighter, and the boxing coach. As he pummeled and grappled me in unspeakable combinations, I saw, through the fog of rape, that his wrists were taped. He had either just taught a boxing class or was about to teach one.
    Another second and I had made the connection. "Bless you, Cabot!" I screamed. This, somehow, excited the dean of men, but it also got Cabot to his graying feet, tail swinging back and forth. I looked at his smiling dog's face, and, hardly able to speak, I said, "Test, Cabot, test!"
    Cabot lifted his head in readiness, as dogs will, and looked about for the compression-meter. He found it—he thought—and approached, just as he had been taught to do in class. He wagged his tail. "Bite, Cabot, bite!" I commanded. And he did.
    This dean of men immediately disengaged from me, the object of his affection, and rolled onto the floor. "Bite, bite, bite!" I chanted, just as we had done in class. "Bite, bite, and never give in!" And that dear dog cracked the bone, got to the marrow, and did not ever have to pay for it, because, to my never-ending satisfaction, the dean of men implicated a phantom bulldog that he claimed, to universal astonishment, had been lying in ambush near the urinals.
    On the way from the Tombs to Château Parfilage I was accompanied by a New York City homicide detective, a nineteenth-century Irishman by the name of Grays Spinney. The judge knew that a straitjacket and certain requirements of nature do not go well together, and, mindful of the cruel and unusual punishment clause in the Constitution, had provided both himself and me with a way out. As soon as we were beyond the three-mile limit, Spinney sized me up and took off the restraints, though he replaced them for transit through Paris, Geneva, and the other cities of my eternal humiliation.
    On the Hudson and in the valley of the Shenandoah, spring was rising. The angle of the sun was perfect, the light not overbearing, the young grass short and uniformly green, the night euphoric with blooms and warm breezes. And the beautiful sights of spring were punctuated by banks of red and yellow flowers that looked like distant strokes of oil paint laid upon forest and field.
    But on the North Atlantic the waves were combat gray, the sky a miasma of spray and fog. Tiny icebergs the size of polar bears blew across the sea like marshmallows, and Spinney, who had spent his life dipping into the Tenderloin in pursuit of derbied gunmen, got me to the porthole a hundred times with sudden exclamations such as, "Jaysus Christ! A neked Iskimo woman ant a blooody fookin' kangaroo!"
    Though he was a detective of exalted rank, he was not