Dog (3 page)

I myself was escaping no more than a run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family, but the decade was perfect for me as well: I could be an activist to whatever quiet degree I wanted. I could be against wars. I could champion the underprivileged. But I didn't have to bomb banks to do it.

We were young and loved each other very much. Like two puppies playing in a big back yard someone else took care of (which any First World country is) we were enjoying life as the young should, the universe willing.

*   *   *

We took the same kind of bus back to the US we'd taken to get to the school. Not one of those stereotypes where a rickety bus designed for seventy people is carrying twice the number, with chickens and turkeys and luggage all roped to the roof. The kind plunging off cliffs in Third World countries and meriting a column one inch or less in our newspapers. Our bus was instead a fine, charter-line bus, and we'd be traveling once again in comfort. We'd packed our souvenirs--the dog-bowl, the other dog pot, other well-wrapped ceramics, and a small glass-framed portrait of our Lady of Guadalupe Jennifer loved—at the center of our luggage where it would be most protected if the driver happened to be a little rough.

Charter bus or not, we went off a cliff.

It was an area called Tepic, a jungle region, and night, and the road was full of sharp curves. The driver had driven it before many times, but when lightning struck the road right in front of him, while the passengers slept, experience didn't matter. He was blinded, and, though he tried to stop, lost control.

*   *   *

I woke in the flashing darkness, in the rain coming down in sheets. I was twenty feet or so from the bus, which had rolled down and down and finally stopped. I was lying on a bus window, which had been thrown free, too. I got up on the broken safety glass, stood, and began, like a frantic foghorn, to call Jennifer's name. I couldn't see except when the lightning flashed. People were screaming and moaning, their voices lost in the thunder.

I looked all around, kept looking, tried to see, was blind, then saw when the lightning fired again. I went to a body. It was moaning, but it wasn't Jennifer.

“Are you all right?” I asked in Spanish

“I don't know,” the man answered

“I have to find my wife. I'm sorry.”

“I understand,” he said.

There were people caught in the roof of the bus, which had separated into layers as the bus rolled and rolled and passengers had gotten caught in them. I pulled a woman from the roof in darkness, but knew by the touch of her hair, which was coarse, that it wasn't Jennifer. I laid her on the ground and tried to ask her whether she could walk. The Spanish wouldn't come.

I was still calling to Jennifer without knowing it, and a voice was answering in the distance. It was hers, but it was somehow on the other side of the bus. I made my way around the wreckage, and there, in the flashing darkness, Jennifer was sitting in the mud.

Lighting flashed again. There was a terrible smell, the same one we'd smelled near the dog's carcass in the gutter, but strong enough now to make you gag. Something moved just beyond her in the glistening brush. I blinked, not sure I'd seen anything at all; but the light came again, and there they were, looking at us, shadows with eyes like coins.
Coyotes
, I thought. What else would they be? But they looked more like pigs—
javalinas
—the kind we'd seen in pictures. Black, round, slick and scuttling in the darkness. Why were they so near us? Why were they so close to
her
?

Pigs eat anything, don't they?

It was a horrible thought. Had the smell of blood brought them? Was someone bleeding nearby? How could they smell blood when the other terrible smell was everywhere even in the rain and wind?

It made no sense. Wild animals—even coyotes or wolves—didn't rush in at accidents, with people screaming and moaning. They felt fear, didn't they?

“Can you stand up, honey?”

“I think so.”

It was the worst thing I could have suggested.

As she stood up, there was a sucking sound and in the next lightning flash I saw her leg, the tibia bone protruding as she tried to stand, and felt only numbness from the shock.

I started to say “Sit back down!” but the forms were moving around us. It wasn't my imagination, my own shock. The lightning didn't lie. They were
real.

What were they?

At the next flash I found a small tree branch broken off by the bus's roll. Jennifer began shrieking. A shadow had darted in toward her leg, grabbed it, was pulling at the protruding bone.

I swung, connected, and the thing darted away, but three others arrived and pulled at her bare leg. I kept swinging the branch, sometimes hitting them, sometimes hitting Jennifer. They weren't interested in me. I swung again, and one whose teeth—long things flashing yellow and red in the lightning—were sunk into Jennifer's leg rolled away, injured, even as another took its place. The branch had broken.

The lightning showed me a piece of metal siding—something the bus had lost in its rolling—and I had it in my hand and was swinging it, too, shouting “Help!” at the top of my lungs in both languages, though the roar of torrential rain and thunder made the shout a whisper.

Would Jennifer in her shock and pain faint? Would the shadows get to her face and throat?

“Lean on me! We need to get to the others!”

As I kept swinging, knocking forms away from her, we moved downhill toward the bus. There, people seemed to have a light and were shouting back and forth.

I saw something else then—something bigger than the coyote-pigs—long-legged, heavier than any Doberman and hungry because (a voice whispered to me)
Death calls it.

We were going to die. The creature was too big, the wrinkles in its face too terrible. The creatures were nipping at her legs—mine now, too, so I would trip—and now the bigger shadow was trotting toward us.

Then a man—a big man with a piece of metal in his hands, too—and three smaller men were beside us, asking in accented English, “You okay?”

“There are
javalinas
.…” I muttered, dizzy.

“There are no
javalinas
.”

“There are
javalinas
!” I said again.

The big man ignored me. He and the other three shined flashlights on Jennifer, all over her, then to her bad leg, which one of the smaller men crouched beside, inspecting it. They spoke fast “kitchen” Spanish to each other, called to someone by the bus for a blanket, and within seconds had Jennifer cradled in it, one man at each corner of the
serape
as they climbed up the ravine with her.

When I looked back, the forms were gone.

Sometimes,
I remember thinking deliriously,
you
can
defeat Death. People can help you do it.

*   *   *

Jennifer lost her leg. Too much necrotic tissue, the doctors said, and nerve and marrow damage, and more osteomyelitis than they'd expected. It was the saddest thing I'd ever known, and neither of us did well when she had the surgery. She had to learn how to walk on just one leg, and prostheses were not very sophisticated in those days. She did her best, and, as her body healed—and her mind tried to—I spent every moment I could with her. With the loss of her federal teaching job, I had to take a part-time job at a discount department store. Friends spelled me, and her mother—without telling her father, who'd been mad at Jennifer since she married me—and was somehow mad at her even now—sent us some money to help us through.

After six months, her spirits began to return. Writing thank-you notes to everyone who'd been there for her helped, as did funny movies, the drop-bys of friends at all hours, and visits from her mom and mine.

Then the dogs found us again.

We lived in an apartment building not far from the Upper Bay. There were parks between us and the water, and the Upper Bay was connected to estuaries, a creek, and marshlands where coyotes and bobcats and other wildlife felt safe enough to make forays into the residential areas.

I stepped outside one night, and there at the top of our outside stairs one of them—fat and dark and short-legged—sat in the dim light of the one porch bulb. I shouted, but it didn't move. I went inside to get a hammer, and when I came back, it was gone.

I didn't tell Jennifer because I didn't want to believe it. It could have been any ugly dog, couldn't it? And there was only one, not a pack.

A week later, at a park, toward sunset—picnicking with friends from college—Jennifer went to the restroom by herself. A moment later she screamed.

“They're here!” she babbled when I reached her. Our friends, who'd run over to her with me, had no idea what she meant.

I didn't argue. I'd seen one on the stairs. She'd just seen three. They'd followed her into the restroom. One had darted toward her good leg, and she'd struck it with her cane.

“Dogs,” we explained to our friends. “We had a scare with them in Morelos. We're still shaky.”

*   *   *

I still hadn't yet given the dog bowl to Tony for the simple reason that I wasn't sure what I felt about it now, wasn't sure whether it was something you should give a friend.

Before we left Mexico I'd told Jennifer what the anthropologist had said—about not taking it with us. She'd laughed too. “Of course we're taking it with us,” she'd declared.

The night of the restroom event, however, she said to me in the darkness of our bedroom:

“I'm scared. They're not ordinary dogs, David. I think we should get rid of the bowl.…”

“I agree.”

We got up, turned on the lights, and put newspaper down on the living room rug. We broke the dog-bowl into tiny pieces with a hammer, then threw everything into the building's dumpster. Then we smudged the apartment with sage smoke. Why? Because that is what our New Age friends did with ghosts and other supernatural things. What else could we do?

*   *   *

Two nights later there were four of them on our stairs, and a week later one of them knocked Jennifer over by the car in broad daylight as we were getting in to go shopping. When we called animal control, they didn't believe us. Why would they?

We called her mother, told them she missed home, her family, even her dad, how she wasn't doing very well, and could they take us in for a couple of months until her spirits improved?

Her father softened, especially after we talked a couple of times. The idea of her coming home seemed to touch him. Her parents had a carriage house we could stay in, in a very nice development called Anderson Place. Woods of pine and oak bordered the development. The neighborhood of course had dogs, but we'd be two thousand miles away from our apartment and the border.

We'd been there for just two weeks when Jennifer disappeared. She'd gone out to get something from the car, which was parked on the gravel driveway by the woods.

Her body was found two days later in those woods. Something had torn it to pieces, removing the belly. I saw the photographs, but much later. They wouldn't let me see the body.

I couldn't think for weeks. I couldn't feel a thing, but I did what I could. I functioned. My nightmares had more than enough
feeling
to them.

There were police interviews and local media interviews, and finally the world stepped back.

I stayed with her parents for a while. They were devastated and perhaps felt guilty, as parents do.

I needed to walk the woods—in the day and in the night, with a flashlight and a rifle I'd bought—looking for them, for any evidence of them, and, when I found nothing, to let go of this too.

It wasn't the bowl, I realized in the end.

It was Jennifer.

Death had chosen her—the anthropologist would have told me—and we'd thwarted it for a time. But the dogs knew, he'd say, that she'd been chosen—“Death always tells them”—and would not give up.

Yes, we'd brought the ancient bowl back, and we shouldn't have, but there was more—something much more important:

The civilization begun by the Chichimec, the Dog People, had stretched from Mexico up as far north as St. Louis and east to Louisiana. Their descendants had been, among other tribes, the Natchez—

—her family's secret.

They were in her blood.

“The dogs knew,” Rocha would have said.

*   *   *

I returned to Morelos and have been teaching English here for decades now. But this isn't really why I'm here. I took hunting lessons long ago and go out with boar hunters into the forests of Sinaloa, Nayarit and Jalisco whenever I can. My Spanish is excellent now. When you have a goal, you can learn a language fast. I don't romanticize this country any more than I romanticize anything these days, but a part of me does remember how happy Jennifer was, here with the pottery we both loved.

I pretend to hunt for boar, but I am looking for something else. I have not seen the dogs again, either kind, but I will see them when the time comes. I'll take as many of the ugly things with me as I can, leaving their flesh to rot and their souls to drift for eternity without a taste of my flesh.

I will certainly be tasting theirs.

—the end—