Dragon Tears (22 page)

Hurry on.

Pee. He can smell pee. People pee. Different kinds of people pee. Interesting. Ten, twenty, thirty different pee smells, none of them real strong but
there
, lots more people pee than he had ever smelled inside anyplace anytime. He can tell a lot from the smell of people’s pee, what they ate, what they drank, where they’ve been today, whether they’ve rutted lately, whether they’re healthy or sick, angry or happy, good or bad. Most of these people haven’t rutted in a long time, and are sick one way or another, some of them bad sick. None of the pee is the kind of pee that’s fun to smell.

He smells shoe leather, floor wax, wood polish, starch, roses, daisies, tulips, carnations, lemons, ten-twenty-lots of kinds of sweat, chocolate good, poop bad, dust, damp earth from a plant pot, soap, hair spray, peppermint, pepper, salt, onions, the sneeze-making bitterness of termites in one wall, coffee, hot brass, rubber, paper, pencil shavings, butterscotch, more pine trees in a bucket, another dog. Interesting. Another dog. Somebody has a dog and brings its scent in on their shoes, interesting dog, female, and they track the scent around the long narrow place. Interesting. There are countless other odors—his world is odors more than anything—including that strange scent, strange and bad, bare-your-teeth bad, enemy, hateful thing, smelled before, policeman smell, wolf smell, policeman-wolf-thing smell, there, got it again, this way, this way, follow.

People are chasing him because he doesn’t belong here. All sorts of places people think you don’t belong, though you never smell as bad as most people, even the clean ones, and though you aren’t as big or crashing around with so much noise and taking up so much space as people do.

Bad dog, the woman says, and that hurts him because he likes the woman, the boy, is doing this for them, finding out about the bad policeman-wolf-thing with the strange smell.

Bad dog. Not true. Good dog. Good.

Woman in white, coming through a door, looking surprised, smelling surprised, trying to stop him. Quick snarl.
She jumps back. So easy to scare, people. So easy to fool.

The long narrow place meets another long narrow place. More doors, more odors, ammonia and sulphur and more kinds of sick smells, more kinds of pee. People live here but also pee here. So strange. Interesting. Dogs don’t pee where they live.

Woman in the narrow place, carrying something, looks surprised, smells surprised, says,
Oh, look, how cute.

Give her a wag of the tail. Why not? But keep going.

That scent. Strange. Hateful. Strong, getting stronger.

An open door, soft light, a space with a sick woman lying on a bed. He goes in, suddenly wary, looking left and right, because this place reeks of the strange odor, the bad thing, the floor, the walls, and especially a chair, where the bad thing sat. It was here for a long time, more than once, lots of times.

The woman says,
Who’s there?

She stinks. Faint sour sweat. Sickness but more than that. Sadness. Deep, low, terrible unhappiness. And fear. More than anything else, the sharp, lightning-storm, iron smell of fear.

Who’s there? Who is it?

Running feet in the long narrow space outside, people coming.

Fear so heavy that the strange-bad odor is almost blotted out by the fear, fear, fear, fear.

Angelina? Is that you? Angelina?

The bad scent, thing scent, is all around the bed, up on the bed. The thing stood here and talked to the woman, not long ago, today, touching her, touching the white cloth draped over her, its vile residue there, up there in the bed, rich and ripe up there in the bed with the woman, and interesting, oh-so-very interesting.

He races back to the door, turns, runs at the bed, leaps, sails, one paw catching the railing but otherwise clearing all obstacles, up with the sick and fear-soaked woman, plop.

A woman screamed.

Janet had never been afraid that Woofer would bite anyone. He was a gentle and friendly dog, and seemed incapable of harming a soul except, perhaps, the thing that had confronted them in the alleyway earlier in the day.

But when she burst into the softly lighted hospital room behind Angelina, and saw the dog on the patient’s bed, for an instant Janet thought it was attacking the woman. She pulled Danny against her to shield him from the savage sight, before she realized Woofer was only straddling the patient and sniffing her,
vigorously
sniffing but nothing worse.

“No,” the invalid cried, “no, no,” as if not merely a dog but something out of the deeper pits of Hell had leapt upon her.

Janet was ashamed of the commotion, felt responsible, and was afraid of the consequence. She doubted that she and Danny would be welcome to take meals in the Pacific View kitchen any longer.

The woman in the bed was thin—beyond thin, wasted—and so pale, as softly radiant as a ghost in the lamplight. Her hair was white and lusterless. She seemed ancient, a shriveled crone, but some indefinable aspect of her made Janet think the poor soul might be much younger than she appeared.

Obviously weak, she was struggling to rise slightly from her pillows and ward off the dog with her right arm. When she became aware of the arrival of those pursuing Woofer, she turned her head toward the door. Her gaunt face might once have been beautiful but was now cadaverous and, in one respect at least, nightmarish.

Her eyes.

She had none.

Janet shuddered involuntarily—and was glad she had shielded Danny, after all.

“Get it off me!” the woman shrieked in terror out of proportion to any threat that Woofer posed. “Get it off me!”

At first, glimpsed in the gray and purple shadows, the invalid’s eyelids merely appeared to be closed. But as the lamplight fell more directly across her drawn face, the true horror of her condition became apparent. Her lids were sewn shut like those of a corpse. The surgical thread had no doubt long ago dissolved, but upper and lower lids had grown together. Nothing existed immediately beneath the flaps of skin to support them, so they sagged inward, leaving shallow concavities.

Janet felt sure the woman had not been born without eyes. Some terrible experience, not nature, had stolen her vision. How severe must the injuries have been, if physicians had concluded it wasn’t possible to install glass eyes even for cosmetic reasons? Dire intuition told Janet that this blind and shriveled patient had encountered someone worse than Vince, and more cold-blooded than Janet’s own reptilian parents.

As Angelina and a male orderly closed in on the bed, calling the blind woman “Jennifer” and assuring her everything was going to be all right, Woofer leaped to the floor again and foiled them with another unanticipated move. Instead of making directly for the door to the corridor, he streaked into the adjoining bathroom, which was shared with the room next door, and from there scrambled into the hall.

Holding Danny’s hand in hers, Janet led the chase this time, not solely because she felt responsible for what had happened and was afraid that their dining privileges at Pacific View were on the verge of being canceled forever, but because she was eager to leave the shadowed, stuffy room and its mealy-skinned, eyeless resident. This time the chase led into the main hall and from there into the public lounge.

Janet damned herself for ever letting the mutt into their lives. The worst thing wasn’t even the humiliation he’d
brought them with this prank, but all of the attention he was drawing. She feared attention. Huddling down, keeping quiet, staying in the corners and shadows of life was the only way to reduce the amount of abuse you had to take. Besides, she wanted to remain virtually transparent to others at least until her dead husband had rested under Arizona sands for another year or two.

Woofer was too fast for them even though he kept his snout to the floor, sniffing every step of the way.

The evening receptionist in the lounge was a young Hispanic woman in a white uniform, hair in a ponytail secured by a red ribbon. Having risen from her desk to check out the source of the oncoming tumult, she assessed the situation and acted quickly. She stepped to the front door as Woofer flew into the lounge. She opened it, and let him shoot past her into the street.

Outside, breathless, Janet halted at the bottom of the front steps. The care home was east of the coast highway, on a sloped street lined with Indian laurels and bottlebrush trees. The mercury-vapor streetlamps shed a vaguely blue light. When a fluctuant breeze shivered branches, the pavement crawled with jittering leaf shadows.

Woofer was about forty feet away, dappled by the blue light, sniffing continuously at the sidewalk, shrubs, tree trunks, curb. He tested the night air most of all, apparently seeking an elusive scent. From the bottlebrush trees, the storm had knocked down scores of bristly red blooms which littered the pavement, like colonies of mutant sea anemones washed up by an apocalyptic tide. When the dog sniffed at these, he sneezed. His progress was halting and uncertain but steadily southward.

“Woofer!” Danny shouted.

The mutt turned and looked at them.

“Come back!” Danny pleaded.

Woofer hesitated. Then he twitched his head, snapped at the air, and continued after whatever phantom he was pursuing.

Fighting back tears, Danny said, “I thought he liked me.”

The boy’s words made Janet regret the unvoiced curses she had heaped upon the dog during the chase. She called after him, as well.

“He’ll come back,” she assured Danny.

“He’s not.”

“Maybe not now but later, maybe tomorrow or the day after, he’ll come home.”

The boy’s voice trembled with loss: “How can he come home when there’s no home to find us at?”

“There’s the car,” she said lamely.

She was more acutely aware than ever that a rusted old Dodge was a grievously inadequate home. Being able to provide no better for her son suddenly made her heart so heavy that it ached. She was troubled by fear, anger, frustration, and a desperation so intense that it made her nauseous.

“Dogs have sharper senses than we do,” she said. “He’ll track us down. He’ll track us down, all right.”

Black tree shadows stirred on the pavement, a vision of the dead leaves of autumns to come.

The dog reached the end of the block and turned the corner, moving out of sight.

“He’ll track us down,” she said, but did not believe.

Stink beetles. Wet tree bark. The lime odor of damp concrete. Roasting chicken in a people place nearby. Geraniums, jasmine, dead leaves. The moldy-sour scent of earthworms rutting in the rain-soaked dirt of flowerbeds. Interesting.

Most smells are now after-the-rain smells because rain cleans up the world and leaves its own tang afterwards. But even the hardest rain can’t wash away
all
of the old smells, layers and layers, days and weeks of odors cast off
by birds and bugs, dogs and plants, lizards and people and worms and cats—

He catches a whiff of cat fur, and freezes. He clenches his teeth at the scent, flares his nostrils. He tenses.

Funny about cats. He doesn’t hate them, really, but they’re so chasable, so hard to resist. Nothing’s more fun than a cat at its best, unless maybe a boy with a ball to throw and then something good to eat.

He’s almost ready to go after the cat, track it down, but then his snout burns with an old memory of claw scratches and a sore nose for days. He remembers the bad things about cats, how they can move so fast, slash you, then go straight up a wall or tree where you can’t go after them, and you sit below barking at them, your nose stinging and bleeding, feeling stupid, and the cat licks its fur and looks at you and then settles down to sleep, until finally you just have to go somewhere and bite on an old stick or snap a few lizards in two until you feel better.

Car fumes. Wet newspaper. Old shoe full of people foot smell.

Dead mouse. Interesting. Dead mouse rotting in the gutter. Eyes open. Tiny teeth bared. Interesting. Funny how dead things don’t move. Unless they’re dead long enough, and then they’re full of movement, but it’s still not them moving but things in them. Dead mouse, stiff tail sticking up in the air. Interesting.