Last Days of the Dog-Men (3 page)

At first they thought the starving dogs had eaten her up: clothes, skin, hair, muscle, and bone. But then, four days later, some hunters found her wandering naked out by a reservoir, all scratched up, disoriented.

She'd been abducted, she said, and described tall creatures with the heads of dogs, who licked her hands and sniffed her privates.

“They took me away in their ship,” she said. “On the dog star, it's them that owns us. These here,” she said, sweeping her arm about to indicate Earth, “they ain't nothing compared to them dogs.”

O
N A WARM AFTERNOON IN
N
OVEMBER, A BEAUTIFUL
breezy Indian summer day, the wind steered Lois somehow in her Volkswagen up to the house. She'd been driving around. I got a couple of beers from the
fridge and we sat out back sipping them, not talking. Then we sat there looking at each other for a little while. We drank a couple more beers. A rosy sun ticked down behind the old grove on the far side of the field and light softened, began to blue. The dogs' tails moved like periscopes through the tall grass.

“Want to walk?” I said.

“Okay.”

The dogs trotted up as we climbed through the barbed-wire fence, then bounded ahead, leaping like deer over stands of grass. Lois stopped out in the middle of the field and slipped her hands in the pockets of my jeans.

“I missed you,” she said. She shook her head. “I sure as hell didn't want to.”

“Well,” I said. “I know.” Anger over Spike rose in me then, but I held my tongue. “I missed you, too,” I said. She looked at me with anger and desire.

We knelt down. I rolled in the grass, flattening a little bed. We attacked each other. Kissing her, I felt like I wanted to eat her alive. I took big soft bites of her breasts, which were heavy and smooth. She gripped my waist with her nails, pulled hard at me, kicked my ass with her heels, bit my shoulders, and pulled my hair so hard I cried out. After we'd caught our breath, she pushed me off of her like a sack of feed corn.

We lay on our backs. The sky was empty. It was all we could see, with the grass so high around us. We didn't talk for a while, and then Lois began to tell me what had happened at the yet's. She told me how
she'd held Spike while the vet gave him the injection.

“I guess he just thought he was getting more shots,” she said. “Like when I first took him in.”

She said Spike was so good, he didn't fight it. He looked at her when she placed her hands on him to hold him down. He was frightened, and didn't wag his tail. And she was already starting to cry, she said. The vet asked her if she was sure this was what she wanted to do. She nodded her head. He gave Spike the shot.

She was crying as she told me this.

“He laid down his head and closed his eyes,” she said. “And then, with my hands on him like that, I tried to pull him back to me. Back to us.” She said, No, Spike, don't go. She pleaded with him not to die. The vet was upset and said some words to her and left the room in anger, left her alone in her grief. And when it was over, she had a sense of not knowing where she was for a moment. Sitting on the floor in there alone with the strong smell of flea killer and antiseptic, and the white of the floor and walls and the stainless steel of the examination table where Spike had died and where he lay now, and in that moment he was everything she had ever loved.

She drained the beer can, wiping her eyes. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I just wanted to hurt you. I didn't realize how much it would hurt me.”

She shook her head.

“And now I can't forgive you,” she said. “Or me.”

I
N THE OLD DAYS WHEN
H
AROLD WAS STILL WITH
W
ESTLEY
and I was still with Lois, Harold had thrown big
cook-out parties. He had a pit we'd dug for slow-cooking whole pigs, a brick grill for chickens, and a smoker made from an old oil drum. So one crisp evening late in bird season, to reestablish some of the old joy of life, Harold set up another one and a lot of our old friends and acquaintances came. Then Phelan showed up, drunk, with the head of a pig he'd bought at the slaughterhouse. He'd heard you could buy the head of a pig and after an afternoon at the Blind Horse he thought it would be interesting bring one to the barbecue. He insisted on putting it into the smoker, so it would have made a scene to stop him. Every half hour or so, he opened the lid with a flourish and checked the head. The pig's eyelids shrank and opened halfway, the eyes turned translucent. Its hide leaked beaded moisture and turned a doughy pale. People lost their appetites. Many became quiet and left. “I'm sorry,” Phelan stood on the porch and announced as they left, stood there like Marc Antony in Shakespeare. “No need to go. I've come to bury this pig, not to eat him.”

Finally Harold took the pig's head from the smoker and threw it out onto the far edge of the yard, and Phelan stood over it a minute, reciting some lines from Tennyson. Ike and Otis went sniffing up, sniffing, their eyes like brown marbles. They backed off and sat just outside of the porch light and watched the pig's head steaming in the grass as if it had dropped screaming through the atmosphere and plopped into the yard, an alien thing, now cooling, a new part of the landscape, a new mystery evolving, a new thing in the world, there whenever they rounded
the comer, still there, stinking and mute, until Harold buried it out in the field. After that we pretty much kept to ourselves.

We passed our winter boarded up in the house, the cracks beneath doors and around windows and in the walls stuffed with old horse blankets and newspaper and wads of clothing falling apart at the seams, the space heaters hissing in the tall-ceilinged rooms. We went out for whiskey and dry goods and meat, occasionally stopped by the Blind Horse of an early afternoon, but spent our evenings at home. We wrote letters to those we loved and missed and planned spring reunions when possible. Harold's once-illicit lover, Sophia the surveyor, came by a few times. I wrote Lois, but received no reply. I wrote to my editor at the
Journal
and asked to return in the late spring, but it may be that I should move on.

It is March just now, when the ancients sacrificed young dogs and men to the crop and mixed the blood with the com. Harold is thinking of planting some beans. We've scattered the astonished heads of bream in the soil, mourning doves in their beautiful lidded repose. The blood of the birds and the fishes, and the seeds of the harvest. I found the skin of our resident chicken snake, shed and left on the hearth. He's getting ready to move outside. The days are warming, and though it's still cool in the evenings we stay out late in the backyard, sipping Harold's Famous Grouse to stay warm, trying in our hearts to restore a little order to the world. I'm hoping to be out here at least until midnight, when Canis Major finally descends in
the west, having traveled of an evening across the southern horizon. It rises up before sunset and glows bright above the pastures at dusk, big bright Sirius the first star in the sky, to wish upon for a fruitful planting. It stirs me to look up at them, all of them, not just this one, stirs me beyond my own enormous sense of personal disappointment. And Harold, in his cups, calls Otis over and strikes a pose: “Orion, the hunter,” he says, “and his Big Dog.” Otis, looking up at him, strikes the pose, too: Is there something out there? Will we hunt? Harold holds the pose, and Otis trots out into the field, restless, snuffling. I can feel the earth turning beneath us, rolling beneath the stars. Looking up, I lose my balance and fall back flat in the grass.

If the Grouse lasts we'll stay out till dawn, when the stellar dog and hunter are off tracing the histories of other worlds, the cold distant figures of the hero Perseus and his love Andromeda fading in the morning glow into nothing.

And then we will stumble into the falling-down house and to our beds. And all our dreams will roll toward the low point in the center of the house and pool there together, mingling in the drafts under the doors with last year's crumbling leaves and the creeping skinks and the dreams of the dogs, who must dream of the chase, the hunt, of bitches in heat, the mingling of old spoors with their own musty odors. And deep in sleep they dream of space travel, of dancing on their hind legs, of being men with the heads and muzzles of dogs, of sleeping in beds with sheets,
of driving cars, of taking their fur coats off each night and making love face to face. Of cooking their food. And Harold and I dream of days of following the backs of men's knees, and faint trails in the soil, the overpowering odors of all our kin, our pasts, every mistake as strong as sulfur, our victories lingering traces here and there. The house is disintegrating into dust. The end of all of this is near.

Just yesterday Harold went into the kitchen for coffee and found the chicken snake curled around the warm pot. Otis went wild. Harold whooped. The screams of Sophia the surveyor rang high and clear and regular, and in my half-sleep I could only imagine the source of this dissonance filling the air. Oh, slay me and scatter my parts in the field. The house was hell. And Ike, too, baying—out on the porch—full-lunged, without memory or sense, with only the barking of Otis to clue his continuing: already lost within his own actions, forgetting his last conscious needs.

SEEING EYE

T
HE DOG CAME TO THE CURB
'
S EDGE AND STOPPED.
The man holding on to his halter stopped beside him. Across the street, the signal flashed the words “Don't Walk.” The dog saw the signal but paid little notice. He was trained to see what mattered: the absence of moving traffic. The signal kept blinking. The cars kept driving through the intersection. He watched the cars, listened to the intensity of their engines, the arid whine of their tires. He listened for something he'd become accustomed to hearing, the buzz and tumbling of switches from the box on the pole next to them. The dog associated it with the imminent stopping of the cars. He looked back over his right shoulder at the man, who stood with his head cocked, listening to the traffic.

A woman behind them spoke up.

“Huh,” she said. “The light's stuck.”

The dog looked at her, then turned back to watch the traffic, which continued to rush through the intersection without pause.

“I'm going down a block,” the woman said. She spoke to the man. “Would you like me to show you a detour? No telling how long this light will be.”

“No, thank you,” the man said. “We'll just wait a little bit. Right, Buck?” The dog looked back over his shoulder at the man, then watched the woman walk away.

“Good luck,” the woman said. The dog's ears stood up and he stiffened for just a second.

“She said ‘luck,' not ‘Buck,' ” the man said, laughing easily and reaching down to scratch the dog's ears. He gripped the loose skin on Buck's neck with his right hand and gave it an affectionate shake. He continued to hold the halter guide loosely with his left.

The dog watched the traffic rush by.

“We'll just wait here, Buck,” the man said. “By the time we go a block out of our way, the light will've fixed itself.” He cleared his throat and cocked his head, as if listening for something. The dog dipped his head and shifted his shoulders in the halter.

The man laughed softly.

“If we went down a block, I'll bet that light would get stuck, too. We'd be following some kind of traveling glitch across town. We could go for miles, and then end up in some field, and a voice saying, ‘I
suppose you're wondering why I've summoned you here.' ”

It was the longest they'd ever stood waiting for traffic to stop. The dog saw people across the street wait momentarily, glance around, then leave. He watched the traffic. It began to have a hypnotic effect upon him: the traffic, the blinking crossing signal. His focus on the next move, the crossing, on the implied courses of the pedestrians around them and those still waiting at the opposite curb, on the potential obstructions ahead, dissolved into the rare luxury of wandering attention.

The sounds of the traffic grinding through the intersection were diminished to a small aural dot in the back of his mind, and he became aware of the regular bleat of a slow-turning box fan in an open window of the building behind them. Odd scents distinguished themselves in his nostrils and blended into a rich funk that swirled about the pedestrians who stopped next to them, a secret aromatic history that eddied about him even as the pedestrians muttered among themselves and moved on.

The hard clean smell of new shoe leather seeped from the air-conditioned stores, overlaying the drift of worn leather and grime that eased from tiny musty pores in the sidewalk. He snuffled at them and sneezed. In a trembling confusion he was aware of all that was carried in the breeze, the strong odor of tobacco and the sharp rake of its smoke, the gasoline and exhaust fumes and the stench of aging rubber, the fetid waves that rolled through it all from garbage bins in the alleys and on the backstreet curbs.

He lowered his head and shifted his shoulders in the harness like a boxer.

“Easy, Buck,” the man said.

Sometimes in their room the man paced the floor and seemed to say his words in time with his steps until he became like a lulling clock to Buck as he lay resting beneath the dining table. He dozed to the man's mumbling and the sifting sound of his fingers as they grazed the pages of his book. At times in their dark room the man sat on the edge of his cot and scratched Buck's ears and spoke to him. “Panorama, Buck,” he would say. “That's the most difficult to recall. I can see the details, with my hands, with my nose, my tongue. It brings them back. But the big picture. I feel like I must be replacing it with something phony, like a Disney movie or something.” Buck looked up at the man's shadowed face in the dark room, at his small eyes in their sallow depressions.

On the farm where he'd been raised before his training at the school, Buck's name had been Pete. The children and the old man and the woman had tussled with him, thrown sticks, said, “Pete! Good old Pete.” They called out to him, mumbled the name into his fur. But now the man always said “Buck” in the same tone of voice, soft and gentle. As if the man were speaking to himself. As if Buck were not really there.