The Dog That Whispered (16 page)

She waited a long moment, anticipating.

“Do you ask God about this?” Pastor Killeen asked.

“No. Well, I did. Back then. A lot. And nothing happened. So I stopped asking. I figured that maybe he's broken, Wilson, I mean…and that maybe God was okay with that.”

Pastor Killeen reached out and took Gretna's hand.

“Start praying again. God does not want that. Ask him again.”

She waited.

“Can I ask Thurman to help him too?”

Pastor Killeen did not hesitate.

“You can, Gretna. And you should. Where one or two of us are gathered…”

She smiled back at him, a wan, weak, hopeful but not totally hopeful smile.

“He's a good boy.”

W
HY DID
I never take this trip before?” Hazel said aloud. “The scenery on this road has been absolutely breathtaking.”

Hazel, in her Quest, was just north of Crescent City, California.

A drive that could have taken four hours and change was taking double that time. She kept stopping and pulling to the side of the road and staring out at the ocean, watching the waves and the gulls and the clouds and the sun glistering off the water. By the time she arrived in California, the sun had set, and Hazel never liked driving after dark on roads she did not know. She found a modest, unstylish motel almost on the beach…well, it had a road between it and the water, but still.

She fell asleep to the sound of a foghorn sounding occasionally and woke to the same foghorn sounding almost incessantly. She opened the drapes in her room to look out and saw nothing, nothing at all—except a cocoon of white. Fog enveloped the hotel, and perhaps much of that section of the California coast.

Hazel prepared for the day, then walked down to the breakfast area, poured a cup of coffee, and joined two other hotel guests who were intently staring out the front doors of the motel, staring at the white nothingness that surrounded them all, everything gone from view except within a few yards' radius of a person. Beyond that, it was as if an individual simply walked through some manner of a space-time portal to be transported to another dimension.

“They say it'll burn off by noon,” one man said. If Hazel had to guess, he went with the semi truck and trailer that she had noticed in the farthest part of the parking lot when she arrived. She looked over to that area and saw nothing.

Maybe it's gone. Vaporized. Teleported, perhaps. Can they teleport big trucks?

“I hope so,” the other guest said, a middle-aged man in a crisp white shirt that was too snug on his belly and a sports coat with sleeves an inch short. “I need to be in San Fran by tonight.”

Hazel had read somewhere that no one who lives in San Francisco ever calls their town “San Fran.” So she assumed that he was some sort of traveling salesman who was not from there. And she surprised herself for not feeling sympathetic to his plight.

It's beautiful out there. And here. In the white. And all he sees is an inconvenience
.

The truck driver nodded to Hazel.

“Which way you headed, miss?”

Miss? Well that's nice…I guess
.

“South,” she replied. “I have to be in Phoenix eventually…but I'm not on any schedule.”

The truck driver nodded again.

“Nice not having a schedule.”

“It is,” Hazel replied. “It's only been a few days, but I'm getting used to it.”

“Vacation?” the traveling salesman asked.

“Something like that,” Hazel replied, and then wondered if being semi-mysterious and enigmatic about what she was doing was fair to others.

It might not be. But I have never been mysterious and enigmatic in my life. Feels good, in an odd way
.

“I have seven more years until I stop driving,” the truck driver said. “After that, I'm never driving anywhere ever again. I'm buying a condo somewhere that is within walking distance of everything. And if there's a place I can't walk to, then I ain't going there.”

Hazel wanted to say, “Amen, brother,” but didn't. She smiled instead and said, “I hear you.”

The traveling salesman was having none of it.

“At least the Wi-Fi here is fast. I gotta send some emails. Let people know I'm going to be late. You know, places to go, people to see.”

And with that he took his paper cup of coffee and trundled off back toward his room, apparently.

The truck driver and Hazel stared at the whiteness, and watched as it billowed and sailed in and around itself, like milk coursing with milk, like smoke mixing with smoke, where all is hidden, nothing remains, and everything has disappeared from sight.

Hazel thought it an apt analogy to her life.

What will I see when the fog clears?

“Pretty, ain't it? If it wasn't such a pain in the butt, that is,” the truck driver said.

“You're right about that.”

Coming out of the fog…is like being reborn, reborn out of blindness
.

Hazel smiled at the whiteness.

I should write that down. I'll never remember it if I don't
.

And even as she made her way to the front desk to ask for a pen and paper, the words were already slipping away, being rearranged, much like life itself.

That's good too
.

Thurman followed Wilson around the house over the next few days, growling, almost to himself, as if offering a commentary on Wilson and his behavior, all the while speaking in a more arcane canine language that Wilson was not privy to.

Wilson often stopped, midstep, as it were, and stared at the grumbling-to-himself Thurman, asking sharply and pointedly, “What?”

Thurman would then respond by looking up with his curious face, as if asking,
Whatever do you mean? I didn't say anything
.

Wilson knew better. He figured that Thurman was making some sort of snide comment but keeping it to himself.

The afternoon sun on this day was bright, but little sunlight reached the kitchen, since it faced the east. Reflected sunlight off the pool in back danced on the kitchen ceiling, an ever-widening trapezoid of shadows and light. Wilson often saw Thurman staring up at the mirrored show, as if trying to determine the source of such animation.

He was certain that dogs, even Thurman, did not understand the physics of sunlight glistening off the surface of a liquid.

Thurman looked up when Wilson entered the kitchen.

Thurman smiled and growled,
Swim?

It struck Wilson as a reasonable request, for once. Thurman often asked, and up until now Wilson had always said no. Thurman's requests had grown less frequent, but they did not stop altogether.

Anything to keep him from muttering to himself
.

So Wilson smiled back.

“Sure. You can go for a swim, Thurman. If you really want to.”

Thurman appeared astonished, and it took him several seconds for the positive reply to be made manifest in a wiggling, dancing, smiling dog. He shimmied all the way to the back door, and when Wilson opened it he hesitated another moment.

Swim?
he growled again.

“Go ahead, Thurman. I said it was okay. It's a hot day.”

With that second reassurance, Thurman raced toward the water and again leaped into the air, sailing with grinning abandon through the void and coming down with a furry, explosive splash. Once his head bobbed to the surface, he set off, paddling away, to the far end of the pool and then back again. He had made two entire circuits of the long reflecting pool by the time Wilson came out and stood at the shallow end, closest to the house.

Wilson watched as the dog so thoroughly enjoyed the experience, as if this was the pinnacle of all canine pleasures, or at least the apex of all retriever pleasures. Wilson took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he slipped off his shoes, reached down with a groan, and pulled off his socks. He hitched up the bottoms of his trousers and sat at the edge of the pool, lowering his feet and calves into the tepid water.

Thurman neared the shallow end, where he could stand on the bottom, with the water level at midchest. He stopped and stared incredulously, like a bird stares at a snake, readying to strike.

You wet
, he growled.

Wilson tilted his head, more amused than anything. “I'm allowed to do this, Thurman. It's my house. And I built this pool.”

Thurman grinned and turned and paddled back to the far end, splashing as much as he could, reveling under the fountain that pumped out in a gentle arc. When he turned back, he was still smiling.

And Thurman had stopped muttering.

For that, Wilson was eminently grateful.

Thurman paddled about, doing four more complete laps, climbing out and diving back in three times, shaking and re-shaking himself, creating a rainbow of water droplets each time. He lolled into the water, falling in sideways, now breathing a bit more deeply than usual, then paddled back to the shallow end, where he could stand, and instead of standing, he sat down, just his head, neck, and a portion of his shoulders out of the water. He bobbed a bit, as if his natural buoyancy kept him from being more firmly planted on the slate bottom. If that were the case, it did not appear as if he minded the slight, watery rocking one bit.

He looked up at Wilson, his tongue out, a huge smile plastered under his wet fur.

Good water
, he growled.

Wilson nodded.

“It is good. I don't think I have ever sat here like this. I mean, with my feet in the water. I sat on the back steps a lot and watched the water. But I don't think I ever felt it.”

Good wet. I like wet
, Thurman growled.

Wilson nodded in agreement.

Thurman's smile slowly evaporated, replaced by a more serene look, then his face morphed into one of concern, if Wilson was to guess the changeable expressions of a dog.

You should talk
, Thurman finally said.

Wilson closed his eyes for a long moment, knowing that this was a discussion he was having with himself, between two fractured facets of his own personality, and that Thurman, as a dog, was not speaking but merely growling in an odd way that Wilson chose to interpret as real words with real meaning.

He knew all that.

He reminded himself of that fact every time Thurman spoke.

And yet…and yet Thurman spoke sometimes—not always, though—in a way that Wilson would never speak, on subjects that Wilson would never discuss, even with himself. He would never say to himself…that is, one part of Wilson would never say to another part of Wilson that he “should talk.”

That's what threw Wilson, that's what perplexed and confounded him.

He didn't want to talk. He never wanted to talk. None of him, not any of the parts of him, ever wanted to talk. Not now. Not ever.

Thurman did not act like a part of Wilson. He didn't. Thurman was not merely a Wilson-formed projection, a carefully arranged figment of Wilson's overwrought psyche.

That's what confused Wilson. That's why he carried on these conversations with Thurman.

Because under all the layers of his degrees and schooling and trappings of academia and sophistication, he thought, at least at times, that Thurman was actually and really talking.

And Wilson did not want to take the chance that all of this was simply a figment of his imagination or the outgrowth of a decades-old psychosis or trauma or a severe, long-term manifestation of some horrible, long-buried post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that he thought mostly contrived.

And what's the harm, really?

“Talk about what?” Wilson replied, opening his eyes and squinting into the afternoon sun.

Past things
, Thurman growled.

Wilson thought about it.

“Why?”

That appeared to take Thurman by surprise, a little. He blinked several times, but maybe he was simply blinking at drops of water falling from his waterlogged eyebrows.

Then become human
.

Wilson thought he had him.

“Why? I'm already human.”

Thurman shook his head slowly.

Bunkum
, he snorted. Then he went on.
Broken. Past broken. Not human now. Not all human. Part human
.

Wilson felt close to peace, at least at the moment. The sun felt good on his face. For once, sunlight glinting off the water did not tighten up his chest, reminding him of afternoon patrols, flying low over the Mekong River. For once warm water did not remind him of the bathwater-warm swampland. For once, water was just water again, and sunlight was just sunlight.

“Why? What do you know about being human?”

Thurman did not look upset or angry or hurt. He stared back, unflinching.

Dogs are dogs
, he growled.
I good at dog. You not good at human
.

Wilson waited.

Dogs do not hide
, Thurman said.
Be human. Unhide
.

For a long moment there was silence, save the sound of buzzing insects, buzzing that grew louder and louder and louder…

Wilson closed his eyes and willed it all to stop, squeezed his eyes shut, tried to shut down his hearing and slow his breathing and become invisible. All those techniques used to work, but as he grew older, the old tricks had become less effective, to the point where he no longer knew what to do, how to escape, where to hide.

And that's when the tremors started, when the water began to feel alive, pulsing, wriggling, and the sunlight erupted into harsh shafts that blinded, confused, and dazed. He had to get up quickly, rushing to stand, pushing his palms into the wet grass that felt sticky, like honey, like blood, splashing out of the water, trembling, and his feet dripping, and his trousers wet at the cuffs, and his skin crawling, and he walked, no…he ran back into the house. He ran into the dimness, into the quiet, leaving his socks and shoes on the grass, and Thurman, gently bobbing in the water in the afternoon sun, growling softly to himself.