Last Days of the Dog-Men

SEEING EYE

THE 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.

“I miss colors, Buck,” the man would say. “It’s getting harder to remember them. The blue planet. I remember that. Pictures from space. From out in the blackness.”

Looking up from the intersection, Buck saw birds dart through the sky between buildings as quickly as they slipped past the open window at dawn. He heard their high-pitched cries so clearly that he saw their beady eyes, their barbed tongues flicking between parted beaks. He salivated at the dusky taste of a dove once he’d held in his mouth. And in his most delicate bones he felt the murmur of some incessant activity, the low hum beyond the visible world. His hackles rose and his muscles tingled with electricity.

There was a metallic whirring, like a big fat June bug stuck on its back, followed by the dull clunk of the switch in the traffic control box. Cars stopped. The lane opened up before them, and for a moment no one moved, as if the empty-eyed vehicles were not to be trusted, restrained only by some fragile miracle of faith. He felt the man carefully regrip the leather harness. He felt the activity of the world spool down into the tight and rifled tunnel of their path.

“Forward, Buck,” said the man.

He leaned into the harness and moved them into the world.