Last Days of the Dog-Men

A BLESSING

THAT AFTERNOON HER HUSBAND DROVE THEM OUT the old Birmingham highway in the wagon, a 1985 Ford LTD Country Squire he’d bought on a lark in these, the latter days of what she called her great gestation. It was a big, safe car. He drove slowly as always, taking it easy, never straining the wagon’s enormous transmission. The car sailed over humps in the road like a yacht over swells in the ocean, and plowed into low-lying dips with a grave and leveling balanced distribution of load.

They sat on the broad front seat as small as children, as if their feet weren’t actually touching the floor. The car’s long, broad interior even made her feel small, with her swollen middle and engorged, stretch-marked, leaky sacs — once girlish breasts she could cup in her palms. Sitting there, she felt like a penitent, pregnant twelve-year-old on an outing with her dad.

After a few miles her husband turned on the wagon’s left blinker, looked in the rearview mirror, checked once over his left shoulder, and turned, releasing a convoy of impatient vehicles gathered behind him. In her visor’s vanity mirror she caught flashes of the angry faces of drivers who watched the Ford mosey off down the little blacktop road.

It was getting toward late afternoon, the sun dropping in the sky and yellowing in the haze. On the left appeared a lush, rolling pasture where two piebald horses grazed in the shade of a grove and flicked their tails at horseflies.

“Oh, look,” she said. “Pintos. Let’s stop, just for a minute.” She’d ridden horses as a girl, and hoped she would again someday, with their child. Her husband eased the wagon onto the shoulder and came around to help her get out. He held her by the arm while she steadied her legs and rolled her weight from the ball of one swollen foot to another, over to the barbed-wire fence. The wire was rusty. They didn’t touch it or try to cross it into the pasture. He whistled a couple of times for the ponies, who looked up from grazing to gaze at them briefly. The smaller one toggled its ears in their direction, and then both bent back down to the sweet-looking grass.

“I wish we had an apple or something,” she said.

“We’d better get on,” he said. “We’ll be late.”

She lingered a moment. “It’s a good omen,” she said, “seeing the ponies.”

Omens weren’t as important to him as to her, she knew, but he was not unaffected by them. Once, after a breakup, she saw an early star right next to the moon, which was full and distinct as a white communion wafer she might reach up, take, and place upon her tongue. She hadn’t taken communion since she was a girl. It had been a very good sign.

He helped her back to the car, and they drove on down the road to a T intersection, where he turned right onto a bumpy lane pocked with potholes and ragged on the edges, as if it had been ripped from the middle of a better road and patched with surplus asphalt. The car jolted and rattled over a washed-out stretch. He slowed even more and looked over at her. She put both hands on her middle as if to steady it.

“I’m okay,” she said, patting herself. “Good shocks.”

They descended into a wooded ravine and crossed a small bridge over a creek. The water rushed beneath them over what looked like slate and plunged into a lower cut off to their left, disappearing into the thick, intertwined foliage of the woods. She wondered at what sort of wildlife crept in there, what strange small animals. Manimals, she’d called animals when she was a toddler. She’d had a sonogram a couple of months back, and was awed and a little frightened by the baby’s alien image on the screen, its wide dark eye sockets and oddly reptilian attitude in the womb. In some ways it was like the grainy, negative image of a nightmare, and yet she felt a profound and overwhelming love the moment she saw it. She was superstitious, she knew, because she had a vulnerable imagination.

The car rose, like an airliner groaning into flight, up the steep other side of the ravine. At the top of the hill he turned right again, onto a hard-packed dirt-and-gravel road that wound into the woods, climbed, and ended in a clearing on top of a knoll from which two narrow drives dropped away.

“I think we take the left one here,” her husband said. The drive he indicated, half the width of the dirt-and-gravel road, seemed to lead off into the air at the treetop level of broadleafs that grew down in the canyon. He eased the wagon up to the edge and they peered over it, where they saw a steep and rutted drive that curved sharply at the bottom into a clearing. Through the trees they could see part of a house and beyond that the slanting late-afternoon light glinting on water.

“There must be lakes all through these old canyons,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind living out here.”

The wagon’s engine idled alternately high and low, adjusting to the condenser cycling on and off. He turned off the air and rolled down every window in the car, using the control panel on his armrest, then turned off the car. The engine ticked like a conductor’s baton upon the music stand, the silence of the woods settled into their ears, and they began to hear the desultory drone of insects, the oddly loud, staccato songs of birds, and some low sound they couldn’t distinguish: water, a breeze in the trees, or both.

“It’s so quiet.”

“I could get used to it,” he said.

“Be careful with this dog, okay?”

“I will. I won’t get out if it doesn’t look right.”

“Okay,” she said.

“We don’t have to get another dog right now, if you don’t want to. It’s not really important.”

“No, it’s all right. I know you miss Rowdy.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I miss him.”

“I just want to make sure this dog’s — I don’t know — good-natured.”

“He’s got a hard act to follow.”

“I know. Rowdy was the best.”

“Yep,” he said. “He was.”

They peered again over the edge of the drive. The car was perched just there.

“Well,” he said, “we’d better get on.”

He didn’t crank the car again, but merely turned the ignition switch to On, dropped the gearshift to Neutral, and allowed the wagon to roll slowly off the knoll and down the narrow drive. It was steep and rutted with erosion, most of its gravel had washed away. The experience was like a slow-motion bronco ride. They were pressed forward into their seat belts and shoulder straps so that her arms actually hung forward toward the dash. She felt a faint, quick wave of nausea and almost wished she hadn’t come along.

At the bottom of the hill they turned into a muddy clearing in front of a small brick home and immediately were rushed by three friendly, barking, tail-wagging dogs. As he got out of the car, the dogs mobbed him, rising on their hind legs and raking his clothes with muddy paws, licking his hands. The dogs were so absurdly happy that she couldn’t suppress a rush of pleasure at seeing them. They wagged their whole rears, spines curling, tails whipping, and ran back and forth between her open window and her husband, desperate for both their attentions at once, transported into happy madness at their arrival. He looked back at her, delighted, and she laughed out loud.

“What great dogs,” she called out the window. Her husband was smiling, tussling with two of the dogs, a big thick-coated shepherd-husky mix with a massive head, and a medium-sized shorthaired dog with white and brown splotches like birthmarks: a plain mutt. The two dogs nipped at his hands and his wrists and pants cuffs. A smaller dog, like a Welsh corgi but surely some mongrel collie mix, wriggled around them, vying for space.

She felt it was safe to get out of the car, so she opened the door and, by rocking backwards a little bit first, rolled out onto her feet. The dogs rushed her but held back, as if sensing she required gentler handling. They brushed and bumped their shoulders and rumps against her, twining themselves around her knees and through her legs, whining in barely suppressed fits of joy. She reached down to scratch the little collie’s head and the dog went still, its soft brown eyes looking up into hers. A sudden heaviness in her chest almost brought tears to her eyes.

She knew what this was about, understood mood swings, irrational fears, hormonal problems. She was even brighter probably than her husband, who had earned his Ph.D. but kept his job teaching high school chemistry because he believed it was where he was most needed. She watched him tussle with the dogs, who’d trotted back over to him. She would have become a teacher, too, but for her somewhat fragile selfesteem, which combined with stage fright and sullen students to make the task impossible. Such failure made her angry and impatient with herself. She did not want to seem weak. In regular jobs she was disillusioned by the cynicism people used to survive; they wielded it like medieval broadswords, without grace and with callous indifference to what incidental damage might be done. The small, still dog whose soft coat she stroked with her palm was innocent of all that.

The other two dogs had come back to her, crowding out the smaller dog, and she knelt with determination into the chaos of whipping tails and thrusting snouts, braved the wet swipe of broad pink tongues across her face. She saw her husband straighten up and face the house, brushing his hands off on his khaki trousers as a short, thick man walked around the comer and approached them. He wore a neat flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of knee-high white rubber boots over the jeans leggings. His broad square face was cleanshaven and his hair was cut in a careless, outgrown flattop. She guessed his age at about fifty. The butt of a small pistol protruded from a short leather holster on his belt.

“Hello,” her husband said. “We called about buying a dog?”

The man nodded.

“Which one you want?”

Her husband paused, then looked at her.

“Well,” he said, looking at the dogs, who were wriggling and trotting back and forth between them and the man. The man paid the dogs no attention. “I spoke to someone — your wife? — and I think she said you had a young retriever mix. A golden.”

The man pointed briefly at the big dog.

“How about him?”

Her husband reached down to stroke the shepherd-husky’s head, and then looked at his wife where she knelt carefully, allowing the little collie and the brown-and-white dog to nuzzle her. She glanced at the house and saw that shades were drawn over the windows. Where there’d once been shrubs around the house were bare brown stalks, the gray earth around them worn and pocked with smooth depressions where she guessed the dogs lay cooling during the day. The screened door of a back porch hung open, its wire sections browned and splayed from their frames. She put her hands on her knees and pushed herself to her feet.

“Is the retriever around?” she said.

“Well, the retriever,” the man said, “I sold him.”

“That’s too bad,” her husband said after a moment. “When we spoke to your wife this morning she said we could come and get the retriever this afternoon.”

“Well,” the man said, reaching down to pick up a small fallen branch and toss it into the brush at the edge of the yard, “she don’t know what’s here and what ain’t. I had to get rid of that dog. He give me some trouble this morning.”

Her husband became somber and closed. He fixed his eyes on the other man, who then looked up and regarded them with disdain, it seemed: first her husband, and then her. It alarmed her to be looked at so directly. His eyes held no trace of compassion. He cared no more for them than he did for these dogs.

“All right, then,” her husband said. “You want to sell us one of these dogs?”

“No,” the man said. “Just take whichever one you want.”

“You’re giving them away?”

“That’s right.”

“We’d be glad to pay. I understood from your wife they’ve had their shots.”

The man seemed distracted. He hawked and spat an amoeboid glob onto the dirt.

“It really don’t make any difference to me,” he said. “These strays come up out the woods. She can’t stand their barking and carrying on. Take them all if you want to. Put them in that big station wagon and take them off.” He squared off and looked each of them in each face. “I don’t give a tinker’s damn. It wadn’t my ad in the paper.”

She saw her husband’s face slowly darken with anger. He pushed his hands into his pants pockets and she saw his lips tighten.

After a moment he said, “I can see there’s been a misunderstanding. I think we’ll just call it off.”

“Suit yourself,” said the man. He went back around the comer of the house. The big dog followed him, then in a second came trotting back to them.

Her husband had stood there a moment, looking at the ground, his face clenched, both fists jammed into his pockets. “We ought to take them all, that son of a bitch,” he said. He kneeled to pet the dogs again and they leapt to him, each desperately trying to get all of his attention. The little collie, squeezed out, began to growl. It tried to work its head in between the big dog and the brown-and-white dog and, when they wouldn’t let it, snarled and lunged for the brown-and-white dog’s throat.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Her husband jumped back and stood up. The collie growled and hung on to the brown-and-white dog’s throat, and the brown-and-white dog tried to get away by holding its head up and hopping backwards. But the little collie, pulled up onto its hind legs with the other dog’s hopping, held on tight. The brown-and-white dog began to cry in high, piercing yelps.

“Stop it,” the woman shouted at them. Her husband shouted, “Hey!” and clapped his hands. But the dogs, their wild eyes inches apart, ignored them.

The big dog, the shepherd-husky mix, tried to shoulder the collie away from the brown-and-white dog, failed, and then trotted happily over to her husband again, tail wagging.

The brown-and-white dog had lowered its neck to the ground and tried to roll over in submission, but the little collie, instead of letting go, yanked hard, and the brown-and-white dog hollered, loudly this time, and got back to its feet.

The owner came walking back around the comer from behind the house.

“She just attacked him,” the woman said.

The man reached down and grabbed the collie by the nape of the neck and pulled, but it hung on to the brown-and-white dog, who hollered even louder, yelping in pain. She could see small grooves of pink flesh where the collie’s teeth had tom the brown-and-white dog’s skin.

“She’s hurting him,” she said.

The man finally spoke.

“Goddamn you little bitch,” he said to the little dog.

“Can I help?” her husband said. “Where’s your water hose?” He stood a few feet apart from the dogs and the man, his arms helplessly at his sides.

The man reached to his waist and drew the small pistol and put it to the little dog’s head.

“No!” she said. The man looked at her.

“Jesus,” her husband said.

“You want her to kill him?” the man said to her. “Which one you want to die?”

She was in tears.

“Just make them stop,” she said.

“Get those dogs away from my wife,” her husband said, his voice strange with emotion. “Don’t shoot that gun. Get those dogs out of here.”

The man turned to her husband and said, “Just where the hell do you think you are?”

They stared at one another and she felt her heart seize down in her chest.

“No,” she said, almost to herself.

The two dogs, their eyes rolled back, were frozen in their struggle, the little dog’s teeth locked onto the other dog’s neck. For a moment, no one moved. The big dog, the shepherd-husky mix, paced nervously among them.

The man shoved the pistol back into its holster and grabbed both dogs by the loose skin behind their necks. He lifted them into the air and carried them, still attached teeth-to-throat, the brown-and-white dog crying the whole way, around back of the house to the lake. The woman and her husband followed partway and stopped as the man waded into the lake carrying the two dogs and then plunged them both into the water. When he brought them up again, the little dog had let go.

“Thank God,” she whispered. Her mouth and throat had gone dry with fear.

The brown-and-white dog paddled to shore and shook himself hard, the droplets clear and distinct as tiny glass beads in the slanting afternoon sunlight. He trotted away down the bank. The man waded out deeper with the collie, put both hands around her neck, shoved her under the water, and held her there.

Even from where they stood she could see him struggling to hold her under. His shirt was wet, and she could see the muscles on his thick shoulders bunch together with the strain. She could see air bubbles break the surface above where he held her. She could see the man’s neck turn a deep red.

She tried to speak but couldn’t. The muscles in her throat wouldn’t respond. She wanted to call out and claim the little dog, try to save her life, but she couldn’t move.

It took a long time. The late sunlight broke through the trees on the high ridge across the lake as if through a prism. The moment was incomprehensibly beautiful, full of grief. She felt the knotted fear in her heart dissolve, and a strange and deeply seated sense of loss washed through her. She wept in broken, childlike sobs and held her husband tight, his frame bent over her middle as if for protection, his lips next to her ear quietly saying shh, shh, shh, but she was lost in this. When she was done they were alone, the water’s surface undisturbed, and the sun gone down behind the high ridge across the lake.

Together they walked back to the car. He opened her door and helped her get in. They rode back up the steep and rutted drive without speaking. At the top of the hill, the brown-and-white dog and the shepherd-husky plunged from the woods and ran alongside the car down the dirt road, silent, and then dropped back, and stood in the road with their tongues out, watching them go.

When the car turned onto the blacktop road again the low sun’s light shot through gaps in the trees and hit the windshield straight-on, exploding. The glare was like a blow to her eyes. Her husband held his hand out before him and slowed the car to a crawl. She’d thrown up her own hands instinctively, but now she lowered them and held her eyes open. She saw a hot white hole bum into the air, the world around it black as smoldering paper. She felt the light go into her brain. She felt it move down through her and into her child, like the infusion of knowledge.