Timbuktu

5

THE CONCEPT OF THE FAMILY VACATION was entirely unknown to him. Back in Brooklyn as a pup, he had sometimes heard Mrs. Gurevitch use the word vacation, but never in any way that could be connected to the word family. Suddenly breaking off from her housework, Mom-san would plop down on the sofa, throw her feet up on the coffee table, and let out a long, passionate sigh. “That’s it,” she would say. “I’m on vacation.” According to this usage, the word seemed to be a synonym for sofa, or perhaps it was simply a more elegant way to describe the act of sitting down. In either case, it had nothing to do with families—and nothing to do with the idea of travel. Travel was what he did with Willy, and in all the years they had spent on the road together, he couldn’t remember a single instance in which the word vacation had crossed his master’s lips. It might have been different if Willy had been gainfully employed somewhere, but except for a few odd jobs picked up along the way (sweeping floors in a Chicago bar, messenger-service trainee for an outfit in Philadelphia), he had always been his own boss. Time had flowed without interruption for them, and with no need to break down the calendar into work periods and rest periods, no particular call to observe national holidays, anniversaries, or religious feast days, they had lived in a world apart, free of the clock-watching and hour-counting that took up so much of everyone else’s time. The only day of the year that had stood out from the others was Christmas, but Christmas wasn’t a vacation, it was a workday. Come December twenty-fifth, no matter how exhausted or hungover Willy might have been, he had always climbed straight into his Santa Claus costume and spent the day walking around the streets, spreading hope and good cheer. It was his way of honoring his spiritual father, he said, of remembering the vows of purity and self-sacrifice he had taken. Mr. Bones had always found his master’s talk about peace and brotherhood a bit too sappy for his taste, but painful as it sometimes was to see their dinner money wind up in the hands of a person who was better off than they were, he knew there was a method to Willy’s madness. Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise—and these were Willy’s exact words—why bother to go on living?

Alice was the one who first spoke the words family vacation to him. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and she had just come out to the yard with a clear plastic bag filled with turkey leftovers and stuffing—more miracles from Polly’s white kitchen. Before Alice emptied the food into his bowl, she squatted down beside him and said, “It’s all set, Sparky. We’re going on a family vacation. Next month when I’m off from school, Daddy’s taking us to Disney World.” She sounded so happy and excited about it that Mr. Bones assumed it was good news, and since it never occurred to him that he wasn’t included in Alice’s we and us, he found himself more interested in the food he was about to eat than in the possible consequences of this new term. It took him about thirty seconds to polish off the turkey, and then, after lapping up half a bowl of water, he stretched out on the grass and listened to Alice as she filled him in on the details. Tiger was going to love seeing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, she said, and even though she’d outgrown those childish things herself, she could remember how much she’d loved them when she was small, too. Mr. Bones knew who this Mickey Mouse character was, and based on the things he’d been told, he wasn’t too impressed. Who ever heard of a mouse with a pet dog? It was laughable, really, an insult to good taste and common sense, a perversion of the natural order of things. Any half-wit could have told you that it should be the other way around. Big creatures lorded it over small creatures, and if there was one thing he was certain about in this world, it was that dogs were bigger than mice. How puzzling it was for him, then, as he lay on the grass that Saturday afternoon in late November, to hear Alice talk so enthusiastically about their impending trip. He simply couldn’t understand why people would want to travel hundreds of miles just to see a pretend mouse. There might not have been many advantages to living with Willy, but no one could accuse Mr. Bones of not having traveled. He had been everywhere, and in his time he had seen just about everything. It wasn’t for him to say, of course, but if the Joneses were looking for an interesting place to visit, all they had to do was ask, and he happily would have led them to any one of a dozen lovely spots.

Nothing more was said about the subject for the remainder of the weekend. On Monday morning, however, when the dog overheard Polly talking to her sister on the phone, he realized how badly he had misunderstood what Alice had told him. It wasn’t just a matter of driving down to see the mouse and then turning around and heading home, it was two weeks of discombobulation and movement. It was airplanes and hotels, rental cars and snorkeling equipment, restaurant bookings and family discount rates. Not only was there Florida, there was North Carolina as well, and as Mr. Bones listened to Polly discuss the arrangements for spending Christmas in Durham with Peg, it finally dawned on him that wherever this family vacation was going to take them, he wasn’t going along. “We need a break,” Polly was saying, “and maybe this will do us some good. Who the hell knows, Peg, but I’m willing to give it a shot. My period’s ten days late, and if that means what I think it does, then I have some pretty fast thinking to do.” Then, after a short silence: “No. I haven’t told him yet. But this trip was his idea, and I’m trying to read that as a good sign.” Another silence followed, and then, at last, he heard the words that told him what family vacation really meant: “We’ll put him in a kennel. There’s supposed to be a nice one about ten miles from here. Thanks for reminding me, Peg. I’d better get started on it right away. Those places can get awfully crowded around Christmastime.”

He stood there and waited for her to finish, watching her with one of those dreary, stoical looks that dogs have been giving to people for forty thousand years. “Don’t worry, Spark Plug,” she said, hanging up the phone. “It’s only two weeks. By the time you start to miss us, we’ll already be back.” Then, bending down to give him a hug, she added: “Anyway, I’m going to miss you a lot more than you miss me. You’ve gotten under my skin, old doggy, and I can’t live without you.”

All right, they were coming back. He was fairly confident of that now, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have preferred to go with them. Not that he had any great longing to be cooped up in a Florida hotel room or to ride in the baggage compartments of airplanes, but it was the principle of the thing that bothered him. Willy had never left him behind. Not once, not under any circumstances, and he wasn’t used to this kind of handling. Perhaps he had been spoiled, but in his book there was more to canine happiness than just feeling wanted. You also had to feel necessary.

It was a setback, but at the same time he knew it wasn’t the end of the world. He had learned that now, and all things being equal, Mr. Bones probably would have recovered from his disappointment and served out his prison term with docile good grace. He had been through worse hardships than this one, after all, but three days after receiving the bad news, he felt the first of several painful twinges in his abdomen, and over the next two and a half weeks the pains spread into his haunches, his limbs, and even into his throat. Evil spirits were lurking inside him, and he knew that Burnside was the one who had put them there. The quack had been too busy looking at Polly’s legs to examine him properly, and he must have missed something, must have forgotten to run a test or look at his blood under the right microscope. The symptoms were still too vague to produce any outward manifestations (no vomiting, no diarrhea, no seizures as of yet), but as the days wore on, Mr. Bones felt less and less like himself, and instead of taking this family vacation business in his stride, he began to sulk and brood about it, to worry it into a thousand component parts, and what at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune.

It wasn’t that the kennel was such a bad place. Even he could see that, and when Alice and her father deposited him there on the afternoon of December seventeenth, Mr. Bones had to admit that Polly had done her homework. Dog Haven was no Sing Sing or Devil’s Island, no internment camp for abused and neglected animals. Situated on a twenty-acre property that had once been part of a large tobacco plantation, it was a four-star rural retreat, a canine hotel designed to accommodate the needs and whims of the most indulged and demanding pets. The sleeping cages lined the east and west walls of a cavernous red barn. There were sixty of them, with ample space provided for each of the boarders (more ample, in fact, than Mr. Bones’s doghouse at home), and not only were they cleaned every day, but each one came with a soft, freshly laundered quilt and a chewable rawhide toy—in the shape of a bone, a cat, or a mouse, depending on the owner’s preference. Just beyond the back door of the barn, there was an enclosed two-acre meadow that served as an exercise field. Special diets were available, and weekly baths were given at no extra charge.

But none of that mattered, at least not to Mr. Bones. These new surroundings failed to impress him, to arouse even the slightest show of interest, and even after he was introduced to the owner, the owner’s wife, and various members of the staff (all of them solid, pleasant pro-doggers), he still had no desire to stay. That didn’t prevent Dick and Alice from leaving, of course, and while Mr. Bones wanted to howl out his objections to the rotten thing they’d done to him, he certainly couldn’t find fault with Alice’s tearful and loving farewell. In his own terse way, even Dick seemed a little sorry about having to say good-bye. Then they climbed into the van and took off, and as Mr. Bones watched them chug down the dirt road and disappear behind the main house, he had his first inkling of the kind of trouble he was in. It wasn’t just a case of the blues, he realized, and it wasn’t just because he was scared. Something was seriously wrong with him, and whatever mayhem had been brewing in him lately was about to come to a full boil. His head hurt, and his belly was on fire, and a weakness had invaded his knees that suddenly made standing difficult. They gave him food, but the thought of food made him sick. They offered him a bone to chew on, but he turned his head away. Only water was acceptable, but when they pushed the water in front of him, he stopped drinking after two sips.

He was put in a cage between a wheezing ten-year-old bulldog and a luscious golden Lab. Ordinarily, a female of that caliber would have sent him into spasms of lustful sniffing, but that night he barely had the strength to acknowledge her presence before dropping onto his quilt and passing out. Within moments of losing consciousness, he was dreaming about Willy again, but this dream was nothing like the ones that had come before it, and instead of gentle encouragements and soothing rationalities, he was given a full taste of his master’s wrath. Perhaps it was the fever burning inside him, or perhaps something had happened to Willy in Timbuktu, but the man who came to Mr. Bones that night was not the Willy he had known in life and death for the past seven and three quarters years. This was a vengeful and sarcastic Willy, a devil Willy, a Willy bereft of all compassion and kindness, and poor Mr. Bones was so terrified of this person that he lost control of his bladder and peed on himself for the first time since he was a pup.

To confuse matters even more, the false Willy was identical in appearance to the true Willy, and when he turned up in the dream that night he was wearing the same tattered Santa Claus gear that the dog had seen him in for the past seven Christmases. Even worse, the dream wasn’t set in some familiar place from the past—like the one in the subway car, for instance—but in the present, in the very cage where Mr. Bones was spending the night. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again in the dream, there was Willy, sitting in the corner just two feet away from him, leaning his back against the bars. “I’m only going to say this once,” he began, “so listen up and keep your trap shut. You’ve turned yourself into a joke, a tired and disgusting joke, and I forbid you to let me into your thoughts anymore. Don’t forget that, mutt. Emblazon it upon the doorposts of your palace, and never use my name again—not in vain, not in love, not in any way at all. I’m dead, and I want to be left in peace. All this complaining, all this bitching about what’s happened to you—do you think I don’t hear it? I’m sick of listening to you, dog, and this is the last time you’ll ever see me in your dreams. Do you understand that? Let go of me, birdbrain. Give me some room. I have friends now, and I don’t need you anymore. You got it? Butt out of my business and stay out. I’m finished with you.”

By morning, the fever had shot up so high that he was seeing double. His stomach had been turned into a battleground of warring microbes, and every time he moved, stirred even an inch or two from where he was lying, another attack would begin. It felt as if depth charges were being detonated inside his bowels, as if poison gases were eating away at his inner organs. He had woken up several times during the night, retching uncontrollably until the pains had been appeased, but none of these lulls had lasted very long, and when day finally broke and light came pouring down through the rafters of the barn, he saw that he was surrounded by half a dozen puddles of vomit: little clumps of dried-out mucus, half-digested meat fragments, specks of congealed blood, yellowish broths that had no name.

A great racket was swirling around him by then, but Mr. Bones was too ill to take notice. The other dogs were up and about, barking in anticipation of the day ahead, but the best he could do was lie there in his torpor, contemplating the bollix his body had made of things. He knew that he was sick, but exactly how sick, and exactly where this sickness was taking him, he had no idea. A dog could die from a thing like this, he told himself, but a dog could also recover and be good as new in a couple of days. Given the choice, he would have preferred not to die. In spite of what had happened in the dream last night, he still wanted to live. Willy’s unprecedented cruelty had stunned him, had made him feel miserable and unspeakably alone, but that didn’t mean that Mr. Bones wasn’t ready to forgive his master for what he had done. You didn’t turn your back on a person for letting you down just once—not after a lifetime of friendship, you didn’t, and especially not if there were extenuating circumstances. Willy was dead, and who knew if dead people didn’t grow bitter and nasty after they had been dead for a while? Then again, maybe it hadn’t been Willy at all. The man in the dream could have been an impostor, a demon dressed in

Willy’s form who had been sent from Timbuktu to trick Mr. Bones and turn him against his master. But even if it had been Willy, and even if his remarks had been stated in an excessively hurtful and mean-spirited way, Mr. Bones was honest enough to admit that they contained a germ of truth. He had spent too much time feeling sorry for himself lately, had frittered away too many precious hours pouting over infinitesimal slights and injustices, and that kind of behavior was unseemly in a dog of his stature. There was much to be thankful for, and much life still to be lived. He knew that Willy had told him never to think about him again, but Mr. Bones couldn’t help it. He was in that churning, semi-delirious state that high fevers bring, and he could no more control the thoughts that flitted in and out of his head than he could stand up and unlock the door of his cage. If Willy happened to be in his thoughts now, there wasn’t much he could do about it. His master would just have to cover his ears and wait until the thought went away. But at least Mr. Bones wasn’t complaining anymore. At least he was trying to be good.

Less than a minute after thinking about the door of his cage, a young woman came and undid the latch. Her name was Beth, and she was wearing a puffy blue nylon parka. Chubby thighs, an inordinately round face, Little Lulu haircut. Mr. Bones remembered her from the day before. She was the one who had tried to feed him and give him water, the one who had patted him on the head and told him he would feel better in the morning. A nice girl, but not much of a diagnostician. The piles of vomit seemed to alarm her, and she crouched down and entered the cage to take a closer look. “Not such a good night, was it, Sparky?” she said. “I think maybe we should show you to Dad.” Dad was the man from yesterday, he remembered, the one who had given them the tour of the grounds. A burly guy with black bushy eyebrows and no hair on his head. His name was Pat—Pat Spaulding or Pat Sprowleen, he couldn’t recall which. There was a wife in the picture as well, and she had accompanied them on the first part of the walk. Yes, now it was coming back to him, the odd thing about the wife. Her name was Pat, too, and Mr. Bones remembered that Alice had found that funny, had even laughed a little when she heard the two names together, and Dick had pulled her aside and told her to remember her manners. Patrick and Patricia. Pat and Pat for short. It was all so confusing, so terribly inane and confusing.

Eventually, Beth coaxed him to stand up and walk over to the house with her. He threw up once along the way, but the cold air felt good against his hot body, and once the gunk had been expelled from his system, his pains seemed to lighten considerably. Encouraged, he followed her into the house, then gratefully accepted her offer to lie down on the living room rug. Beth went off to look for her father, and Mr. Bones, already curled up in front of the fireplace, turned his attention to the sounds coming from the grandfather clock in the hall. He heard ten ticks, twenty ticks, and then he closed his eyes. Just before he went under, there was a small disturbance of approaching footsteps, and then a man’s voice said, “Leave him be for now. We’ll see how he is when he wakes up.”

He slept through the morning and deep into the afternoon, and when he woke up he sensed that the worst of it was behind him. It wasn’t that he was in top form, but at least he was half alive now, and with his temperature down by a couple of degrees, he could move his muscles without feeling that his body was made of bricks. He was well enough to accept a little water, in any case, and when Beth called her father in to judge the dog’s condition for himself, Mr. Bones’s thirst got the better of him, and he kept on drinking until the water was gone. That was a bad miscalculation. He was in no shape to handle such a prodigious amount, and the instant Pat One entered the room, Mr. Bones promptly barfed the contents of his stomach onto the living room rug.

“I wish to hell people wouldn’t dump their sick dogs on us,” the man said. “All we need is for this one to croak. We’ll have one pretty lawsuit on our hands then, won’t we?”

“Do you want me to call Dr. Burnside?” Beth asked.

“Yeah. Tell him I’m on my way over.” He started to leave the room, but halfway to the door he stopped and turned to Beth again. “On second thought, maybe your mother should do it. Things are awfully busy around here today.”

That was a lucky break for Mr. Bones. In the time it took for them to track down Pat Two and organize the trip, he was able to work out a plan. And without a plan, he never would have been able to do what he did. It made no difference to him whether he was sick or well, whether he was going to live or going to die. They had presented him with the last straw, and over his dead body would he ever allow them to take him to that moron of a vet. That was why he needed a plan. He would only have a few seconds to pull it off, and the whole thing had to be shining in his head before it happened—so he would know exactly what to do and exactly when to do it.

Pat Two was an older version of Beth. A bit broader in the beam, perhaps, with a red parka instead of a blue one, but she gave off the same air of mannish competence and stolid good humor. Mr. Bones liked both of them better than Pat One, and he felt a little sorry about abusing their trust, especially after they had treated him with such kindness, but this was an all-or-nothing proposition, and there was no time to waste on sentimentality. The woman walked him out to the car on a leash, and just as he knew she would, she opened the passenger door to let him in first, not letting go of the leash until the last possible second. The moment the door slammed shut, Mr. Bones scrambled to the other side of the car and settled into the driver’s seat. That was the essence of the strategy, and the trick was to make sure that the leash didn’t get tangled up on the gearshift or the steering wheel or any other protrusion (which it didn’t) and to be securely in his position by the time she had walked around the front of the car and opened the door on the other side (which he was). That was how he had seen it in his mind, and that was how it happened in the world. Pat Two opened the door on the driver’s side, and Mr. Bones jumped out. He hit the ground running, and before she could grab hold of his tail or step on his leash, he was gone.

He headed for the woods on the north side of the main house, trying to keep as far away from the road as possible.

He heard Pat Two calling out for him to come back, and a moment later her voice was joined by those of Beth and Pat One. A little after that, he heard the engine of the car turn over and the sound of wheels skidding on dirt, but he was far into the woods by then, and he knew they would never find him. Darkness came early at that time of year, and in another hour they wouldn’t be able to see.

He kept going north, trotting along through the frozen underbrush as the dim winter light faded around him. Birds scattered as he approached, soaring up into the high branches of the pines, and squirrels ran off in all directions when they heard him coming. Mr. Bones knew where he was going, and even if he didn’t know exactly how to get there, he was counting on his nose to point him in the right direction. The Joneses backyard was only ten miles away, and he figured he would arrive by tomorrow, the day after that at the latest. Never mind that the Joneses were gone and wouldn’t be returning for another two weeks. Never mind that his food was locked up in the garage and he had no way of getting at it. He was only a dog, and he wasn’t capable of thinking that far ahead. For now, the only thing that mattered was to get where he was going. Once he did, the rest would take care of itself.

Or so he thought. But the sad truth was that Mr. Bones thought wrong. If he had been at full strength, there’s no doubt that he would have reached his destination, but his body wasn’t up to the demands he was making on it, and all this jumping and running soon took its toll. Ten miles was not a long journey, not when compared to the monumental treks he had undertaken as recently as three and a half months ago, but he was traveling on an empty tank now, and a dog could go only just so far on pure willpower. Remarkably, he managed to cover almost two miles in that weakened state. He went as far as his legs could carry him, and then, between one step and the next, without the slightest premonition of what was about to happen, he sank to the ground and fell asleep.

For the second time in two nights, he dreamed about Willy, and once again the dream was unlike any of the others that had come before it. This time they were sitting on the beach in La Jolla, California, a place they had visited on their first trip together, before he was fully grown. That meant it was years and years ago, and he was back in the days when everything was new and unfamiliar to him, when everything that happened was happening for the first time. The dream started in the middle of the afternoon. The sun was shining brightly, a small breeze was stirring, and Mr. Bones was lying with his head on Willy’s lap, savoring the feel of his master’s fingertips as they moved back and forth across his skull. Had any of this really happened? He couldn’t remember anymore, but it felt vivid enough to be real, and that was all that concerned him now. Pretty girls in bathing suits, ice cream wrappers and tubes of suntan lotion, red Frisbees wobbling through the air. That’s what he saw when he opened his eyes in the dream, and he could smell the strangeness and the beauty of it, as if a part of him already knew that he was beyond the boundaries of hard fact. It seemed to begin in silence, silence in the sense of no words, with the sound of the waves washing in and out on the shore and the wind flapping the flags and beach umbrellas. Then a pop tune started playing on a radio somewhere, and a woman’s voice was singing Be my baby, be my baby, be my baby now. It was a lovely song, a lovely and stupid song, and Mr. Bones got so caught up in listening to it that he failed to realize that Willy was talking to him. By the time he turned his attention to his master, he had already missed several sentences, perhaps whole paragraphs of vital information, and it took a few moments before he managed to piece together the gist of what Willy was saying.

“Make amends” was the first thing he heard, followed by “sorry, old boy” and “test.” When those words were succeeded by “ugly business” and “charade,” Mr. Bones was well on his way to catching on. The devil Willy had been a trick, a ruse to tempt him into hardening his heart against his master’s memory. Wrenching as the ordeal had been, it was the only way to test the permanence of the dog’s affections. The prankster had tried to break his spirit, and even though Mr. Bones had been scared half to death, he hadn’t hesitated to forgive Willy when he woke up in the morning, to shrug off his slanders and false accusations and let bygones be bygones. In this way, without even knowing that he was being judged, he had passed the test. The reward was this dream, this visit to a world of languorous, unending summer and the chance to bask in the warmth of the sun on a cold winter’s night, and yet pleasurable and well-crafted as this dream was, it was no more than a prelude to something far more important.

“What thing is that?” Mr. Bones heard himself say, and suddenly he was aware of his ability to speak again, to form words as clearly and smoothly as any two-leg yapping in his mother tongue.

“That, for one thing,” Willy said.

“What that?” Mr. Bones said, not understanding at all. “What thing?”

“What you’re doing now.”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m just lying here with you on the sand.”

“You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”

“It feels like talking. It sounds like talking. But that doesn’t mean I’m really doing it.”

“And what if I told you that you were?”

“I don’t know. I think I’d get up and do a little dance.”

“Well, start dancing, Mr. Bones. When the time comes, you don’t have to worry.”

“What time, Willy? What are you talking about?”

“When the time comes for you to go to Timbuktu.”

“You mean dogs are allowed?”

“Not all dogs. Just some. Each case is handled separately.” “And I’m in?” “You’re in.”

“Don’t kid me, master. If you’re joking now, I don’t think I could stand it.”

“Believe me, pooch, you’re in. The decision’s been made.”

“And when do I get to go?”

“When the time comes. You have to be patient.”

“I have to kick the bucket first, don’t I?”

“That’s the deal. In the meantime, I want you to be a good boy. Go back to Dog Haven and let them take care of you. When the Joneses come to pick you up, remember how lucky you’ve been. You can’t ask for more than Polly and Alice. Those two are as good as it gets, take my word for it. And another thing: don’t fret about that name they gave you. You’ll always be Mr. Bones to me. But if it ever starts getting you down, just put it in its Latin form, and you’ll feel much better. Sparkatus. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Sparkatus the Dog. Behold yon Sparkatus, the noblest tail-wagger in all of Rome.”

Yes, it did have a nice ring to it, a very nice ring to it, and when Mr. Bones woke up just after dawn, the sound of it was still rattling around in his head. So much had changed while he had been asleep, so many things had happened to him between the closing and opening of his eyes, that at first he didn’t notice the snow that had fallen during the night, nor did he recognize that the tinkling noises caused by the word Sparkatus were in fact the ice-coated branches overhead, slowly creaking in the wind. Reluctant to leave the world of the dream, Mr. Bones only gradually became aware of the intense cold around him, and then, once he began to feel the cold, he became aware of an equally intense heat. Something was burning inside him. The cold was outside, and the heat was inside; his body was covered with snow, and inside his body the fever was back, as fierce and paralyzing as it had been the day before. He took a stab at trying to stand up to shake the snow off his fur, but his legs felt like sponges, and he had to abandon the effort. Maybe later, he told himself, maybe later when the sun came out and the air warmed up a little. Meanwhile, he lay there on the ground and studied the snow. No more than an inch had fallen, but even that was enough to make the world feel like a different place. There was something eerie about the whiteness of snow, he found, something both eerie and beautiful, and as he watched two pairs of sparrows and chickadees pecking away at the ground in search of something to eat, he felt a small ache of sympathy flutter inside him. Yes, even for those useless featherbrains. He couldn’t help it. The snow seemed to have brought them all together, and for once he was able to look at them not as nuisances but as fellow creatures, members of the secret brotherhood. Watching the birds, he remembered what Willy had told him about going back to Dog Haven. That was good advice, and if his body had been up to the task, he would have followed it. But it wasn’t. He was too weak to go that far, and if he couldn’t count on his legs to get him there, then he would have to stay where he was. For want of anything else to do, he ate some snow and tried to remember the dream.

By and by, he began to hear the sounds of cars and trucks, the rumble of early-morning traffic. The sun was just coming up then, and as the snow melted off the trees and dropped to the ground in front of him, Mr. Bones wondered if the highway was as close as it seemed to be. Sounds could be tricky sometimes, and more than once the air had fooled him into thinking a far-off thing was closer than it was. He didn’t want to waste his energies on futile efforts, but if the road was where he thought it might be, then maybe he had a chance. The traffic was increasing now, and he could detect all manner of vehicles rushing down the wet highway, an unbroken parade of big cars and small cars, trucks and vans, long-distance buses. A person was at the wheel of each one of them, and if just one of those drivers was willing to stop and help him, then perhaps he would be saved. It would mean climbing up the hill in front of him, of course, and then working his way down the other side, but hard as all that was going to be, it had to be done. The road was somewhere, and he had to find it. The only drawback was that it had to be found on the first try. If he took the wrong path, he wouldn’t have the strength to go back up the hill and start again.

But the road was there, and when Mr. Bones finally saw it after forty minutes of struggling past the thorns and outcrops and bulging roots that had blocked his way, after losing his footing and slipping down a dirt embankment, after drenching his fur in the muddy residues of the snow, the sick and feverish dog understood that salvation was at hand. The road was immense, and the road was dazzling: a six-lane superhighway with cars and trucks speeding past in both directions. With the moisture from the melted snow still clinging to the black surface of the road, the metal guardrails, and the branches of the trees that lined the east and west shoulders, and with the winter sun blazing in the sky and beating down on these millions of drops of water, the highway presented itself to Mr. Bones as a spectacle of pure radiance, a field of overpowering light. It was exactly what he had been hoping for, and he knew now that the idea that had come to him during those forty minutes of punishing effort up and down the hill was the only correct solution to the problem. Trucks and cars could carry him away from this place, but they could also crush his bones and make him stop breathing forever. It was all so clear once you took the long view. He didn’t have to wait for the time to come; the time was upon him now. All he had to do was step into the road, and he would be in Timbuktu. He would be in the land of words and transparent toasters, in the country of bicycle wheels and burning deserts where dogs talked as equals with men. Willy would disapprove at first, but that was only because he would think that Mr. Bones had gotten there by taking his own life. But Mr. Bones wasn’t proposing anything as vulgar as suicide. He was merely going to play a game, the kind of game that any sick and crazy old dog would play. And that’s what he was now, wasn’t it? A sick and crazy old dog.

It was called dodge-the-car, and it was a venerable, time-honored sport that allowed every old-timer to recapture the glories of his youth. It was fun, it was invigorating, it was a challenge to every dog’s athletic skills. Just run across the road and see if you could avoid being hit. The more times you were able to do it, the greater the champion you were. Sooner or later, of course, the odds were bound to catch up with you, and few dogs had ever played dodge-the-car without losing on their last turn. But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.

And so it happened, on that resplendent winter morning in Virginia, that Mr. Bones, a.k.a. Sparkatus, sidekick of the late poet Willy G. Christmas, set out to prove that he was a champion among dogs. Stepping off the grass onto the eastbound shoulder of the highway, he waited for a break in the traffic, and then he began to run. Weak as he was, there was still some spring left in his legs, and once he hit his stride, he felt stronger and happier than he had felt in months. He ran toward the noise, toward the light, toward the glare and the roar that were rushing in on him from all directions.

With any luck, he would be with Willy before the day was out.