Last Days of the Dog-Men (4 page)

“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.

AGNES OF BOB

A
GNES MENKEN, MISSING HER LEFT EYE, AND BOB
the bulldog, missing his right, often sat together on their porch, Agnes in her straight-backed rocking chair and Bob in her lap. Together they could see anything coming, Bob to one side and Agnes to the other. They always seemed to be staring straight ahead but really they were looking both ways.

Whereas Bob's bad right eye was sewn up, Agnes had a false one that roved. It was obvious to her that people often had trouble telling which eye was the good one, so sometimes she would look at them awhile with the good one, and then when they'd become comfortable with this she switched and looked at them with the false one, which was clear and had the direct hard-bearing frankness of detachment. In her good eye's peripheral vision she could see the general distress that this caused.

Despite his years and his sewn-up eye, Bob was as stout and fit as a young dog. He stayed that way naturally, as dogs of his type will, having the metabolism of all small muscular animals. He was tight, compact— much like her late husband, Pops, but just the opposite of Agnes, who was lanky. Officially, he had been Pops's dog, the son he'd never had, she supposed. In that way Agnes had felt at best like a stepmother, standing just a little apart. Pops and Bob had understood one another, shared a language of some kind that only they'd understood, whereas Agnes could never tell if Bob was listening to her or not.

Nevertheless, she and Bob had become closer in the year since Pops had died. They had their routine together. Bob ate twice a day, morning and evening. He got to stay outside in the fenced backyard as long as he wanted during the day. At night he slept on Agnes's bed, down near the footboard. And every evening, once early and once late, she let him out to pee in the yard. A neighbor wandered out back to look at the moon would see the light on her back.porch snap on, the door creak open, see Bob come flying out onto the grass, snarling and grunting the way Boston bulldogs do, dashing around in the dark near the back of the yard. But Agnes hadn't the patience with him Pops'd had, how Pops would sit at the kitchen table smoking, sipping coffee, waiting till Bob sauntered back up to the door and barked to be let back in. Now, Bob would hardly have time to pee before the door creaked open
on its hinges again and Agnes started in on him, saying, “Where are you? What are you doing back there? Go on, now. Go on and do what you're gonna do. What are you doing? Come on. Come on in here and finish up your supper. I want to go to bed. Come on in this door. Where are you? Please, Bob. I'm tired, boy. What are you doing out there? Come on in here. Come on. Come on.” Then Bob would stop, sniff around, shoot a quick stream into the monkey grass, lob a fading arc to the bark of the popcorn tree, and then leap back into the light of the porch. And she would pull the door shut, turn all three dead bolts, snap off the kitchen light, and feel her way along the hallway to bed.

E
XCEPT FOR THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR ON HER EAST SIDE
, where the professor lived with with his wife and two little girls, this seemed to Agnes like a neighborhood of widows. Next door on the west side was Lura Campbell, eighty-four, who insisted on driving every day. She did all right once she got out of her azalea-lined driveway, but she had the worst time trying to back herself out. On this morning, Agnes lay in bed and listened to Lura's old Impala wheeze to a start, clank into Reverse, back up a little ways, and then
screee
, into the azaleas. Clank clank, into Drive, pull forward. Clank clank, into Reverse, back up.
Screee
, into the azaleas. Clank clank, into Drive, pull forward. Clank clank, into Reverse, back up.
Screee
, into the azaleas. All the way down her driveway. Drove Agnes crazy. She'd said to Lura, I don't see why you feel like you got to get out and go every morning. Well, I like to go, Lura said. I don't see any sense in going just to be going, Agnes said. Well, Lura said, I just have to get out and go somewhere, I can't sit here at the house.

Agnes did not want to end up like Lura, an aimless, doddering wanderer driving down the middle of the street in her ancient automobile threatening dogs and children. She hoped that something would happen to ease her on out of the world before she got that way, that she would die in her sleep or simply somehow disappear, whisked into thin air by the hand of God. She had made her peace with God, though she'd never liked religion. She certainly wasn't afraid of God, like she had been once without realizing it. She would face God like she would anybody else, with dignity and demanding a little respect in return. She'd never willingly offended God, had only ignored Him a little, like everyone else. But recently she had silently said, If it comes a time when it's convenient to You, go ahead.

She thought, Maybe I'll see Pops, and with two good eyes.

She fished her glass one out of the little dish of solution on the bedside table, popped it in, and eased her legs off the side of the bed. As soon as her toes touched the cool bare floor, Bob was there, leaping into the air around her like a circus dog.

“Get,” she waved at him, shuffling into the kitchen to make coffee. “Get.”

The coffee made, she poured a cup, took it out to the porch, and no sooner had her bottom touched the chair than Bob jumped into her lap, circled, and settled in his sphinxlike pose to observe the traffic.

Carolyn Barr and April Ready walked briskly by, swinging their arms like majorettes. They waved, Agnes nodded. The women, in their sixties, had the legs of thirty-year-olds.

“Amazing, Bob,” Agnes muttered. “I bet I know why their old boys kicked off.”

She and Pops had had what she'd considered a normal life, in that regard. Toward the end, Pops got to where he wasn't interested, and she didn't mind, much. The truth was, they'd never really gotten over the embarrassment. She'd always figured more sex would've been a good thing, but she'd never brought it up with Pops. It seemed frivolous. They'd never talked about sex, never even used the word. She'd always worked, just like him. Forty years! Forty years at the power company for her. He'd kept books at the steam feed works, never retired. A chain-smoker with Coke-bottle-thick glasses, he came home smoking, seemed like steam from the works leaking out of his thick windows onto the world. When he had his attack, he fell into a pile of foundry sand and suffocated.

The day Pops had died, the widow Louella Marshall (a Baptist) had come by. Her husband, Herbert, had been dead for ten years, and since then she hadn't so much as had coffee with a man. She'd married her church, is what she said. Agnes couldn't stand her because she seemed so smug, and Agnes couldn't believe
she wasn't a phony, a religious bully who was scared to death of dying herself, afraid she was going to hell for having secretly wished her bullying husband would die and leave her alone. Agnes wasn't afraid of going to hell, but when Louella sat in her armchair and made like to comfort her by saying God had taken Pops to be with Him in heaven, she had gotten so angry she took her coffee cup and saucer into the kitchen and dashed them in the sink. She didn't pretend to have dropped them.

After that, for a while, she frequently had a dream in which she was swimming out in the middle of the ocean, strong as one of those nuts that used to swim across the English Channel. But then there was a roaring sound, and she'd look up and see it was the edge of the world, and a beast would rise up with the body of a dragon and the face of Pops, which then changed into the dog face of Bob, and she awoke in her bedroom where the blue night-light made the damp air seem like water and the breeze through the window sounded like ocean swells and it took her some minutes to calm down and hear Bob down at the foot of her bed, grunting and thrashing in some dream of his own.

She had realized then that she was afraid of dying, and afraid of what had happened to Pops. But she could not be like Louella and believe that this was God's will, that he had singled out Pops like an assassin. She decided that she would face the possibility of her own death with dignity, by inviting it in, leaving the door unlocked, and that in that way she would be
in charge and unafraid. We all know death better than we think, she said to herself.

The only one who'd said anything interesting on that day at her house had been poor Lura Campbell, who had sat tiny and quiet on Agnes's huge old sofa and sipped her coffee and said, when there'd been a long quiet spell in the room, “I think if I had it to do all over again, after Lester passed away, I'da done some traveling.”

Louella Marshall said, “Well, Lura, where in the world would you've gone? To Florida?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Lura said. “I'da just got into my car and gone.”

Lura and her car.

A
GNES DIDN
'
T SOCIALIZE WITH ANY OF THE WIDOWS
. S
HE
tended the yard and looked after Bob and kept the house fairly clean and watched for rare birds at her feeders. She didn't see many rare birds, which was natural seeing as how they
were
rare, but the occasional chickadee or purple finch made it interesting enough.

Warm days, she sunned in her lounge chair on the patio out back, her eyes shut tight against the glare and the heat, talking to Bob the whole time. She could hear him grunting and snuffling and rooting around like a hog. Whenever he was quiet she raised up and looked, to see if anyone had walked up, and then lay back down. She hated sunbathing, but it was good for the psoriasis, and it helped fight her natural pallor,
which made her feel like those little cave frogs she'd seen once on a trip to the mountains with Pops. Little red eyes and the rest of them clear as a jellyfish, you could see their little hearts pumping and their veins jumping, like their skins were made of glass.

Sometimes she volunteered to take the little girls next door to the pool. Swimming was good for her, the doctor said, and Agnes had always liked the water. She wasn't much on the surface, since she was too slim to float, but she liked to be underwater, moving along in steady breaststrokes like a long slow fish. She liked the look of things underwater, the silent and bright world that seemed strange in the way that a dream is, very intimate and distant at the same time.

After a swim, lying in the sun beside the pool was easier than tanning in her buggy backyard with Bob always snorting around. She'd take a brush and brush her wet hair straight back and forget about it. She couldn't do anything with it anymore, it was getting so thin and frizzy. The gray she didn't care about. She pretty much let Sherilyn just chop it short and do it up in a little permanent. She got it washed once a week. She knew short hair made her neck look longer, but there wasn't any way around that. Her good eye was a little smaller than the false one and a little reddened from strain, her nose was a little long, and her back was bent just a little forward because of less than ideal posture. She could see this when she walked past a storefront window and saw her reflection. Now, to boot, her fingers were swollen with a mild arthritis and there were the faded, healed reminders of a few small sores on her arms and legs from the psoriasis. It was a good thing she never cared much about appearances. And after a swim, with her muscles tingling from the exercise, she cared even less.

Nevertheless, a tan seemed to help all of that, and helped create a natural vigor, and in her mind's eye she sought a dignity in the way she looked and mentally compared herself to a tall gray crane beside a bay or a lake, and she tried to carry herself with that dignity in mind. She walked slowly and deliberately, like a crane, and without thinking kept her eye fixed that way, like they did when they were fishing or just stalking along.

I
T WAS A NATURAL COMPARISON, GIVEN HER INTEREST IN
birds and the three feeders she kept in her backyard.

“Look at that, Bob,” she'd say. “I believe that's a towhee pecking around down there.” Bob stared at her, jaws clamped. Then he let his tongue out again and started panting.

She sometimes forgot it was Pops who'd first started watching the birds. Feeding them, anyway. He built the feeders in his shop out in the garage. Then he started to read about them a little, and he'd keep track of when they came and went, and he'd sit with her in the kitchen sipping coffee and looking out at the feeders in the spring and announce their arrivals from Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Venezuela, Peru and Colombia and Costa Rica. “Flown here nonstop from
the Yucatan,” he'd say. “Made a little stop down on the coast.”

And he took her down there one time in the season. They put on their sun gear, light long-sleeved shirts and khaki pants and tennis shoes and light socks, broad hats, sunglasses and binoculars. They drove down the beach road to the old fort and camped out for two days on the grounds with a bunch of odd ones who called themselves birders and walked the sandy trails and Pops made notes in a little spiral-bound notebook.