The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (23 page)

The sun kept setting, setting still,

Because I could not stop for Death.

Great Streets of silence led away—

I took my power in my hand,

As far from pity as complaint.

My life closed twice before its close

I asked no other thing.

Safe in these alabaster chambers

A spider sewed at

Night.

When his mother heard it the next evening she wept.

Days sang and days passed, one like the other, until Theron’s mother tapped at the door one night, bright-eyed and quivering. Theron sat quietly without beginning, because he knew she had something on her mind. She ducked her head, pretending to stroke Piggy’s sparse mane, and then she saw that Theron wasn’t going to begin; he was waiting for her to tell him what was bothering her.

“Mister Gummery was asking after you, Theron,” she said.

Theron scratched his head.

“He was in fourth grade the year you quit school.” Her hands fluttered in Piggy’s mane.

Theron rattled some papers, wondering what she was going to say.

“Theron.” She got up abruptly, so that Piggy’s chin fell off her lap and bumped on the floor. “He says the church is going to have its hundred-twentieth birthday next month, and he wants you to write them a play.”

Suddenly, Theron’s hands were still. “Mama, I don’t know if I can. Piggy’s getting tired.” His voice sounded old. “And so am I. Can’t he use some play out of a book?”

Her eyes were hurt. “I never asked you anything before. Your great-great granddaddy went to that church.” She touched his arm gently. “Son?”

Theron looked at Piggy, whose skin was almost transparent now under the light fall of his brindled mane. Piggy’s white-rimmed eyes were wide open and swimming with love. He began rocking and rocking back and forth gently, back to floor, then belly, until he got his spidery legs under him and began heaving himself to his feet. He almost made it and then he fell, catching splinters in his delicate knees. Theron rushed to him but he was already struggling again, heaving until he got his legs under him. He rose with a massive gesture and with a sigh put his nose on Mrs. Pinckney’s shoulder. Theron gave him one tragic look and then turned to his mother.

“You better go now, Mama. Piggy and I have to get to work.”

Piggy carried Theron on his back all that night and all the next day and they were still going the next evening, when Mrs. Pinckney scratched at the door of the shack. Theron’s eyes were bloodshot and his fingers cramped from scribbling, but Piggy snatched at him with his teeth every time Theron tried to get down. Finally Theron scribbled “The End,” so drunk with words that he didn’t realize what he was writing, and with a gallant toss of the head Piggy fell sideways away from the supporting rock and sank to the floor. He turned his head toward Theron, and his eyes glazed over with pride.

“Mama,” Theron said simply. “The play.”

She turned her eyes away because she couldn’t stand to see Piggy’s rigid fat body with the legs sticking out, or the pain in Piggy’s eyes. After the church show, when Mrs. Pinckney sent a copy of the play,
A.B.
, to Mr. Brooks, he sent her a pile of money and told her it was going to Broadway and Theron would certainly win the Poets’ Prize. The money came too late. Piggy had already gone into a decline.

Theron called a heart specialist down from Charleston (he’d have nothing to do with a vet, like he’d had nothing to do with the dog warden all those years before) but there was nothing anybody could do. He took to his shack, pining so that he wouldn’t even let his mother come in at night. She sat on a step outside, listening for Piggy’s breath.

The prize came the day after Piggy was buried under a wooden marker, down in the soft grass at the end of the field.

Five men in dark suits and black Homburgs and a woman in a lace-trimmed dress and a velvet tam pulled up outside the Pinckney house. Hushed by the brooding trees, they talked in whispers until Mrs. Pinckney opened the front door. She hardly recognized Mr. Brooks, he was so gray and distinguished-looking. She seemed not to understand until, wordlessly, the woman held out a small leather case with the medal, nested in satin, bearing Theron’s name.

“Oh,” Mrs. Pinckney said. “You want my son.”

They followed her around the house, past crumbled garden statues and a sundial that had sunk into itself a hundred years before, nudging each other and whispering as they caught glimpses of ruined chiffoniers and Federalist mirrors through the tall, low windows. Gently, they untangled vines and bushes from their ankles and, single file, looking reverent and austere in the bright daylight, they followed Theron’s mother across the hummocked field. They picked their way up the worn little path and stood uneasily at the door to Theron’s shack. His mama called to him. There was a rustling inside and Theron poked out his shock-white head.

He stood in the doorway with the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled up above his gaunt elbows, and looked at the men in the fine black suits. Then he smiled tentatively at Mr. Brooks, who nodded almost shyly, and the ceremony began.

The leader of the delegation gave his speech. Theron heard him say something about “most coveted prize in poetry,” and he said, “Piggy’ll be glad,” but the man in the sack suit gave him a puzzled look and went on with the speech. Theron waited respectfully until he was finished, stepping aside because he could see that the lady in the velvet hat was trying to peek inside his door. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the Queen Anne chair was standing up, just where he’d propped it, and Piggy’s place was all swept clean. He whispered, “That’s where Piggy used to sleep,” but she pretended not to hear.

“ … pleased to give you this award,” the speaker concluded, and he held out the medal so Theron could see where they had engraved his name.

“It wasn’t me,” Theron mumbled, and they all nodded their heads and twittered to each other about his modesty. “It wasn’t me, it was Piggy,” Theron said again, as they pressed the leather case with the medal into his hands. “It was Piggy,” he said again as they bowed their heads in a moment’s respect and turned like nuns in a procession and started single file back across the field. “It was Piggy,” Theron said, looking down at the glint of the medal in his hands.

He sat down on the front step of his shack, turning the case over and over, watching the sunlight catch the gold until tears shimmered in his eyes and he couldn’t see. Then he went inside and combed his hair and put on a clean shirt. Slowly, as the delegation had walked, he went to the end of the field and put the leather case on Piggy’s grave.

—
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 1962

Song of the Black Dog

“The black dog is not like any other,” the forensics officer says. It is a little incantation.

In the journalists’ skybox high above the civic auditorium, Bill Siefert strains to see the distant stage, the speaker, and at her back, the beast he is here to deconstruct. That’s the way he thinks of it. Siefert hates anything he doesn’t understand. If it doesn’t make sense, disassemble it. He’s always been uncomfortable with the idea of supernatural powers, but this is not his stated reason for sneaking into the press box. He thinks he’s here to crack the black dog program and show the people its inner workings. If the wonder dog is just a dog, then the police department are money-grubbing charlatans and the exposé will move him from unemployed to famous.

He’ll be all over
CNN
. Networks will come calling.
Silence the black dog
, he thinks, and wonders where that came from. Stop mizzling and get the story. He needs a job. He needs the attention. He needs the power. He needs to be more than who he is, and before any of this and all of this Bill Siefert needs to figure out why this morning, on a perfectly ordinary day, he woke up screaming.

Get the story, he tells himself and does not know what about this makes him so uneasy. Cell phone for instant screen shots. Notebook, digicorder, nice smile. Seat in the booth. Fake press pass to get him backstage. Piece of cake.

With the black dog, nothing spins out the way you expect.

“The black dog can cut through the welter of visual and olfactory stimuli in a disaster situation and find those most in need of rescue,” the forensics officer says matter-of-factly, as though this is a given. She is sleek in the black uniform. Persuasive. It is disturbing. “He is only the first,” she says and then she says portentously, “His descendants will save thousands.”

Cut to the chase.
Startled, Bill shakes himself.
Did I speak? Who?

The speaker glitters in a cone of light but the wonder dog—if there is one—is nowhere present. Peering into the shadows behind her, Bill looks for the darker shadow signifying a living creature, reflected light pinpointed in the eyes. The darkness gives back only darkness. Nothing to see, he tells himself,
and wonders why this comes as a relief. No dog. Another wasted day like so many days in what is shaping up to be a wasted life.

With the black dog, the future is open to question.

In the next second he shivers, transfixed. He can’t even guess what just happened, but all the furniture in his head has shifted.

It sees me.

Given that the stage is far, far below this is unlikely, but the sense that he is being watched is so acute that all of Bill Siefert’s bones begin to itch. No, he tells himself. No way. He swallows hard but his throat closes. It’s just a dog.

Far below, she continues, “Of course the prototype is a genetic fluke, but one that can be exploited for the good of all.”

Yeah
, he thinks bitterly.
Yeah, right.

There are a thousand people in the auditorium, city officials and guests, all in some variation on black tie, velvet, opera-length pearls. The gentry have come out for this press conference—the unveiling of the superdog. A thought flies across Bill’s mind:
If there is a dog
. Shifting on his haunches, sweating for no apparent reason, he thinks:
what if I kidnap the thing?
Down, boy. Focus. First in his class in Communications Studies, but a tad bit A.D.D. No wonder he can’t keep a job.

The woman who discovered and trained the black dog continues thoughtfully. “We’re not certain exactly which combination of pheromones alerts the black dog, but we do recognize his singular power. He can rush into a burning building or dig his way into earthquake debris and go like an arrow to the victim most in need.”

Fine
, Bill thinks,
your basic St. Bernard
. It helps to picture him bounding over the snow with that keg of rum and the pink tongue flapping. Pant pant pant. Hello, I am here to save you. He tries to laugh but his belly is jittering and when he tries to swallow, the spit won’t go down. There is something terribly the matter here, and nobody sees it but him.

“The black dog is unique,” she says. “He has no interest in the quick or the dead.”

Unaccountably, Siefert feels twin points of light like paired lasers, fixed on him. The eyes—why can he not see the eyes? It leaves him jittery and unsettled.

What the forensics officer says next will overturn him.

“His peculiar skill is like no other.” Severe in black, with her own offbeat elegance, the tall, bony woman creates a silence so profound that even the mayor gets nervous.

Then she says into the hush: “He can identify the dying.”

The journalists mutter among themselves. From the orchestra seats far below comes a muffled cry.

“He has the uncanny ability to smell impending death.” In case they still don’t get it, she finishes: “The black dog knows who’s next to die.”

Everything inside Siefert’s head skids to a stop. He wants to silence the other journalists, stop them breathing if he has to, so he can hear what comes next. He has to know! He leans forward with his mouth open and his tongue out like a dog hanging out a car window, gulping the words like rushing air. If he could, he would find a way to stop his heart to create the silence he needs to grasp her meaning. Stop the pounding of his blood so he can hear.