The Sun Dog (10 page)

'Those are pickets, not fence-posts,' he told her. 'Like what you do when your nose goes on strike.'

'Ha-ha. Count them.'

He did. He could see four, and part of a fifth, although the dog's scraggly hindquarters obscured most of that one.

'Now look at this one.'

She put the fourth Polaroid in front of him. Now he could see all of the fifth picket, and part of a sixth. So he knew - or believed - he was going to see a cross between a very old cartoon and one of those 'flip-books' he used to make in grammar school when the time weighed heavy on his hands. The last twenty-five seconds of the tape were indeed like that, although, Kevin thought, the flip-books he had drawn in the second grade were really better ... the perceived action of the boxer raising and lowering his hands smoother. In the last twenty-five seconds of the videotape the action moved in rams and jerks which made the old Keystone Kops silent films look like marvels of modern filmmaking in comparison. Still, the key word was action, and it held all of them - even Pop - spellbound. They watched the minute of footage three times without saying a word. There was no sound but breathing: Kevin's fast and smooth through his nose, his father's deeper, Pop's a phlegmy rattle in his narrow chest. And the first thirty seconds or so ...

He had expected action, he supposed; there was action in the flip-books, and there was action in the Saturdaymorning cartoons, which were just a slightly more sophisticated version of the flip-books, but what he had not expected was that for the first thirty seconds of the tape it wasn't like watching notebook pages rapidly thumbed or even a primitive cartoon like
Possible
Possum on TV: for thirty seconds (twenty-eight, anyway), his single Polaroid photographs looked eerily like a real movie. Not a Hollywood movie, of course, not even a low-budget horror movie of the sort Megan sometimes pestered him to rent for their own VCR when their mother and father went out for the evening; it was more like a snippet of home movie made by someone who has just gotten an eight-millimeter camera and doesn't know how to use it very well yet.

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The Sun Dog

In those first twenty-eight seconds, the black no-breed dog walked with barely perceptible jerks along the fence, exposing five, six, seven pickets; it even paused to sniff a second time at one of them, apparently reading another of those canine telegrams. Then it walked on, head down and toward the fence, hindquarters switched out toward the camera. And, halfway through this first part, Kevin noted something else he hadn't seen before: the photographer had apparently swung his camera to keep the dog in the frame. If he (or she) hadn't done so, the dog would have simply walked out of the picture, leaving nothing to look at but the fence. The pickets at the far right of the first two or three photographs disappeared beyond the righthand border of the picture and new pickets appeared at the left. You could tell, because the tip of one of those two rightmost pickets had been broken off. Now it was no longer in the frame.

The dog started to sniff again ... and then its head came up. Its good ear stiffened; the one which had been slashed and laid limp in some long-ago fight tried to do the same. There was no sound, but Kevin felt with a certainty beyond repudiation that the dog had begun to growl. The dog had sensed something or someone. What or who?

Kevin looked at the shadow they had at first dismissed as the branch of a tree or maybe a phone-pole and knew. Its head began to turn ... and that was when the second half of this strange 'film' began, thirty seconds of snapjerk action that made your head ache and your eyeballs hot. Pop had had a hunch, Kevin thought, or maybe he had even read about something like this before. Either way, it had proved out and was too obvious to need stating. With the pictures taken quite closely together, if not exactly one after another, the action in the makeshift

'movie' almost flowed. Not quite, but almost. But when the time between photographs was spaced, what they were watching became something that nauseated your eye because it wanted to see either a moving picture or a series of still photographs and instead it saw both and neither.

Time was passing in that flat Polaroid world. Not at the same speed it passed in this
(real?)

one, or the sun would have come up (or gone down) over there three times already and whatever the dog was going to do would be done (if it
had
something to do), and if it did not, it would just be gone and there would be only the moveless and seemingly eternal eroded picket fence guarding the listless patch of lawn, but it
was
passing.

The dog's head was coming around to face the photographer, owner of the shadow, like the head of a dog in the grip of a fit: at one moment the face and even the shape of the head was obscured by that floppy ear; then you saw one black-brown eye enclosed by a round and somehow mucky corona that made Kevin think of a spoiled egg-white; then you saw half the muzzle with the lips appearing slightly wrinkled, as if the dog were getting ready to bark or growl; and last of all you saw three-quarters of a face somehow more awful than the face of any mere dog had a right to be, even a mean one. The white spackles along its muzzle suggested it was no longer young. At the very end of the tape you saw the dog's lips were indeed pulling back. There was one blink of white Kevin thought was a tooth. He didn't see that until the third run-through. It was the eye that held him. It was homicidal. This breedless dog almost screamed rogue. And it was nameless; he knew that, as well. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that no Polaroid man or Polaroid woman or Polaroid child had ever named that Polaroid dog; it was a stray, born stray, raised stray, grown old and mean stray, the avatar of all the dogs who had ever wandered the world, unnamed and unhomed, killing chickens, eating garbage out of the cans they had long file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (46 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM

The Sun Dog

since learned to knock over, sleeping in culverts and beneath the porches of deserted houses. Its wits would be dim, but its instincts would be sharp and red. It ..

When Pop Merrill spoke, Kevin was so deeply and fundamentally startled out of his thoughts that he nearly screamed.

'The man who took those pitchers,' he said. 'If there
was
a person, is what I mean to say. What do you suppose happened to
him?'

Pop had frozen the last frame with his remote control. A line of static ran through the picture. Kevin wished it ran through the dog's eye, but the line was below it. That eye stared out at them, baleful, stupidly murderous - no, not stupidly, not entirely, that was what made it not merely frightening but terrifying -and no one needed to answer Pop's question. You needed no more pictures to understand what was going to happen next. The dog had perhaps heard something: of course it had, and Kevin knew what. It had heard that squidgy little whine. Further pictures would show it continuing to turn, and then beginning to fill more and more of each frame until there was nothing to see but dog - no listless patchy lawn, no fence, no sidewalk, no shadow. Just the dog. Who meant to attack.

Who meant to kill, if it could.

Kevin's dry voice seemed to be coming from someone else. 'I don't think it likes getting its picture taken,' he said. Pop's short laugh was like a bunch of dry twigs broken over a knee for kindling.

'Rewind it,' Mr Delevan said.

'You want to see the whole thing again?' Pop asked.

'No - just the last ten seconds or so.'

Pop used the remote control to go back, then ran it again. The dog turned its head, as jerky as a robot which is old and running down but still dangerous, and Kevin wanted to tell them, Stop
now. Just stop.
That's
enough.
Just stop
and let's break the camera.
Because there was something else, wasn't there? Something he didn't want to think about but soon would, like it or not; he could feel it breaching in his mind like the broad back of a whale.

'Once more,' Mr Delevan said. 'Frame by frame this time. Can you do that?'

'Ayuh,' Pop said. 'Goddam machine does everything but the laundry.'

This time one frame, one picture, at a time. It was not like a robot now, or not exactly, but like some weird clock, something that belonged with Pop's other specimens downstairs. jerk. Jerk. Jerk. The head coming around. Soon file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20...ing%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (47 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM

The Sun Dog

they would be faced by that merciless, not-quite-idiotic eye again.

'What's that?' Mr Delevan asked.

'What's what?' Pop asked, as if he didn't know it was the thing the boy hadn't wanted to talk about the other day, the thing, he was convinced, that had made up the boy's mind about destroying the camera once and for all.

'Underneath its neck,' Mr Delevan said, and pointed. 'It's not wearing a collar or a tag, but it's got something around its neck on a string or a thin rope.'

'I dunno,' Pop said imperturbably. 'Maybe your boy does. Young folks have sharper eyes than us old fellas.'

Mr Delevan turned to look at Kevin. 'Can you make it out?'

He fell silent. 'It's really small.'

His mind returned to what his father had said when they were leaving the house. If
she never asks you, you never
have to tell her
...
That's lust the way we do things in the grown-up world.
Just now he had asked Kevin if he could make out what that thing under the dog's neck was. Kevin hadn't really answered that question; he had said something else altogether.
It's really small.
And it was. The fact that he knew what it was in spite of that ... well ... What had his father called it? Skating up to the edge of a lie?

And he
couldn't
actually see it. Not
actually.
just the same, he knew. The eye only suggested; the heart understood. just as his heart understood that, if he was right, the camera must be destroyed.
Must
be. At that moment, Pop Merrill was suddenly struck by an agreeable inspiration. He got up and snapped off the TV.

'I've got the pitchers downstairs,' he said. 'Brought em back with the videotape. I seen that thing m'self, and ran my magnifying glass over it, but still couldn't tell ... but it
does
look familiar, God cuss it. just let me go get the pitchers and m'glass.'

'We might as well go down with you,' Kevin said, which was the last thing in the world Pop wanted, but then Delevan stepped in, God bless him, and said he might like to look at the tape again after they looked at the last couple of pictures under the magnifying glass.

'Won't take a minute,' Pop said, and was gone, sprightly as a bird hopping from twig to twig on an apple tree, before either of them could have protested, if either had had a mind to. Kevin did not. That thought had finally breached its monstrous back in his mind, and, like it or not, he was forced to contemplate it.

It was simple, as a whale's back is simple - at least to the eye of one who does not study whales for a living - and it was colossal in the same way.

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The Sun Dog

It wasn't an idea but a simple certainty. It had to do with that odd flatness Polaroids always seemed to have, with the way they showed you things only in two dimensions, although all photographs did that; it was that other photographs seemed to at least suggest a third dimension, even those taken with a simple Kodak 110. The things in
his
photographs, photographs which showed things he had never seen through the Sun's viewfinder or anywhere else, for that matter, were that same way: flatly, unapologetically two-dimensional. Except for the dog.

The dog wasn't flat. The dog wasn't
meaningless,
a thing you could recognize but which had no emotional impact. The dog not only seemed to suggest three dimensions but to really
have
them, the way a hologram seems to really have them, or one of those 3-D movies where you had to wear special glasses to reconcile the double images.

It's not
a Polaroid dog,
Kevin thought,
and
it
doesn't belong in the world Polaroids take pictures
of.
That's crazy,
I know it is, but I also know it's true. So what does it mean? Why is my camera taking pictures of it over and
over
...
and what Polaroid man or Polaroid woman is snapping pictures of It? Does he or she even see it? If it
is
a three-dimensional dog in a two-dimensional world, maybe he or she doesn't see it
...
can't see it. They say for
us time is the fourth dimension, and we know it's there, but we can't see it. We can't even really feel it pass,
although sometimes, especially when we're bored, I guess, it seems like we can.
But when you got right down to it, all that might not even matter, and the questions were far too tough for him, anyway. There were other questions that seemed more important to him, vital questions, maybe even mortal ones. Like why was the dog in
his
camera?

Did it want something of
him,
or just of anybody? At first he had thought the Answer was anybody, anybody would do because anybody could take pictures of it and the movement always advanced. But the thing around its neck, that thing that wasn't a collar ... that had to do with him, Kevin Delevan, and nobody else. Did it want to do something
to
him? If the answer to
that
question was yes, you could forget all the other ones, because it was pretty goddamned obvious what the dog wanted to do. It was in its murky eye, in the snarl you could just see beginning. He thought it wanted two things.

First to escape.

Then to kill.

There's a man or woman over there with a camera who maybe doesn't even see that dog,
Kevin thought,
and if
the photographer can't see the dog, maybe the dog can't see the photographer, and so the photographer is safe.
But if the dog really
is
three-dimensional, maybe he sees out - maybe he sees whoever is using my camera.
Maybe it's still not me, or not specifically me; maybe whoever is using the camera is its target.
Still - the thing it was wearing around its neck. What about that?