The Seventh Day

by Scott Shepherd

  “You’re missing the party,” Fixer told him.

  The post-wedding celebration had been going for a few hours. Evening had fallen, and torches had been lit. Between the aurora borealis doing its nightly thing, and the firelight reflecting off the buildings making up the one-time outlet mall, there was more colorful bouncing light than any disco ball could have ever provided. The people of Promise were singing songs they remembered and butchering others they had forgotten, but no one cared. They were celebrating and Joad thought they deserved it.

  But his mind was elsewhere. He gave Fixer a look, and continued to stare down the abandoned road.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Fixer asked.

  “That obvious?”

  “Habitual loner stands by side of long dark highway, staring off into great wide darkness. Yes. Leaving. That’s my final answer. Unless you’d rather I take Potpourri for two hundred, Alex.”

  Joad turned to study Fixer. “Primo was right. You are a peculiar little man.”

  “Heard that, huh?”

  The moonlight streamed across Joad’s face, revealing a slight smile.

  “You weren’t going to go without saying goodbye, were you?”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  Fixer pointed back toward the settlement. “Why go? These seem like terrific people. You could make a home here.”

  “Yes. I presume so.”

  “But . . ?”

  Joad didn’t elaborate. He was grateful Fixer didn’t push him.

  They stood by the side of the road in silence. Joad could hear Fixer’s mind whirring away.

  “It’s what Primo said, isn’t it?” Fixer finally asked. “About not being the last.”

  Joad wasn’t surprised that Fixer had hit the nail on the head. “Pretty much.”

  “What do you think that means?” asked Fixer.

  “I’m not sure,” Joad answered truthfully.

  But it had been on his mind ever since they had buried the eldest brother. Joad was afraid that the secret behind those words had all but died on the man’s grinning lips—and that he would only find out their meaning when “the last” was upon him and it was too late to do anything. Joad kept thinking about the moment he’d been pinned to the confessional and Primo wanted to know why someone wanted Joad dead so badly.

  Joad wondered if that someone had been “the last.”

  He said as much to Fixer.

  “Sounds like that dream Secundo told Aurora about. The one by the pool.”

  Joad remembered. The Husky telling the brothers they must hunt down Joad, and finish him off.

  “Back to the talking Husky, are we?”

  “I’m not the guy who had one growing up,” Fixer said pointedly.

  “I told you—mine was totally normal-looking. White as snow. Not flaming red.”

  “Then, I guess it didn’t have two different-colored eyes either. One blue, one green.”

  Joad felt a rush of woe surge through his entire body.

  “Say that again.”

  JOAD

  He first saw it in the supermarket window.

  It looked like a pure white cotton ball, stuffed in a corner by itself. It was only when it heaved up and down that he realized it was actually alive. Joad tapped on the window and two black eyes popped open in the middle of the fluff ball. Two seconds later, it was up on tiny hind legs, leaning against the glass, clicking its teensy toenails on the pane, and trying to lick the nine-year-old Joad through the window.

  “Mom, Mom! Can I have him? Please oh please?” cried Joad.

  Of course, she had said no, blaming it on his father. Joad must have gone back to the window a half-dozen times while she got the week’s groceries. Each time his mother came searching for him, he looked at her with big pleading eyes and begged again.

  By the time they left, the only thing he’d done was cause his mother to wipe tears from her own eyes; she felt bad about not buying him the husky puppy.

  The next morning, he went into his piggy bank and scraped together the few bills he had left from his meager five-dollar-a-week allowance, the coins Old Man Perlman had given him for doing chores around The Famous Store, and a ten-dollar bill he found in his mom’s “cookie jar” (an empty flour tin), which he promised to put back before she missed it. Then, he dashed into the garage for his bicycle.

  He was back at the store before it opened, and his heart sank.

  The husky puppy was no longer in the window.

  The minute the door opened, Joad flew inside looking for the store manager, a spectacled fellow in his fifties. He found him in back, moving produce from cartons onto the shelves.

  “What happened to him?” Joad cried. “Did somebody buy him?”

  “Whoa, there, kiddo,” said Specs, which is what everyone naturally called the manager. “Who are we talking about here?”

  Before Joad could answer, there was a yipping sound, followed by clattering and skidding on the store’s concrete floor. Next thing Joad knew, the puppy was nuzzling his Converse All Stars. He dropped to the floor and picked up the squiggly tail-wagger, which promptly slobbered all over his face.

  “Wow. He likes you,” said Specs.

  “We met yesterday,” Joad said between giggles, the husky’s tongue tickling him. He nodded up front. “In the window. I thought you’d sold him.”

  “We keep him in his crate in back at night. I’m surprised he’s still here. Guess it’s because he’s the runt of the litter.” Specs leaned down and rubbed the puppy under the chin. “Aren’t you, Flake?”

  “Flake?”

  “Short for Snowflake,” Specs said, straightening up. “That’s what he looks like to me. What do you think?”

  “I think I’d like to buy him.”

  Specs cut him a deal.

  He had wanted thirty dollars for the whole kit and caboodle—Flake, the crate, and a week’s supply of food. Joad had a grand total of twenty-two dollars, plus the ten he’d “borrowed” from his mom’s cookie jar. Specs could tell he was reluctant to part with the ten-spot, and the guilty Joad fessed up where he had gotten it.

  “Tell you what. I’ll take the twenty-two bucks and you’ll put this back where it belongs,” Specs said, returning the ten dollars, which suddenly felt like the burning bush in Joad’s pocket. “I’ll also throw in this.”

  He handed Joad a bright blue collar with a lot of holes in it. “Only one he’ll ever need,” Specs told him. “Keep changing where you buckle it as he gets bigger.” He flipped over the package to show him the info on the back. “Says right here. Fits any size—from Pup to Man’s Best Friend.”

  “Thanks, Specs … I mean, sir,” stammered Joad.

  “Specs is fine, kid. You and Flake just take good care of each other.”

  Joad tried his best.

  But Flake and his father got off on the wrong foot.

  Especially when the puppy pooped on it the first night Joad brought him home.

  His mother actually embraced the idea of the dog once she got over the fact Joad had gone and bought it. She didn’t punish him for swiping the ten dollars (“I was only borrowing it, Mom!”) since he ended up returning it and was in enough hot water with his father over the shoe incident.

  It wasn’t the last time it happened, either.

  As Flake grew and went through the notches on his bright blue collar, he developed an uncanny ability to find Joad’s father’s newest pair of shoes and mess on them. No question the dog did it on purpose; and though Joad scolded Flake each time in front of his parents, privately, he told the dog he was a fantastic judge of character.

  Unfortunately, Flake and his dad had locked horns the moment Joad brought him home—his father always saying “the mutt’s a distraction for the boy.”

  It was inevitable that things would come to a head.

  Joad was only surprised it took five years.

  He was fourteen, and sick to death of JROTC.

  Joining the junior reserve program had be
en at his father’s insistence, and Joad tried to resist at first. But his father wouldn’t let up, saying he had done it all through high school, as had Joad’s grandfather. As much as he wanted to break tradition and had grown to hate the family patriarch, Joad finally relented and signed up halfway through freshman year—for his mother.

  “It’ll make your father happy,” she told him. Joad said he didn’t care. But his mother persisted. “If he’s happy, it makes me happy.”

  Joad found it impossible to say no to that.

  For six months, he marched up and down the football field in a dorky uniform that made the girls giggle—the girls he was just becoming interested in. They laughed even louder watching him perform flag drills or serve on color guard. He resented the classes on military discipline, science, and history that kept him after school while his few friends played sports. The only pleasure he got was walking Flake first thing in the morning and right after supper, and receiving a dose of unrequited love from the grown puppy he had rescued from the supermarket window years before.

  But that soon changed.

  His father rose up the military ladder and began spending more time in D.C. One of his scheduled jaunts coincided with a class trip to the lake. Joad had wanted to go, but his father said he’d miss JROTC and refused to sign the permission slip. Egged on by his friends, and sick to death of kowtowing to his dad, Joad called in sick to JROTC the moment his old man left, and jumped on the bus with his buddies.

  It was quite a day. His last good day under his father’s roof.

  They enjoyed the sunshine, a few water-skiing runs, and plenty of girl-watching. But things went to shit when some kid who wasn’t in their group almost drowned and their bus driver volunteered his services to rush the idiot and his three brothers to a local hospital. When the driver returned two hours later, telling them this Cletus kid was going to be fine, Joad couldn’t have cared less. He just knew they were going to get home really late.

  Flake would be pitching a fit to go outside.

  Someone was pissed all right. But not his faithful companion.

  His father was sitting on the front porch waiting for him, his hand wrapped in gauze, blood still soaking through it.

  “I thought you were in D.C.,” Joad stammered.

  “Obviously,” his father replied, the tone even sterner than usual. “My meeting got rescheduled.”

  Joad pointed at his father’s hand. “What happened?”

  “Never mind what happened. Where the hell were you?”

  “W-with my friends… .”

  “… up at the lake where you weren’t supposed to be. Instead of JROTC.” His father gave him that stare which always unnerved him; the unholy-looking one. “The school called, asshole. They wanted the parents to know their kids would be home late from their class trip because of some incident at the lake. The class trip I said you couldn’t go on. The class trip I had no idea you were on… .”

  “They made me sign a waiver when I got on the bus… .”

  “You think I give a shit?” His father got up and grabbed Joad by the shoulder. He shoved him into the chair he’d been sitting on. “You know what I give a shit about? You screwing around with your friends instead of being where you’re supposed to be—in JROTC, and back here walking your damn dog.”

  Joad looked around, suddenly aware. “Where’s Flake?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. The mutt was yipping and yapping to go out so I did that—your job. And what does that mongrel do? He goes off and bites me!”

  “Flake would never do that . . ! “

  His father waved his gauze-wrapped hand in front of Joad, the blood twice as red as his blustery face and hair. “What the hell do you think this is?”

  “Where is he?” Joad repeated, more nervous than ever.

  “Who knows? He ran off. And if he’s smart, he won’t come back here.” He moved a threatening step closer to his son. “You’re certainly going to be sorry that you just did.”

  Joad had been sure his father was going to haul off and slug him. Instead, he did something much worse.

  He sent Joad away to military school.

  Flake didn’t come back the next morning. And hadn’t shown up by the start of the following week, when Joad was shipped out on the bus. Even though he’d papered the neighborhood with LOST and REWARD signs.

  Good for you, Flake, thought Joad. At least you got away from the bastard on your own terms.

  Over the next three years in military school, Joad often thought of Flake—especially while marching on frozen football fields in harsh New England winters. He imagined a long life for his childhood companion, in a warm place with a family that would love and care for him until he grew old and spent his days sleeping in good people’s laps.

  At least one of them wasn’t having their heart hardened by the demands and expectations of a cruel patriarch.

  By the time he entered West Point, Joad had stopped fighting the fight he should have kept battling—the one against his father.

  He’d been turned inside out, become what his old man always wanted. The “best of the best” as the Army ads put it.

  A genuine killing machine that his father put right to work.

  And on the rare occasion, usually when stuck in some godforsaken desert or the bowels of the darkest tank, he wondered what life might have been like if he had gotten back in time to walk Flake that night.

  He didn’t have a clue.

  Not until he ended up in a hospital bed, his body riddled with shrapnel, and an angel named Becky appeared to show him.

  The first call came just as he was embarking on his goodwill mission.

  He was halfway up the plane steps when the number showed up on his cell phone, the same damned one from the 202 area code with the digits he wished he could forget but knew came from deep inside the Pentagon.

  He almost didn’t answer it. But knew it would just ring again.

  “Yes?” he said into the cell.

  “Please hold for General Joad,” came a female voice that would’ve doubled nicely as an automaton.

  “Please tell him to go to hell,” Joad responded and disconnected.

  The second one was in the form of a wire at his hotel in Bangladesh.

  Four words. Urgent. Must see you.

  Joad sent a return with only two. Must not.

  It was the third reach-out that Joad couldn’t ignore.

  He found it on his hotel bed after returning from a long dinner and debate with Indian clerics in New Delhi.

  It was a manila envelope with just his name on it.

  It wasn’t flat. There was something round and raised inside.

  Joad opened the envelope and a bright blue dog collar dropped onto the bed. There were bloodstains on it.

  He didn’t need to look at the tag hanging off it to know the name etched there.

  Joad squashed the feeling of bile rising from his stomach, and picked up the paper it had been wrapped in.

  A military map of the Gobi Desert.

  There was a red circle in the middle—with a scribbled latitude and longitude. Along with a time and date.

  Two days from now.

  Forty-three hours and fifteen minutes to be precise.

  His father had always been a stickler for punctuality.

  The coordinates proved to be a remote army outpost. The motor pool commander met Joad and provided him with a Jeep and exact directions to find the General. He said it was a twenty-minute ride into the heart of the desert. He also told Joad his father wanted him to come alone.

  “Of course, he did,” Joad replied.

  The last thing the man held up was a burka.

  “You’re going to need it. It gets really nasty out there this time of day,” he said, handing it over. Then, the man smiled. “What am I saying? It’s always nasty out there.”

  I bet, thought Joad, as he threw on the covering and hopped into the Jeep.

  The wind kicked up immediately. If it h
ad been calm, the trip would have taken him all of five minutes.

  Forty minutes and one sandstorm later, he spotted the other Jeep.

  Joad pulled to a stop and exited the driver’s door.

  He half expected something more spectacular—a surprise attack by a Bedouin army, or a bloodied Peter O’Toole tumbling down a sand dune.

  But only one thing emerged from the vehicle.

  The man he thought he’d ousted from his life.

  Joad stared down at the dog collar in his hand.

  And then at the man he now hated more than ever.

  The wind whipped up around them as they drew nearer. His father had a burka wrapped tightly around him. Strands of his still-bright red hair poked through, and he wore Wayfarers to block out the bright sun.

  He pointed at the collar in Joad’s hand.

  “Thought that would get your attention.”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Now, those aren’t words I expect to hear from a holy man,” his father said with a grin.

  “Report me to someone.”

  Joad took a step closer and repeated his question. “What do you want? Besides dragging me all the way out here to tell me that you killed my dog.”

  “You.” His father replied. “I want you back.”

  This time it was Joad who laughed.

  “You cannot be serious.”

  “There’s something coming, son. A shitstorm you wouldn’t believe. And you’re going to want to line up with me and not leave this time.”

  “Fuck you.”

  His father threw up his hands in mock disbelief. “There you go swearing again. Some kind of priest you are.”

  “What can I say? You bring out the worst out in me.”

  The man he loathed pointed at Joad’s chest. “That’s where you’re wrong, son. I bring out the best in you. Not that God you’re hiding behind. And certainly not that woman whose skirts you’re clinging to.”

  “Leave Becky out of this.”

  An anger began to surge through Joad, one he hadn’t felt since meeting Becky. An anger borne out of doing this bastard’s bidding, the man who had given him life and turned him into the soldier he had come to abhor.

  “You always had a weakness for the fairer sex,” said his father. “First it was that mother you thought was a saint, but I’m telling you she wasn’t. Now, it’s this preacher’s daughter you went and married like the fool you are.”