Time is the Fire

by Connie Willis

  I had wrenched away from the hand he tried to put on my shoulder. “How does it feel to have killed one of the last dogs in the world?” I shouted at her. “How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?”

  The screen door banged again. Katie was looking at me, still holding the reddened paper towel.

  “You moved away,” she said, “and I thought maybe that meant you’d forgiven me, but it didn’t, did it?” She came over to the table and wiped at the red circle the glass had left. “Why did you do it? To punish me? Or did you think that’s what I’d been doing the last fifteen years, roaring around the roads murdering animals?”

  “What?” I said.

  “The Society’s already been here.”

  “The Society?” I said, not understanding.

  “Yes,” she said, still looking at the red-stained towel. “They said you had reported a dead animal on Van Buren. They wanted to know where I was this morning between eight and nine A.M.”

  I nearly ran down a road worker on the way back into Phoenix. He leaped for the still-wet cement barrier, dropping the shovel he’d been leaning on all day, and I ran right over it.

  The Society had already been there. They had left my house and gone straight to hers. Only that wasn’t possible, because I hadn’t even called Katie then. I hadn’t even seen the picture of Mrs. Ambler yet. Which meant they had gone to see Ramirez after they left me, and the last thing Ramirez and the paper needed was trouble with the Society.

  “I thought it was suspicious when he didn’t go to the governor’s conference,” she had told them, “and just now he called and asked for a lifeline on this person here. Katherine Powell. 4628 Dutchman Drive. He knew her in Colorado.”

  “Ramirez!” I shouted at the car phone. “I want to talk to you!” There wasn’t any answer.

  I swore at her for a good ten miles before I remembered I had the exclusion button on. I punched it off. “Ramirez, where the hell are you?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” she said. She sounded even angrier than Katie, but not as angry as I was. “You cut me off, you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “So you decided you had it figured out for yourself, and you told your little theory to the Society.”

  “What?” she said, and I recognized that tone, too. I had heard it in my own voice when Katie told me the Society had been there.

  Ramirez hadn’t told anybody anything, she didn’t even know what I was talking about, but I was going too fast to stop. “You told the Society I’d asked for Katie’s lifeline, didn’t you?” I shouted.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?”

  “Did the Society come see you this afternoon?”

  “No. I told you. They called this morning and wanted to talk to you. I told them you were at the governor’s conference.”

  “And they didn’t call back later?”

  “No. Are you in trouble?”

  I hit the exclusion button. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m in trouble.”

  Ramirez hadn’t told them. Maybe somebody else at the paper had, but I didn’t think so. There had, after all, been Dolores Chiwere’s story about them having illegal access to the lifelines. “How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked me, which meant they’d read my lifeline, too. So they knew we had both lived in Colorado, in the same town, when Aberfan died.

  “What did you tell them?” I had demanded of Katie. She had been standing there in the kitchen still messing with the Kool-Aid-stained towel, and I had wanted to yank it out of her hands and make her look at me. “What did you tell the Society?”

  She looked up at me. “I told them I was on Indian School Road, picking up the month’s programming assignments from my company. Unfortunately, I could just as easily have driven in on Van Buren.”

  “About Aberfan!” I shouted. “What did you tell them about Aberfan?”

  She looked steadily at me. “I didn’t tell them anything. I assumed you’d already told them.”

  I had taken hold of her shoulders. “If they come back, don’t tell them anything. Not even if they arrest you. I’ll take care of this. I’ll . . .”

  But I hadn’t told her what I’d do because I didn’t know. I had run out of her house, colliding with Jana in the hall on her way in for another refill, and roared off for home, even though I didn’t have any idea what I would do when I got there.

  Call the Society and tell them to leave Katie alone, that she had nothing to do with this? That would be even more suspicious than everything else I’d done so far, and you couldn’t get much more suspicious than that.

  I had seen a dead jackal on the road (or so I said), and instead of reporting it immediately on the phone right there in my car, I’d driven to a convenience store two miles away. I’d called the Society, but I’d refused to give them my name and number. And then I’d canceled two shoots without telling my boss and asked for the lifeline of one Katherine Powell, whom I had known fifteen years ago and who could have been on Van Buren at the time of the accident.

  The connection was obvious, and how long would it take them to make the connection that fifteen years ago was when Aberfan had died?

  Apache was beginning to fill up with rush hour overflow and a whole fleet of tankers. The overflow obviously spent all their time driving divideds—nobody bothered to signal that they were changing lanes. Nobody even gave an indication that they knew what a lane was. Going around the curve from Tempe and onto Van Buren they were all over the road. I moved over into the tanker lane.

  My lifeline didn’t have the vet’s name on it. They were just getting started in those days, and there was a lot of nervousness about invasion of privacy. Nothing went online without the person’s permission, especially not medical and bank records, and the lifelines were little more than puff bios: family, occupation, hobbies, pets. The only things on the lifeline besides Aberfan’s name was the date of his death and my address at the time, but that was probably enough. There were only two vets in town.

  The vet hadn’t written Katie’s name down on Aberfan’s record. He had handed her driver’s license back to her without even looking at it, but Katie had told her name to the vet’s assistant. He might have written it down. There was no way I could find out. I couldn’t ask for the vet’s lifeline because the Society had access to the lifelines. They’d get to him before I could. I could maybe have the paper get the vet’s records for me, but I’d have to tell Ramirez what was going on, and the phone was probably tapped, too. And if I showed up at the paper, Ramirez would confiscate the car. I couldn’t go there.

  Wherever the hell I was going, I was driving too fast to get there. When the tanker ahead of me slowed down to ninety, I practically climbed up his back bumper. I had gone past the place where the jackal had been hit without ever seeing it.

  Even without the traffic, there probably hadn’t been anything to see. What the Society hadn’t taken care of, the overflow probably had, and anyway, there hadn’t been any evidence to begin with. If there had been, if the cameras had seen the car that hit it, they wouldn’t have come after me. And Katie.

  The Society couldn’t charge her with Aberfan’s death—killing an animal hadn’t been a crime back then—but if they found out about Aberfan, they would charge her with the jackal’s death, and it wouldn’t matter if a hundred witnesses, a hundred highway cameras had seen her on Indian School Road. It wouldn’t matter if the print-fix on her car was clean. She had killed one of the last dogs, hadn’t she? They would crucify her.

  I should never have left Katie. “Don’t tell them anything,” I had told her, but she had never been afraid of admitting guilt. When the receptionist had asked her what had happened, she had said, “I hit him,” just like that, no attempt to make excuses, to run off, to lay the blame on someone else.

  I had run off to try to stop the Society from finding out that Katie had hit Aberfan,
and meanwhile the Society was probably back at Katie’s, asking her how she’d happened to know me in Colorado, asking her how Aberfan died.

  I was wrong about the Society. They weren’t at Katie’s house. They were at mine, standing on the porch, waiting for me to let them in.

  “You’re a hard man to track down,” Hunter said.

  The uniform grinned. “Where you been?”

  “Sorry,” I said, fishing my keys out of my pocket. “I thought you were all done with me. I’ve already told you everything I know about the incident.”

  Hunter stepped back just far enough for me to get the screen door open and the key in the lock. “Officer Segura and I just need to ask you a couple more questions.”

  “Where’d you go this afternoon?” Segura asked.

  “I went to see an old friend of mine.”

  “Who?”

  “Come on, come on,” Hunter said. “Let the guy get in his own front door before you start badgering him with a lot of questions.”

  I opened the door. “Did the cameras get a picture of the tanker that hit the jackal?” I asked.

  “Tanker?” Segura said.

  “I told you,” I said, “I figure it had to be a tanker. The jackal was lying in the tanker lane.”

  I led the way into the living room, depositing my keys on the computer and switching the phone to exclusion while I talked. The last thing I needed was Ramirez bursting in with “What’s going on? Are you in trouble?”

  “It was probably a renegade that hit it, which would explain why he didn’t stop.” I gestured at them to sit down.

  Hunter did. Segura started for the couch and then stopped, staring at the photos on the wall above it. “Jesus, will you look at all the dogs!” he said. “Did you take all these pictures?”

  “I took some of them. That one in the middle is Misha.”

  “The last dog, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No kidding. The very last one.”

  No kidding. She was being kept in isolation at the Society’s research facility in St. Louis when I saw her. I had talked them into letting me shoot her, but it had to be from outside the quarantine area. The picture had an unfocused look that came from shooting it through a wire-mesh-reinforced window in the door, but I wouldn’t have done any better if they’d let me inside. Misha was past having any expression to photograph. She hadn’t eaten in a week at that point. She lay with her head on her paws, staring at the door, the whole time I was there.

  “You wouldn’t consider selling this picture to the Society, would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  He nodded understandingly. “I guess people were pretty upset when she died.”

  Pretty upset. They had turned on anyone who had anything to do with it—the puppy mill owners, the scientists who hadn’t come up with a vaccine, Misha’s vet—and a lot of others who hadn’t. And they had handed over their civil rights to a bunch of jackals who were able to grab them because everybody felt so guilty. Pretty upset.

  “What’s this one?” Segura asked. He had already moved on to the picture next to it.

  “It’s General Patton’s bull terrier Willie.”

  They had fed and cleaned up after Misha with those robot arms they used to use in the nuclear plants. Her owner, a tired-looking woman, had been allowed to watch her through the wire mesh window, but she’d had to stay off to the side because Misha flung herself barking against the door whenever she saw her.

  “You should make them let you in,” I had told her. “It’s cruel to keep her locked up like that. You should make them let you take her back home.”

  “And let her get the newparvo?” she said.

  There was nobody left for Misha to get the newparvo from, but I didn’t say that. I set the light readings in the camera, trying not to lean into Misha’s line of vision.

  “You know what killed them, don’t you?” she said. “The ozone layer. All those holes. The radiation got in and caused it.”

  It was the Communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren’t guilty at all.

  “This one here looks kind of like a jackal,” Segura said. He was looking at a picture I had taken of a German shepherd after Aberfan died. “Dogs were a lot like jackals, weren’t they?”

  “No,” I said, and sat down on the shelf in front of the developer’s screen, across from Hunter. “I already told you everything I know about the jackal. I saw it lying in the road, and I called you.”

  “You said when you saw the jackal it was in the far right lane,” Hunter said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you were in the far left lane?”

  “I was in the far left lane.”

  They were going to take me over my story, point by point, and when I couldn’t remember what I’d said before, they were going to say, “Are you sure that’s what you saw, Mr. McCombe? Are you sure you didn’t see the jackal get hit? Katherine Powell hit it, didn’t she?”

  “You told us this morning you stopped, but the jackal was already dead. Is that right?” Hunter asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Segura looked up. Hunter touched his hand casually to his pocket and then brought it back to his knee, turning on the taper.

  “I didn’t stop for about a mile. Then I backed up and looked at it, but it was dead. There was blood coming out of its mouth.”

  Hunter didn’t say anything. He kept his hands on his knees and waited—an old journalist’s trick, if you wait long enough, they’ll say something they didn’t intend to, just to fill the silence.

  “The jackal’s body was at a peculiar angle,” I said, right on cue. “The way it was lying, it didn’t look like a jackal. I thought it was a dog.”

  I waited till the silence got uncomfortable again. “It brought back a lot of terrible memories,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking. I just wanted to get away from it. After a few minutes I realized I should have called the Society, and I stopped at the 7-Eleven.”

  I waited again, till Segura began to shoot uncomfortable glances at Hunter, and then started in again. “I thought I’d be okay, that I could go ahead and work, but after I got to my first shoot, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, so I came home.” Candor. Openness. If the Amblers can do it, so can you. “I guess I was still in shock or something. I didn’t even call my boss and have her get somebody to cover the governor’s conference. All I could think about was—”

  I stopped and rubbed my hand across my face. “I needed to talk to somebody. I had the paper look up an old friend of mine, Katherine Powell.”

  I stopped, I hoped this time for good. I had admitted lying to them and confessed to two crimes: leaving the scene of the accident and using press access to get a lifeline for personal use, and maybe that would be enough to satisfy them. I didn’t want to say anything about going out to see Katie. They would know she would have told me about their visit and decide this confession was an attempt to get her off, and maybe they’d been watching the house and knew it anyway, and this was all wasted effort.

  The silence dragged on. Hunter’s hands tapped his knees twice and then subsided. The story didn’t explain why I’d picked Katie, who I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, who I knew in Colorado, to go see, but maybe, maybe they wouldn’t make the connection.

  “This Katherine Powell,” Hunter said, “you knew her in Colorado, is that right?”

  “We lived in the same little town.”

  We waited.

  “Isn’t that when your dog died?” Segura said suddenly. Hunter shot him a glance of pure rage, and I thought, It isn’t a taper he’s got in that shirt pocket. It’s the vet’s records, and Katie’s name is on them.

  “Yes,” I said. “He died in September of ninety-three.”

  Segura opened his mouth.

  “In the third wave?” Hunter asked before he could say anything.

  “No,” I said. “He was hit by a car.”
>
  They both looked genuinely shocked. The Amblers could have taken lessons from them. “Who hit it?” Segura asked, and Hunter leaned forward, his hand moving reflexively toward his pocket.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It was a hit and run. Whoever it was just left him lying there in the road. That’s why when I saw the jackal, it . . . That was how I met Katherine Powell. She stopped and helped me. She helped me get him into her car, and we took him to the vet’s, but it was too late.”

  Hunter’s public face was pretty indestructible, but Segura’s wasn’t. He looked surprised and enlightened and disappointed all at once.

  “That’s why I wanted to see her,” I added unnecessarily.

  “Your dog was hit on what day?” Hunter asked.

  “September thirtieth.”

  “What was the vet’s name?”

  He hadn’t changed his way of asking the questions, but he no longer cared what the answers were. He had thought he’d found a connection, a cover-up, but here we were, a couple of dog lovers, a couple of good Samaritans, and his theory had collapsed. He was done with the interview, he was just finishing up, and all I had to do was be careful not to relax too soon.

  I frowned. “I don’t remember his name. Cooper, I think.”

  “What kind of car did you say hit your dog?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking, not a jeep. Make it something besides a jeep. “I didn’t see him get hit. The vet said it was something big, a pickup maybe. Or a Winnebago.”

  And I knew who had hit the jackal. It had all been right there in front of me—the old man using up their forty-gallon water supply to wash the bumper, the lies about their coming in from Globe—only I had been too intent on keeping them from finding out about Katie, on getting the picture of Aberfan, to see it. It was like the damned parvovirus. When you had it licked in one place, it broke out somewhere else.

  “Were there any identifying tire tracks?” Hunter said.

  “What?” I said. “No. It was snowing that day.”

  It had to show in my face, and he hadn’t missed anything yet. I passed my hand over my eyes. “I’m sorry. These questions are bringing it all back.”