"Man, this sucker is big."
"Just once I'd like to get it on a leash and go down Hundred and Thirty-Fifth. Nobody bother me then."
"Big boys bother you, little man?"
"Fuck you. Man, look at those eyes, just starin'."
"Starin' at you."
"We gonna gas 'im?"
"Dunno. Cage 'im tonight, in the morning, Tony know what to do."
"Look out, man, he might be comin' 'round. Give 'im another dart."
"No, man, what can he do? He's in the muzzle. Let him wake up. I want to see that sucker on his feet."
"Tear your throat right out."
"Yeah, man. Beautiful."
"You sick, man."
By the time they got to the pound Bob could lift his head enough to see. He could also scent things with great acuity, but the smells were meaningless to him—a jumble of startling new sensations. He could identify some of the odors: the stale fetor of sick breath, of tooth decay and smoker's mouth, the odor of other animals in the truck, the smell of the steel and the plastic and the gasoline. But there were other scents, far more subtle, that seemed elusively beautiful. He was in contact with the world in a new way, but he had no time to appreciate it, for the truck stopped and he was carried down a corridor into hell.
The sound hit him in flashes. He imagined that he was at the exploding muzzle of a machine gun. Then he saw walls of cages all filled with roaring dogs. Their barks were wild and furious, their eyes terrible. Close up, on direct terms with it, he could scarcely imagine the intensity of this passion. The dogs' voices were blasting with fear and savage hate.
They knew he was no wolf, they knew it at once. Quailing in their cages as he was carried past, screaming, their lips frothy, their eyes beyond the border of sanity, they leaped and clawed, trying to get away from the monster that was being deposited among them.
"Don' like the wolf," one of the men said.
"He a mean sucker. They knows it. He kill ten of 'em all at once."
"You wanna see 'im fight?"
"Shit, he'd never make it tonight. Tomorra night, though."
"You on tomorra night?"
"Yeah."
"I got fifty bucks says he'll go down against the three shepherds that're up for gassin' Friday."
"You got fifty bucks sayin' that wolf ain't gonna stand against three mangy, broke-down street mutts? I got fifty bucks sayin' you is wrong."
There were slapped hands, then the two men walked out, oblivious to the noise of the crazed dogs. Bob lay on the filthy floor of a large cage, surrounded by other large cages. To his left and right large dogs shrank away from him. Across the aisle a terrier yammered, glaring at him out of scared, dripping pop eyes.
Despite all the noise, the barking and the whining, Bob was overtaken by sleep. It came quite suddenly, a black sheath. Abruptly he was dreaming. It was May 1961: Junior Cotillion Night at the Country Club. He was taking Melissa Costers, driving Dad's enormous new Thunderbird. There was a scent of oleander blossom in the air. He gave Melissa a corsage of gardenias, and the two smells mingled. On the way to the cotillion they listened to Fats Domino on the radio, singing "Blueberry Hill." Bob fell in love with the softly smiling Melissa. He even liked the way she looked in her braces. At a light he asked very solemnly if he could give her a kiss. Their lips touched dryly, then a waiting hunger captured them both and the kiss grew more intimate and humid. Their braces clattered together but neither of them cared. The light changed to green, a car honked and finally came alongside. The driver asked if they needed help.
It was then that Bob discovered that their braces had become locked together. Receiving no answer to his question, the other driver huffed and went away.
Bob woke up, sweating out the hideous waiting for rescuer, the frantic bending and twisting of the braces, the amused stares of the police, the flashbulbs of the Express photographer.
He awoke snapping at his muzzle, and knew to his despair why he had been dreaming about braces. The iron bound him, the leather straps tasted of the saline gnaw of a thousand other canines. He got to his feet, glanced around for a water fountain. Then he realized that he had a hangover from the tranquilizer dart. He was sick in a comer of the cage.
Thirsty, and he smelled water. All he could see, though, was an encrusted dish attached to a feeder tube that automatically refilled when the dish was empty. There was something floating in the water, possibly the previous occupant's spittle. The dish was slick with the licking of thousands of tongues. Bob was revolted, and crept to the far side of the cage.
Presently a small man came hurrying along, pushing a cart stacked with bowls. He thrust one into each cage through a spring-loaded door. The dogs commenced eating at once, gobbling down the appalling mess with gusto.
They were a dull group of creatures, these dogs. They were tired and broken, most of them, standing in these cages awaiting their turn in the gas chamber, which was a little black hutch at the far end of the room. Bob tried to remember how long animals were kept here before being destroyed. Five days, wasn't it?
Surely Cindy would manage something.
But time passed, and he remained in his cage. The light coming in the high, barred windows changed, grew thin. Bob yearned toward that light. His initial despair had given over to fury. Most of all he was furious at science for giving him no hint at all that this could happen. He had grown up in the illusion that there is something fundamentally stable about the universe. But that was a lie. It was only stable for those who believed it to be stable. If you did not so believe, you risked personal catastrophe. How many others had ended up like him, stuck in the bodies of creatures that had interested, inspired, or obsessed them?
He walked over and stared at the drying glop in the bowl. It was so damn stupid. He had to get out of this mess. The thing was, he hadn't felt any control over his transformation. So how could he hope to change himself back?
He searched his mind, trying to understand how this had happened to him. All of his life he had been fascinated by wolves. He had tried to observe them in the wild in Minnesota, but had gotten only a few glimpses. They were the devil to track. Hunters flushed them into clearings and shot them from helicopters. Bob had used years of tracking skills, gained from the Boy Scouts, from books, from professional guides. Still, the wolves had eluded him.
All but one. This was a she-wolf, young, weighing no more than eighty pounds. He had been crawling down a brush-choked ridge to a little stream when he had encountered a thatch of gray-brown fur. He had felt ahead and discovered the animal. She had been so frightened by his approach that she had become like a thing of rubber. There had been a brief moment between them. Her eyes had met his. He had thought himself the possessor of a great secret, to stare into the enigmatic, panic-clouded eyes of this alien creature, to see her as she was in her own world, a place intended to be hidden from human eyes.
Had that done it—had something of her somehow stuck to him all these years, some strange seed . . .?
But this was a matter of the flesh, of the real, immutable body, of blood and bone and skin. There had been some kind of dance of atoms, for they had reordered themselves. Wouldn't there have been a discharge of energy as the molecules of his old body broke their borders and sought new ones? And why had he first melted, then re-formed?
It was all completely impossible. And yet here he was in this cage with a bowl of dog food to eat. Not a very high quality brand, either, judging from the fatty bits and the chunks of what looked like organ meat suspended in the dissolved cereals. He sniffed at it. Most unappetizing. He wanted eggs, bacon, orange juice, and coffee. He wanted toast, dammit, butter, a bit of strawberry jelly. He wanted the Times and maybe another cup of coffee. He wanted all of these things at the Elephant and Castle restaurant on Prince Street, with Cindy sitting across from him with her croissant and cappuccino.
He wanted them now!
When the echo died away, he realized that he had somehow learned to bark. He had rattled aw
ay like the worst of them, yammering at the top of his lungs.
What a foul degeneration. He was now a coarse beast, he couldn't say a word, he couldn't turn a key, he had no clothes and had only garbage to eat. There was a gas chamber right out in the middle of the room and they were soon going to put him in it, and this terrible mystery was going to die. A human being who had gone through the mirror was going to come to a choking end, pitiful, terrified, claustrophobic.
All around him dogs licked bowls, paced, slept, barked, whined, defecated, urinated. The air was a fog of canine odors. When the door to the front of the building opened, expectant noses twitched, eyes followed the coming of the men with the big plastic garbage bags. They opened a cage and took a scrabbling animal down to the gas chamber. In a moment it was locked inside. The others paced and panted, then a buzzer rang and the inert form was pulled out and stuffed into a bag. Another dog, this one screaming and running, was processed. Then another, and another and another. The cages were disinfected.
Didn't these people realize that the dogs knew what was being done here? They all knew it was a charnel house. But they could not make the leap of consciousness to see that they themselves would be victims in a few days. They could not see this. When the men went away with their bags of cadavers, the other dogs settled down to an afternoon of licking themselves, pacing, barking, and sleeping.
Bob was alone. He could not befriend one of these creatures, for they had not his intelligence. He could not tap out signals or share noble thoughts in this filth.
During the day new dogs were brought to fill the cages of the old, most of them scruffy, terrible creatures, things of the streets. One was so emaciated that all it did was lie on its side. When a keeper offered it food, it gently licked the man's hand and closed its eyes.
Whenever a new beast was brought in, the other dogs barked. For Bob there could not be any real rest or even contemplation—much less sleep— with the cacophony. He kept wanting to believe that it was mindless, but the more he listened, the more he heard something new in it.
He heard a song, built on a very definite, very unhuman esthetic, but certainly a song. When dogs barked they expressed excitement or fear or rage, but they also expressed a beauty, something in its way as subtle as the luster of an aria. An aria, or was it a prayer? There was joy in it, even from these trapped beasts, and when one of them went to the gas chamber and the others barked, it seemed to Bob that the unseen world shifted and fluttered in sympathy.
"It isn't eating. It hasn't touched a thing through three feedings."
"Shit, I got fifty bucks on it. I hope it ain't sick."
"The pool's seventeen hundred dollars, you aren't the only one who doesn't want it to be sick. I've got some money on it myself. It's an exceptional wolf. Must weigh in at a hundred and sixty pounds, maybe a little better."
"It jus' look at you. You think it wants to eat us?"
"Don't take the muzzle off before the fight. If that's what's keeping it from its food, it can wait a little longer."
"That lady been by. We say we ship it up to Queens."
"I've got a buyer already. Movie guy."
"That lady done los' her a wolf!"
The man in khaki and the one in the soiled white coat left. Bob followed them with his eyes, hungering for their freedom, their voices, their beautiful hands.
The implications of their conversation were so unfortunate that it was a few minutes before Bob fully realized what had been said. Then it hit him a solar blow: he ran back and forth in the squeeze; he panted and snapped at his muzzle; he butted his head against the cage, finally stared in fury and frustration at the rusty padlock. Given the muzzle, he couldn't even chew it—not that he'd have a prayer of chewing it through.
They were stealing him, if they didn't kill him first. Made to fight to the death, then sold to some movie producer for God knew how much money —it was outrageous, criminal.
He raised his head and found that he could howl, and it felt good to howl out the misery of his situation. God, though, was as silent as ever He had been when Bob used to pray the Our Father and the Hail Mary. He hadn't been really Catholic since he was twelve, but now the nobility of the old prayers returned to his mind. He saw his religion as a grand and rather pitiful human attempt to somehow speak back to the mute wonder of creation. He had prayed just now, with his howl.
The dogs had fallen silent. Many of them were staring at him, and in their faces he could see reproach. He knew why: he had interrupted the song of the barks with a noise that did not fit. One little Shih Tzu in a tiny cage yapped. Then a terrier, then a mutt, and another mutt, and a burned mutt and a starved mutt, and two shepherds, and some other nameless breeds, and then like a night full of crickets they were going at it again, deep in their esthetic.
It came to him with great force that he was the only creature here who was not already in heaven. Nothing could happen to these dogs that really mattered to them. They were all lovers, they had all seen God many times in the human form, and theirs was the celebration of the heavenbound.
He yapped, but it was wrong, a sullen little note in these symphonics. He brought the habit of concept, of memory and forethought with him from the human world. That was why he was so much less than the dogs, why his voice lacked timbre and resonance. He had the past to savor, the future to fear, the present to endure. The dogs had only their barking. They strove to make it fine and exciting and fun. It was prayer, yes, but also entertainment: they were singing a song of dog-affirming.
This was not an unhappy place. Dogs suffered terribly here, yes, but the suffering only reached so deep. The gay tails, the flags on the jumping bodies of the condemned, attested to the persistence of life and the triumph of dogdom in a way that nothing in human experience could, save perhaps the singing that came from the gas chambers of World War II, when briefly man had experimented with treating himself as he did the animals. He longed to ask these dogs: "How does it feel to love a master, to live with and see and smell a God?" And how does it feel to be deprived of this love? Each dog was a detailed, complex tragedy. Lost, given away, abandoned, forgotten. They knew what it was to be discarded by someone they adored. Why then were they not lovelorn, and what was this strange humor in the barking? Did they see themselves as absurd? Were they capable of sensing the ridiculousness of being a dog?
When once a woman came looking for a dog to take home, the whole place filled with a smell as if of hope, and dog after dog shambled to the edge of its bars, dancing and panting its friendliness.
"That one you can't have," the vet said to the woman, a girl of perhaps twenty, with clear, hard eyes and the heart-stopping skin of the just-formed.
"Is he a husky?"
"He's a wolf."
"You're kidding!"
"No, ma'am, that's a full-blooded male timber wolf in the prime of life."
"What's he doing here?"
"Bit a guy's foot off. Cops confiscated him as an illegal pet."
"I don't want any problems like that!"
"No, ma'am. Now, let me show you this little husky over here. Name's Rindy. Got him in two days ago."
"Hello, Rindy. Rindy?"
A wave of ambrosial odor poured from the dog at the sound of its name. It wagged its tail, it shot gladness and welcome from its eyes.
The whole pound awaited the decision of the human goddess, who turned with a murmured instruction to call her when a female husky came in. When he saw she was leaving, Rindy circled his tail, climbed his cage, panted, yapped, licked at the withdrawing hand. This was blood-love, this feeling the dogs had for humankind. They were not capable of hating people, only of fearing them.
The pound was silent for a time after the young woman left. Then the barking started again, a rhythmic mystery.
Chapter Nine
CINDY FELT LIKE SHE WAS TUMBLING DOWN A SCREAMING well when she saw poor, netted Bob disappear into the elevator in the hands of a bunch of near thugs. Blotches of fur stuck through gaps in the n
et.
It was more than she could bear. A curious silence enveloped her. Little Kevin hopped around like a frenzied dwarf, trying to break through to her. She watched him, heard him calling her name. Or was that all a dream?
Eventually he gave up, lay down on the couch, and slept a miserable sleep. Cindy stared at a comer of the rug.
A long time later the door buzzer rang. It was now nearly three o'clock in the morning. The buzzer rang and rang. Cindy heard it as a voice calling from the top of the well. It didn't seem very important. Then she heard Kevin, saw his stricken face. "Monica is here," he said.
Monica, Monica, the ocean whispered. Monica, the ocean said. Monica, Monica.
Monica soon appeared beside Kevin. Something tickled Cindy's face. Monica's hands were holding Cindy's cheeks. It felt nice.
A blow followed, sharp and colored red. It exploded the numbness. "Kevin," Monica said, "that sort of thing is unwise!"
"It worked."
Her son had struck her.
"Can you feel your body?"
It was as if she was enclosed in a cotton wool.
"Sort of."
"Hysteria. Under the circumstances, an appropriate reaction."
Kevin's voice cracked. "She was like a wax statue, just sitting there. I couldn't get through to her! Monica, I was scared."
Cindy realized she had frightened her dear man-boy. She had to pull herself together, she was a mother. He lay against her chest, and she stroked his trembling body. "It's going to be all right, Kevin. You'll see."
He drew back from her. "Please don't act like I'm eight, Mother. I'm twelve, remember. I know what's going on." He looked at Monica. "They took him away. He bit Jodie's dad. The police saw he was a wolf—" Kevin stopped, became the little boy again. His body shook and he stifled his cracked sobs into his mother's breast. It was all she could do not to cry with him.
"The police?" Monica's eyes implored for more. Cindy told how they had taken him. Still listening, Monica bustled across to the kitchen and ground some coffee. In the middle of it she stopped. "Get a lawyer." Cindy did not like to hear tremor in that voice. Monica had to be strength.
The Wild Page 12
