The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

He pushed out into the heat, was able to make himself wait all the way until dark for the cake. Because it was a celebration, he even sedated the mare, cut another flank steak off, packed it with poultice.

  He’d forgot to collect any water, but he’d forgot to collect all the jewelry and guns too.

  There’d be more, though.

  In places without women like Annie Jorgensson.

  Lonegan wiped the last of the mare’s grease from his mouth, pulled his chin hair down into a point, and pulled the cake plate into his lap, started fingering it in until he realized that he was just eating the sweet off the top, like his aunt had always warned him against. It needed to be balanced with the dry cake inside.

  He cut a wedge out with his knife, balanced it into his mouth, and did it again and again, until something popped under his blade, deep in the cake.

  It was a half a wafer.

  Lonegan’s jaws slowed, then he gagged, threw up onto his chest, and looked all the way back to town, to the old man in the door, smiling now, lifting his Bible to show that he knew, that he’d known, that he’d been going to get religion into his daughter’s life whether she wanted it or not.

  Lonegan shook his head no, no, lied to the old man that—that, if she’d just waited to pull the trigger, he would have told her that it wasn’t the poppy water, that he wouldn’t have let her—but then he could feel it inside him, burrowing like a worm for his heart, his life.

  He threw up again, but it was just thin blood now.

  “ . . . no,” he said, trying to sling the vomit from his fingers. It didn’t—it couldn’t . . . didn’t happen this fast. Did it?

  But—but . . .

  The oil, the barbershop oil. It was the delaying agent.

  Lonegan stumbled up through the fire, scattering sparks, the cake plate shattering on a rock, and started falling towards the mare. To ride, fast, back to Gultree, back to the old man. Back to those last two bottles.

  But the mare saw him coming, jerked her head away from the wagon wheel she was tied to.

  The reins held. The spoke didn’t.

  She skittered back, still sluggish from what he’d given her, and Lonegan nodded, made himself slow down. Held his hat out like there were going to be something in it.

  The mare opened her nostrils to the night, tasting it for oats, then turned her head sideways to watch Lonegan with one eye, then stepped back when he stepped forward, and again, and again, like a dance, then managed to keep this up for the rest of the night, her reins always just within reach of Lonegan’s arms. Or what he thought was his reach.

  Monsters

  When I was twelve and my parents were doing their usual thing of my dad living in an apartment to teach my mom a lesson, my mom finding something new of his each day to leave out on the lawn, I ended up spending three weeks of the summer with my grandmother and her new husband. My mother said she’d traded up for him after Granddad died, and that she deserved it. What she meant was that my grandmother’s new husband had a vacation place in a town that had a beach, and filled with tourists. He’d made his money consulting or something, like I had any idea what that meant. All that mattered to me was that I wasn’t going to be the go-between on phone calls for a while, and that I wasn’t going to be standing at different front doors every few days, one of my parents at the curb, their car in gear, the other in the kitchen thinking up the perfect terrible thing to say across the lawn or sidewalk.

  Needless to say, I’d pretty much decided to never get married.

  Of course, though, it was summer, and I was twelve, and the world being what it was, a few streets over from my new granddad’s house—I had to call him that, “Granddad”—there was a girl one grade ahead of me but the same age, and we kind of just fell in together the way you do no matter how old you are, when you each understand that this isn’t going to last, that it doesn’t have to matter.

  This isn’t about her, though. She doesn’t even need a name here. Call her Elaine, I guess.

  What this is about is the job she’d wound up with for August. Through some golf and beer circumstances, her parents, who were old enough that at first I thought she was staying with her grandparents too, had met another couple, who lived in that resort town year round, and were on the way to the mountains for their vacation. Which, yeah, I mean, it seemed to me like they were going on vacation from living on vacation, but the way it worked out for Elaine was that she got paid twenty dollars a week, in advance, to water their flowers and walk their dog. To prove she could do it she had to walk him up and down the street one day before they (the Wilkersons) left, but the dog, as big as he was, had been trained, so Elaine had no problem with him.

  And of course, because I had nothing else to do with my days but duck my grandmother’s loaded questions about my dad (my new granddad just watched me a lot, as if waiting for me to approach him, finally; I was his first grandkid, I think, so he thought I was made of glass), I’d stand with her while she drowned the flowers and then help her get Matey leashed up to make the rounds.

  Which, those rounds, that is what this is about.

  As we became more and more bold with Matey, sometimes we’d wrap his leash six or seven times around one of our fists and take him down to the boardwalk. The tourists usually gave us wide lanes to walk around. According to Elaine’s parents, Sid Wilkerson had been some kind of big brass with the police department. He’d joined right after high school and then stayed on until his retirement cottage. The reason we got told this, I think, was so we wouldn’t let the flowers die, and wouldn’t let anything happen to Matey. It wasn’t that Elaine’s parents cared about the plants or the dog, but that it would be awkward to have to explain it to the Wilkersons, who they thought were good people to know, as they might have an inside line on a cheap rental next summer. I don’t know. Like we had anything else going on, and were going to forget the flowers. Matey, though, he was the real fun.

  Because Sid Wilkerson was ex-police, he was in some kind of retirement program for “canine units.” When the bomb and drug and cadaver dogs all got too old to do their jobs anymore, Sid would take one, give it a good year or two as reward for catching so many bad guys.

  And, though nobody’d left us any cheat sheet for Matey, we found out soon enough that he knew some kind of hand signals. We only ever figured out the obvious ones like “get” and “stay” and “go right,” but even that was a thrill, especially after all the brainless dogs we cycled through at home.

  He was like our secret, our treasure, and of course we wanted to show him off down at the beach. We each even had—at least I know I did—dreams of him saving a drowning lady, or smelling a bomb in a trash can and saving everybody’s lives, or stopping a carjacking, something like that. It was what happened in these “What I did that summer I met that girl or guy, and we found ourselves in a mystery”-stories. Though Elaine and me lived in different states, we’d still read all the same books from the library, had the same romantic-sleuth-adventure plotlines in our heads, and would never talk about something so stupid as being in a story with a “magic” dog, of course. But that was partly just because talking about something’s the best way to mess it all up, right?

  When you’re twelve, your superstitions are pure like they’ll never be again, I’m pretty sure.

  And, yeah, I did finally tell her about my parents and how stupid they were, and she listened and digested it for a day or two then showed me her dad’s golf clubs in the storage closet behind their barbecue. Each of the clubs was bent perfectly in half, over the memory of a knee. I didn’t ask who’d done it. It was enough to know it was us against them, and that, if we could help it, we were going to wind up different people.

  We should have been more specific about that last part, though, spelled it out letter by letter, that what we meant was we weren’t going to still be children when we grew up.

  Instead, whoever answers these kinds of impulsive prayers just took the broad strokes into account.

  We are di
fferent now, I mean. Definitely not our parents. But that’s just because our parents, unlike Elaine, didn’t have their throats chewed out the day before they were supposed to pack up and go back to their real lives.

  This is why Matey is important here.

  Sid Wilkerson should have told us all his commands before he left. The one we needed most was whatever one would make Matey forget all his training and just be a normal, average dog.

  What happened, finally, as it had to I guess, was that we asked Elaine’s parents if we could go down to the boardwalk for sausage-on-a-stick at dusk. There was a stand that faced the ocean and always had music rolling across the splintery counter. Elaine’s parents said yes, provided we took the Wilkersons’ dog, okay?

  It kept us from having to ask.

  As for my grandmother and “granddad,” they were still on some schedule from 1950, where kids are supposed to stay outdoors until a half hour after dark, then sneak in, wash behind their ears, eat a cold dinner and—this was the update—watch game shows with them until bedtime. So I just went, didn’t have to ask.

  Because it was a Friday night, the very last one of the summer, the boardwalk was shoulder to shoulder, tight enough that the tourists weren’t even making room for Matey. Not that they didn’t notice him, they did, only now it was a few steps later, when they looked down at the back of their hand to see what they’d just rubbed against.

  And Matey, the boardwalk was dog heaven to him. He was grinning, his tongue lolling, his eyebrows raised, tail playful like an invitation. He was what I imagined Sid Wilkerson to be like on the inside: totally content with his life, with everything he’d done, and now just enjoying retirement.

  Still, Elaine kept the leash balled around her fist, just in case a cat darted through the forest of legs. As far as we knew, a hand held palm-out was enough to get Matey to stay until released, no matter what, but part of that was catching his eye, which we knew were the makings of some comedy routine we didn’t want any part of, at least not in public.

  Another part of being twelve is the certainty that one public embarrassment is enough to ruin the rest of your life.

  Since Elaine had Matey—it was her turn—I carried the ten her dad had slipped us so he could feel like a hero.

  It wasn’t enough to cut through the three-deep line to the sausage stand, though.

  “Well?” Elaine said, the leash between her and Matey pulled tight.

  We couldn’t stand in line with him for forty minutes, we knew.

  “Other one,” I shrugged, pointing down the beach with my chin to the place that sold sausage and drumsticks and got neither of them right. We’d only been down there once, when my grandparents were insisting on being grandparents. It involved umbrellas and complicated folding chairs and Elaine and me eating ice cream we really probably liked but had to act like we didn’t. Because they were grandparents, too, they were blind to all the natural divisions of the beach that everybody else tuned into without even having to think about. What they didn’t understand was that there was a senior citizen’s part, way down by the parking lot—old people tended to wake up first—and then, for the next four miles, it was alternating sections of girls in bikinis and the guys they attracted and then whole families with complicated coolers and buckets for sand castles and trash bags for lunch. The only bump in all this was around the sausage and drumstick place; it ran right by the boardwalk, which meant whoever was on that beach could duck under to smoke or do whatever. So, it was the bad area, more or less, the part that when you walked through it you became aware of how you were holding your face.

  And of course my new granddad, the consultant, plopped his chair right down in the middle of it, and kept telling Elaine and me to go introduce ourselves to these kids, or those kids.

  That was the sausage and drumstick place we were at now.

  It wasn’t so much Matey that gave us the nerve we needed to go there either, but that neither of us wanted to back out. I mean, it was our last Friday night of the summer. If we were going to kiss or anything, it was now or never, and the boardwalk was right there to duck under, right?

  Not that either of us knew how to start such a thing.

  The line at this stand, of course, was nothing. We took our sausage-on-a-stick and gave the four dollars it cost, and I held our large drink because Elaine didn’t have enough hands. By then we were sharing a straw, of course.

  We sat on a utility pole bench and pulled the heat lamp skin off with our teeth and let the grease run down into our hands, and knew this adventure or romance or mystery we’d been pretending to be involved in was almost over, now. Maybe it would be better by the time school got started, though. Already I was thinking how I was going to describe Elaine to my friends, or, worse, to my dad when he was trying to get even with my mom by talking “boy-stuff” with me. Teaching me about girls, like a secret. Like he knew.

  As for the mystery we were supposed to be on, the closest thing the resort town had was that it had misplaced four people over the course of the summer. None of them had washed up, though, so it wasn’t a very pressing thing. Probably they’d just ducked their weekly hotel tab, slipped up the Interstate. That was what my new granddad said, at least, and he’d lived here longer than anybody else we knew except maybe Sid Wilkerson. But if Sid Wilkerson were here, he’d have probably already solved the thing. With our help, of course. And Matey’s.

  I still smile, thinking of it like that.

  And Elaine, God. If I’d have ever got married, I’m pretty sure it would have been to the first girl who reminded me of Elaine, the first girl who looked like what Elaine might have grown up into.

  I can still see her, too, sitting at the top of the stairs like she was waiting for me to save her, all the blood still, then, in her body.

  I was twelve years old, though.

  But that’s no excuse.

  This is what happened: we’d found a trash can to leave our half-eaten sausage sticks in. It was close enough to the boardwalk that people would try to drop drinks down into it, so to avoid getting splashed, we just lobbed our sticks over. Matey was trained enough that he didn’t snatch them from the air. He was one of those dogs that you could put a treat on his nose and he wouldn’t eat until you told him he could.

  How close we were to the darkness under the boardwalk then was about four feet, I’d guess, and Matey wasn’t even straining at the leash to go into it, chase down some bad guy, but we went anyway, just on a silent agreement that this was going to stand in for everything else we hadn’t done. This was going to be our big adventure.

  Underneath, once our eyes adjusted, it was another world—trash and smoke and cast-off clothes and seaweed the tide brought in. Because the sun couldn’t get to it to dry it up, it festered and stank. And there were eyes watching us, we could tell. Too many posts to tell what was bodies, what wasn’t. Just that some of the posts were blowing out pale lines of smoke. It was like walking through a dream, I suppose, the kind where you don’t realize you can’t breathe until you’re suddenly suffocating. Matey could feel it too, I think. He didn’t growl or pull against Elaine, but there was a new tenseness about him. It had to do with his ears and his tail.

  Without him, we probably would have made a show of pretending to be looking for something we couldn’t find, then scampered back to the safety of the beach.

  Nobody approached us, or said anything to us.

  My guess is that the people under there had a certain respect for the line Matey still cut. He just looked like a police dog.

  Ten minutes later, breathing again, we were on the boardwalk. It was exactly forty-four minutes past the time Elaine was supposed to have been home, and there was a band taking the stage somewhere behind us, so the crowd was streaming past like water. We kept our arms close, and I went first so we could keep Matey between us, which, this is how parents are supposed to act, I’m pretty sure. They’re supposed to take the knees and elbows the world has to offer, keep their kid safe, out of the w
ay.

  In our case, though, we trusted Matey, sure, but didn’t want him taking a piece out of a passing hand either.

  And I’m probably making these people rushing past us sound like a mob. It was nothing that big, was starting to thin out after a few seconds, even, so we could see clear concrete ahead, and past that the road that led to Elaine’s and however we were going to say goodbye.

  Maybe Matey could feel that, too, how we weren’t exactly pushing to get to that awkwardness.

  Either way, some of his training bubbled up, right at the end of the crowd.

  For the first time since we’d been walking him, he exploded, real jaw-snapping, slobbering, maniac killer dog kind of stuff. Not at us either, but at somebody in the crowd. Had they touched his ear wrong? Were they carrying drugs, a bomb?

  I held onto his leash with Elaine, and still, he was edging us forward.

  Who he was barking at was this one guy wearing leather pants instead of the bright shorts everybody else had on.

  The guy stood still, let the crowd melt ahead of him, and looked from Matey up to Elaine and me.

  He was smiling.

  “Yours?” he said, taking a step forward, to Matey.

  I started to yell to him not to, that couldn’t he see the dog hated him, but I didn’t even say anything. This close to Elaine, I could smell the chlorine on her, from when we’d swam earlier in the hotel pool, when we had the whole ocean if we wanted.

  “Nice doggy,” the guy said like a joke, taking another step forward, and there wasn’t even anything that strange about his voice or, from what I could tell, his smell, or anything, but Matey was about to choke himself on the leash.

  “He’s a police dog,” Elaine managed to get out.

  The guy nodded, said that explained it then, yeah? It was a joke to him, all of this.

  “Please,” I said, losing ground, “we’ve got to—” but the guy was stepping forward again, like he wanted to see what Matey was made of.

  Instead of walking away to his concert, he squatted down so that Matey’s teeth were maybe two feet from his face, then looked over him to us.