The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Yours?” he said, and we shook our heads no just as Matey bunched his haunches and surged forward for the kill.

  Though he didn’t make it to the guy’s throat, he did catch him in the meat just under the thumb.

  The guy ripped his hand away slower than I thought made any sense. As if it were made of paper, and he didn’t want to pull too fast, as that might rip it even more.

  “No worries,” he said, his voice a new kind of even, his eyes photographing Matey practically, and—we talked about this on the way home—for the ten or maybe twelve seconds more we were there on the sidewalk with him, the guy’s hand where Matey’s tooth had opened it, it was just white flesh on the inside. No blood. Like the time I’d cracked my shin on the curb next door and then sat there for maybe five minutes staring at the white I knew had to be cartilage. What I was afraid of, and never told anybody, was that I was dead, and only just figuring it out. That I would only be alive if I bled.

  It kept me looking behind us all the way to Elaine’s turn-off, and then made me walk past it with her too, to deposit Matey one last time. Tomorrow the Wilkersons were supposed to be back, and the town was going to just go on without us, without even remembering us, probably.

  At least that’s what we thought.

  Back at the split in the road which went uphill to my new granddad’s house, after having held hands for the width of exactly three consecutive houses, which even this late in the summer felt impulsive, like falling off some tall thing, Elaine leaned down and kissed me and then turned before I could kiss back, danced off to her house.

  Our nerves were still on fire from being under the boardwalk, and from Matey biting that guy, and the night, for the first time I could remember, it was alive.

  On the way home I kept smiling on accident and then rubbing it in with the side of my arm.

  This year at school was going to be different, I knew. It didn’t matter what was going on at my house, or houses. I was going to be a different person. I was leaving all the stupid stuff behind me.

  At my new granddad’s I sat at the table and watched game shows and ate some cold Tater Tots with warm brown ketchup—my grandmother had no idea that ketchup went in the fridge, not the cabinet—then went up to my room to cry with the door closed, and hit the mattress because I was being stupid but then tell myself to just get it all out now anyway, because I wasn’t going to let this happen again, ever.

  I went to sleep on top of the covers in my beach clothes, and the last thing I remember thinking was Sid Wilkerson, driving across all of America to get back to Matey, so that, when I started hearing him bark, I thought it was just in my head.

  But then it wasn’t.

  I rose, parted the blinds of my room, and there on the beach, staked on a chain, was Matey, long strings of saliva arcing out from his mouth.

  “I don’t think he likes me,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned around slow.

  It was the guy in the leather pants.

  He was just standing there.

  “You—you shouldn’t—” I started to say, building up to a scream, but then he was close, his hand clamped over the lower part of my face, my back pressed into the wall, his eyes hot at mine.

  His breath smelled like Matey’s.

  “Wanna be number five?” he said, smiling.

  I tried kicking him but it was like kicking a brick wall. My tears were collecting on the top of his hand. He lifted his hand, licked them off, his other hand already keeping me quiet.

  “Your little girlfriend,” he said then. “She’s not here, is she?”

  If my heart had been pounding before, it stopped now.

  “Yeah,” the guy said, leaning back to study Matey.

  “Don’t,” I told him. “She’s—you can’t . . . ”

  “You’d be surprised at what I can do, maybe,” he said back. “Want a little test drive?”

  It took me a bit to hear what he was saying. I shook my head no and he smiled with his eyes.

  “Then you know what to do,” he said.

  I shook my head no, I didn’t—I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t—but he was already stuffing me deep enough into the closet that by the time I got out, he was gone.

  And then I realized it was quiet for the first time since I’d woke.

  I felt my way to the window.

  Matey was gone.

  I didn’t even stop to put my shoes on or care if my new granddad heard me. I went out the window, through the bushes, and crossed lawn after lawn, to get to Elaine first.

  By the time I got to her street I could taste blood in my throat, feel it on the soles of my feet, but none of that mattered.

  I jumped the rail to get to her front door, stabbed the doorbell button until Elaine’s dad answered, a straight golf club held low by his thigh.

  I was crying and trying to talk and, finally, Elaine’s mom had to call my mom in the city to get my new granddad’s phone number.

  Nobody was mad, but nobody understood, either.

  The whole time Elaine sat at the top of their carpeted stairs, studying me. Because she was in her nightgown, her dad wouldn’t let her come down.

  “Sid Wilkerson gets home tomorrow,” I said, like my last hope.

  Elaine’s mom patted me on the shoulder.

  They thought—I don’t know what they thought. That I was lovesick, I guess. That I was twelve years old and had fallen for their daughter and now was making up things to keep them there.

  Soon enough my grandmother was at the door in her robe, and was apologizing to Elaine’s parents, guiding me away, to the car with my new granddad sitting in the front seat.

  “No problem, sport,” he said, reaching back to clap me on the leg like I was part of the club now. Like he understood, and would cover for me if needed.

  I looked away, my breath too hitched up to answer any of my grandmother’s questions. After we’d gone all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac to make the wide turn home my new granddad didn’t accelerate like a normal human, but crept along at senior citizen speed. I just sat in the back seat, watching all the dark houses skid by into my past, thinking to myself that this was it, then, it was over, maybe Matey really was back in his pen at the Wilkersons’, and maybe I deserved the parents I had, maybe I deserved everything that had happened, even Elaine, the way she’d looked at me from the top of the stairs, her toes digging into the carpet. It was like, being a grade ahead, she understood too. Like she wanted to come down, let me explain it all to her.

  And I would have, that’s the thing. All night.

  I pushed my knee hard into the back of the seat and closed my eyes and tried to hide in my arms, and only looked up when my new granddad made the sound he made when a game show answer was surprising him.

  What he was seeing was the guy from the boardwalk.

  He was walking our direction—to the turnaround—away from Elaine’s house.

  At his side was Matey. The way he was controlling him was he had the handle of the leash in his left hand, with his right hand cinched down to the back of Matey’s neck.

  As we passed him I slammed myself up against the glass and he stopped, smiled, nodded something like thanks and then opened his hands, let Matey slip away.

  I was out of the car before my new granddad could even stop it, and caught Matey ten minutes later in front of a house with a motion-sensitive security light. He was crazy, even snapping at me. I calmed him down as much as I could, held his head to my chest, then looked back for the guy I knew had to have been running behind us.

  There was just my new granddad in his house slippers, though.

  “That’s Sid’s?” he said, about Matey.

  I nodded, and then—because they were my grandparents, and not really that bad—they rode the brakes and lit the sidewalk ahead of me, all the way back to the Wilkersons’.

  I ushered Matey into his pen then watched him check all the corners over and over, and that was the second-to-the-last time I ever saw him.


  The next morning, then, along with the rest of the town, we got the news: Elaine had been killed in her own bed. Something had chewed her throat out, splashed her all over the walls.

  It was like I was hearing all this through a long series of tubes. Like I could angle my head away and not any of it would be real anymore.

  Over the next three days, with my grandparents’ help, the police pieced the events of the night together, and decided that Elaine had become too attached to Matey, so had smuggled him up to her room—her parents said she usually didn’t go to bed that early, no, especially not after a scene like I’d made—and then something had happened. Something terrible. Their proof was the blood and hair smeared on the gate of Matey’s pen. According to them, he’d probably licked it all off his muzzle and feet himself, hours ago. His water pan was empty too, I heard, which somehow made it not so much his fault: if we’d only not been kids; if we’d only taken better care of him.

  As for my run across all the lawns to save her, everybody just shrugged, assumed I knew she had Matey up in her room, but, out of loyalty, wouldn’t say anything about it. And, after a prod or two, they didn’t push me to either. The story they had was neater, I mean. Made more sense: Elaine had accidentally made some bad hand signal to him, or stumbled onto an old kill command, or worn the same hair spray as some long-gone bad guy.

  Whatever she’d done, or whatever had happened, the facts were that her throat had been torn out, and Matey, her responsibility, had been running the streets around her house that night, and had even snapped at me, whom he knew and loved, when I tried to pull him close.

  The last time I saw him, an Animal Control officer was leading him away from the Wilkersons’ house, to be put down. He had that same grin on his face too, like this was just going to be another adventure—the boardwalk, with different smells.

  Standing on the porch were Sid Wilkerson and a younger cop, who’d maybe worked with Matey before Matey started killing sixth grade girls. When Sid Wilkerson saw me he just thinned his lips, turned away. Shut the door.

  My new granddad guided my away by the shoulder.

  My mom and dad were already having a complicated road race to get to me, prove to each other who the real parent was.

  My grandmother was making something elaborate for all of us to eat, to prove how happy she was in her new marriage.

  And Elaine.

  All that was left of Elaine was a black stain on Matey’s fence, with stupid, hateful flies crawling over it (because I didn’t believe, I went and saw). And the shape my hand still remembered, from when she’d held it for three consecutive houses, and from when it had brushed hers in that dreamworld under the boardwalk where we’d walked together, not even afraid.

  We should have been, though.

  We should have run out into the surf as far as we could, until the parents packing up their bags became our parents and splashed out after us, shook us by the shoulders until we woke up.

  Except they never would have caught us. We were twelve.

  “He thinks I made him do it,” I said, not really to my new granddad but just out loud.

  My new granddad licked his lips, said, “Sid, you mean?”

  Across town, somebody in protective goggles was probably already push-

  ing a needle into the back of Matey’s neck, then, if they were nice, petting the fur down over it.

  I kept having to make my hands into fists.

  “He thinks we made Matey bite him,” I said, my lower lip trembling more than I wanted to let it, so that I couldn’t say there hadn’t been time for Matey to do it, that it had to have happened after I caught Matey, that there never had been any blood on him.

  My new granddad’s hand was still on my shoulder. He patted me, looked ahead of us, and said it wasn’t my fault, not really. I looked up to him but he was just staring down the sidewalk as if already deciding where to place each foot.

  “Sid should just quit taking those in,” he said, tottering forward.

  By the time they came for Christmas he would be on a cane, but, that summer anyway, he was still pretending.

  “Taking what in?” I said.

  “Those dogs,” he said. “He not tell you?”

  “They’re . . . police,” I said like a question.

  He pulled his lower lip into his mouth, took another step—it was going to take us forever to get back to the house—and said, “Those are—those dogs he takes. What do you call them, that smell out people who have been . . . ”

  He made a motion with his hand, like dumping something out.

  Cadaver dogs.

  Trained to find dead people.

  I breathed in once and held it, remembering the way the guy in the leather pants’ hand hadn’t bled. How he’d smiled from what should have hurt. How cold he’d been when he’d pulled me to him, how he’d got in my room. How—how . . . His breath.

  Did I want to be number five?

  I swallowed, my eyes full with what had happened, with who, or what, I’d led to Elaine, with what he might be picking from his teeth right now in whatever dark place he was holed up in for the daylight hours, and then, to make up for it, to start making up, I draped my new granddad’s arm across my shoulders, to help him up the hill, and understood a little even then, I think, about what it might be like to have spent your whole life alone, so that just one person reaching up to help you along could mean the world, and save your life, and make everything all right for a few moments.

  But yeah, then we got home, and the only thing really different about the next few years, about all the years since that summer, is that I still wake at night, sure I’ve just heard the creak of leather, and I can close my eyes, sure, but then Elaine’s waiting for me at the top of the stairs, like she understands, her gashed-open throat just white, not even bleeding.

  The first girl I ever kissed.

  The last girl I ever kissed.

  What I’m waiting for now, I think, is for her to walk down in her nightgown, take me by the elbow and lead me back to that night the guy in the leather pants asked me if I knew what I had to do here, or if I wanted to be number five?

  The first time I made that decision, I was twelve, and didn’t know I was going to have to live with it.

  When my mom calls these days, she tells me I should consider getting a dog, maybe. That it would be good for me. A nice first step.

  Thanks, Mom, but I’ve already got a dog, really.

  His name is Matey. He lives in my head.

  Maybe we’ll come see you one of these days.

  Wolf Island

  They found each other on the second day. She thought she remembered him from the deck. He knew her at once, even in the waterlogged rags of her dress: the painter’s girlfriend.

  “Ronald,” he said about himself.

  “Where are we?” she said back, falling into him.

  The horizon in every direction was featureless, the sea green and swollen. Around them the beach looked spent. The storm had dredged up muck from the bottom and left it well above the tide line. Drifting back and forth at the water’s edge was the flotsam of the ship they’d been on—clothes, linen napkins, plastic jugs. A man, facedown and pale, draped in seaweed.

  Ronald held her tighter, then remembered he was naked.

  He tried to push her away, to go collect some pants from the surf, but she wouldn’t let him go.

  “Last night,” she said into his chest, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Last night there was . . . I saw it. Running on the beach. A wolf.”

  Ronald stroked her hair down along her back and studied the trees.

  The night after that she was sick, from eating the fruit. At first she’d said it was from the water in the pool, but Ronald had drunk there as well.

  The next morning—she’d asked to be alone for the night, embarrassed, but then called for him between bouts—Ronald was sitting alone on the beach. The dead man in the surf had drifted farther out to sea, so Ronald could no long
er make out the crabs picking at the bloated face. Soon enough a fin cut the water beside the dead man.

  Ronald stood, suddenly alert.

  The painter’s girlfriend padded up beside him. Her name was Emma, but he was trying not to think of her like that.

  “Are those—?” she said, then clapped her hands over mouth when the fin breached the water, became a spinning dolphin, the water spiraling off it.

  It was followed by another, and another.

  “A pod,” Ronald said, lacing his fingers into hers.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she said to him, then doubled over, her right fist to the sand, and started heaving again.

  Ronald stepped forward to give her her privacy.

  The dolphins were cavorting around the dead man.

  “They’re trying to wake him,” Ronald said, impressed.

  After a while the pod ducked under, didn’t come back up.

  By the time Emma came back from the woods, pale and hugging herself, nodding that it was over, Ronald had a large bird, its underside torn open, the sand soaking the blood.

  “How did you?” she said.

  He held up the driftwood, cracked sharp at one end.

  “It wasn’t scared,” he told her. “I don’t think it’s ever been hunted.”

  This made Emma cry. Ronald looked from the bird to her and drew her closer to him, held him to her until she was still again.

  The bird was like an oversized gull. A tern, maybe. Definitely not a pelican.

  After pulling all the feathers out there was hardly any meat.

  Emma shook her head no about it anyway.

  Ronald nodded that he understood, and peeled the stringy meat from the bone, had his eyes closed to eat it when Emma stopped him.

  “What?” he said.

  She took the meat, touching it with as little of her fingertips as possible, and walked to the water line, laid the meat in the wet sand.

  Within thirty seconds, two large crabs and one smaller one were snipping at the meat.

  “Now,” she said to Ronald, and he stepped forward, brought his foot down on one of the large crabs.