The Heart of Dog

by Doranna Durgin

  It was a dog. A sheep dog. And its sides went up and down as it took shallow breaths.

  No one stood near it. There wasn't a car down the embankment. The dog had been hit, and no one had done anything.

  Leaving it to me.

  "You son of a bitch," I muttered to the creature. I supposed I could call to him, and he would probably pull me from this past, like he had pulled me from the previous one, like he had pulled me from the alternate timeline.

  But I was probably dying, just like that damn dog. My chances were nearly used up, and all of this was a figment of my imagination anyway.

  Besides, this wasn't like a wife not getting a job, or failing to take a woman up on her first-ever proposition. This was a situation I hadn't seen, one I had been in and hadn't realized how very dangerous it was.

  The first time this happened, if my car had come out of the spin facing west instead of east, I would have seen the dog. I would have gotten out, and I would have gone to move it off the road.

  If the dog had been alive then (and what's to say it wouldn't have been?) I would have been furious, but I wouldn't have been able to leave it. Much as I hated the creatures, I couldn't let one die alone and in pain on the side of the road.

  But I was terrified, even now. Even when I knew I could go back to my own muddy isolation with a single shout.

  I didn't shout. Instead, I went back to the car, and got the blanket I carried for emergencies. Safety first, something you learn on Montana roads in the winter.

  Only I'd never planned to use that thick blanket to protect me from a dog bite. I'd planned to use it to stay warm if the car broke down in worse weather than this.

  I was shaking violently, my fear making me queasy. I'd never volunteered for a dog bite before. That dog, in pain and dying, would probably lash out blindly, hoping to hurt whatever had hurt it.

  I walked close. I made myself take deep breaths, mostly to stop the urge to beg my Puck-like hallucination to get me out of there. If I did survive, even if this were all a dream, I didn't want to know I could be the kind of man who could leave a dying dog in the middle of the road, a dog large enough that, when another car hit it, that car would probably spin out of control worse than I had.

  I didn't want to be that man. I didn't want to die knowing I could be.

  I swung the blanket over the dog's head and body. The animal whined, but its tail thumped, a response I hadn't expected. I slipped my hands underneath it, feeling warmth.

  The dog whined again.

  The air smelled of fresh rain, oil, and blood.

  Who left this animal here to die? Who had been cruel enough to feel the double thud of the wheels as they drove over the body, and then just continued onward?

  I knew it hadn't been me—not even the previous time I'd lived through this. I always stopped when I hit something—and hitting something wasn't uncommon on a country road. Usually it was mice. Once, I hit a mole and I had to use a shovel to move it off the road. And once, worst of all, it was a rabbit, skull crushed and little feet still moving.

  I had used the shovel on the rabbit too, just to make sure it was dead, since there was no hope of saving it.

  I supposed I could have used the shovel on the dog, but I saw no obvious injuries and, much as I feared them, dogs were something more than rabbits.

  Dogs were almost human.

  I lifted the dog, startled at the weight. The warmth spread along my hands. Blood, then, a serious amount. The wet fur stench nearly gagged me, bringing up memories—the pressure of the Great Dane's paws on my shoulder—and I banished them, sent them away as if they hadn't mattered at all.

  Then I carried the sheep dog—who didn't try to bite me—to the car. I realized, as I struggled to open the back passenger door, that I had been crooning to the animal, talking to it as if it were a frightened child.

  Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, I knew what it felt like to be alone in the wet, knowing you're dying, and realizing that nothing you could do would save you.

  No matter how much you wanted it.

  No matter how much you tried.

  ~~~

  A dog was barking in my dreams. A deep rumbling bark with a hint of a rasp. It sounded like Pythagoras, only panicked. Why would Pythagoras panic?

  I opened my eyes. Sunlight, filtering through the pines, momentarily blinded me. I raised a hand, and cold water dripped onto my face.

  I'd fallen. Mud held me like a lover.

  Below, I heard the creek, still filled with snowmelt, roar by. My ankle hurt. It was caught between two rocks. I looked up.

  Pythagoras was peering at me from the path, his face caked with mud. His legs and long fur were caked too. He would need a bath when I got out of here.

  Nothing I hated worse than bathing the dog.

  And then the chill that had filled me from the moment I landed here got worse. I remembered bathing the dog. Long careful baths to ease his pain after the car accident, then regular fighting baths after he had healed. Years had gone by. Years, just the two of us. He even accompanied me to class.

  But I remembered the years without him, too. Years that ended in me sliding off the path, dying of exposure here, between the rocks and the creature, like something out of Kafka, watching me from the boulder that had broken my fall.

  There was no creature. Just a raspy voice still echoing in my ear. And music, a cross between a violin and a sustained piano chord, humming nearby, even though I couldn't see the source.

  Pythagoras still barked, but he didn't try to come down. Had he tried before? Had he been trying to rescue me the way that I had rescued him?

  It's not about you.

  I looked, couldn't see the voice had come from. I'd passed out, had a strange dream, and now I was awake. Pythagoras had awakened me with his barking, and I had to get out. I had to figure out a way.

  I sat up, feeling déjà vu. I knew, before I tried, that the rocks would go beneath the surface, that when I dug in the mud, I'd find a V, narrowing as it went down, that trying to remove my boot would make no difference. I'd been through this—and yet I hadn't.

  The barking had stopped. I looked up, but the sun caught my eyes again. Still, I couldn't see Pythagoras up there. Maybe he had found a way down the path. Maybe with his combined strength and mine, we could pull me out of this mess.

  It wasn't right to save him like that so that he'd have to find yet another owner, one he'd have to train all over again.

  The dreams had been odd, though. Not just the creature. But the woman—Annabeth? Amazing that I would remember one student out of hundreds, the one I'd found mentally fascinating, who'd been the only one I'd ever allowed to proposition me.

  Pythagoras had been in one of those dreams as well. Running toward me, with children following him. Apparently, even in that alternate life, I had saved him.

  The creature gave me the chance not to, when he'd sent me back to that coffee shop, allowing me to try all over again.

  You have to ask yourself: how many of those stories—those traditional stories you claim to hate—have dogs?

  I squinted. Was there a shape on the boulder? I couldn't quite tell. Something iridescent flashed before my eyes—a dragonfly wing? A splash of creek water in the sun?—and then it was gone.

  "I don't think Jimmy Stewart got a dog," I said to the voice. "Zuzu's petals, but not a dog."

  "Peter?"

  I squinted again, but saw nothing. Not even the iridescence from before.

  "Peter!"

  I looked up. My neighbor stood there, Pythagoras at his side.

  "Jesus, Pete, let me get a rope."

  "My ankle's wedged," I said, feeling relief. Someone human. Someone real.

  "This is going to take more than me, then." My neighbor. So practical. One of the real Montanans, crusty and strong. Not just someone who looked the part. "I'm going to get help. You stay, Pythag."

  My dog looked at him, then looked at me, and started barking all over again.

&n
bsp; "Christ!" My neighbor said, voice fading. "That dog could wake the dead."

  And probably had. No one could ignore Pythagoras for long. The students never had. My friends couldn't. Hell, half of them became my friends because he led them to me, as if he felt we'd be a good match.

  He was rarely wrong.

  He sat, and looked down at me, like that Great Dane had so many years ago. Only Pythagoras would never hurt me. Couldn't really.

  The Dane might have, but that wouldn't have been his fault. That would have been caused by Michael Kappel, Neighborhood Bully, or the parents that created him. People who didn't know how to treat an animal, let alone a child.

  The fact that that dog had to be destroyed wasn't the Dane's fault. It was theirs, for treating him wrong.

  Pythagoras had taught me that too.

  "It's okay," I said to him. "They're going to get me out."

  He glanced over his shoulder, as if to say if they didn't, he'd find them, he'd find someone, he'd make sure I was safe.

  I leaned against the boulder, conserving my warmth. And, after what seemed like a moment—even though it had to have been much longer—there were voices on the trailhead, followed by my dog's happiest, most welcoming bark.

  ~~~

  I still walk with a limp. The ankle had been crushed, the bone only shards. That, the doctors proclaimed, was how I got wedged into such a narrow space.

  Even if I had been able to get out, they weren't sure I would have made it up the hill. The land was fragile, slides common. There were two when my neighbor tried to rescue me—fortunately none of them serious.

  But it could have been. Everyone impressed upon me how serious it could have been if Pythagoras had fallen with me, or if he hadn't had barked incessantly, drawing all that attention.

  As if I didn't already know. The dreams—the creature—all seemed so real, although everyone assured me they couldn't have been. Fever dreams from the pain, from the cold, from the exposure.

  It had been spring, yes. June, even. But not warm. Dangerous, as those of us who live in the mountains know.

  Still, I had convinced myself they were right—my friends, the doctors, even Pythagoras, who listened to those conversations and looked at me with a hurt expression, as if he thought I wanted him out of my life.

  I didn't. I just could remember a life with him and a life without him. Not only a life before him—I could remember that too—but a life in which my car, after spinning, faced east, and I never realized that the thing in the middle of the road had been a dog, not just some vague, ruglike shape.

  Funny how we both would have ended up the same way. Dead from our injuries or exposure or both.

  Three weeks ago, I received a new text in the mail. The volume was slim, the binding simple, the pages thick and smooth.

  Mathematics and Thought by Annabeth Lillys, recommended for Philosophy of Mathematics courses.

  I read her bio first. Now teaching courses on the brain at Harvard, Lillys had gotten her Ph.D. in mathematics at Montana. She had gone on to study theology and biology, settling on sciences which focused on the structure of the mind.

  The nature of thought.

  Just like she used to talk about.

  The book was fascinating, but a bit above the coursework I taught. Annabeth postulated that thought patterns could change the brain itself—how thinkers who focused on theory seemed to have a capacity for seeing things that were beyond the average human ken.

  The link between genius and madness, she claimed, wasn't that geniuses were close to being insane. It was that they saw dimensions inaccessible to the rest of us.

  Dimensions where creatures who looked like Puck if he had been part grasshopper played music when they scratched behind their wing, and smiled like the Cheshire Cat when they forced recalcitrant humans to live up to their responsibilities toward the animals they had domesticated so long ago.

  At least, that's my theory now. My theory as of this afternoon, when I found a box of photographs beneath the eaves of my house, photographs of a four-by-four truck, bright red, one I never bought. One I couldn't afford after all the vet bills from saving Pythagoras's life.

  The truck wasn't in just one or two. It was in a lot of those pictures, taken over years. The shiny red paint became dull, mud-splattered, and dented as time went on.

  And I was skinnier in those photographs, as if there were times when I got so absorbed in thought that I forgot to eat. I looked like a pale ghost of my current self, a man who existed half in this life and half out of it.

  A man who might have found a partially open door to another dimension and tumbled, Alice-like, toward the rabbit hole.

  I am still not Ward Cleaver material. In the years since the fall, I have had more opportunities to marry and I have avoided them all. I like being childless. I don't believe in the suburban dream, and I see no point in living in a house that looks like all the others on the block, without a creek or a mountain in sight.

  I will never have two-point-five children, but I know now that I will always have a dog.

  With the help of friends, I've rebuilt the path. I've walked it maybe a hundred times since my fall. And even though I enjoy the hikes, I've never achieved the fugue state of my memory—my pre-Pythagoras memory, the one others claim is a dream.

  It's impossible to get lost in thought with a dog beside you, snuffling the ground, reading messages in the leaves, leaving his own on tree trunks. Impossible to think of equations and higher numbers with a creature who finds joy in a chill wind, who knows—perhaps better than you do—how close he came to death, and how very happy he is to be alive.

  I know I am living a different life from the one I started in. I suspect that the man I had been died that afternoon, propped against a boulder, near a dangerously swollen creek.

  But I never discuss it any more. I'm not sure if it matters whether that death was real or metaphorical; the result is the same.

  I am solidly here now, a man whose presence will be missed if he disappears again. A man with contacts, friends, and a dog. A man with a life.

  The events of that afternoon may not have been about me, but they changed me—and the change, I like to believe, was my choice.

  It still is.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Return to Table of Contents

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Piece of Mind

  by Jennifer Roberson

  If anyone is a Friend of ConneryBeagle, it's Jennifer. She was there when I picked him out; she was there when he was attacked, and she was there when he first got sick. I'm so pleased to present one of my favorites of her short stories here!

  ~Doranna

  ----------

  In the Los Angeles metro area, you can pay $250K-plus for a 1-bedroom, 1-bath bungalow boasting a back yard so small you can spit across it—even on a day so hot you can't rustle up any sweat, let alone saliva. And that's all for the privilege of breathing brown air, contesting with a rush "hour" lasting three at the minimum, and risking every kind of "rage" the sociologists can hang a name on.

  But a man does need a roof over his head, so I ended up in a weird little amoebic blob of an apartment complex, a haphazard collection of wooden shingle-sided boxes dating from the '50s. It wasn't Melrose Place, and the zip wasn't 90210, but it would do for a newly-divorced, middle-aged man of no particular means.

  ~~~

  Interstate 10 may carry tourists through miles of the sere and featureless desert west of Phoenix, but closer to the coast the air gains moisture. In my little complex, vegetation ruled. Ivy filled the shadows, clung to shingles; roses of all varieties fought for space; aging eucalyptus and pepper trees overhung the courtyard, prehensile roots threatening fence and sidewalk.

  I found it relaxing to twist off the cap of a longneck beer at day's end and sit outside on a three-by-six-foot slab of ancient, wafer-thin concrete crumbling from the onslaught of time and whatever toxins linger in L.A.'s air. I didn't want to think of what the brown cloud was doing
to my lungs, but I wasn't motivated enough to leave the Valley. The kids were in the area. Soon enough they'd discover independence and Dear Old Dad would be relegated to nonessential personnel; until that happened, I'd stay close.

  Next door, across the water-stained, weather-warped wooden fence, an explosion of sound punched a hole in my reverie. I heard a screen door whack shut, the sound of a woman's voice, and the cacophony of barking dogs. She was calling them back, telling them to behave themselves, explaining that making so much racket was no way to endear themselves to new neighbors. I heartily concurred, inwardly cursing the landlady who allowed pets. She was one of those sweet little old widow-ladies who was addicted to cats and spent much of her income on feeding the feral as well as her own; apparently her tolerance extended to dogs, now. Dogs next door. Barking dogs.

  Muttering expletives, I set the mostly-empty beer bottle on the crumbling concrete, then heaved myself out of the fraying webwork chaise lounge with some care, not wanting to drop my butt through or collapse the flimsy aluminum armrests.

  The dogs had muted their barking to the occasional sotto voce wuff as I sauntered over to the sagging fence, stepped up on a slumping brick border of a gone-to-seed garden, and looked into the yard next door. When they saw me—well, saw my head floating above the fence—they instantly set off an even louder chorus of complaint. I caught a glimpse of huge ears and stumpy legs in the midst of hurried guard-dog activity, and then the woman was coming out the back door yet again to hush them.

  I saw hair the color some called light brown, others dark blond, caught up in a sloppy ponytail at the back of her head; plus stretchy black bike shorts and a pink tank top. Shorts and tank displayed long, browned limbs and cleanly defined muscles. No body fat. Trust her to be one of those California gym types.

  She saw me, winced at renewed barking, and raised her voice. "Enough!"

  Amazingly, the dogs shut up.