Timbuktu

by Paul Auster

  Just as he was about to climb out from under the shrub and move on, he spotted a white sneaker not two feet from his nose. It was so like the sneaker that had just landed in his gut that Mr. Bones nearly gagged on his saliva. Had the scoundrel come back to continue the job? The dog recoiled, retreating farther into the tangle of thorns and low-lying branches, snagging his fur in the process. What a dreary predicament to be in now, he thought, but what alternative did he have? He had to keep himself hidden, flattened down on all fours with a dozen spikes in his back, and hope that the bully would get tired of waiting and leave.

  But such luck was not to be granted to Mr. Bones that day. The ruffian held his ground, refusing to give up, and instead of taking his mischief to some other area of the park, he crouched down in front of the bush and parted the branches to look in. Mr. Bones growled, ready to pounce on the thug if he had to.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the boy said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Like hell you aren’t, Mr. Bones thought, and because he was still too afraid to let his guard down, he failed to realize that the gentle voice floating through the branches wasn’t a trick—but the voice of an altogether different boy.

  “I saw what they did to you,” the new boy said. “They’re jerks, those guys. I know them from school. Ralph Hernandez and Pete Bondy. You hang around with creeps like them, and something bad is always going to happen to you.”

  By then, the speaker had poked his head in far enough for Mr. Bones to get a clear view of his features, and at last he understood that he wasn’t looking at his tormentor. The face belonged to a Chinese boy of ten or eleven, and in that first indelible instant, Mr. Bones felt that it was one of the loveliest human faces he had ever had the pleasure to gaze upon. So much for general principles and rules of conduct. This kid meant him no harm, and if Mr. Bones was wrong about that, then he would turn in his dog badge and spend the rest of his life as a porcupine.

  “My name is Henry,” the boy said. “Henry Chow. What’s your name?”

  Ha, thought Mr. Bones. A little wise guy. And how does he think I’m supposed to answer that one?

  Still, with so much riding on the outcome of the conversation, he decided to give it his best shot. Buried among the twigs and dead leaves, he raised his head and emitted a series of three quick barks: wôof wôof woóf. It was a perfect anapest, with each syllable of his name accorded the proper stress, balance, and duration. For a few brief seconds, it was as if the words Mister Bones had been boiled down to their sonorous essence, to the purity of a musical phrase.

  “Good dog,” young Henry said, holding out his right hand as a peace offering. “You catch on fast, don’t you?”

  Mr. Bones barked once more to convey his agreement, and then he began to lick the open palm of the hand that was dangling in front of him. Little by little, Henry coaxed him out from the safety of his hiding place, and once Mr. Bones had fully emerged, the boy sat down on the ground with him and, in between numerous pats on the head and kisses on the face, carefully picked out the leaves and brambles that had collected in his fur.

  Thus began an exemplary friendship between dog and boy. In age, they were only three and a half years apart, but the boy was young and the dog was old, and because of that discrepancy, each wound up giving to the other something he had never had before. For Mr. Bones, Henry proved that love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another. For Henry, an only child whose parents worked long hours and had steadfastly refused to allow a pet in the apartment, Mr. Bones was the answer to his prayers.

  Nevertheless, this budding alliance was not without its pitfalls and its dangers. Once Henry began to talk about his father, Mr. Bones understood that throwing in his lot with this boy was not quite the sure bet it had seemed at first glance. They were slowly wending their way toward the street where the Chow family lived, and as Henry continued to describe the various problems the two of them would be up against, Mr. Bones found himself advancing from anxiety to fear to outright terror. It was bad enough that Henry’s father disliked dogs and that Mr. Bones would be barred from entering the house. Worse still was the fact that even after a place had been found for him, his presence would have to be kept a secret from Mr. Chow. If Henry’s father caught so much as a whiff of the dog anywhere in the neighborhood, the boy would be punished so severely that he would wish he had never been born. Given that Mr. Chow both lived and worked in the same building, it seemed almost preposterous for them to think they could avoid discovery. The family apartment was upstairs on the second floor, the family business was downstairs on the first floor, and Henry’s father was always around, either sleeping or working, morning, noon, and night.

  “I know it doesn’t look too good,” Henry said. “But I’m willing to give it a try if you are.”

  Well, at least the boy had spirit. And a pleasant voice to go along with it, Mr. Bones added, doing everything he could to look on the bright side and count his blessings. What he didn’t know at that point, however, was that the worst was still to come. He had heard the bad, he had heard the worse, but it wasn’t until Henry started talking about hiding places that he understood the full horror of what he was getting himself into.

  There was the alley, Henry said. That was one option, and if Mr. Bones was willing to sleep in a cardboard box and promised not to make any noise, they might get away with it. Another possibility was the yard around in the back. It wasn’t very big—just a patch of weeds, really—with some rusting refrigerators and corroded metal shelves lined up along the fence, but the waiters sometimes went out there to smoke, and on most evenings, especially when the weather was warm, his father liked to spend a few minutes walking around back there after he locked up the restaurant for the night. He called it “drinking in the stars,” and according to Henry, he always slept better if he had his little dose of sky before going upstairs and climbing into bed.

  Henry rattled on for a while about his father’s sleeping habits, but Mr. Bones was no longer listening. The fatal word had passed the boy’s lips, and once Mr. Bones realized that the restaurant in question was not just any two-bit hot-dog stand but a Chinese restaurant, he was ready to turn tail and run. How many times had Willy warned him about those places? Just yesterday morning, he had lectured him for fifteen minutes on the subject, and was Mr. Bones going to ignore that advice now and betray the memory of his beloved master? This Henry was a fine little fellow, but if Willy’s words contained even the smallest particle of the truth, then sticking with the boy would be like signing his own death sentence.

  Still, he couldn’t bring himself to bolt. He had been with Henry for only forty minutes, and already the attachment was too strong for him to dash off without saying good-bye. Torn between fear and affection, he chose a middle course, which was the only course available to him under the circumstances. He simply stopped—just came to a dead halt on the sidewalk, lay down on the ground, and began to whimper. Henry, who had little experience with dogs, had no idea what to make of this sudden, unexpected move. He crouched down beside Mr. Bones and began stroking his head, and the dog, trapped in an agony of indecision, could not help noticing what a gentle touch the boy had.

  “You’re bushed,” Henry said. “Here I am blabbing away, and you’re all worn out and hungry, and I haven’t even bothered to feed you.”

  A Big Mac followed, topped off by a bag of fries, and once Mr. Bones had devoured these delectable offerings, his heart was putty in the boy’s hands. Run away from this, he told himself, and you’ll die in the streets. Go home with him, and you’ll die there too. But at least you’ll be with Henry, and if death is everywhere, what difference does it make where you go?

  And so it was that Mr. Bones went against his master’s teachings and wound up living by the gates of hell.

  His new home was a cardboard box that had once contained a jumbo-model Fedders air conditioner. For cauti
on’s sake, Henry wedged it between the cyclone fence and one of the old refrigerators in the backyard. That was where Mr. Bones slept at night, curled up in his dark cell until the boy came to fetch him in the morning, and because Henry was a clever lad and had dug a hole under the fence, Mr. Bones could crawl through to the next yard—thus avoiding both the back and side doors of the restaurant—and meet up with his young master at the other end of the block to begin their daily rambles.

  Don’t think that the dog wasn’t afraid, and don’t think that he wasn’t aware of the perils that surrounded him—but at the same time, know too that he never once regretted his decision to team up with Henry. The restaurant provided him with an inexhaustible source of savory delicacies, and for the first time since Mom-san’s death four years earlier, Mr. Bones had enough to eat. Spareribs and dumplings, seasame noodles and fried rice, tofu in brown sauce, braised duck and lighter-than-air won tons: the variety was endless, and once he had been initiated into the glories of Chinese cooking, he could scarcely contain himself at the thought of what Henry would be bringing him next. His stomach had never been happier, and while his digestion sometimes suffered as a result of a too-tangy spice or seasoning, those intermittent bowel eruptions seemed a small price to pay for the pleasure of the meals themselves. If there was any drawback to this heady regime, it was the pang of unknowing that pricked his soul whenever his tongue chanced upon an unidentifiable taste. Willy’s prejudices had become his fears, and as he bit down on the obscure new concoction, he couldn’t help wondering if he was eating a fellow dog. He would stop chewing then, suddenly frozen with remorse, but it was always too late. His salivary juices were already flowing, and with his taste buds aching for more of what they had only just discovered, his appetite would always get the better of him. After the brief pause, his tongue would dart out at the food again, and before he could tell himself that he was committing a sin, the platter would be licked clean. A moment of sadness would inevitably follow. Then, in an effort to assuage his guilty conscience, he would tell himself that if this was to be his fate as well, he only hoped that he would taste as good as the thing he had just eaten.

  Henry bought several packets of radish seeds and planted them in the dirt near Mr. Bones’s cardboard box. The garden was his cover story, and whenever his parents asked him why he was spending so much time in the backyard, he had only to mention the radishes and they would nod their heads and walk away. It was peculiar to start a garden so late in the season, his father said, but Henry had already prepared an answer to that question. Radishes germinate in eighteen days, he said, and they would be up long before the weather turned cold. Clever Henry. He could always talk his way out of tricky spots, and with his knack for pinching coins and stray singles from his mother’s purse and his nighttime raids on the kitchen leftovers, he built a more than tolerable life for himself and his new friend. It wasn’t his fault that his father gave Mr. Bones several bad scares by coming out to the garden in the middle of the night to inspect the progress of the radishes. Each time the beam of his flashlight swept over the area in front of Mr. Bones’s box, the dog would quake in the darkness of his cubicle, certain that the end was upon him. Once or twice, the stink of fear that rose up from his body was so pungent that Mr. Chow actually stopped to sniff the air, as if suspecting that something was wrong. But he never knew what he was looking for, and after a moment or two of puzzled reflection, he would rattle off a string of incomprehensible Chinese words and then return to the house.

  Gruesome as those nights were, Mr. Bones would always forget them the moment he set eyes on Henry in the morning. Their days would begin at the secret corner, directly in front of the trash bin and the coin-operated newspaper dispenser, and for the next eight or ten hours, it was as if the restaurant and the cardboard box were no more than images from a bad dream. They would walk around the city together, drifting from here to there with no special purpose in mind, and the aimlessness of this routine was so like the helter-skelter days with Willy that Mr. Bones had no trouble understanding what was expected of him. Henry was a solitary child, a boy who was used to being alone and living in his thoughts, and now that he had a companion to share his days with, he talked continuously, unburdening himself of the smallest, most ephemeral musings that flitted through his eleven-year-old brain. Mr. Bones loved listening to him, loved the flow of words that accompanied their steps, and in that these monologic free-for-alls reminded him of his dead master as well, he sometimes wondered if Henry Chow were not the true and legitimate heir of Willy G. Christmas, the reincarnated spirit of the one and only himself.

  That wasn’t to say that Mr. Bones always understood what his new master was talking about, however. Henry’s preoccupations were radically different from Willy’s, and the dog usually found himself at a loss whenever the boy started in on his pet subjects. How could Mr. Bones be expected to know what an earned run average was or how many games the Orioles were behind in the standings? In all the years he had spent with Willy, the poet had never once touched on the topic of baseball. Now, overnight, it seemed to have become a matter of life and death. The first thing Henry did every morning after meeting up with Mr. Bones at their corner was to put some coins into the newspaper dispenser and buy a copy of The Baltimore Sun. Then, hastening to a bench across the street, he would sit down, pull out the sports section, and read an account of the previous night’s game to Mr. Bones. If the Orioles had won, his voice was full of happiness and excitement. If the Orioles had lost, his voice was sad and mournful, at times even tinged with anger. Mr. Bones learned to hope for wins and to dread the prospect of losses, but he never quite understood what Henry meant when he talked about the team. An oriole was a bird, not a group of men, and if the orange creature on Henry’s black cap was indeed a bird, how could it be involved in something as strenuous and complex as baseball? Such were the mysteries of the new world he had entered. Orioles fought with tigers, blue jays battled against angels, bear cubs warred with giants, and none of it made any sense. A baseball player was a man, and yet once he joined a team he was turned into an animal, a mutant being, or a spirit who lived in heaven next to God.

  According to Henry, there was one bird in the Baltimore flock who stood out from the rest. His name was Cal, and although he was no more than a ball-playing oriole, he seemed to embody the attributes of several other creatures as well: the endurance of a workhorse, the courage of a lion, and the strength of a bull. All that was perplexing enough, but when Henry decided that Mr. Bones’s new name should also be Cal—short for Cal Ripken Junior the Second—the dog was thrown into a state of genuine confusion. It’s not that he objected to the principle of the thing. He was in no position to tell Henry what his real name was, after all, and since the boy had to call him something, Cal seemed as good a name as any other. The only problem was that it rhymed with Al, and the first few times he heard Henry say it, he automatically thought of Willy’s old friend, dapper Al Saperstein, the man who owned that novelty shop they used to visit on Surf Avenue in Coney Island. He would suddenly see Uncle Al in his mind again, decked out in his lemon-yellow bow tie and hound’s-tooth sport jacket, and then he would be back in the shop, watching Willy as he wandered up and down the aisles, perusing the handshake buzzers and whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. He found it painful to encounter Willy like that, to have his old master jump out from the shadows and strut about as if he were still alive, and when you combined these involuntary recollections with Henry’s incessant talk about Cal the oriole, and then added in the fact that half the time Henry used the name Cal he was actually referring to Mr. Bones, it was hardly strange that the dog wasn’t always certain about who he was anymore or what he was supposed to be.

  But no matter. He had only just arrived on Planet Henry, and he knew that it would take some time before he felt completely at home there. After one week with the boy, he was already beginning to get the hang of it, and if not for a nasty trick of the calendar, there’s no telling what kind of p
rogress they would have made. But summer was not the only season of the year, and with the time approaching for Henry to return to school, the tranquil days of walking and talking and flying kites in the park were suddenly no more. The night before he was to begin the sixth grade, Henry forced himself to stay awake, lying in bed with his eyes open until he was sure his parents were asleep. Just past midnight, when the coast was finally clear, he crept down the back staircase, went into the yard, and climbed into the cardboard box with Mr. Bones. Holding the dog in his arms, he tearfully explained that things were going to be different now. “When the sun comes up in the morning,” Henry said, “the fun times will officially be over. I’m such an idiot, Cal. I was going to find another place for you, something better than this rotten box in this rotten backyard, and I didn’t do it. I tried, but nobody would help me, and now we’ve run out of time. You never should have trusted me, Cal. I’m a loser. I’m a retarded piece of shit, and I mess up everything. I always have and I always will. That’s what happens when you’re a coward. I’m too scared to talk to my dad about you, and if I go behind his back and talk to my mom, she’ll just tell him anyway, and that would only make things worse. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, and all I’ve done is let you down.”

  Mr. Bones had only the dimmest idea of what Henry was talking about. The boy was sobbing too hard for his words to be understood, but as the rush of chopped-off syllables and stuttered phrases continued, it became increasingly clear that this outburst was more than just a passing mood. Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry’s sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy’s sadness as his own. Such is the way with dogs. They might not always understand the nuances of their masters’ thoughts, but they feel what they feel, and in this case there was no doubt that young Henry Chow was in bad shape. Ten minutes went by, then twenty minutes, then thirty, and there they sat, the boy and the dog, wedged together in the darkness of the cardboard box, the boy with his arms wrapped tightly around the dog, crying his eyes out, and the dog whimpering along in sympathy, raising his head every so often to lick the tears from the boy’s face.