Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  “What went on with . . . What went on between you two?”

  She crossed her arms and sighed, her eyes were twinkling. “Jealous, huh? That’s good! Well, I knew him in college. After that he disappeared for a few years, then he turned up one day and we hung around together for a couple of months. He was more friend than boyfriend, even though a lot of people thought we had a big thing going. Why’re you asking? How’d we get onto this?”

  “Jazz told me—”

  Friend started barking crazily in the other room. “Friend! Friend! Friend!” It sounded like he’d gone totally nuts. Kathleen and I looked at each other and moved.

  On television, a man beat a white baby seal over the head with a wooden truncheon. The seal screamed while its head spewed dark blood onto the snow.

  Friend stood next to the set and barked.

  “Friend, stop!”

  He kept on.

  On television, a man pried open a wooden crate with a crowbar. Inside were ten dead parrots clumped together in a colorful, orderly row. Over the barking, I made out something about the illegal importation of rare birds in to the United States.

  “Friend, shut up!”

  “Oh, Egan, look!”

  A dog was strapped to an operating table. Its stomach was cut wide open, and its mouth was twisted up over its teeth.

  All we needed then—a special on educational television about cruelty to animals.

  It had been an impossible, weird day. The kind when the best thing you can do is throw up your hands, go directly to bed after dinner, and hope it ends at that.

  But the air was full of something wrong and deep, and we ended up having everything out over dinner.

  Victor Dixon was still around. No, she hadn’t touched him since we’d been together. Yes, he called her at work sometimes. Yes, they’d gone out to lunch once or twice. No, nothing had happened. Didn’t I believe her? How could I even think that?

  I said I wanted very much to believe her, but why hadn’t she told me about him before?

  Because it only made things more confused . . .

  Our voices got louder, and dinner, a nice dinner, got colder.

  Friend stayed with us until about Round Three, then slunk out of the room, head and tail low. I felt like telling him to stay, hadn’t he started this war in the first place?

  “So what is your definition of trust, Egan? As far as you can throw me?”

  “Oh, come on, Kathleen. How would you feel if you were in my place? Turn the situation around.”

  “I’d feel fine, thank you. Because I’d believe what you told me.”

  “Gee, you’re quite a girl.”

  That did it. She got up and left, mad as hell.

  ###

  While I waited and worried, Jasenka called twice within an hour.

  The first time she said only that Kathleen was at Vitamin D’s house, and gave me his telephone number.

  I called. A very sleepy man with a Southern accent answered. I asked for her.

  “Hey, bud, do you know what time it is? Kat isn’t here. I haven’t seen her in days. Jesus, do you know what time it is? Hey, how’d you get this number in the first place? It’s unlisted! Did Kat give it to you? Man, she’s going to get it when I see her. She promised she wouldn’t give it out to anyone.”

  “Look, this is really important. I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me talk to her. I’m her brother, and we’ve got some very serious family problems.”

  “Oh no, I’m really sorry. But she isn’t here, honest to God. Hold it a sec—I do have this other number where you might be able to reach her.”

  He gave me my number.

  ###

  The second call from Jasenka lasted longer. Her voice was a child’s whisper in a parent’s ear. The words slowed and died at the end of every sentence.

  “Egan? It’s me again. Listen, you have to listen to me. The animals are rising. It’s happening much sooner than I thought. They’re going to kill everyone. They’ve had enough. Only their friends will be saved. Every animal in the world will do it. They’ll kill everyone.

  “Get a map as soon as you hang up. There’s an island in Greece called Formori. F-O-R-M-O-R-I. You must go there immediately tomorrow. Everything will be starting in three days.”

  “Jazz—”

  “No, be quiet! Formori is the place where they’ll let some people live. People who are the animals’ friends. Friend says you can go there and live, they’ll let you. But not Kathleen. She wouldn’t let him have his bone. Please, please go, Egan. Good-bye. I love you!”

  It was the last time I ever talked to her. By the time I reached the hospital twenty minutes later, a sad-faced nurse told me she had just died.

  Now it’s almost three-thirty in the morning. I’ve looked at my world almanac and there it was: F-O-R-M-O-R-I.

  I let Friend out three hours ago, and he hasn’t returned. Neither has Kathleen.

  The moon is still extraordinarily bright. While standing in the open doorway a few minutes ago, I saw what must have been thousands and thousands and thousands of birds flying in strict, unchanging patterns over its calm, lit face.

  I must decide soon.

  Wish Hound

  by Pat Murphy

  Be very careful what you wish for. You just might get it . . .

  Pat Murphy lives in San Francisco, where she works for a science museum, the Exploratorium. Her elegant and incisive stories have been turning up for the past few years in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Elsewhere, Amazing, Universe, Shadows, Galaxy, Chrysalis, and other places. Her first novel. The Shadow Hunter, was published in 1982. Her most recent novel, The Falling Woman, is at the time of this writing a strong contender for the 1987 Nebula Award.

  * * *

  Alice hugged Tommy at the bottom of the plane’s ramp, but the boy did not set down the case he carried to return his mother’s embrace. When she released him, the case shifted in his grasp as if something moved within, and Alice heard a muffled whimper through the cardboard.

  Tommy, solid and self-assured even at age seven, watched her with steady blue eyes. “Dad gave me a dog,” he said. “It’s not a very big one.”

  Alice opened her mouth to speak, but stopped herself—the words she wanted to say were meant for Paul, her former husband, not for Tommy. Paul had taken the boy to his ranch for three weeks immediately following Alice’s remarriage. He had promised to keep Tommy while Alice and her new husband, Joseph, traveled in England, a trip that they had been planning for almost a year. But when Paul was called away from the ranch on a business trip that would last several weeks, he had shipped the boy back to Alice.

  Goddamn Paul, Alice thought with cold anger. He knows that I live in a city apartment, he knows that we are leaving for England soon—and not content with burdening me with a seven-year-old on my honeymoon, he tries to buy the kid’s affections with a puppy. Goddamn him.

  Alice waited until they got to the apartment, where Joseph was, before tackling the question of what would be done with the puppy. “We can’t keep the puppy here, you understand that, don’t you?” Alice held Tommy by the arm and tried to speak gently. The apartment seemed too full. With her and Joseph, it had been a comfortable size.

  She had missed the boy when he left for his father’s ranch, but at last she had had time for Joseph, a patient lover and now a husband. At last she had been able to sleep late with him on weekend mornings without being awakened by the sound of a knock at the door, to stay out late without worrying about the sitter, to putter about the kitchen, cooking dolmas, wonton soup, baklava, and other foods she had never tried to make before, wearing Joseph’s robe because she liked its faint aroma of tobacco and aftershave until Joseph complained that it was starting to smell of her perfume.

  Tommy looked at the small black dog that wiggled in his arms, trying to lick his face, and did not reply. The puppy whined, then twisted in his grasp, growled a tiny growl, and strove to attack Alice’s hand with sharp new te
eth.

  “Your father should have known better than to give him to you,” she said. “Joseph is allergic to animal hair.” The boy shot Joseph a look of intense dislike, and Alice continued hurriedly. “Even if it weren’t for that, we couldn’t take him to England with us.”

  “I don’t want to go to England,” Tommy said. “I want to go back to the ranch. I hate England.”

  “That’s silly. You haven’t seen England yet. You might like it.” Alice strove to be positive.

  “I’ll hate it.” Tommy stood steadfast in the center of the room, puppy in his arms, his face set in a stubborn expression.

  For the next week, Alice tried to give the puppy away—to friends, to relatives, to co-workers at the advertising agency where she was receptionist. No one wanted a puppy of uncertain breeding. And no one wanted to babysit a seven-year-old for a month. Tommy’s aunt was planning on having house guests. His grandmother would be vacationing in Bermuda. The old lady who sat for Alice on weekends was leaving town.

  “It’s all right,” Joseph said when she told him that Tommy would have to accompany them. “Tommy and I have to learn to get along sooner or later.” Joseph was an accepting man; a history professor, he seemed to have adapted his spirit to the lessons of history. He was willing to compromise, to allow events to take their natural time.

  Tommy was less accepting when she explained again why the dog had to go, why he could not keep it. He watched her with sullen eyes. Finally, on the last day before they were scheduled to leave, she asked Joseph to take the puppy to the pound while she fixed a bon-voyage dinner for the three of them.

  The boy did not cry when Alice put the puppy in the carrying case and handed the case to Joseph to take to the pound. He set his jaw in a way that reminded her of Paul.

  After Joseph left with the puppy, Alice stood in the doorway of the living room, where Tommy lay on his stomach, his head propped up on his hands, watching TV. The TV movie was an old Sherlock Holmes story—the Hound of the Baskervilles. On the screen, Basil Rathbone paced and smoked his pipe with enormous intensity, discussing the spectral hound with Watson.

  “You want to go out to the park, Tommy?” Alice asked. “We could go to the playground.”

  Without looking around, Tommy shook his head in firm denial.

  “We could go out and get some ice cream for dessert tonight. You can pick the flavor.”

  Again, a silent headshake. Alice retreated to the kitchen, unwilling to force Tommy to share his pain with her. While she chopped vegetables for dinner, she tried to ignore the baying of a hound on the TV.

  That night, as she lay awake in bed, she told Joseph, “I’d feel so much better about all this if I thought Tommy understood that there’s nothing we can do. He seems to blame you for dragging him away from his father’s ranch and for this business about the dog. I just wish I could make him understand.”

  Joseph put his arm around her. “You’re trying to treat him like a small adult and he’s not. Kids aren’t human. The way a kid feels about things doesn’t necessarily make sense—it just is.”

  “I’m trying to be a good mother.” She snuggled closer to him in bed. “You just don’t understand him like I do, Joseph. He and I are alike in a lot of ways. But I just wish he could see that having to get rid of the puppy wasn’t your fault. The whole thing was his father’s fault.”

  “Well, it isn’t really his fault either, is it?” Joseph asked. “He couldn’t help having a business deal come up.”

  Alice kissed Joseph’s cheek. “Don’t waste your time trying to be fair to him, Joseph. You don’t know him like I do. He always put his business before his family. Always.”

  A shadow of a frown, visible in the faint moonlight that shone through the window, crossed Joseph’s face. “You really dislike him, don’t you?”

  “Hate is the word.” Her voice was low but steady. “I save dislike for strangers. I only really hate people I used to love.”

  “Makes sense, I suppose.” Joseph stroked her hair away from her eyes, then hesitated. “The kid’s a lot like Paul, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a lot like me, too.” She used his shoulder as a pillow and settled down to sleep. “I’ll try not to worry about Tommy. There’s nothing to be done about it all anyway. And maybe he’ll like England.”

  Tommy hated England. He hated London—complaining loudly in museums so that guards stared indignantly at the family, chasing pigeons in Trafalgar Square so that the old people who fed them scowled in annoyance. He got lost for three hours in Hyde Park and they finally found him talking to an organ grinder with a dancing poodle. He talked to people with dogs and to dogs themselves, but he did his best to ignore both Joseph and Alice except when he was complaining. He moped when they went to the theater without him, but complained that it was boring when they took him with them.

  A guidebook to eastern England that Joseph purchased in a bookstore on Charing Cross (while Alice held the hand of an angry child to keep him from ransacking the shelves) suggested a small coastal resort community as an ideal vacation spot for families on tour. As a desperate move, they took the train from London to the coast, and found a bed-and-breakfast place in the little seaside town.

  On the first day in the village, Joseph wanted to visit a small church on the edge of town that the guidebook had described. Under protest, Tommy accompanied them. He sulked on the walk through the village, kicking rocks into the gutter, stepping on and off the curb, dawdling at corners.

  “Come on, Tommy, let’s move it,” Alice said, looking back at him.

  “I don’t want to see a stupid church,” he complained. “I don’t want to go at all.”

  “Come on, Tommy, don’t make me angry.” Alice turned back to Joseph frowning.

  “Just keep walking,” Joseph advised softly. “He’ll realize that we’re leaving him behind and he’ll hurry to catch up.” Joseph gently placed an arm around her shoulders. “And try to relax.”

  Alice smiled up at him. Having his arm around her reminded her of the idyllic time they had spent together. “You’re so understanding,” she murmured. “I’ll try to relax. I just . . . I wish Tommy liked you better.”

  He shrugged. “We get along all right. Sure, it’s a little tense, but that’s only natural. He’s a little jealous, that’s all.”

  Alice looked back when they reached the end of the second block, and Tommy was nowhere in sight. She shook her head in disgust. “Where could he have gone?”

  They found him a block and a half back, a long enough distance for Alice to forget her resolve to be calm. Tommy was patting a Yorkshire terrier that he had found sleeping in the shade of a fish-and-chips stand. “He likes me,” Tommy said, looking up at Alice. “But he’s not as smart as my dog.”

  “You don’t have a dog, Tommy,” Alice snapped. “The puppy’s at the pound. No come on.” She took the boy’s hand and marched him along the village street toward the church. Joseph followed a step behind on the other side of the angry mother.

  At the church, Tommy stopped at the door. “I want to go play over there,” he said. “I don’t want to go inside.”

  Alice fought the urge to hustle the boy inside as a punishment, guessing that it would be as much a punishment for her as for him. “Where do you want to play?” she asked sternly.

  “Right over there.” Tommy pointed over the low stone wall that separated the churchyard from the road. They had left the village behind, and the land sloped away from the road in pastureland, covered with clumps of scrubby grass and wildflowers. Beside the church, a wrought-iron fence overgrown with rose bushes divided an area of land from the rest of the pasture.

  Alice nodded. “All right. Don’t go any further than that fence.”

  She released his hand with a feeling of relief and linked arms with Joseph once again. Inside the church, the air was cold and smelled faintly of damp stone and incense. Alice shivered and Joseph draped his jacket over her shoulders. Gratefully, she pulled it on, and smiled at him.
“I’ve been wearing this as much as you have.”

  He grinned back. “It’s the only thing that makes me indispensable. You’d freeze to death without me.”

  She took his hand. “Not the only thing.”

  As the guidebook had promised, the church was tiny, but the stained-glass windows were magnificent, far more elaborate than any they had seen in London’s cathedrals. And for a change, no complaining child dragged on Alice’s hand.

  Joseph peered out through a low window that looked out onto the pastureland and reassured Alice that they could relax. “The kid looks happy enough. He’s found himself a dog to play with.”

  Alice looked out. Tommy stood by the wrought-iron fence and as she watched, he hurled a stick high in the air. A black shadow, almost the size of the boy, bounded from the shade of the rose bushes and leaped after the stick. “Yeah, he looks happy.”

  So they took their time admiring the windows. Joseph read from the guidebook in the hushed tones that seemed appropriate for the quiet church, and they admired the carved pews, the altar stone, the crucifix from which Christ stared down with a sad expression. Even then, Alice lingered, reluctant to return to the outside world.

  When at last they stepped back into the sunshine, Alice saw Tommy standing alone by the wrought-iron fence. “I guess the dog’s master came and got it,” Joseph remarked as they walked along the flagstones to the fenced-off area.

  “Look, don’t mention dogs around Tommy, will you?” she asked.

  “Hey, take it easy.” He put his arm around her, stopping her just before they reached the fence. “I won’t mention the dog. You’ve been having a hard time of it, I know.” He kissed her, in the sunshine by the fence where the smell of roses filled the air.

  When Alice turned her head to lay it against his chest, she saw Tommy watching them, through the mesh of rose branches. Beneath his shock of hair, his blue eyes burned; his small face was distorted by a look of hatred.