The Last of the Winnebagos

by Connie Willis

  I went home, fighting my way through a fleet of red-painted water tankers who weren’t even bothering to try to outrun the cameras and thinking about Taco. My grandmother had had a chihuahua. Perdita. Meanest dog that ever lived. Used to lurk behind the door waiting to take Labrador-sized chunks out of my leg. And my grandmother’s. It developed some lingering chihuahuan ailment that made it incontinent and even more ill-tempered, if that was possible.

  Toward the end, it wouldn’t even let my grandmother near it, but she refused to have it put to sleep and was unfailingly kind to it, even though I never saw any indication that the dog felt anything but unrelieved spite toward her. If the newparvo hadn’t come along, it probably would still have been around making her life miserable.

  I wondered what Taco, the wonder dog, able to distinguish red and green at a single intersection, had really been like, and if it had died of heat prostration. And what it had been like for the Amblers, living all that time in a hundred and fifty cubic feet together and blaming each other for their own guilt.

  I called Ramirez as soon as I got home, breaking in without announcing myself, the way she always did. “I need a lifeline,” I said.

  “I’m glad you called,” she said. “You got a call from the Society. And how’s this as a slant for your story? ‘The Winnebago and the Winnebagos.’ They’re an Indian tribe. In Minnesota, I think—why the hell aren’t you at the governor’s conference?”

  “I came home,” I said. “What did the Society want?”

  “They didn’t say. They asked for your schedule. I told them you were with the governor in Tempe. Is this about a story?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you run a proposal past me before you write it. The last thing the paper needs is to get in trouble with the Society.”

  “The lifeline’s for Katherine Powell.” I spelled it.

  She spelled it back to me. “Is she connected with the Society story?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is she connected with? I’ve got to put something on the request-for-info.”

  “Put down background.”

  “For the Winnebago story?”

  “Yes,” I said. “For the Winnebago story. How long will it take?”

  “That depends. When do you plan to tell me why you ditched the governor’s conference? And Taliesin West. Jesus Maria, I’ll have to call the Republic and s they’ll trade footage. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have shots of an extinct RV. That is, assuming you got any shots. You did make it out to the zoo, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I got vidcam footage, stills, the works. I even used the eisenstadt.”

  “Mind sending your pictures in while I look up your old flame, or is that too much to ask? I don’t know how long this will take. It took me two days to get clearance on the Amblers. Do you want the whole thing—pictures, documentation?”

  “No. Just a resume. And a phone number.”

  She cut out, still not saying goodbye. If phones still had receivers, Ramirez would be a great one for hanging up on people. I highwired the vidcam footage and the eisenstadts in to the paper and then fed the eisenstadt cartridge into the developer. I was more than a little curious about what kind of pictures it would take, in spite of the fact that it was trying to do me out of a job.

  At least it used high-res film and not some damn two hundred thousand-pixel TV substitute. I didn’t believe it could compose, and I doubted if the eisenstadt would be able to do foreground-background either, but it might, under certain circumstances, get a picture I couldn’t.

  The doorbell rang. I answered the door. A lanky young man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggies was standing on the front step, and there was another man in a Society uniform out in the driveway.

  “Mr. McCombe?” he said, extending a hand. “Jim Hunter. Humane Society.”

  I don’t know what I’d expected—that they wouldn’t bother to trace the call? That they’d let somebody get away with leaving a dead animal on the road?

  “I just wanted to stop by and thank you on behalf of the Society for phoning in that report on the jackal. Can I come in?”

  He smiled, an open, friendly, smug smile, as if he expected me to be stupid enough to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and slam the screen door on his hand.

  “Just doing my duty,” I said, smiling back at him.

  “Well, we really appreciate responsible citizens like you. It makes our job a whole lot easier.” He pulled a folded readout from his shirt pocket. “I just need to double-check a couple of things. You’re a reporter for Sun-co, is that right?”

  “Photo-journalist,” I said.

  “And the Hitori you were driving belongs to the paper?”

  I nodded.

  “It has a phone. Why didn’t you use it to make the call?

  The uniform was bending over the Hitori.

  “I didn’t realize it had a phone. The paper just bought the Hitoris. This is only the second time I’ve had one out.”

  Since they knew the paper had had phones put in, they also knew what I’d just told them. I wondered where they’d gotten the info. Public phones were supposed to be tap-free, and if they’d read the license number off one of the cameras, they wouldn’t know who’d had the car unless they’d talked to Ramirez, and if they’d talked to her, she wouldn’t have been talking blithely about the last thing she needed being trouble with the Society.

  “You didn’t know the car had a phone,” he said, “so you drove to—” He consulted the readout, somehow giving the impression he was taking notes. I’d have bet there was a taper in the pocket of that shirt. “—The 7-Eleven at McDowell and Fortieth Street, and made the call from there. Why didn’t you give the Society rep your name and address?”

  “I was in a hurry,” I said. “I had two assignments to cover before noon, the second out in Scottsdale.”

  “Which is why you didn’t render assistance to the animal either. Because you were in a hurry.”

  You bastard, I thought. “No,” I said. “I didn’t render assistance because there wasn’t any assistance to be rendered. The—it was dead.”

  “And how did you know that, Mr. McCombe?”

  “There was blood coming out of its mouth,” I said.

  I had thought that that was a good sign, that he wasn’t bleeding anywhere else. The blood had come out of Aberfan’s mouth when he tried to lift his head, just a little trickle, sinking into the hard-packed snow. It had stopped before we even got him into the car. “It’s all right, boy,” I told him. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Katie started the jeep, killed it, started it again, backed it up to where she could turn around.

  Aberfan lay limply across my lap, his tail against the rar shift. “Just lie still, boy,” I said. I patted his neck, was wet, and I raised my hand and looked the palm, afraid it was blood. It was only water from the melted snow. I dried his neck and the top of his head with the sleeve of my sweater.

  “How far is it?” Katie said. She was clutching the steering wheel with both hands and sitting stiffly forward in the seat. The windshield wipers flipped back and forth, trying to keep up with the snow.

  “About five miles,” I said, and she stepped on the gas pedal and then let up on it again as we began to skid. “On the right side of the highway.”

  Aberfan raised his head off my lap and looked at me. His gums were gray, and he was panting, but I couldn’t see any more blood. He tried to lick my hand. “You’ll make it, Aberfan,” I said. “You made it before, remember?”

  “But you didn’t get out of the car and go check, to make sure it was dead?” Hunter said.

  “No.”

  “And you don’t have any idea who hit the jackal?” he said, and made it sound like the accusation it was.

  “No.”

  He glanced back at the uniform, who had moved around the car to the other side. “Whew,” Hunter said, shaking his Hawaiian collar, “it’s like an oven out here. Mind if I come in
?” which meant the uniform needed more privacy. Well, then, by all means, give him more privacy. The sooner he sprayed print-fix on the bumper and tires and peeled off the incriminating traces of jackal blood that weren’t there and stuck them in the evidence bags he was carrying in the pockets of that uniform, the sooner they’d leave. I opened the screen door wider.

  “Oh, this is great,” Hunter said, still trying to generate a breeze with his collar. “These old adobe houses stay so cool.” He glanced around the room at the developer and the enlarger, the couch, the dry-mounted photographs on the wall. “You don’t have any idea who might nave hit the jackal?”

  “I figure it was a tanker,” I said. “What else would be on Van Buren that time of morning?”

  I was almost sure it had been a car or a small truck. A tanker would have left the jackal a spot on the pavement. But a tanker would get a license suspension and two weeks of having to run water into Santa Fe instead of Phoenix, and probably not that. Rumor at the paper had it the Society was in the water board’s pocket. If it was a car, on the other hand, the Society would take away the car and stick its driver with a prison sentence. “They’re all trying to beat the cameras,” I said. “The tanker probably didn’t even know it’d hit it.”

  “What?” he said.

  “I said, it had to be a tanker. There isn’t anything else on Van Buren during rush hour.”

  I expected him to say, “Except for you,” but he didn’t. He wasn’t even listening. “Is this your dog?” he said.

  He was looking at the photograph of Perdita. “No,” I said. “That was my grandmother’s dog.”

  “What is it?”

  A nasty little beast. And when it died of the newnarvo, my grandmother had cried like a baby. “A chihuahua.” He looked around at the other walls. “Did you take all these pictures of dogs?” His whole manner had changed, taking on a politeness that made me realize just how insolent he had intended to be before. The one on the road wasn’t the only jackal around.

  “Some of them,” I said. He was looking at the photograph next to it. “I didn’t take that one.”

  “I know what this one is,” he said, pointing at it. “It’s a boxer, right?”

  “An English bulldog,” I said.

  “Oh, right. Weren’t those the ones that were exterminated? For being vicious?”

  “No,” I said.

  He moved on to the picture over the developer, like a tourist in a museum. “I bet you didn’t take this one either,” he said, pointing at the high shoes, the old-fashioned hat on the stout old woman holding the dogs in her arms.

  “That’s a photograph of Beatrix Potter, the English children’s author,” I said. “She wrote Peter Rabbit.”

  He wasn’t interested. “What kind of dogs are those?”

  “Pekingese.”

  “It’s a great picture of them.” It is, in fact, a terrible picture of them. One of them has wrenched his face away from the camera, and the other sits grimly in her owner’s hand, waiting for its chance. Obviously neither of them liked having its picture taken, though you can’t tell that from their expressions. They reveal nothing in their little flat-nosed faces, in their black little eyes.

  Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, comes through beautifully, in spite of the attempt to smile for the camera and the fact that she must have had to hold onto the Pekes for dear life, or maybe because of that. The fierce, humorous love she felt for her fierce, humorous little dogs is all there in her face. She must never, in spite of Peter Rabbit and its attendant fame, have developed a public face. Everything she felt was right there, unprotected, unshuttered. Like Katie.

  “Are any of these your dog?” Hunter asked. He was standing looking at the picture of Misha that hung above the couch.

  “No,” I said.

  “How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” he asked, and I wondered how he knew I had had a dog and what else he knew.

  “He didn’t like having his picture taken.”

  He folded up the readout, stuck it in his pocket, and turned around to look at the photo of Perdita again. “He looks like he was a real nice little dog,” he said.

  The uniform was waiting on the front step, obviously finished with whatever he had done to the car.

  “We’ll let you know if we find out who’s responsible,” Hunter said, and they left. On the way out to the street the uniform tried to tell him what he’d found, but Hunter cut him off. The suspect has a house full of photographs of dogs, therefore he didn’t run over a poor facsimile of one on Van Buren this morning. Case closed. I went back over to the developer and fed the eisenstadt film in. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds,” I said, and watched as the pictures came up on the developer’s screen. Ramirez had said the eisenstadt automatically turned on whenever it was set upright on a level surface. She was right. It had taken a half-dozen shots on the way out to Tempe. Two shots of the Hitori it must have taken when I set it down to load the car, open door of same with prickly pear in the foreground, a blurred shot of palm trees and buildings with a minuscule, sharp-focused glimpse of the traffic on the expressway. Vehicles and people. There was a great shot of the red tanker that had cupped the jackal and ten or so of the yucca I had parked next to at the foot of the hill.

  It had gotten two nice shots of my forearm as I set it down on the kitchen counter of the Winnebago and some beautifully composed still lifes of Melmac with Spoons. Vehicles and people. The rest of the pictures were dead losses: my back, the open bathroom door, Jake’s back, and Mrs. Ambler’s public face.

  Except the last one. She had been standing right in front of the eisenstadt, looking almost directly into the lens. “When I think of that poor thing, all alone,” she had said, and by the time she turned around she had her public face back on, but for a minute there, looking at what she thought was a briefcase and remembering, there she was, the person I had tried all morning to get a picture of.

  I took it into the living room and sat down and looked at it awhile.

  “So you knew this Katherine Powell in Colorado,” Ramirez said, breaking in without preamble, and the highwire slid silently forward and began to print out the lifeline. “I always suspected you of having some deep dark secret in your past. Is she the reason you moved to Phoenix?”

  I was watching the highwire advance the paper. Katherine Powell, 4628 Dutchman Drive, Apache Junction. Forty miles away.

  “Holy Mother, you were really cradle-robbing. According to my calculations, she was seventeen when you lived there.”

  Sixteen.

  “Are you the owner of the dog?” the vet had asked her, his face slackening into pity when he saw how young she was.

  “No,” she said. “I’m the one who hit him.”

  “My God,” he said. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” she said, and her face was wide open. “I just got my license.”

  “Aren’t you even going to tell me what she has to do with this Winnebago thing?” Ramirez said.

  “I moved down here to get away from the snow,” I said, and cut out without saying goodbye.

  The lifeline was still rolling silently forward. Hacker at Hewlett-Packard. Fired in ninety-nine, probably during the unionization. Divorced. Two kids. She had moved to Arizona five years after I did. Management programmer for Toshiba. Arizona driver’s license.

  I went back to the developer and looked at the picture of Mrs. Ambler. I had said dogs never came through. That wasn’t true. Taco wasn’t in the blurry snapshots Mrs. Ambler had been so anxious to show me, in the stories she had been so anxious to tell. But she was in this picture, reflected in the pain and love and loss on Mrs. Ambler’s face. I could see her plain as day, perched on the arm of the driver’s seat, barking impatiently when the light turned green.

  I put a new cartridge in the eisenstadt and went out to see Katie.

  I had to take Van Buren—it was almost four o’clock, and the rush hour would have started on the divideds— but the
jackal was gone anyway. The Society is efficient. Like Hitler and his Nazis.

  “Why don’t you have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked. The question could have been based on the assumption that anyone who would fill his living room with photographs of dogs must have had one of his own, but it wasn’t. He had known about Aberfan, which meant he’d had access to my lifeline, which meant all lands of things. My lifeline was privacy-coded, so I had to be notified before anybody could get access, except, it appeared, the Society. A reporter I knew at the paper, Dolores Chiwere, had tried to do a story a while back claiming that the Society had an illegal fink to the lifeline banks, but she hadn’t been able to come up with enough evidence to convince her editor. I wondered if this counted.

  The lifeline would have told them about Aberfan but not about how he died. Killing a dog wasn’t a crime in those days, and I hadn’t pressed charges against Katie for reckless driving or even called the police.

  “I think you should,” the vet’s assistant had said. “There are less than a hundred dogs left. People can’t just go around killing them.”

  “My God, man, it was snowing and slick,” the vet had said angrily, “and she’s just a kid.”

  “She’s old enough to have a license,” I said, looking at Katie. She was rumbling in her purse for her driver’s license. “She’s old enough to have been on the roads.” Katie found her license and gave it to me. It was so new it was still shiny. Katherine Powell. She had turned sixteen two weeks ago.

  ’This won’t bring him back,” the vet had said, and taken the license out of my hand and given it back to her. “You go on home now.”

  “I need her name for the records,” the vet’s assistant had said.

  She had stepped forward. “Katie Powell,” she had said.

  “We’ll do the paperwork later,” the vet had said firmly.

  They never did do the paperwork, though. The next week the third wave hit, and I suppose there hadn’t seemed any point.

  I slowed down at the zoo entrance and looked up into the parking lot as I went past. The Amblers were doing a booming business. There were at least five cars and twice as many kids clustered around the Winnebago.