by André Alexis
What pleasure it must have given Dougie to do this, thought Benjy. (He judged Dougie’s pleasure from the pleasure the spectacle had given him.) The sound alone had been arousing: the screeches that were the cat’s last pleas, the struggle of the thing in Dougie’s mouth as he knocked it against the wall and sunk his teeth in deeper, breaking it almost in two, it seemed, as he shook its corpse. Benjy felt a deep satisfaction at the creature’s demise. Dougie had killed one of the haughtiest of the cats, one that hissed and arched its back when either of the dogs was close to its prized possessions: a pink ball of wool, a wicker basket lined with a pink blanket. They had often entertained each other with talk of how they would, someday, bite it to death. That day had come and it was good.
If Benjy had killed the creature, he would have left its body in the kitchen and retired to some other part of the house. He would not have hidden, exactly, but he would not have wanted to be associated with its death. Dougie, however, took the corpse upstairs to the human’s bedroom, the cat’s head knocking against the struts of the bannister. Benjy did not follow him up. He waited in the living room and listened. He did not have to wait for long, nor did he have to listen intently. He heard Dougie’s nails on the hardwood. There was a momentary silence and then the woman began to wail. A further moment passed and, as the woman cried, evidently upset about the cat, Dougie descended the stairs, unhurried, almost thoughtfully.
– What happened? asked Benjy.
– I do not know, answered Dougie. I put the creature down beside her and then she began to make noise.
– Was she displeased?
– No, said Dougie, she seemed frightened.
– Maybe she thought you might do the same thing to her.
– I felt the same, said Dougie. So, I left the creature for her.
– That was wise, said Benjy.
For a long while, the two of them sat in the living room, listening to the sounds of the woman, waiting for her to call them.
(Here, Majnoun interrupted Benjy’s account.
– That was not a good thing for the bearded dog to do, he said. Humans protect the creatures. They call them ‘cats.’
As Majnoun could not precisely pronounce the word, it came out like the ch in the Scottish word loch followed by a t. It was the sound of something caught in the throat.
– It is a good name for them, said Benjy.)
But the woman did not call them. She descended the stairs carrying the dead cat in her arms as if it were her child, holding its body to her chest.
– What have you done? she said to them. What have you done?
Despite himself, Benjy found the sight exciting. It was so oddly incongruous. And for the first time in his life, a feeling within him was so powerful it forced the low sounds of pure joy from him. In other words, he laughed. Dougie laughed as well, the two of them helplessly releasing the emotion within, as if some container inside them had broken and its contents flooded out. Benjy had released tension before but in very different circumstances and in very different ways. He had, for instance, barked happily when, as a pup, he’d rolled in the green and humid grass of his master’s front lawn. This laughter was strange, however. It was not provoked by his senses but by something almost as powerful: his intellect.
If laughter was strange for the dogs, the sight (or rather the sound) of it was clearly disturbing to the woman. She stood still at the entrance to the living room, listening to them, the dead cat in her arms. And seeing her there holding the dead cat as if it were precious, Benjy and Dougie were further amused. They could not stop laughing, their low growls like some strange fit. Clutching the dead cat to her chest, the woman got down on her knees, bowed her head, and put her hands together as if she were begging. She did not speak to them, though she was clearly speaking to someone.
After a long while, during which she fervently said whatever it was she had to say, the woman rose, opened the door to her home and moved out of the way.
If it had been up to Benjy, they would have stayed. He could feel the woman’s terror and he was certain they could exploit it. (It did trouble him that she was speaking to the unseen.) But Dougie, though he was as struck by the woman’s reactions as Benjy, wanted only to get out of the house. He bounded out the door without looking back. So, Benjy followed.
From the moment they left the woman’s house, Benjy had premonitions of disaster. They were not far from the den, and he knew the way as well as Dougie, but he followed some distance behind. Coming up to the coppice, Dougie moved even quicker, happy as he entered what had been their home. There was silence and, moments later, a burst of growls and barking as Dougie ran out again. He was pursued by Atticus and the brothers. The three sounded different – not feral, not domesticated, not like dogs. Benjy was immediately afraid and, bad luck for him, when Dougie ran from the den he ran straight at him, speaking his last words in his first tongue. That is, in his final moments, Dougie unmistakably spoke the universal language of dogs.
– I submit, he yelped. I submit! I submit!
as if he were being done by unknown dogs who, for some reason, could not understand him at all.
Recalling his friend’s death, Benjy stopped speaking. Overwhelmed by emotion, he lay down and dropped his head on a crimson patch of carpet.
He and Majnoun were quiet for a long while. Aware of the silence, Nira entered and asked Majnoun if he or his friend wanted anything to eat or drink. At Nira’s entrance, Benjy jumped up and began to walk in front of her, back and forth, looking up and barking until Majnoun told him to stop.
In answer to Nira’s question, Majnoun shook his head ‘no.’ So, after turning on the light in the room, Nira again left the dogs alone.
– I’m amazed, said Benjy, that this human treats you so well. You do nothing for it. Do you walk on your hind legs now and then? You must do something.
– I do nothing like that, answered Majnoun.
– This does not sound like the usual master, said Benjy. A master who wants nothing is not a master. And if this is not a master, it will bring you pain. You will suffer one day. It is always better to know with whom you are dealing, don’t you agree?
– I understand your thinking, said Majnoun, but this human is not a master. I do not know what Nira is, but I am not afraid.
– ‘Nira’? said Benjy. You can speak its name? That is very strange.
– Tell me what happened after the dog was killed, said Majnoun. Why would they kill him if he submitted?
– I think, said Benjy, that they could not help themselves.
Benjy watched as the three dogs bit at Dougie’s legs, belly and neck. Dougie struggled to the end, attempting to get away. He was outnumbered, however, by dogs who were single-minded in their attack. Dougie was as spirited and valiant as a dog could be under the circumstances, getting a few bites in himself, but his valour served no purpose, it seemed to Benjy, other than to prolong his suffering.
While Atticus, Frick and Frack were occupied with killing, Benjy backed away from the scene, his tail tucked between his legs. He would have run, but just as he turned to flee, Rosie was on him, bounding out of the den. Catching him by surprise, she had her teeth firmly in his neck before he knew what to do. He peed in submission and went as limp as a pup, but she held on and growled, forcing him to be present at Dougie’s death.
(Benjy could not express what he’d felt on watching his friend being killed. Every fibre of him had felt hatred for the three who killed Dougie. He hated them still, as he recounted Dougie’s death, but he hid his emotions from Majnoun, thinking them a sign of weakness.)
Once Dougie stopped moving, the three dogs – Atticus and the brothers – stood around his remains, as if waiting for him to get up. Atticus even nudged Dougie’s head, pushing him, as if to make certain he was dead or as if hoping he were still alive. For a moment, the killers seemed puzzled by what they’d done. You’d have said they’d come upon Dougie’s body, not that they had reduced it to what it was: an unmoving
clump from which Dougie’s spirit had fled. Their bewilderment – if that is what it was – was brief. Seeing that Dougie’s body no longer moved, Atticus and the brothers turned to Benjy.
As they came at him, Benjy assumed his life was through. He made himself as small and unthreatening as he could. But, for some reason, Atticus and the brothers were no longer interested in violence. Atticus looked at Benjy, growled and returned to the coppice. The others followed, leaving Dougie’s body to rot where humans would find it.
Were it not for Rosie, Benjy would have fled as soon as the three turned away. But Rosie growled to remind him she was there and nudged him forward as if he had been one of her pups. So, against his will, Benjy returned to life with his own kind or, more accurately, with those he assumed were his own kind. As he quickly came to understand, the pack had changed. They were now almost as mysterious to Benjy as humans were. He felt the same instinctive fear for Atticus as other dogs must have felt for the twelve of them when they had first fled from their cages.
One thing for certain: he no longer belonged in the coppice.
Atticus, the brothers and Rosie still refused to use the new words. But neither did they communicate in the old way – or, at least, what Benjy remembered the old way to be. There were still growls, lowered eyes and exposed necks. But along with that there were strange movements of the head, there was a kind of muzzle-pointing that had nothing to do with indicating direction, there was a stuttered bark that sounded to Benjy like human imitations of barking. Their movements and sounds were now unselfconsciously produced but they were even further away from the canine. The pack had grown very peculiar indeed: an imitation of an imitation of dogs. All that had formerly been natural was now strange. All had been turned to ritual.
Take the business of mounting, for instance.
– I could not move, said Benjy, without one of them biting my neck and fucking me.
In times gone by, mounting had always been an instinctive matter, no more worth thinking about than breathing was. Nor had it always been about status. At times one had an erection, because it was such pleasure to meet other dogs. The lines that separated happiness from fucking and fucking from dominance were fairly clear.
By the time Benjy returned to the pack, however, Atticus and the others mounted him, it seemed, in order to prove that there was order and hierarchy. That is, to prove it to themselves. And for the first time in his life, it occurred to Benjy that being mounted was a humiliation. He understood why the others did it and he would certainly have mounted any dog weaker than himself, but this new feeling, this shame, changed him. He began to think about it.
For instance, it occurred to him one day while Frick was atop him that if the point were to demonstrate that one had the power to mount another, the point did not need to be made over and over. The point being made once or twice, it became obvious or redundant, a mere reflex to which smaller dogs like himself were forced to submit. He submitted without resistance, accepting his place in the echelon. After all, he believed with all his soul that the social order was the most important thing. And yet …
There came a moment with Rosie, one in which he began to see himself and the pack differently. He and the German shepherd were apart from the others, alone in the coppice. Though Benjy thought of his second stay in the coppice as a long one, it lasted not much more than two months. During that time, there was little communication with Atticus or the brothers. They would not speak to him. He and Rosie, however, sometimes found themselves alone together. One afternoon, she surprised him by using the old (new) tongue.
– You should not try to run away, she said. They will hurt you if you do.
Once he’d recovered from the surprise of being addressed in their old language – and decided to risk speaking back – Benjy asked why dogs should hurt one who wished to be free.
Rather than answer, Rosie told him what had happened to Max. When Benjy and Dougie had fled, the others – Rosie included – began to mount Max. It was only natural, she said, as all of them were superior to the dog. And this was fine, for a while. But then, the dog got it into his head that he should mount one of them. None let him, and what had been balance turned into an unpleasant battle for leadership. It was a battle that escalated until, one winter afternoon, the brothers had had enough. They attacked Max together, leaving him half-dead by the side of the pond. They left it for the leader to finish the dog off, and the leader, naturally, had no choice. It was he who bit through the dog’s neck and left him to die.
As far as Rosie was concerned, Max had been to blame for the trouble that led to his death. In killing him, the dogs had behaved according to nature. They had been true dogs: blameless and faithful to the canine. It was up to every dog to follow the right road, to know his place. It was up to Benjy to do so now.
– Do you see? she asked.
He had answered that he did see, but, in fact, he saw more than she did. If he had, previously, wondered why he and Dougie had been kept around, he now had a very good idea: the others needed him, weak and lowly though he was, to maintain their echelon. This thought, which he shared with no one, instilled in him a sense of his own power. He, Benjy, was in his way as necessary as the leader, for if there is a top there must necessarily be a bottom. Why, then, should he alone be mounted? Wasn’t it reasonable to think that from time to time the leader should allow himself to be mounted by the lowest – that is, Benjy? The heights depend on the depths. This revolutionary thought, new as it was to him, was disturbing. It was a paradox that Benjy could neither shake nor resolve, and it set him – unconsciously, at first – against his pack mates.
Two months into his time with the others in the coppice, Benjy too began to lose his sense of the canine. He could not piss or sit still without wondering if he were doing it right. The selfconsciousness was disorienting, its effect very like listening to the strange-speaking dog:
How the sky moves above the world!
How the ground’s fur is changed.
All to distract the dog with bones,
buried or dug. He will wander unsatisfied.
So, although Benjy was unsure about many things, he was certain that he wanted no part of Atticus’s pack. He had to get away. The thing was, he knew escape would be difficult. He had become a part of the pack’s rituals, their necessary underdog. As a result, they kept a close watch on him, protecting him from strange dogs, yes, but ready to pounce if he made the slightest misstep. In the end, it was only through good fortune – good fortune for him, good fortune guided by spite – that Benjy managed to escape. That is, he found a garden of death.
Gardens of death are difficult to speak of. For dogs, they exist only on the edge of awareness. They are the places – sometimes literally gardens – where humans leave poison for animals to eat. For obvious reasons, few living dogs know about them. To begin with, those who discover them seldom live to learn from their discovery. And then, they rarely die within the gardens. Poisoned dogs tend to die well away from the places where they’ve been poisoned. So, their dead bodies do not serve as warnings to others.
In his life, Benjy – an extremely cautious dog – had, to his knowledge, known but two gardens of death. The first had been three houses away from his master’s home. It was a vegetable garden from which there inevitably came enticing smells, smells both mineral and fleshy. All one had to do to enter the garden was to use a dugout that went under the yard’s metal fence. Any number of dogs entered and ate. The breath and arses of the ones who did smelled of rust and rubbing alcohol. The smaller ones died soon after their breath took on the smell. The larger ones either died or became very sick. Benjy had free run of the neighbourhood and he had gone into the garden a number of times. There, buried a little way under the ground, you could find cow’s meat, pieces of cooked chicken or even sugary breads. It had been tempting to dig the good things up and eat them, but, as well as being naturally suspicious, Benjy was well-fed. He had dug up a bone or two on which there was still much
meat, but he’d resisted eating what smelled like mineral flesh. He had, instead, contented himself with sniffing at the dogs, cats and dying raccoons who had not.
Just as the pattern had imposed itself on his memory, just as he’d linked the garden with suffering and death, the ground had ceased to bring those things. The garden was trampled, meats were no longer buried there, and the animals who entered did not grow sick, did not die.
It had all been so odd, so fascinating, that Benjy never forgot either the place or its association with pain and death. And then, on one of his forays to the houses beside the park, he caught the smell of rust and rubbing alcohol on the breath of an agonizing dog whose body writhed in the tall weeds along Parkside Drive. A few evenings later, along Ellis Park Road, he, with Frick and Frack behind him, had passed a house from which came the same strange tang: alcohol and rust. Benjy barked, calling the brothers away from the house to a provocative scent at the base of a willow tree. (The dogs who used the park seemed all to piss vanilla, honey, alfalfa, clover and something not quite definable but entrancing nevertheless.) He was not certain there was a garden of death behind the house, but if there was, he wanted all of Atticus’s pack – as he now thought of them – to eat there at once.
It was disturbing to imagine the death of his fellows. His pack would die out: a desolating thought, despite his hatred for the others. Then again, he had no idea what effect the garden of death would have. It was possible that Atticus’s pack would merely be incapacitated, allowing him to flee the coppice. In either case, Benjy could see no other route to freedom. All he had to do was lead those who’d killed Dougie to the proper place. The garden itself would do the rest.
The following morning, as they all set out from their den, Benjy drifted toward Ellis Park Road. That is, he made a show of sniffing tree trunks that led in the direction of Ellis Park Road. As if the gods themselves approved of Benjy’s intentions, on this summer morning the trees along the way were redolent of fascinating urine. The pack moved inexorably in the direction of the house that had hinted of death.
