Cassius approached the girl silently. He sat and laid a long nose into the fold of her lap . . . and waited.
Heidy’s hand released her other and dropped slowly down, as if thinking on its own. Her fingers alighted on the smooth brow of the poodle . . . and remained on his head.
Cassius closed his eyes and smiled.
As did Mrs. Beaglehole, still watching from the hall. She slowly closed the door.
Nobody in the McCloud house at that moment knew that only a quarter mile away, two men stood just outside the estate walls peering down at their beaver trap, trying to decide what sort of critter they had caught.
“Looks like a rat,” said one.
“A blue ribbon big rat,” said the other. “Three-legged rat now.”
“ ’ Cept rats got naked tails. This one’s furry.”
When Sam let out a low whimper, the two trappers knew the creature was indeed something else. They pulled the halves of the trap apart and lifted the limp dog away. One wrapped a handkerchief around Sam’s smashed leg and secured it with a rubber band that had kept his matches attached to his box of cigarettes.
They carried Sam to their truck a mile away and placed him on the seat between them. In the warmth of the cab, the fog of Sam’s mind slowly cleared, although the sights and sounds around him still seemed like a dream. And in that dream he watched through half-closed eyes as he was driven into town, where more men met the truck and huddled with the men who had found him. The second group of men handed over a small stack of money to the first and then carried Sam over to a different truck, the back of which was filled with small steel boxes. Sam’s nose told him that they also contained dogs, unwanted and lost. He was placed inside a cage and the door closed and locked. Still too weak to stand, Sam peered through a crack in the steel door and watched the forested hills he’d explored with Heidy over recent months change to those far less familiar.
After many hours, the truck pulled up to a tall chain-link security fence that surrounded a vast array of very dark buildings with few windows. A sign next to the fence read:NEW ENGLAND UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH LABS.
As the sun set, the skies again became leaden, and snow began to fall as the truck pulled into the complex. The dogs in the boxes around him sensed a change, and one by one, each began to utter low mournful howls. Through the door’s crack, Sam watched as the gate closed behind him and the world beyond—the world of sunlight and dandelions and a girl’s laughter and everything he’d known that was right and fair and good—receded into the distance. He knew with absolute certainty . . . like dogs know that a distant storm is approaching or that a stranger isn’t to be trusted . . . he knew that world was gone forever.
NINETEEN
12:03:28 A.M.
The following year, spring came early to the leafy hills surrounding University Research Labs before burning out in its usual fiery finale in fall.
It did the same the next year.
No, there will be no details recounted here to describe the indescribable events experienced by Sam and the other animals living beyond those terrible walls during this time. No good will come from dwelling on such horrors, and they are best left to the nightmares of feverish children and the dark imaginations of bullies who pull the wings off flies.
When the leaves returned in the third year, it was in the warming, rainy night air of April that our story and our dachshund return.
Three minutes, twenty-eight seconds after midnight, actually . . .
TWENTY
ANGEL
The gate guard for University Research Labs looked up from what he was reading and peered through the window of his little booth to see thousands of white rats running toward him.
This normally would have been enough to wrest his attention from a comic book, but it was the two hundred dogs behind them that brought him to his feet spewing forth a half-chewed Butterfinger from his mouth.
He jumped outside his booth into the drizzle to better see what appeared to be a biblical plague descending on his little spot on the planet. Like a swarm of ants, the rats and dogs funneled down from the dark lab buildings, from which now blared forth an emergency siren announcing the obvious.
It was a breakout.
The guard squinted and refused to believe what he thought he saw at the front of the phalanx of hopping, running, stumbling animals: Two beagles ran side by side, strapped across their backs a sort of missile launcher made of a half-curved aluminum rain gutter. Within this lay the now three-legged Sam, aimed and ready to launch like a furry bullet in a hot dog bun. Stretched onto the dachshund’s nose was a human’s latex glove, its index finger filled with several ounces of Elmer’s glue hardened rock solid. The guard believed it was aimed directly at his nose.
This image alone was enough for the guard to abandon all romantic notions of a Custer-like last stand, and he threw himself backward toward the chain-link gate behind him, scrambling upward and away from what he believed to be certain death.
At precisely nine feet from the guard booth, the two beagles threw out their front paws and came to an abrupt stop, sending Sam shooting out the half-pipe and up. He sailed straight and true through the night air, feet back, tail straight, hitting the electric gate’s recessed green Open button with the index finger of the glove on his nose. He clung to the electric junction box with his three feet like a huge squirrel while the massive gate began to roll aside, opening a space to escape for the approaching horde of animals.
“FORWARD! GO! C’MON! FASTER!” yelled Sam to the rats and dogs, now streaming through the ever-enlarging space and toward the street—and freedom—below the facility. Sam looked back to the lab buildings and saw that people began to emerge on the heels of the last dogs. “GO GO GO DON’T LOOK BEHIND!”
Another beagle struggled in the back, hampered by bandages that circled his middle covering the burns given him to test a new antiseptic ointment. The men behind were almost on him. The dog yelled at Sam: “Go on without me! (puff puff puff) I’m not gonna make it!”
“Yes, you are! Don’t stop!” said Sam. He pressed the red Close button on the gate with his latex nose finger The gate began rolling shut again, all the animals safely through . . . except for the struggling beagle, closing fast, the lab people reaching out for him only two yards behind.
With a metallic bang, the gate slammed shut, the beagle having slid through with only a few hairs at the end of his tail getting severed by the metal portal. Unable to stop in time, the men piled into the chain link in a tangle of limbs and squashed bodies.
Sam had freed the others but remained inside the perimeter. He leapt to the roof of the guardhouse, inches from the fingers of several lab workers. Even now, with only three legs, his former gymnastic instincts returned to carry him as he leapt from the roof to the light pole to the gate, up the chain link and through the razor wire coiled across its top, several of the sharp daggers tearing the flesh across his back as he went.
Sam dropped to the wet pavement with a howl of pain, spraining his remaining rear leg. Shaking off the latex glove from his nose, he looked to the other side of the street, where the last of the beagles were scrambling to the uncertain destiny of a life far away from people. Then he looked back to the workers in the white coats still piled in a tangle on the other side of the gate, breathing hard, staring at him from three feet away. Sam’s sprained leg was near useless, and he couldn’t run at all now. They had only to open the gate to reach him and return him to the horrors he’d just left.
A woman he recognized . . . the only human in that place who had ever looked at him with something besides cold disinterest . . . the one who had risked a rare, gentle stroke of her fingers across his shaking head at his darkest moments of pain and fear . . . she stood at the gate’s switch box, hand poised over the green Open button.
“Push it! Push it, Simmons!” screamed one of the men. “Push it or you’re fired!”
Sam looked at the woman, who smiled back with a look somethin
g between pain and relief and shame. She dropped her hand to her side.
“SIMMONS!” the man yelled, not believing what he was watching.
Sam turned and hobbled down the highway into the darkness, knowing that the gate would open soon regardless. Cars roared past him, their lights stabbing through the mist like searchlights, confusing him. The sirens at the lab grew distant, but he didn’t dare stop, now nearly dragging the rear of his long torso along the slippery pavement. He saw the lights of a service station across the highway, and the prospect of a hiding place lured him to cross the expanse of road.
He had nearly crossed the final lane when the pickup truck swerved and braked after its lights found the small dog directly in front of it. The tire hit Sam on his upper hip, sending him spinning onto the shoulder of the road.
Sam lay there, spent and breathing hard. Pain racked his tiny body, moving in torturous waves that ebbed and flowed from sources too numerous to count. He lay on his back and stared up at the sky, cold, cruel and black. He licked the air for rain, desperate to slake a parched and raw throat. His mind whirled from exhaustion and pain, and his thoughts became muddy, confused.
The sky suddenly grew lighter, and the falling mist sparkled like tiny diamonds. Sam opened his eyes wider. Suddenly he was doused in the brilliance of a blinding white light that seemed to descend on his broken body.
Despite the mental fog, his mind traveled back to what Cassius had said that terrible night over three years ago: that for the lost and unwanted dogs of the world, a guardian angel comes calling at their final moments.
This, the dazzling brilliance suddenly flooding his senses and surrounding his world . . . this surely must be that.
He could feel his brutalized body lifting . . . floating up from the freezing road.
Sam closed his eyes and waited.
TWENTY-ONE
LIFTED
The tall young man stood in the rain staring down at the small panting dog lying on the wet road. He ran his flashlight across the tiny body and was surprised to see the foot missing. For a moment he thought it might have been the result of the impact, but he quickly saw that the stump was long healed. Sam’s short breaths told the man that a broken rib lay below his shaking chest. He saw the shallow rips that covered the dog’s flesh and wondered how they had happened.
Reaching down, he slipped rough, callused hands below the limp form and lifted him from the pavement. He carried the wounded dog to his truck and laid him on his dirty coat, coiled on the passenger floor.
The man pulled back onto the highway and drove off into the rainy night, pointed to somewhere else far, far from heaven.
TWENTY-TWO
JAM
“Leggle.”
Sam heard this word and some chuckling as he finally woke fully a few days later. He winced in pain, but it wasn’t the searing pain on the street from before. He looked down at his body, which was almost completely swaddled in bandages. He looked up to see a man fiddling with the lengths of twine, holding on to something that one doesn’t normally see attached to dogs:
A ladle. Small, made of steel, for scooping gravy.
Loops of twine affixed the ladle to the stump of his long-missing leg.
“A leggle,” the man said to himself, amused. He stopped chuckling when he saw that Sam’s eyes were open. “Well, little buddy. Back to the land of the livin’, I see. I was worried. Good.” He stood up and looked down at the broken dachshund curled in the towel on his worn couch. “I gotta go to work. You just stay put, hang loose, heal up.
I’ll be back at five.” He put on a torn coat and looked around the tiny apartment, dingy but neat. He pointed to the sink. “Wouldn’t be bad if you did a few dishes.”
At the door he turned around. “Leggle!” he said, chuckling again. “I’ll bring home some food. Any requests?”
Soup, thought Sam, looking at his new leg. I’ll serve. The man stared at Sam with a sad smile. “Life. She don’t much like either of us, does she?” He closed the door.
Sam lifted his leggle and waved it around a bit. Might work. He put his head back down and closed his eyes. He would think about what to do later, after his wounds and rib healed, when his strength returned. He fell asleep, smiling faintly. I’ll serve the soup. It was a good joke.
He hadn’t thought of anything funny for almost three years.
For the next few months, Sam’s life followed the routine of the Rough-Handed Man’s, wavering little. Each morning they would leave after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage, Sam’s steel leggle clattering as they both descended the steps of the tiny apartment behind the auto repair shop. With the help of his new foot, Sam would leap into the cab of the beaten pickup truck and ride to the man’s work at a construction site. Sam put his back feet on the seat and propped his front two on the dashboard to better observe the world up ahead, being careful not to think about anything and anyone from the distant world behind him. Because behind him was where it was going to stay, and if he thought about it much, a darkness would descend that he might not ever escape from.
Every day, the man would park under a tree, roll down the windows, leave a bowl of water on the cab floor and give Sam a pat on the head before walking to the huge building that was under construction. At lunch, the man returned and they often ate peanut butter sandwiches together. Peanut butter, Sam decided, was not his new favorite food, as his tongue would usually get stuck to the roof of his long mouth and the Rough-Handed Man would have to pry it off with a wooden coffee stirrer. At 5 P.M. the man would return and they would go home and watch TV and often have—to Sam’s relief—french fries. At bedtime, the man would reach to pet Sam on his head, and Sam would pull away slightly for reasons neither understood but both came to accept.
And that was about it. Until one Friday.
It was dark and almost ten o’clock, and the man hadn’t returned to the truck. Sam stood up and peered over the door into the work site. A few cars remained, and there was a light inside. People were still in there doing something, but Sam couldn’t imagine what it was. Maybe a game of some sort. He could hear voices. An occasional whoop or cheer. Or groan.
Suddenly Sam saw the man running full speed out from the building, keys in hand. Several large men followed, chasing. Sam could hear the man screaming the same thing repeatedly: “I’LL PAY IT BACK! I’LL PAY IT BACK!” He dove into the cab of the truck, but one of his pursuers grabbed the door, keeping him from closing it. As the man frantically pulled, the other man tried to reach around the door to grab his neck. The Rough-Handed Man turned to Sam and screamed, “DON’T LET ’EM IN! DON’T LET ’EM IN!”
Sam had no idea what was going on, but it seemed clear enough that life would be generally better without the other men getting into the truck, so he curled his lips halfway up to his skull and let loose a display of saliva-spewing, teeth-snapping dog fury of such fierce proportions, the sight of it stopped the approaching men like a wall of skunk stink.
Even the Rough-Handed Man, still struggling with the door, couldn’t help but be shocked, and he let out a low “Wow” in admiration of the performance.
The man got the door closed and, with the help of Sam’s rabid Tasmanian devil imitation, sped the truck away with squealing tires, leaving the very angry men behind screaming unfamiliar words.
The Rough-Handed Man looked worried as he sped away and turned around to see if they were being followed. They weren’t. His pursuers receded from view, their shouts getting lost finally in the wind noise. The man looked at Sam sitting on the seat next to him, looking peaceful, and started to laugh . . . and then began singing an old sailors’ song: “Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies . . .”
Sam thought this was hilarious and joined in, his muzzle pointed high with matching howls.
But after a while, the man looked ahead and thought very, very hard about the mess he was in. Sam had never seen such fear on a human being’s face before.
That night they ate in silence while
the man paced the small rooms, deep in disturbed thought. Then he placed Sam on a chair and sat opposite him. He clasped his hands, leaned close and spoke to Sam in the way that people speak at length to dogs when they’re frightened or excited or have been alone for too long and gone slightly crazy.
“Hey, ol’ buddy. We’ve . . . You haven’t done too bad by me, have ya?”
“I have a big spoon for a foot. Could be worse,” said Sam.
“I . . . I’m in a bit of a jam. There’s some people I owe a lot of . . . stuff. I don’t have it. But there’s a way—a small chance, really—that I could get it. You could have some-thin’ to do with it.”
“Me?” said Sam.
“I’m askin’ a lot. Maybe everything.”
“You want my half of the french fries.”
The man’s face was twisted in the worst sort of painful grimace Sam had ever seen. He reached to pat Sam’s head but then pulled his hand back, almost embarrassed.
“What I’m asking, little buddy,” he said, “is for you to forgive me.”
Sam had no idea why he said that.
By the next terrible night . . . the night where this book began, he would.
Flawed Dogs Page 6
