9 Tales Told in the Dark 2

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  Another year passed. Another year of vapid holidays and fits of visiting, and I watched Luke slow down. I saw him stop hoping for something new in the dull hallways and changeless rooms. I knew what he saw, because I saw it too: the doors were paper cutouts in the dead spaces of the halls; the rooms were prosaic. The stairs led up to nowhere in particular, and he trucked up and down them without hope of reward. Sparrows that had once made Luke cackle almost like a cat were as tame as he was and interested him only when they crashed into the picture window, leaving a spot of blood. In time, even the mythic front door became the gate to a trampled prison yard.

  He sank deep into boredom, and beyond.

  By his fourth birthday, Luke’s tail hung low and he’d grown heavy and desperate in his bleary, wasted days. His antics were treated as comical more than criminal, and he became a living joke. I believe I saw his spirit die. It happened – something distinctly expired – but a dog called Luke still existed. I watched with interest. His trucking up and down the stairs and wanderings of the halls were like a harmless young dementia.

  He became, to my disillusionment, almost manageable. Nearly…integrated…into the house. It gave me terrors that I might be the same, and I avoided him. My discomfort returned to its former shrieking pitch until Luke surprised me. After that fourth deadly year, he changed again.

  He did not dissipate. He did not become something old before its time. He began a venture which I took personally and in which I saw personal ramifications: a new life beyond defeat, beyond vaporization. He became a stranger.

  At first, he scavenged only at night. He was quiet. A folded-over bag of chips leaning against the side of the living room chair, or his box of treats in the bottom pantry, would go missing. Packaging would be found shrunken and hidden away in the garage or behind the couch. There would be unidentifiable crumbs, sometimes wet trails where they had been hacked up. Then he began attacking the garbage. In the morning, the kitchen might look like raccoons had been through it. Luke would not be available for comment. He could hide like a cat.

  I witnessed it the first time the day after Thanksgiving. That morning, turkey bones from the tip of the kitchen trash pail were found throughout the house. I woke first and was baffled. It seemed magical, inexplicable. Then the family woke up, and their reaction surprised me even more. As recently as my last visit, everyone had seemed to understand that Luke was to leave no trace of himself. But now they simply bothered through the house picking up after him, practically without comment.

  I think he was like the strange, repressed teenaged boy who relieves his parents by finally doing something outwardly irresponsible.

  Their relief did not last long. Luke became the bonafide midnight goblin of the house. It became assured that anything left out at night would become a thin soup behind the chair or a lump in the yard. I was particularly struck by the marvelous way Luke compensated for these ravages with a false and preening obedience. It was most apparent the day after he struck. His face and the skirt of longer fur at his sides would shine, and he had a way of sitting at attention that was clearly designed to please. That and his thin-lipped smile.

  When I returned that March, Luke had opened the sunlight hours to his activities, as well. An empty room was subject to a thorough tossing for scraps. He had tremendous energy for nosing through couch cushions and hunting through luggage, tearing through bags or packaging of any kind. He snuffled after hard-to-reach potato chip crumbs like an anteater. He was attracted to plastic wrapping like a landfill grizzly. It was probably unnecessary for me to keep my luggage shut away in the guest bedroom, since Luke had a keen instinct for the untidy and absent-minded, paying me and my things only the most cursory attention. I was complemented.

  For my part, there may have been a Fourth of July weekend when I left open the garage door the night before collection. I may have felt a little thrill as Luke’s fattening body bumbled past my legs. He may have looked back at me from the dark garage with eyes that shone like new pennies in the light coming through the doorway, a rapacious curiosity there, a boldness. He turned to his work, and the reflecting eyes vanished. A horde of raccoons couldn’t have wreaked more havoc.

  I may have forgotten to close a low cabinet a time or two. I felt like a boy again at those times, releasing flies into spider webs. And again, I did not hate going to the house.

  By late spring, it was assaults: if anything fell from a clumsy hand by moonlight or daylight, there would be a race across the kitchen to keep the scuffling, nail-clacking, charging dog from snapping it up. If the race were neck-and-neck, fur might be left behind in a fist. I was shocked the first time I saw it, but once again, it must have evolved slowly: Luke’s masters got angry but not nearly as outraged I might have expected. He would go barreling past me through the living room, chased by lazy curses. Like a boy, he had learned that father’s wrath had a short memory. I could not believe this was the same animal from a year before.

  I thought: you will know them by their fruit.

  Luke was not ferocious, neither mean-tempered nor a guard dog, and a sixth sense had told him to avoid the baby. But when Michael was two and had play friends in the house, there was suspicion that he had begun to bite. It was summer, then. Luke still did not bark or snarl; instead, he bit like a snake, invisibly fast. They knew what he had done only by the pain he left behind. He seemed to know what he was doing, never being caught in the area once the crying began.

  I was there, once, standing in the open door at the top of the back porch steps, when it happened. Luke was nosing in the grass alongside a sandbox where a child played, and all I did was turn my head for a moment. When I looked back, I knew that something had happened – I did not know what – but my feeling was confirmed when the child began a slow, rising wail. What fascinated me was scene immediately after the bite, before the crying. It lasted perhaps two seconds, but I saw it. An unnatural landscape that did not translate, a nonsense tableau of a surprised child and an unrelated, innocent dog with shining fur standing sideways to the child. It was a jumble of objects that had nothing to do with each other and implied nothing.

  When the child’s instincts brought it to me, I examined the arm it held up. Just above the elbow was a red-angry area too vague to be called a bite.

  I thought this was an excellent development.

  Luke would stand at the door, watching them play. If I pressed the latch, he would immediately horn the door open with his triangular face and be among the children, with a half-hidden urgency.

  He did not break the skin. The marks he left could have been from a nasty pinch in the screen door, and this was often given the blame, although that was a conspiracy of laziness.

  Even while this was going on, Luke was in some respects more manageable than when he was younger. For example, he could be trusted not to run away. He would stand in the open door, not a large dog, with his brilliant Shetland face, like a collie, naturally clean, the fur of his neck ruffling in a breeze like a dove’s. He was forgetting what he used to imagine lay beyond his street.

  Sometimes I watched him pace and turn in apparent indecision when the discontent and lingering energy of youth cloyed at him. He was still too young for them to have departed completely. He would sit very upright in a quiet room staring at nothing, as if contemplating or working over a wistful memory. Other times, something dire and free and near forgotten seemed to stir in the coffee eyes like a fish circling a shrinking pool and he would shift his weight and whine. It exhausted him more than sprinting. He would turn one way and then the other like a mime in a glass box. He seemed to argue with himself until he finally collapsed in a sweat, bewildered. It was amazing to see. Very human.

  He would eventually trot away, and eat.

  His masters may have seen a cycle of behavior that was winding down; even something natural, because of their blockheaded farmer’s view of living things. It lightened my mood to predict surprises in their future.

  On my visits, I sometimes witn
essed Luke stealing, nipping. It was rare and like spotting a wild vermin when it happened, sending a brief ugly thrill through me. I did not want to get too close to him at those times; there were even moments when, during the savage dismemberment of some packaged food late at night, I would have run from him if he’d come toward me. He seemed to understand that I could be safely ignored and that there was little profit in me. I (for one) was neither generous nor careless with my food, and I did not care what he did. Sometimes he seemed to consider it, eyeballing me steadily while the rest of him appeared to watch the television. That there could be a man whose position in the house was not so different from his own. He knew how I felt sitting there, conscious of all the piggy pink bare feet of my brother’s family propped up on ottomans, framing the television set. He knew I was furious with myself for not getting up and leaving, as I sat in indecision, sinking my hands like talons into the arms of the plush, sprawling, obscene chair, having nowhere else to go. Luke understood.

  He even seemed to reserve judgment – although it may be my imagination – about the fact that I left and came back. Luke was uncritical.

  I took it upon myself to encourage him in his work a little, since he got encouragement nowhere else. When I found him tearing apart a large oatmeal cookie two feet from a bawling neighbor toddler with a snatch of cookie still in its little fist, I bent down to stroke his fur. I’d never touched him before, and Luke’s rotund body tensed at my touch, although he did not stop snapping at crumbs. He was always tense, but sudden anxiety could make even his well-marbled flesh turn as hard as a truck tire. It frightened me a little, but I kept on. “Goooood doggie,” I said.

  Gradually he ignored me and continued eating. He nicked a finger when he took the last shard of cookie from the little hand, and the same slow wailing rose to notify the household.

  I realized with irritation, with fascination, why a child’s crying is terrible: because it is always the same.

  When food was scarce, Luke would eat things that dogs will not touch: vegetables, candies, wax candles, eggs in the shell. He became more goat than dog. When he finally did bite Michael, he must have eaten the little bloody Band-Aid he’d gotten from Michael’s arm, because we never found it.

  The household was in a constant state of alert against the rampant oinker and suspected biter.

  When the wife came into the guest living room and found myself, Michael, and Luke all in the room alone, she practically panicked. I do not believe she could have said why. Neither could I, really. I remember looking at Luke, and the dog looking at Michael, his body shivering.

  For a while, I had toyed with the idea of testing Luke’s goatiness. Opportunity called to me late at night after New Year’s Eve, when I had trouble sleeping. I was up reading in the formal room. About six hundred dollars in assorted bills and some pocket change lay near me on the table. I knew I would not dream of benefiting from a theft, but if all it took was a gentle swipe of my elbow to send the money to the floor – to return it to the house my brother had made, as ashes to soil – then who was really to blame?

  Luke stood watching me from the living room, the chandelier reflected in his eyes. He sensed something was happening.

  When he did approach, it was in a wandering in an offhand way, full of zigzagging, a confused and aimless snuffle around the table in which the bills happened to be vacuumed up. A sense of deep approval moved through me, making my thumbs twitch.

  They found only a trail of sticky pennies and nickels around a heating grate. I saw faces wan from sifting the productions of Luke’s bowels that day, greedy wan faces in which the only color came from irritation. I felt as though I had really done nothing at all, played no role.

  Luke’s owners tried to keep up with their punishments. They used baby gates to cordon off most of the house from the fat dog, making their own lives inconvenient. They stopped walking him except into the yard, where they complained about cleaning up his scat. They brushed vomitus oils onto things he liked to chew. They believed that Luke only created his own mockish destiny, and their part was only to react to his mystifying piggishness. The wife’s visiting sister crouched in front of Luke, explaining this to him as if he were a child, talking in patient falsetto. The delicate tilt of Luke’s head gave the illusion of rapt attention, though to me he seemed to be grinning.

  The punishments had their own weird consequences. Luke’s quick and wily intelligence turned to something strange and craven. Instead of learning obedience, he learned to be an actor. He would sit upright with his forepaws together and head held high, secretly licking his chops. His beautiful dark eyes turned glassy and concealing. He showed no trace of injury when he was punished and pranced gleefully away from the scene of his humiliation as soon as he was out of sight.

  With only me watching him, that was out of sight.

  By the time he was five years old, Luke lumbered like a giant beetle even though his limbs and face were sleek, young. Visitors and guests blanched at the sight of this chimera. The body was a cylinder like a potato bug’s, and his skirt of fur hid his too-small legs so that he seemed to have too many feet, like a centipede. Of course, there was still his small, well-groomed, fine-furred face.

  They admired his intelligence and despised him.

  His fur shined, but they complained that he was fat.

  They had really stopped dealing with him at all. What they did, they did out of habit. Of course they did. One such habit – one in particular – was a torture to be near. It scratched at my soul each time it happened, and it happened often. They were constantly bleating his name. Over and over and over. Any time something went wrong in the household, a spilled garbage bag, a crinkly wrapper behind a couch, the lazy shout came: Luke! It came from some distant room while the culprit sat contentedly at my feet. It rang out at night, during dinner, in the middle of a program. It came in the morning like an alarm. It erased any remaining farce of decorum.

  Constantly, angrily, lazily: Luke! Even if I was standing a few feet away. The wife once did it once right in my ear, and it made me jump. In that moment, I almost took her face in my hands and told her everything that I thought of her.

  The only ones that could be more fundamentally bad than Luke were certain neighbors’ children. Those cursed with excess energy or need, perhaps living with a single parent. These inspired a low, inarticulate, peasant fear of corruption in Luke’s masters, and those children were not under their protection. When Luke nipped them, all that happened was that he would be shut up in a room for a while. He obeyed happily enough, mincing, acting nervous until he was out of sight. I would pay him visits with doggie treats from a new, well-hidden, little-used box.

  When the angry parents rang the doorbell, my brother or his wife told them that Luke was only defending himself. They matched their adversaries for volume and hostility until things became confused. That was victory. Did they ever really believe what they said? I did not know. I do not think they did, either. The real issue was decided by breeding: some bastard child, or Luke, who had cost a small fortune and had papers?

  What they did not know, that I did, was that Luke was not just biting them: bit by bit, he was eating them. A guilty nibble from the edge of a steak, nothing different from that. The children were mostly rotten and cruel anyway, and another dog might have been biting in self-defense, but not Luke. Luke never defended himself. He simply ate.

  I tried to catch his eye if I sat reading and he trotted through the room with mischief in his perfect face, but he would not have it. He pretended to treat me like ordinary authority, as if he did not know what he knew. I wanted – I do not know what I wanted. To exchange some dark knowledge. I tried to be near whenever I thought he was up to something just so that he could see me seeing him and saying nothing, punishing not at all.

  We encountered each other often. I inhabited an empty, quiet room whenever I could get away to one during my stays in that house, and these were Luke’s retreats as well. Sometimes Michael would come in
on me, or Luke, or both of us. Michael’s presence always drove me out—it was not good to be alone with him. Suspicion always followed. Of something, of anything. But sometimes I, or we, stood our ground. Luke would look at him and shiver slightly beneath his skin.

  Luke’s career continued. He bobbed the open tank for goldfish in the small hours; he gobbled an expensive flying rodent of which they found a single little organ, intact, a little purple fist-shaped something that stuck to a finger like glue. He willingly endured the constant anger and dislike of all who lived with him, the disgust of visitors, and the puerile wrath of Michael.

  Until at last, Luke had no master whatsoever but his hunger. When he watched me from a corner of a room like a statue, I sometimes felt he was thinking of eating me (imagine my delight!). He would lick his chops and seem to smile. When he yawned, his mouth looked lipstick red. In the midnight hall, he cast the arched shadow of a rotund wolverine or a boar, a rangy and yellow-toothed mega-rodent, the final exhausted state of dog.

  Luke’s masters were sensitive to this development only in their stupid, savage, inarticulate way. It became the first rule of the house to keep baby gates and closed doors between Luke and anything living, edible, or even valuable. The guest bedroom and living room, the den, these gradually emptied. The reason never fully formed in his masters’ minds. They protected this or that on a given day but had no larger sense of things. They could not see Luke anymore, nor could they say what they meant with all of this reshuffling. It was this inarticulateness that I knew would be their downfall, because one cannot plan for what one cannot say.