Luke stood up. He looked at me, confused at first. He had never been left alone with Michael since the last bite, and especially not since the rodent.
Still he hesitated. His doggy brain had developed into something unnatural and impenetrable, and Luke communicated with me now through slight facial expressions like a human being. I could not believe the legibility of his face. He took two mincing, wolf like steps toward the opening I had made, then backed up one. Do you know? His expression asked. Do you know what I’m going to do if you let me out? You aren’t stupid. I believe I read his look correctly when I perceived a final, Not you.
We had mostly watched each other, Luke and I, but we shared an intimate knowledge.
I straightened up and walked away. Barely a moment later I heard him shuffle his bulk down the stairs, too excited for discretion. He sounded like almost like my brother on the steps. Almost exactly like the man.
My stomach floated. My hands stayed close to my chest as if afraid to be caught alone, and then I was practically hugging myself. I went back into the guest bedroom and stood just inside the door for a minute, turning in place. Then, when I thought I heard a door creak, I flung off my robe and slippers and scurried back beneath the sheets of the bed. Nothing followed the little noise. The sheets were cool. Frost had narrowed the window glass to a scratchy porthole, and the light coming in was blue and black with hints of unnatural holiday color. I shivered. A train wailed in the distance behind the highway, and my eyes grew into huge transparent globes seeing in every direction at once.
A variety of sounds drifted up the stairs during the next ninety minutes, sending a chain of horrifying images prancing through my imagination. First, I heard the scuffling again, more distant this time. My stomach gradually tightened so much that my belly button hurt. At some point, I heard Michael’s voice raised in a childish tear-strangled rebuke. Something bumped over. Something was scratched. I heard Christmas tree bulbs bouncing against artificial pine needles as something brushed the lower branches. The horror climbed. Something yipped: I could not tell whether it was the boy or the dog, or what it meant. Then everything was silence.
It stretched. It stretched. I could not stand it.
Then Michael started to cry. A confused emotion flooded through me. I was sure his parents would wake up and rush down the stairs, but nothing stirred. Not even a mouse.
The crying changed. It changed from a healthy cry to something deep and mournful, full of mortal loss. What could it have been? What? The cry took on a harried, exhausted whoop after twenty minutes or so, and the boy was clearly trying to wake his parents. They did not wake. The blanket crept up beneath my chin like a gibbet.
Did I want them to wake, come running? Could I make them think I was asleep if they came inside the room turning on lights, looking at me closely? Would I immediately jump up and confess?
They did not wake. Even if they did, they might have sleepily assumed he was crying in his own room, exactly what he had done - wrathfully - when they first put him to bed. By now, the sobs hitched in his chest and his wet wails had turned weak, dry, and wheezy. Something new and unprecedented was happening to him. I heard real agony and despair. My open hands covered my face; my eyes peeked out through my fingers. Such fingers, that they could set this in motion. The slight shuffling sounds continued. It was so much more terrible than if they had been loud and violent; so much more. For it to happen like this…my mind reeled. This was not quick. My eyes worked back and forth. My spine tensed until I could hear it crackling all up and down my back. My legs climbed each other and my arms entwined each other. My stomach remained clenched. After what seemed like an eternity, I must have fallen asleep.
For just an instant in the waking morning, I remembered nothing. Then I felt amazed, and late for something. The light was pale and almost misty, as if it could go on forever revealing nothing, never becoming day. I stayed in bed as long as I could, thinking of the things daylight cannot dispel. I knew I could not be the one to discover the crime, the grisly thing. Grisly and gristly. The thing that I had lain listening to, never moving. I lay awake for nearly twenty minutes before I heard my brother get up and go into the hall.
I listened with all of my might.
“What the hell?” he said. He must have found the baby barrier open.
There was more to find. Much more. He had no idea of where he was standing at that moment, at what beginning. Then I heard his weight on the stair. I tensed even more, seeing nothing and knowing nothing, only listening, listening to a sparrow in a cloud, to an ant crawling across snow.
When he got to the living room downstairs, the revelation came…although it was not what I expected. I expected something rare. The words were right, and maybe even the volume was right, breathless and muffled, and yet…the tone I heard was closer to annoyance. “Oh, shit. Oh, my God.”
My eyes flicked. I lay under the blanket listening to the disgust and horror in his voice, and definite annoyance. His wife joined him a minute later. I heard her gasp. I waited for something to make sense. She sobbed a grieved sound. What I wanted was to hear the regular shout, Luke! in a way that I’d never heard it before. But it didn’t come.
What came was a simple scream, so piercing in that frost-locked morning that I felt it in my soft palate and front teeth. Then they were herding through Christmas presents and muttering back and forth in hysteria.
I had to clamp my hand over my mouth and nose to stifle the sudden tittering. My neck flared.
They were calling for Michael.
Calling for him?
Their voices were aimed into other rooms. They were moving throughout the house, voices coming from the walls as much as the stairs. In between calling for Michael, they called to each other. My toes were curling on themselves. The voices were rising in pitch. I heard raw rage and was frightened. Then the two of them met somewhere, probably the living room. There was high-pitched babbling. It sounded withering and accusing. It became a gibberish of emotion, schizophrenic, senseless. I was terrified and shocked to find them capable of such sensitivity, such vulnerability. My small hairs stood up until the sheets were almost painful against me. That they could go crazy had never occurred to me. I had thought they were beneath it.
The tenseness flooded out of my body when I heard something unexpected.
I sat up.
Michael was crying. He was crying right outside of my room. It was his usual braying, vengeful scream, like a wasp fanning its wings in the cup of my ear. I abandoned my pretense of being asleep. Confused feelings swept through me, raging, bitter, and relieved. I burst into the hall. The child looked hatefully into my face and then turned away again.
Then the parents were rushing up at us from the other direction.
There were five seconds or so of relief and tears, and then blame exploded all around.
I was ignored until I gathered up enough outrage to shove past them down the stairs.
I found a puzzling scene.
The Christmas presents were tumbled across a wide area. Many of them had been sloppily unwrapped, clearly by the hands of a child, except for one that had contained chocolates. I waded to it. Around the edges of the cardboard were ridges made by a dog’s teeth.
It was cold in the room. I could smell snow.
At the edge of the kitchen tile were nickels and quarters of tacky blood. I found a little more beneath the tree. They must have seen it just before the wildness and shouting had begun.
I tried to make what sense of things I could without touching anything.
Twenty minutes later, the wife stood in a robe at the edge of the kitchen, looking on and hugging herself. My brother knelt in front of the unused side door of the house, partly behind the tree. He ran his finger along something, making small noises of wonder.
I had been circuiting the house looking for signs: for Luke, for more blood, for something dead. Now I started to move around the tree to see what my brother was looking at.
I stopped s
hort. The wife had broken loose of herself and begun wading numbly through the see of torn-open presents, crying. She crossed my path as if I were invisible. She was lost the way a spoiled child is lost. I stared at her for a minute, noticing how terrible she looked, how barbaric with her features distorted, how unfit for anything remotely civilized.
I put her out of my mind.
I came around the tree. It stood almost exactly in front of an unused door in the side of the house. In the door was an old dog door that had been too small for the dog of the house for several years. I had never particularly noticed it. It had been painted over, effectively sealing it. It was outlined in crisp white winter light that came in on three sides, letting in the air. The cold silked around my ankles. Layers of blood caked the edges of the little portal.
The blood around the dog door was cold and sticky when my brother tamped it with his finger. Stuck to it were fistfuls of black, brown, and white fur — Luke’s fur. Silver dollars of furry blood had pooled just inside the door, and more just outside. The wide white world outside was empty and seemed uncivilized and frightening when we opened the door and stepped onto the small square porch. My brother blinked at me as if surprised to see me there. He pointed at the blood on the concrete. The morning was totally quiet. Fog and snow had both banked overnight. It was a thoroughly white Christmas.
My brother stumbled around outside for a while, but a snow early that morning had buried any tracks that might have been there. Back inside, we discovered a pair of stainless steel kitchen shears hidden in the tree, near the socket. These were also sticky with cold blood and a pinch of fur. Nearby was something we couldn’t understand at first, but after our eyes adjusted, we saw it was the last four or five severed inches of Luke’s tail. It was hard to look at with any sense of proportion. The tail part was thin as a pencil. It was mostly fur.
There is the temptation to confuse savagery with stupidity. My brother and his ilk are not stupid. Only brute. Throughout the day, he began to know several things about what had happened before dawn that morning. It was only the inarticulateness that bothered me. It was their power. One does not have to confront or be properly tormented by what it never occurs to them to put to words.
At the same time that notions were mounting – inarticulately – about what had happened, it was being decided – in a not particularly articulate way – to try to forget the episode. Luke could not be found. Michael was not hurt. There was nothing else.
I sensed a subtle threat and mute intention directed against myself: keep quiet. I liked to say, to explain. One person can be irrational; two, a mob. They had the horse sense that the explanation for what they had seen would not be one they wanted to hear. They became stony and guarded; I saw a lot of their backs and lowered brows. They sensed words hovering around me like flies. They avoided me in small ways. They tried to pass me by, move on. How I hated them and the speed of ignorance.
I was not about to let them get away with it. Not this time. I would have to be more assertive than I had ever been – than I had ever been interested in being. If I waited even a few more hours, it would be as if that bad dog Luke had never lived at all. I could feel the house and the family already begin palsying forward in time.
And as it was with Luke, so would it be with me.
I took up the cause of explanations. When attention shifted to breakfast, I became unusually helpful and set out butter in a crystal dish and stuffed the lazy Susan with breads and pastries, logically connecting events and theorizing about motives. I reviewed the circumstances in detail, first. A simple recounting. The dog door. The bit of tail. I brushed over the things I had actually heard, leaving out enough so that I would not be remiss for staying in bed through them.
I seized what was left of their attention during television commercials and during coffee. I joined them and joined them, the good sport, in cleaning up wrapping paper, in rubbing out stains. I pressed the attack. They were weakened by the ruined ritual, lost money, and Michael’s extreme crankiness. I was pleasant and almost piquant. Always I returned to my favorite subject.
I pretended to make connections, drawing from what they did not know I knew.
At lunch, I started in again. Michael, the bad boy, the clever boy, had opened the barrier and opened the presents. This, I said, was certain, since Luke would not have been able to tear away such large, uncrumpled sheets. Luke had merely followed him down and chosen the box of chocolates. It was not his fault: he was crazed from the Diet. So crazed, I thought to myself, that he had not allowed Michael to take any sweets away from him — this must have been the source of Michael’s extreme heartache, his lost and agonized wailing.
They chewed relentlessly even though their faces darkened. I could hear the fresh pickles crunching, the crisp lettuce. I sensed them turning – inarticulately – against my pleasant-sounding unpleasantness – but turning too slow. Brows lowered, necks stiffened, but words finally had the upper hand. I found I could confuse them like dogs with a tone.
Later, dinner. Frozen dinner. The day’s upsets proved too much for cooking. I picked at my food, unable to tuck into it as they did. But it did not ruin my mood, or my purpose. I even played host a little, pouring water, and fetching napkins, avoiding eating. We had discovered three more distinct pieces of Luke’s tail. Three more scraps of the untidy dog, leaving bits of himself.
The chocolates wrapped in their pretty box were not Luke’s goal, even with the Diet in effect. They were only a going away present to himself.
I poured ice water. I carved pats of butter. The table was mine.
The only way out of the locked house had been the dog door. He had tried to go through it, but was too fat. He must have charged into the opening, broken the seal of paint with his head, and gotten stuck. Thus the shuffling sounds. From the amount of ichor, he had gyrated painfully for hours, pushing and shoving and chafing his skin and shedding his blood.
They chewed. They tried to chew through what I was saying.
Eventually Luke had escaped, but not before Michael had amused himself by torturing him and cutting off his tail. Since the end of the tail looked the most dried, I concluded that the boy must have cut the pieces off one at a time rather than severing the tail and butchering it afterward. I said ‘butchering’ to see if they would slow their chewing. As an aside, I suggested we bury the tail and asked if there were a handy shoebox. Maybe we could cut a few flowers from the beds beneath the front windows. I thought we could also put with it one of Michael’s favorite toys that Luke had enjoyed, which instantly had the boy screaming. I sat back and reposed in mourning for our loss, as if the crying were only too appropriate.
The family proved too sad to think of punishing Michael for what he had done and consoled themselves that at least no one was hurt. I did not mention what I believed was Luke’s main motivation for leaving: the horror of what I had obviously meant for him to do. At least, I like to think so. I liked the idea that I had – if accidentally – inspired a kindred soul to action.
I took out and sliced a pie that was clearly being saved for another occasion. I served it too quickly and smoothly for protest.
I speculated about where Luke went. Grandly. I told them at great length how happy he would be if – when - he made it to the country where a farmer or a rancher could use a good shepherd. I talked about how he would become thin and strong again, how brave he was to go through the little doggy door, what a brave, smart, good dog he was. I walked around the table while the family ate, serving scoops of ice cream that melted fast over the warmed pie, wrapping my fingers around the backs of their chairs, and whispering his excellent qualities into their ears.
Outwardly they were prepared to chalk it up to a simple case of his having been a bad dog, running away because he was bad, but I felt their hearts twisting like bodies from a rope as I spoke. I pressed. If only, I said, we had all taken better care of him, shown him more love, paid him more attention. If only we had made him feel the least bit wanted. S
hown him anything but disapproval, given him a chance from when he was a pup. I continued pacing around the table, like an executioner. I was as much to blame as anyone, of course. This I said several times.
And the character he had shown at last. How he was the best of us, how he would be missed, what had been lost from the house. How, in fairness, we had set our hearts against him. How he had – and we should be glad of this, would one day be grateful for it – beaten us in the end.
I wrapped my fingers over the back of my brother’s chair. We should all show so much courage. We should each try to overcome the way Luke had, although we were more inclined to suffer blandly, needlessly, endlessly, because we could not be bothered. It was the story of our lives.
I spoke down the back of the wife’s neck, surprising myself. I felt my genius stirring in me.
How we should not be bitter about being dismissed because of our thoughtlessness. At being left behind because of our simplicity.
I think that once my brother almost attacked me, probably to choke off my words, and I planned to bite off his nose if he did. It was our finest moment. They never did stop chewing as I talked, and talked, and spun Luke’s new adventures and his new free-running life. The bottom was slowly falling out from under the room, and the black meeting of the minds was writhing up around us at last. It was in their faces. They could hardly hide their dark and hateful looks, and I savored every one of them.
We were on our way, now, finally.
THE END.
A STORM CAME AND SO DID THEY BY GEORGE STRASBURG
We knew the storm was coming. Everything warned us; the television, the internet, and even the radio, which I never listen to but just happened to stop in a backwoods gas station for beer and the clerk seemed deaf or at least capable of hiding his concern with a bored expression. I made a quip that glazed over him.
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