Reed Lester shook his head. “They don’t know what to make of you and it’s your own damn country.”
The boy smoked.
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. I worked for two weeks and moved on.”
“With a nail-gun nail in your tire.”
The boy said nothing. Watching the road. Then he said: “Those Mexican boys worked harder than anyone I ever saw. They were making good money and I never saw them eat anything but beans and tortillas. They were sending every dime back down to their families.”
“Well,” said his passenger. “There you have it.”
“Have what.”
“The whole problem with those people. Crying about discrimination and deportation and all the while they’re throwing U.S. currency over the border and it’s never coming back, not ever. Uncle Mickey won’t hire them anymore, not even when they’ve got papers. Says there’s plenty of Americans around who can swing a hammer.”
The boy stared ahead with nothing to say. He put some air on the fogged windshield.
“Some people want to call that racism,” Reed Lester volunteered. “But if Americans don’t get the jobs, then they don’t get the capital to build houses, and if they don’t build houses, then Uncle Mickey can’t give jobs to ten other guys. It’s not racism, it’s Economics 101.”
The boy drew on his cigarette. He tapped the ash in the draft. “I never said it was racism.”
“I know you didn’t, boss,” said Reed Lester. He picked up his wet cap and sat weighing it in his hand.
“Hell,” he said. “My girlfriend back at school was Cuban. Pure Cuban. All her family crossing over on a boat hardly more than a raft. Daddy and granddaddy and all her aunts and uncles. Her mother eighteen and pregnant with her. They hit a storm in sight of Miami. They could see the lights one second and then they couldn’t. When the Coast Guard got there it was just girls in the water—her mother and her mother’s sisters. All the men, Mia’s daddy, her granddad, all her uncles, all drowned.” He scratched at his jaw. “They didn’t send them back because what would become of four teenage girls in Cuba with no family and one of them already pregnant?”
“Why did all the men drown?”
The young man looked up, as if roused from a daydream. “What?”
“Why’d the men all drown.”
“Because there was only enough life jackets for the girls.”
The rain was turning sleety, dashing like insects on the glass and collecting in slushy berms at the outer reaches of the wipers. Along the road the mile markers flared green in the truck’s daylights. Ten miles on, sixty miles outside of Omaha, something appeared in the road ahead and the boy lifted his foot from the gas and began tapping the brake.
“What is that?” said Reed Lester. “Is that a coyote?”
“No, it’s too big.”
The wipers flicked and they watched the animal grow larger in the gloom. It was a dog. A German shepherd on its side, half on the road and half off. It lay with its long spine to them and one dark ear aimed at the sky, the tail limp and rain-flattened on the shoulder. The boy pulled over and brought the Chevy to a stop a few yards short of the dog and killed the engine and the lights.
“What are you going to do?” said Reed Lester.
“Go look, I guess.”
“At what? That dog is dead.”
The boy reached and unbuckled the kitbag at his passenger’s feet and brought out his gloves and then switched on his flashers and pulled the key from the ignition and stepped out into the driving sleet.
Reed Lester stepped from the truck with his cap on and stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. The boy tugged on his gloves and walked over to the dog and Reed Lester followed.
The dog did not appear to have been there long. Its thick coat was not saturated but stirred yet in the wind at the haunches and at the hackles. Over the road lay a sleety film and a fine white pebbling unbroken but for the black stripes where tires had passed. In both directions the tracks ran straight as far as the eye could see. There was no sign that any car had swerved or braked or pulled over on the shoulder.
The boy came up slowly, watching the dog’s ribs, the black pointed ear. Nothing moving but the sleet and the windblown fur. He came closer, bent at the waist, and came closer yet and suddenly the dog lifted its head in a lunging motion and the boy dodged back, and Reed Lester’s feet went out from under him and he sat down on the shoulder saying “Holy shit,” then scrambled up and moved off.
The dog returned its head to the pavement and the boy stood there, stunned and chilled. The shepherd had tried to bite him but it had no lower jaw. There was the muzzle, the upper canines, and that was all. The tongue and lower jaw had been shorn off and flung away somewhere. Or else they rested in the bumper of a car on its way to Iowa.
He removed his gloves and came forward again and knelt to his good knee, and this time when the dog’s head snapped up he set his bare hands on its body, one at the ribs and the other at the neck, and he worked his fingers into the fur and he told the dog Shh and met its wide desperate eye. The head went down again and he listened to the high whimpering in its bloodied nostrils and he said Shh and moved his hand to the dog’s skull and rubbed the great ears. Everywhere he looked he saw damage. Bleeding rents in the fur, disfigured bones under the hide. The dog had known that sudden astounding flight, that long ride in the air and the return to earth with its snapping sound of breakage. The only unbroken part seemed to be the neck, and pressing his fingers into the fur there he felt the collar. He dug deeper and raised a length of blackened leather. He rotated the collar until the tags came jingling into view.
“King,” he said. “It’s all right, King. It’s all right, boy.” There was a phone number. He undid the buckle and slipped the collar from the shepherd’s neck and folded it into his jacket pocket and got slowly to his feet while the animal watched him with its skyward eye. It lifted its head again, not aggressively but as if to rise, and he showed his palm and said “Stay,” and Reed Lester watched him turn and walk back to the truck and lay his forearms on the rail of the truckbed.
He went to stand beside him.
“What’re you going to do, boss?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing you can do for that animal.”
Grains of ice ticked in the bed of the truck. A dark station wagon hissed by on the highway, the face of a young girl in the window.
“There’s one thing,” said the boy. He went to the cab and reached into the kitbag and pulled out the Estwing and turned back to the shoulder, back to the dog, and Reed Lester watched him and he saw the dog’s ear prick to the sound of the boy’s step, and as the boy came nearer he saw the dog’s tail strain to lift, and he watched the boy lower himself to his knee again and set his bare hand on the dog’s neck and speak to the dog, telling it something
he couldn’t hear. He saw the boy move his hand to the dog’s ears, rubbing, and then to its brow, and with his hand over the dog’s eyes he saw him cock the hammer high and bring it down once, very hard, very close to his hand.
They lifted the dog and carried it into the ditch and set it down again. The boy looked up and down the highway. Then he returned to the truck and reached behind the seat for the red mechanic’s rag his father kept there, and he carried the rag back through the ditch and tied it to the uppermost fence wire. He stood looking down on the dog as the sleet fell and he looked at the sky and he shuddered. He went once more to the truck and reached again behind the seat and returned to the ditch and unfolded the blue tarpaulin and spread it over the dog and tucked its edges under him. The tarp had been his shelter, his plastic roof on nights under the stars when the dew came down. He stood back and the sleet pocked loudly at the plastic, as if angered by it. He returned his hammer to the kitbag and the two of them got back in the truck and he turned off the flashers and started up the Chevy. The wipers leapt back to their noisy work. He checked his mirror and pulled back onto the highway and in silence he lit a cigarette and in silence they drove on.