41
The boy kicked off his boots and fell back onto the little bed and watched as a multitude of near-invisible bodies rose into the space above him. Dense nebulae coalescing into shapely whorls like the formation of stardust into stars and planets and moons. Himself rising bodilessly and traveling through systems of light and color and mass that he alone had ever seen and that were his alone to name. But in the next moment, or what seemed like the next moment, there was a sound, and the alien worlds dispersed as if in fright and he opened his eyes and listened, and after another moment it came again, a kind of cry. A single windy note, short and uncertain. It came at slow intervals and he thought it must be his father in the bedroom across the hall fashioning some new kind of snore in his nose. But then he realized it wasn’t coming from across the hall but from his own room, and he sat up and listened, and then he leaned and looked under the bed, finding only dust and the old floorboards. The sound, louder and nearer, came again while he was bent over looking. After a minute he pulled on his boots and trod quietly down the hall and out onto the porch into the cold dawn.
He stood on the porch listening, his breath smoking. Then he went down the steps and got down on his good knee to look under the porch. Nothing there but packed dirt and a kind of smooth wallow, roughly lined by the remains of a once-red blanket. He dropped to all fours in the snow and crawled just under the porch to peer into the recesses of the crawl space, and when he was under there, waiting for his eyes to adjust, boots clopped overhead on the floorboards, the storm door hinges croaked, and boots came clopping down the steps.
“Did we bust a pipe?” His father stood stooped in the light behind him, hands on knees, face upended.
“No. The dog’s under here.”
“She’s under there?”
“I’m looking at her.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Looking at me.”
“Why doesn’t she come out?”
“I don’t know.” He called the old Labrador by name and told her to come on out of there. She made her whimpering sound and the boy said, “I think she’s hurt.”
Grant came up beside him on hands and knees. “Maybe it’s her hips.” He gestured and called to the dog and she scrabbled forward a few inches on her forepaws and stopped and whimpered. Grant watched her. He surveyed the crawl space and the dirt and said with his eyes on the dog, “Think you can crawl back there?”
They got the dog out from under the house and arranged her gently in the cab of the blue Chevy, and doing so the boy remembered the girl bleeding in the truck, and in his exhaustion he thought that that must have been something he dreamed.
They climbed in on either side of the dog and Grant drove to the county road and turned west, away from town, and a mile later he parked in front of a white two-story farmhouse, pink in the dawn, and after a moment a stately white-haired woman appeared on the screened porch and called down, “Is that you, Grant Courtland?” and Grant called back, “I’m afraid so, Evelyn.”
“I see you got your truck back.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Who’s that with you?”
“He came with the truck.”
“Don’t say? How are you, Sean?”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Struthers. How are you?”
Her head tilted back and she peered down at him from the height of the porch, the height of herself. “Mrs. Struthers is what my students call me. Were you ever my student?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I thought not. In that case call me Evelyn.” She held the door wider and gestured them up. “Come on, come up out of the cold and let me get some coffee in you.”
When the old man came down, Grant said, “I’m sorry about this, Dale, I know you’re retired but I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Oh, stuff,” said Evelyn, sweeping in behind her husband and going to the coffee pot. “Neighbors are neighbors.”
Struthers regarded the back of her head, then turned to Grant and the boy and jerked his thumb at her, as if to say there was nothing more to say nor better way to say it. She turned and fitted a mug of coffee into his waiting hand and so armed he said: “All right then. Let’s see what you got.”
Grant pulled the truck around and parked before a small red outbuilding, and he and the boy carried the dog inside and settled her onto the stainless-steel table. The boy cupped his hands and blew into them and the old vet said, “I’m sorry about the cold. I don’t hardly heat anything but the house anymore, and hardly that, cost of gas.”
Cold as it was the air smelled richly of kennel and ammonia and pine.
The old man set down his coffee and reached into the pocket of his white coat and put something under the dog’s nose and in one chomping instant the offering was gone. He placed his hands on her, playing them slowly through her fur, watching her eyes, frowning, pausing, moving on again and waiting for his hands and the dog’s eyes to tell him something. He slipped one hand underneath her and she gave a yip and swung as if to bite his wrist but only licked at it furiously. He reached into his pocket again and again she took the treat and licked her chops and watched his hand.
“Way under the house, you say.”
“About as far as you could get,” Grant said. “Had to send skinny under there to pull her out.”
The three of them looked at the dog. The dog watched the vet.
He sipped from his coffee and set it down again. “She’s got at least two cracked ribs under there. One is just about broke but not quite. I’d guess a horse kick right off. But of all the horse-kicked dogs I ever saw I never saw one got itself kicked from underneath like this. I don’t know what kind of horse could pull that off, do you?”
Grant held the old man’s eyes. Then both turned again to the dog, as if she might put an end to speculation with her testimony. Grant stood in silence and the boy watched him and watching him understood that something had been discussed between the two men that though he’d been right here, was not available to him—as if he’d dozed on his feet, or blacked out.
“Can you do anything?” Grant said.
“How do you mean?”
“For the ribs.”
“There’s not a whole lot I can do for cracked ribs but wrap them up. And she’s old.”
“Right,” said Grant. “Meaning?”
“Meaning she’ll be a long time healing, if at all. And she’ll be in pain.”
Grant nodded. “Is there something for that? For the pain?”
“Sure, sure,” said the vet. “But.”
Grant and the boy and the dog waited. Struthers took his clean-shaven jaw in his hand and worked it over. “I’m not sure she ought to be going back there, Grant, is the thing,” he said.
“No,” Grant said.
“I mean it ain’t my business . . .”
“No, I think you’re right.”
“And I can’t keep her here.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to, Dale.”
“I’m just not set up for it anymore. And Evie can’t have an animal in the house for her allergies, never could, all these years. The Lord said no children and then he said no pets either, all you get woman is this old man comes in end of the day smelling of horse and dog and everything else.”
“Seems to me she’s had plenty of kids, Dale,” said Grant. “Hundreds of them.”
Struthers didn’t seem to hear this, but then he looked up from under his silver eyebrows and said, “Thirteen hundred and twelve.”
Grant watched him.
“She’s got ever last grade book going back to her very first class, year we were married. Takes them out time to time. Goes through them one by one, like picture albums.”
“NOW WHAT,” SAID THE boy.
“Now we go see a friend.”
They were in the truck again, driving back toward town. The dog in her trussings nested between them, blinking drowsily as the painkiller found its way into her blood. The sun climbing the pines, washing the snowy boughs in a restless glitter. They came around a turn and Grant brought the Chevy to a stop behind a school bus. Flushed little faces in the rear window, too listless at that hour even to stick out their tongues.
The boy got a cigarette to his lips and depressed the lighter knob.
“Give me one of those,” Grant said. “I’m out.”
The lighter popped and they took turns with it.
“Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” said the boy.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Grant shook his head. “Can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you think then?”
“What do I think?” Grant flicked his ash. A young girl and a younger boy came out of a small clapboard house and made their way to the bus. The bus door folded open and the little boy stood stomping some last-second imperative into the snow until the girl nudged him and he hauled himself aboard and she climbed up after him. The door rattled shut and the stop sign clapped to and the bus rumbled on, towing the Chevy behind at a distance.
Grant said: “I’m wondering if Billy didn’t do that to her.”
“Billy.”
“Emmet’s son. That’s his car at the house. The El Camino.”
The boy looked at the dog. He watched the rear of the bus.
“Why would he do that?”
Grant drew on his cigarette. “I’m not saying he did.”