The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

  I was still looking at the picture. “She is a cute little thing,” I said and handed it back to her. “She wasn’t very big, was she?”

  “I could carry Taco in my jacket pocket. We didn’t name her Taco. We got her from a man in California that named her that,” she said, as if she could see herself that the dog didn’t come through in the picture. As if, had she named the dog herself, it would have been different. Then the name would have been a more real name, and Taco would have, by default, become more real as well. As if a name could convey what the picture didn’t—all the things the little dog did and was and meant to her.

  Names don’t do it, either, of course. I had named Aberfan myself. The vet’s assistant, when he heard it, typed it in as Abraham.

  “Age?” he had said calmly, even though he had no business typing all this into a computer, he should have been in the operating room with the vet.

  “You’ve got that in there, damn it!” I shouted.

  He looked calmly puzzled. “I don’t show any Abraham . . .”

  “Aberfan, damn it. Aberfan!”

  “Here it is,” the assistant said imperturbably.

  Katie, standing across the desk from me, glanced up from looking at the screen. “He had the newparvo and lived through it?” she said, and her face was wide open.

  “He had the newparvo and lived through it,” I said, “until you came along.”

  “I had an Australian shepherd,” I told Mrs. Ambler.

  Jake came into the Winnebago, carrying the plastic bucket. “Well, it’s about time,” Mrs. Ambler said. “Your coffee’s getting cold.”

  “I was just going to finish washing off Winnie,” he said. He wedged the bucket into the tiny sink and began pumping vigorously with the heel of his hand. “She got mighty dusty coming down through all that sand.”

  “I was telling Mr. McCombe here about Taco,” she said, getting up and taking him the cup and saucer. “Here, drink your coffee before it gets cold.”

  “I’ll be in in a minute,” he said. He stopped pumping and tugged the bucket out of the sink.

  “Mr. McCombe had a dog,” she said, still holding the cup out to him. “He had an Australian shepherd. I was telling him about Taco.”

  “He’s not interested in that,” Jake said. They exchanged one of those warning looks that married couples are so good at. “Tell him about the Winnebago. That’s what he’s here for.”

  Jake went back outside. I screwed the longshot’s lens cap on and put the vidcam back in its case. She took the little pan off the miniature stove and poured the coffee back into it. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said to her back.

  She didn’t turn around. “He never liked Taco. He wouldn’t even let her sleep on the bed with us. Said it made his legs cramp. A little dog like that that didn’t weigh anything.”

  I took the longshot’s lens cap back off.

  “You know what we were doing the day she died?” she said bitterly. “We were out shopping. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but Jake said she’d be fine. It was ninety degrees that day, and he just kept on going from store to store, and when we got back she was dead.”

  She set the pan on the stove and turned on the burner. “The vet said it was the newparvo, but it wasn’t. She died from the heat, poor little thing.”

  I set the Nikon down gently on the formica table and estimated the settings.

  “When did Taco die?” I asked her, to make her turn around.

  “Ninety,” she said. She turned back to me, and I let my hand come down on the button in an almost soundless click, but her public face was still in place, apologetic now, smiling, a little sheepish. “My, that was a long time ago.”

  I stood up and collected my cameras. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said again. “If I don’t, I’ll come back out.”

  “Don’t forget your briefcase,” she said, handing me the eisenstadt. “Did your dog die of the newparvo, too?”

  “He died fifteen years ago,” I said. “In ninety-three.”

  She nodded understandingly. “The third wave,” she said.

  I went outside. Jake was standing behind the Winnebago, under the back window, holding the bucket. He shifted it to his left hand and held out his right hand to me. “You get all the pictures you needed?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think your wife showed me about everything.” I shook his hand.

  “You come on back out if you need any more pictures,” he said, and sounded, if possible, even more jovial, openhanded, friendly than he had before. “Mrs. Ambler and me, we always cooperate with the media.”

  “Your wife was telling me about your chihuahua,” I said, more to see the effect on him than anything else.

  “Yeah, the wife still misses that little dog after all these years,” he said, and he looked the way she had, mildly apologetic, still smiling. “It died of the newparvo. I told her she ought to get it vaccinated, but she kept putting it off.”

  He shook his head. “Of course, it wasn’t really her fault. You know whose fault the newparvo really was, don’t you?”

  Yeah, I knew. It was the Communists’ fault, and it didn’t matter that all their dogs had died, too, because he would say their chemical warfare had gotten out of hand or that everybody knows Commies hate dogs. Or maybe he’d say it was the fault of the Japanese, though I doubted that. He was, after all, in a tourist business. Or the Democrats or the atheists or all of them put together, and even that was One-Hundred Percent Authentic—portrait of the kind of man who drives a Winnebago—but I didn’t want to hear it. I walked over to the Hitori and slung the eisenstadt in the back.

  “You know who really killed your dog, don’t you?” he called after me.

  “Yes,” I said, and got in the car.

  I went home, fighting my way through a fleet of red-painted water tankers who weren’t even bothering to try to outrun the cameras and thinking about Taco. My grandmother had had a chihuahua. Perdita. Meanest dog that ever lived. Used to lurk behind the door waiting to take Labrador-sized chunks out of my leg. And my grandmother’s. It developed some lingering chihuahuan ailment that made it incontinent and even more ill-tempered, if that was possible.

  Toward the end, it wouldn’t even let my grandmother near it, but she refused to have it put to sleep and was unfailingly kind to it, even though I never saw any indication that the dog felt anything but unrelieved spite toward her. If the newparvo hadn’t come along, it probably would still have been around making her life miserable.

  I wondered what Taco, the wonder dog, able to distinguish red and green at a single intersection, had really been like, and if it had died of heat prostration. And what it had been like for the Amblers, living all that time in a hundred and fifty cubic feet together and blaming each other for their own guilt.

  I called Ramirez as soon as I got home, breaking in without announcing myself, the way she always did. “I need a lifeline,” I said.

  “I’m glad you called,” she said. “You got a call from the Society. And how’s this as a slant for your story? ‘The Winnebago and the Winnebagos.’ They’re an Indian tribe. In Minnesota, I think—why the hell aren’t you at the governor’s conference?”

  “I came home,” I said. “What did the Society want?”

  “They didn’t say. They asked for your schedule. I told them you were with the governor in Tempe. Is this about a story?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you run a proposal past me before you write it. The last thing the paper needs is to get in trouble with the Society.”

  “The lifeline’s for Katherine Powell.” I spelled it.

  She spelled it back to me. “Is she connected with the Society story?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is she connected with? I’ve got to put something on the request-for-info.”

  “Put down background.”

  “For the Winnebago story?”

  “Yes,” I said. “For the Winn
ebago story. How long will it take?”

  “That depends. When do you plan to tell me why you ditched the governor’s conference? And Taliesin West. Jesus Maria, I’ll have to call the Republic and see if they’ll trade footage. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have shots of an extinct RV. That is, assuming you got any shots. You did make it out to the zoo, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I got vidcam footage, stills, the works. I even used the eisenstadt.”

  “Mind sending your pictures in while I look up your old flame, or is that too much to ask? I don’t know how long this will take. It took me two days to get clearance on the Amblers. Do you want the whole thing—pictures, documentation?”

  “No. Just a résumé. And a phone number.”

  She cut out, still not saying good-bye. If phones still had receivers, Ramirez would be a great one for hanging up on people. I highwired the vidcam footage and the eisenstadts in to the paper and then fed the eisenstadt cartridge into the developer. I was more than a little curious about what kind of pictures it would take, in spite of the fact that it was trying to do me out of a job. At least it used high-res film and not some damn two-hundred-thousand-pixel TV substitute. I didn’t believe it could compose, and I doubted if the eisenstadt would be able to do foreground-background, either, but it might, under certain circumstances, get a picture I couldn’t.

  The doorbell rang. I answered the door. A lanky young man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggies was standing on the front step, and there was another man in a Society uniform out in the driveway.

  “Mr. McCombe?” he said, extending a hand. “Jim Hunter. Humane Society.”

  I don’t know what I’d expected—that they wouldn’t bother to trace the call? That they’d let somebody get away with leaving a dead animal on the road?

  “I just wanted to stop by and thank you on behalf of the Society for phoning in that report on the jackal. Can I come in?”

  He smiled, an open, friendly, smug smile, as if he expected me to be stupid enough to say “I don’t know what you’re talking about” and slam the screen door on his hand.

  “Just doing my duty,” I said, smiling back at him.

  “Well, we really appreciate responsible citizens like you. It makes our job a whole lot easier.” He pulled a folded readout from his shirt pocket. “I just need to double-check a couple of things. You’re a reporter for Sun-co, is that right?”

  “Photojournalist,” I said.

  “And the Hitori you were driving belongs to the paper?”

  I nodded.

  “It has a phone. Why didn’t you use it to make the call?”

  The uniform was bending over the Hitori.

  “I didn’t realize it had a phone. The paper just bought the Hitoris. This is only the second time I’ve had one out.”

  Since they knew the paper had had phones put in, they also knew what I’d just told them. I wondered where they’d gotten the info. Public phones were supposed to be tap-free, and if they’d read the license number off one of the cameras, they wouldn’t know who’d had the car unless they’d talked to Ramirez, and if they’d talked to her, she wouldn’t have been talking blithely about the last thing she needed being trouble with the Society.

  “You didn’t know the car had a phone,” he said, “so you drove to—”

  He consulted the readout, somehow giving the impression he was taking notes. I’d have bet there was a taper in the pocket of that shirt. “—the 7-Eleven at McDowell and Fortieth Street, and made the call from there. Why didn’t you give the Society rep your name and address?”

  “I was in a hurry,” I said. “I had two assignments to cover before noon, the second out in Scottsdale.”

  “Which is why you didn’t render assistance to the animal, either. Because you were in a hurry.”

  You bastard, I thought.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t render assistance because there wasn’t any assistance to be rendered. The—it was dead.”

  “And how did you know that, Mr. McCombe?”

  “There was blood coming out of its mouth,” I said.

  I had thought that that was a good sign, that he wasn’t bleeding anywhere else. The blood had come out of Aberfan’s mouth when he tried to lift his head, just a little trickle, sinking into the hard-packed snow. It had stopped before we even got him into the car. “It’s all right, boy,” I told him. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Katie started the car, killed it, started it again, backed it up to where she could turn around.

  Aberfan lay limply across my lap, his tail against the gearshift. “Just lie still, boy,” I said. I patted his neck. It was wet, and I raised my hand and looked at my palm, afraid it was blood. It was only water from the melted snow. I dried his neck and the top of his head with the sleeve of my sweater.

  “How far is it?” Katie said. She was clutching the steering wheel with both hands and sitting stiffly forward in the seat. The windshield wipers flipped back and forth, trying to keep up with the snow.

  “About five miles,” I said, and she stepped on the gas pedal and then let up on it again as we began to skid. “On the right side of the highway.”

  Aberfan raised his head off my lap and looked at me. His gums were gray, and he was panting, but I couldn’t see any more blood. He tried to lick my hand. “You’ll make it, Aberfan,” I said. “You made it before, remember?”

  “But you didn’t get out of the car and go check, to make sure it was dead?” Hunter said.

  “No.”

  “And you don’t have any idea who hit the jackal?” he said, and made it sound like the accusation it was.

  “No.”

  He glanced back at the uniform, who had moved around the car to the other side. “Whew,” Hunter said, shaking his Hawaiian collar, “it’s like an oven out here. Mind if I come in?” which meant the uniform needed more privacy. Well, then, by all means, give him more privacy. The sooner he sprayed print-fix on the bumper and tires and peeled off the incriminating traces of jackal blood that weren’t there and stuck them in the evidence bags he was carrying in the pockets of that uniform, the sooner they’d leave.

  I opened the screen door wider.

  “Oh, this is great,” Hunter said, still trying to generate a breeze with his collar. “These old adobe houses stay so cool.” He glanced around the room at the developer and the enlarger, the couch, the dry-mounted photographs on the wall. “You don’t have any idea who might have hit the jackal?”

  “I figure it was a tanker,” I said. “What else would be on Van Buren that time of morning?”

  I was almost sure it had been a car or a small truck. A tanker would have left the jackal a spot on the pavement. But a tanker would get a license suspension and two weeks of having to run water into Santa Fe instead of Phoenix, and probably not that. Rumor at the paper had it the Society was in the Water Board’s pocket. If it was a car, on the other hand, the Society would take away the car and stick its driver with a prison sentence.

  “They’re all trying to beat the cameras,” I said. “The tanker probably didn’t even know it’d hit it.”

  “What?” he said.

  “I said, it had to be a tanker. There isn’t anything else on Van Buren during rush hour.”

  I expected him to say, “Except for you,” but he didn’t. He wasn’t even listening. “Is this your dog?” he said.

  He was looking at the photograph of Perdita. “No,” I said. “That was my grandmother’s dog.”

  “What is it?”

  A nasty little beast. And when it died of the newparvo, my grandmother had cried like a baby. “A chihuahua.”

  He looked around at the other walls. “Did you take all these pictures of dogs?” His whole manner had changed, taking on a politeness that made me realize just how insolent he had intended to be before. The one on the road wasn’t the only jackal around.

  “Some of them,” I said. He was looking at the photograph next to it. “I didn’t take that one.”

 
“I know what this one is,” he said, pointing at it. “It’s a boxer, right?”

  “An English bulldog,” I said.

  “Oh, right. Weren’t those the ones that were exterminated? For being vicious?”

  “No,” I said.

  He moved on to the picture over the developer, like a tourist in a museum. “I bet you didn’t take this one, either,” he said, pointing at the high shoes, the old-fashioned hat on the stout old woman holding the dogs in her arms.

  “That’s a photograph of Beatrix Potter, the English children’s author,” I said. “She wrote Peter Rabbit.”

  He wasn’t interested. “What kind of dogs are those?”

  “Pekingese.”

  “It’s a great picture of them.”

  It is, in fact, a terrible picture of them. One of them has wrenched its face away from the camera, and the other sits grimly in its owner’s hand, waiting for its chance. Obviously neither of them liked having its picture taken, though you can’t tell that from their expressions. They reveal nothing in their little flat-nosed faces, in their black little eyes.

  Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, comes through beautifully, in spite of the attempt to smile for the camera and the fact that she must have had to hold on to the Pekes for dear life, or maybe because of that. The fierce, humorous love she felt for her fierce, humorous little dogs is all there in her face. She must never, in spite of Peter Rabbit and its attendant fame, have developed a public face. Everything she felt was right there, unprotected, unshuttered. Like Katie.

  “Are any of these your dog?” Hunter asked. He was standing looking at the picture of Misha that hung above the couch.

  “No,” I said.

  “How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” he asked, and I wondered how he knew I had had a dog and what else he knew.

  “He didn’t like having his picture taken.”

  He folded up the readout, stuck it in his pocket, and turned around to look at the photo of Perdita again. “He looks like he was a real nice little dog,” he said.