“You’ve got a mean streak,” I said to Rocket.
The defeated black bike lay down at the bottom of the ditch. Whoever went in after it had better be stocked up on calamine lotion.
I rode back to school. The fight was over, but three guys were searching the playground. One of them had a tackle box under his arm.
We found most of the arrowheads. Not all. A dozen or so had been swallowed up by the earth. An offering, as it were. Among the lost was the smooth black arrowhead of Chief Five Thunders.
Johnny didn’t seem to mind that much. He said he’d look again for it. He said if he didn’t find it, somebody else might, in ten years, or twenty years, or who knew how long. It hadn’t been his to own anyway, he said. He’d just been keeping it for a while, until the chief needed it on the Happy Hunting Grounds.
I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about “grace.” I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.
By that definition, Johnny’s grace was awesome.
I didn’t know it yet, but I stood on the verge of my own test of grace.
5
Case #3432
AFTER THAT DAY on the playground, the Branlins didn‘t bother us anymore. Gotha returned to school with a false front tooth and a dose of humility, and when Gordo was released from the hospital he skulked away whenever I was near. The capper came when Gotha actually approached Johnny and asked to be shown—in slow motion, of course—the haymaker punch that he hadn’t even seen coming. That’s not to say Gotha and Gordo became saints overnight. But Gotha’s beating and Gordo’s itchy agony had been good for them. They’d been given a drink from the cup of respect, and it was a start.
As October moved along, the hillsides lit up with gold and orange. The smell of burning autumn hazed the air. Alabama and Auburn were both winning, Leatherlungs had eased off her tirades, the Demon was in love with somebody other than me, and everything would have been right with the world.
Except.
I often found myself thinking about Dad, scribbling questions he could not answer, in the small hours of the morning. He was getting downright skinny now, his appetite gone. When he forced a smile, his teeth looked too big and his eyes shone with a false glint. Mom started biting her fingernails, and she was really nagging Dad now but he refused to go to either Dr. Parrish or the Lady. They had a couple of arguments that made Dad stalk out of the house, get in the pickup, and drive away. Afterward, Mom cried in their room. I heard her on the phone more than once, begging Grandmomma Sarah to talk some sense into him. “…Eatin’ him up inside,” I heard Mom say, and then I went out to play with Rebel because it hurt me to hear how much pain my mother was suffering. Dad, as I well knew, was already locked in his own cell of torment.
And the dream. Always the dream: two nights straight, skip a night, there it is again, skip three nights, then seven nights in a row.
Cory? Cory Mackenson? they whispered, standing in their white dresses beneath the scorched and leafless tree. Their voices were as soft as the sound of doves in flight, but there was an urgency about them that struck a spark of fear in me. And as the dream went on, little details began to be revealed as if through misted glass: behind the four black girls was a wall of dark stones, and in that wall the splintered window frame held only a few ragged teeth of glass. Cory Mackenson? There was a distant ticking noise. Cory? It was getting louder, and the unknown fear welled up in me. Cor—
On this seventh night, the lights came on. I looked at my parents, my eyes and brain still drugged with sleep. “What was that noise?” Dad asked. Mom said, “Look at this, Tom.” On the wall opposite my bed there was a big scraped mark. Glass and gears lay on the floor; the clock face read two-nineteen. “I know time flies,” Mom said to me, “but alarm clocks cost money.”
They chalked it up to the Mexican enchilada casserole Mom had made for dinner.
For some time now, an event had been taking shape that was one of those destinies of place and circumstance. I was unaware of it. So were my folks. So, too, was the man in Birmingham who got into his truck at the soft-drink bottling company every morning and drove out to make his deliveries to a prearranged list of gas stations and grocery stores. Would it have made a difference, if that man had decided to spend an extra two minutes in the shower that morning? If he’d eaten bacon instead of sausage with his eggs for breakfast? If I had tossed the stick for Rebel to retrieve just one more time before I’d gone off to school, might that have changed the fabric of what was to be?
Being a male, Rebel was wont to roam when the mood was right. Dr. Lezander had told my folks it would be best if Rebel and his equipment were removed from each other, to cure the wandering itch, but Dad winced every time he thought of it and I wasn’t too keen on it, either. So it just didn’t get done. Mom didn’t like to keep Rebel in his pen all day long, considering the facts that he stayed on the porch most of the day anyhow and our street never got much traffic.
The stage was set. The die was cast.
On the thirteenth of October, when I walked into the front door after school, I found Dad home from work early and waiting for me. “Son,” he began. That word instantly told me something terrible had happened.
He took me in the pickup truck to Dr. Lezander’s house, which stood on three acres of cleared land between Merchants and Shantuck streets. A white picket fence enclosed the property, and two horses grazed in the sunshine on the rolling grass. A kennel and dog exercise area stood off to one side, a barn on the other. Dr. Lezander’s two-storied house was white and square, precise and clean as arithmetic. The driveway curved us around to the rear of the house, where a sign said PLEASE LEASH YOUR PETS. We left the pickup truck parked at the back door, and Dad pulled a chain that made a bell ring. In another minute the door opened, and Mrs. Lezander filled up the entrance.
As I’ve said before, she had an equine face and a lumpish body that might’ve scared a grizzly. She was always somber and unsmiling, as if she walked under a thundercloud. But I had been crying and my eyes were swollen, and perhaps this caused the transformation that I now witnessed.
“Oh, you poor dear child,” Mrs. Lezander said, and such an expression of care came over her face that I was half stunned by it. “I’m so, so sorry about your dog.” Dok, she pronounced it. “Please come in!” she told Dad, and she escorted us through a little reception area with portraits of children hugging dogs and cats on the pine-paneled walls. A door opened on stairs leading to Dr. Lezander’s basement office. Each step was a torture for me, because I knew what was down there.
My dog was dying.
The truck bringing soft drinks from Birmingham had hit him as he’d run across Merchants Street around one o’clock. Rebel had been with a pack of dogs, Mr. Dollar had told Mom when he’d called the house. It was Mr. Dollar who had heard the shriek of tires and Rebel’s crushed yelp as he’d been coming out of the Bright Star Cafe after lunch. Rebel had been lying there on Merchants Street, the rest of the dogpack barking for him to get up, and Mr. Dollar had gotten Chief Marchette to help him lift Rebel onto the back of Wynn Gillie’s pickup truck and bring him to Dr. Lezander. Mom was all torn up about it, too, because she’d meant to put Rebel in his pen that afternoon but had gotten wrapped up in “Search for Tomorrow.” Never in his entire life had Rebel roamed as far away as Merchants Street. It was clear to me that he’d been running with a bad bunch and this was the price.
Downstairs the air smelled of animals; not unpleasant, but musky. There was a warren of rooms lit up with fluorescent lights, a shine of scrubbed white tiles and stainless steel. Dr. Lezander was there, wearing a doctor’s white coat, his bald head aglow under the lights. His voice was hushed and his face grim as he said hello to Dad. Then he looked at me, and he placed a hand on my shoulder. “Cory?” he said. “Do you want to see Rebel?”
“Yes sir.”
“I’ll take you to him.”
“He’s no
t…he’s not dead, is he?”
“No, he’s not dead.” The hand massaged a tight muscle at the base of my neck. “But he’s dying. I want you to understand that.” Dr. Lezander’s eyes seized mine and would not let me look away. “I’ve made Rebel as comfortable as possible, but…he’s been hurt very badly.”
“You can fix him!” I said. “You’re a doctor!”
“That’s right, but even if I operated on him I couldn’t repair the damage, Cory. It’s just too much.”
“You can’t…just…let him die!”
“Go see him, son,” Dad urged. “Better go on.” While you can, he was saying.
Dad waited while Dr. Lezander took me into one of the rooms. Upstairs I could hear a whistling noise: a teakettle. Mrs. Lezander was above us, boiling water for tea in the kitchen. The room we walked into had a sickly smell. There was a shelf full of bottles and a countertop with doctor’s instruments arranged on a blue cloth. And at the center of the room was a stainless steel table with a form atop it, covered by a dog-sized cotton blanket. My legs almost gave way; blotches of brown blood had soaked through the cotton.
I must’ve trembled. Dr. Lezander said, “You don’t have to, if you don’t—”
“I will,” I said.
Dr. Lezander gently lifted part of the blanket. “Easy, easy,” he said, as if speaking to an injured child. The form shivered, and I heard a whine that all but tore my heart out. My eyes flooded with hot tears. I remembered that whine, from when Dad had brought Rebel home as a puppy in a cardboard box and Rebel had been afraid of the dark. I walked four steps to the side of the table, and I looked at what Dr. Lezander was showing me.
A truck tire had changed the shape of Rebel’s head. The white hair and flesh on one side of the skull had been ripped back, exposing the bone and the teeth in a fixed grin. The pink tongue lolled in a wash of blood. One eye had turned a dead gray color. The other was wet with terror. Bubbles of blood broke around Rebel’s nostrils, and he breathed with a painful hitching noise. A forepaw was crushed to pulp, the broken edges of bones showing in the twisted leg.
I think I moaned. I don’t know. The single eye found me, and Rebel started struggling to stand up but Dr. Lezander grasped the body with his strong hands and the movement ceased.
I saw a needle clamped to Rebel’s side, a tube from a bottle of clear liquid feeding into his body. Rebel whimpered, and instinctively I offered my hand to that ruined muzzle. “Careful!” Dr. Lezander warned. I didn’t think about the fact that an animal in agony might snap at anything that moves, even the hand of a boy who loves it. Rebel’s bloody tongue came out and swiped weakly at my fingers, and I stood there staring numbly at the streak of scarlet that marked me.
“He’s suffering terribly,” Dr. Lezander said. “You can see that, can’t you?”
“Yes sir,” I answered, as if in a horrible dream.
“His ribs are broken, and one of them has punctured his lung. I thought his heart might have given out before now. I expect it will soon.” Dr. Lezander covered Rebel back over. All I could do was stare at the shivering body. “Is he cold?” I asked. “He must be cold.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Zo, he pronounced it. He grasped my shoulder again, and guided me to the door. “Let’s go talk to your father, shall we?”
Dad was still waiting where we’d left him. “You okay, partner?” he asked me, and I said I was though I was feeling very, very sick. The smell of blood was in my nostrils, thick as sin.
“Rebel’s a strong dog,” Dr. Lezander said. “He’s survived what should have killed most dogs outright.” He picked up a folder from his desk and slid a sheet of paper out. It was a preprinted form, and at the top of it was Case #3432. “I don’t know how much longer Rebel will live, but I think it’s academic at this point.”
“There’s no possibility, you mean?” Dad asked.
“No possibility,” the doctor said. He glanced quickly at me. “I’m sorry.”
“He’s my dog,” I said, and fresh tears streamed down. My nose felt clogged with concrete. “He can get better.” Even as I said that, I knew all the imagination in the world could not make it so.
“Tom, if you’ll sign this form, I can administer a drug to Rebel that will…um…” He darted another glance at me.
“Help him rest,” Dad offered.
“That’s right. Exactly right. If you’ll sign here. Oh, you need a pen, I think.” He opened a drawer, fished around, and brought one up.
Dad took it. I knew what this was about. I didn’t need to be lulled and coddled as if I were six years old. I knew they were talking about giving Rebel a shot to kill him. Maybe it was the right thing to do, maybe it was humane, but Rebel was my dog and I had fed him when he was hungry and washed him when he was dirty and I knew his smell and the feel of his tongue on my face. I knew him. There would never be another dog like Rebel. A huge knot had jammed in my throat. Dad was bending over the form, about to touch pen to paper. I looked for something to stare at, and I found a black and white photograph in a silver frame on the doctor’s desk. It showed a light-haired, smiling young woman waving, a windmill behind her. It took me a few seconds to register the young apple-cheeked face as being that of Veronica Lezander.
“Hold on.” Dad lifted the pen. “Rebel belongs to you, Cory. What do you have to say about this?”
I was silent. Such a decision had never been offered to me before. It was heavy.
“I love animals as much as anyone,” Dr. Lezander said. “I know what a dog can mean to a boy. What I’m suggesting be done, Cory, is not a bad thing. It’s a natural thing. Rebel is in terrible pain, and will not recover. Everything is born and dies. That is life. Yes?”
“He might not die,” I murmured.
“Say he doesn’t die for another hour. Or two, or three. Say he lives all night. Say he manages somehow to live twenty-four more hours. He can’t walk. He can hardly breathe. His heart is beating itself out, he’s in deep shock.” Dr. Lezander frowned, watching my blank slate of a face. “Be a good friend to Rebel, Cory. Don’t let him suffer like this any longer.”
“I think I need to sign this, Cory,” Dad said. “Don’t you?”
“Can I…go be with him for a minute? Just alone?”
“Yes, of course. I wouldn’t touch him, though. He might snap. All right?”
“Yes sir.” Like a sleepwalker, I returned to the scene of a bad dream. On the stainless steel table, Rebel was still shivering. He whined and whimpered, searching for his master to make the pain go away.
I began to cry. It was a powerful crying, and would not be held back. I dropped down to my knees on that cold hard floor, and I bowed my head and clasped my hands together.
I prayed, with my eyes squeezed tightly shut and the tears burning trails down my face. I don’t recall exactly what I said in that prayer, but I knew what I was praying for. I was praying for a hand to come down from heaven or paradise or Beulah land and shut the gates on DEATH. Hold those gates firm against DEATH, though DEATH might bluster and scream and claw to get in at my dog. A hand, a mighty hand, to turn that monster away and heal Rebel, to cast DEATH out like a bag of old bleached bones and run him off like a beggar in the rain. Yes, DEATH was hungry and I could hear him licking his lips there in that room, but the mighty hand could seal shut his mouth, could slap out his teeth, could reduce DEATH to a little drooling thing with smacking gums.
That’s what I prayed for. I prayed with my heart and my soul and my mind. I prayed through every pore of my flesh, I prayed as if every hair on my head was a radio antenna and the power was crackling through them, the mega-megamillion watts crying out over space and eternity into the distant ear of the all-knowing, all-powerful Someone. Anyone.
Just answer me.
Please.
I don’t know how long I stayed there on the floor, bowed up, sobbing and praying. Maybe it was ten minutes, maybe longer. I knew that when I stood up, I had to go out there where Dad and Dr. Lezander waited, and tell them y
es or—
I heard a grunt, followed by an awful sound of air being sucked into ruined, blood-clogged lungs.
I looked up. I saw Rebel straining to stand on the table. The hair rippled at the back of my neck, my flesh exploding into chill bumps. Rebel got up on two paws, his head thrashing. He whined, a long terrible whine that pierced me like a dagger. He turned, as if to snap at his tail, and the light glinted in his single eye and the death-grin of his teeth.
“Help!” I shouted. “Dad! Dr. Lezander! Come quick!”
Rebel’s back arched with such violence I thought surely his tortured spine would snap. I heard a rattle like seeds in a dry gourd. And then Rebel convulsed and fell onto his side on the table, and he did not move again.
Dr. Lezander rushed in, with my father close behind. “Stand back,” the doctor told me, and he put his hand to Rebel’s chest. Then he got a stethoscope and listened. He lifted the lid of the good eye; it, too, had rolled back to the white.
“Hold on, partner,” Dad said with both hands on my shoulders. “Just hold on.”
Dr. Lezander said, “Well,” and he sighed. “We won’t be needing the form after all.”
“No!” I cried out. “No! Dad, no!”
“Let’s go home, Cory.”
“I prayed, Dad! I prayed he wouldn’t die! And he’s not gonna die! He can’t!”
“Cory?” Dr. Lezander’s voice was quiet and firm, and I looked up at him through a hot blur of tears. “Rebel is—”
Something sneezed.
We all jumped at the sound, as loud as a blast in the tiled room. It was followed by a gasp and rush of air.
Rebel sat up, blood and foam stringing from his nostrils. His good eye darted around, and he shook his grisly head back and forth as if shaking off a long, hard sleep.