Last Days of the Dog-Men Read Free Page B

I’d only now just met, whom I’d walked in on by her own design. She looked at me, and my heart sank, and the knot that had formed in my chest the night before began to dissolve into sorrow.
    â€œHe was getting pretty old,” she said. She took a sip of wine, which was an expensive bottle we’d saved for a special occasion. “I had him put to sleep.”
    I ’ M SURPRISED AT HOW OFTEN DOGS MAKE THE NEWS. There was the one about the dog elected mayor of a town in California. And another about a dog thatcould play the piano, I believe he was a schnauzer. More often, though, they’re involved in criminal cases—dog bitings, dog pack attacks on children. I’ve seen several stories about dogs who shoot their masters. There was one of these in the stack of old Mobile Registers in the front room. “Dog Shoots, Kills Master,” the headline read. Way back in ’59. How could you not read a story like that? The man carried his shotguns in his car. He stopped to talk to his relative on the road and let the dogs run. When his relative walked on, the man called his dogs. One of them jumped into the backseat and hit the trigger on a gun, which discharged and struck him “below the stomach,” the article said. The man hollered to his relative, “I’m shot!” and fell over in the ditch.
    There was another article called “Death Row Dog,” about a dog that had killed so many cats in his neighborhood that a judge sentenced him to death. And another one sentenced to be moved to the country or die, just because he barked so much. There was another one like that just this year, about a condemned biter that won a last-minute reprieve. I’m told in medieval times animals were regularly put on trial, with witnesses and testimony and so forth. But it is relatively rare today.
    One story, my favorite, was headlined “Dog Lady Claims Close Encounter.” It was about an old woman who lived alone with about forty-two dogs. Strays were drawn to her house, whereupon they disappeared from the streets forever. At night, when sirens passed on the streets of the town, a great howling rose from inside her walls. Then one day, the dogs’ barking kepton and on, raising a racket like they’d never done before. It went on all day, all that night, and was still going the next day. People passing the house on the sidewalk heard things slamming against the doors, saw dog claws scratching at the windowpanes, teeth gnawing at the sashes. Finally, the police broke in. Dogs burst through the open door never to be seen again. Trembling skeletons, who wouldn’t eat their own kind, crouched in the comers, behind chairs. Dog shit everywhere, the stench was awful. They found dead dogs in the basement freezer, little shit dogs whole and bigger ones cut up into parts. Police started looking around for the woman’s gnawed-up corpse, but she was nowhere to be found.
    At first they thought the starving dogs had eaten her up: clothes, skin, hair, muscle, and bone. But then, four days later, some hunters found her wandering naked out by a reservoir, all scratched up, disoriented.
    She’d been abducted, she said, and described tall creatures with the heads of dogs, who licked her hands and sniffed her privates.
    â€œThey took me away in their ship,” she said. “On the dog star, it’s them that owns us. These here,” she said, sweeping her arm about to indicate Earth, “they ain’t nothing compared to them dogs.”
    O N A WARM AFTERNOON IN N OVEMBER, A BEAUTIFUL breezy Indian summer day, the wind steered Lois somehow in her Volkswagen up to the house. She’d been driving around. I got a couple of beers from thefridge and we sat out back sipping them, not talking. Then we sat there looking at each other for a little while. We drank a couple more beers. A rosy sun ticked down behind the old grove on the far side of the field and light softened,