Night Howl Read Free

Clara, who was simply holding Bobby to her in the living room, he went to the telephone and called the Fallsburg police department. The dispatcher said he would call for an ambulance.
    By the time the first patrol car arrived, the dog was sitting casually in front of the doghouse and eating his food. He didn’t bark at the police; he simply stared at them with what was now a puppy’s curiosity. The patrolmen were quite confused. They saw the bad gashon Bobby Kaufman’s shoulder and the bad bite in Sid Kaufman’s leg.
    “Shoot him,” Sid demanded. “Shoot him!” he shouted at the hesitant young cop, who looked to his older partner.
    “What do you think?” he asked.
    “ Shoot him,” Sid repeated. The older officer looked at Sid and then shrugged.
    “Shoot the bastard,” he said.
    The younger patrolman took out his thirty-eight, walked a few steps toward King, and fired directly into the animal’s head. All the while the dog sat there peacefully. To the young policeman, it felt like a murder.
    Afterward, it was clearly determined that the dog did not have rabies.
    From the time he was a boy, Sid Kaufman demanded logic in everything. Contradictions, paradoxes, mysteries annoyed him to no end. He was downright intolerant when it came to confusion. When he analyzed it, he concluded that his attitude had found it’s genesis on the day his mother gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. When his father brought his mother home and they all sat together in the gloomy living room after the comforting relatives had gone, Sid demonstrated a four-year-old’s inquisitiveness, as precocious as it was.
    “Why did God make a baby if the baby was going to be dead?” he asked. His parents looked at him, their faces filled with sympathy because they didn’t have the answer and they knew he needed a satisfactory one very badly.
    “It happens,” his father offered.
    “Why?”
    “It just does. It’s part of life, part of this world.”
    “That’s silly,” he said. He looked to his mother, but she offered nothing else.
    But the frustration didn’t defeat him. Questions continued to be a major part of his dialogue. He challenged everything and anything he could. In school his teachers saw him as a genuine pain in the ass, always wanting to know why things were due on a certain date or why they had to be done a certain way.
    Perhaps it was only logical that he eventually became an efficiency expert. As a systems analyst, he traveled all over the state and country, going into factories, plants, corporations, and department stores to review practices and regulations and find ways of streamlining methods. He was good at it; he usually left a list of recommendations that resulted in increased production, if not more pleasant and agreeable working conditions.
    Although his firm was situated in New York City, it didn’t really matter where he lived. He was rarely at the office. Usually he received his assignments on the telephone, traveled to the location, did his job, and returned to file a report. So when Clara wanted them to buy the house in the Catskills in a town not far from her parents, he didn’t resist. It was only an hour and forty minutes to the George Washington Bridge and the quiet country setting was very appealing. It was certainly a beautiful place for the kids to grow up. The school system was small and suffered from few of the problems that plagued more urban areas.
    It was true that in the summertime, the resorts attracted thousands of tourists to the area, but their home was situated on a side country road, just east of a beautiful lake. In the fall the geese flew over on their journey south, and in the spring they returned, always in their remarkable V formation.
    The air was clear, the people were friendly, the woods were beautiful, and the mountains were oftenawe-inspiring. A man could feel alive here and a father and husband could feel that his family was secure and safe. There was little crime, even though