by Matt Ruff
Blackjack studied Luther’s eyes for a long moment. Luther did not look well. If dogs had been capable of crying out of emotion, his face would have been streaked with hysterical tears.
“It’s not fair, you know,” Luther said, and the thought was quiet, meek. “I was the only one in my litter to survive past the first month. And my mother, she just disappeared. Moses always thought the ’catchers had gotten her. Lately I’ve been wondering if it wasn’t something worse. What if she was out at night sometime, ail alone, and she met up with Raaq in person?”
“Raaq isn’t real, Luther,” Blackjack told him patiently. “Raaq’s only a bad dream that some caveman put a name to. Then a cat overheard the caveman talking about it and just for laughs he told a dog. And you’ve been scaring yourselves over it ever since.”
Luther listened to this with equal patience. Cats often said strange things, especially in reference to the Masters. A good dog nodded and took it all with a polite grain of salt.
“You’ll still be my friend, won’t you, Blackjack?” he asked, when the Manx had finished. “You’re all I've got left now that Moses is gone.”
“I’ll be your friend,” Blackjack promised. And because cats can’t hug, he bit Luther playfully on the ear. Then he said: “Now what’s this I hear about you going to look for Moses?”
“Well . . .” Luther lowered his eyes, embarrassed. “Even with you as a friend, you understand, I still miss him a lot. I want to see him again.”
“His body, you mean?”
“Oh no!” Luther looked frankly surprised. “Why would I want to see that? What good’s a body if nobody’s in it?”
“Then what—”
“I want to see his soul again, Blackjack.”
“His soul.” Blackjack shifted uncomfortably on his haunches. “And where might that be?”
“In Heaven, of course.”
Now Blackjack looked surprised. As he happened to glance down into the alley, a terrible thought struck him.
“I hope you’re not stupid enough to be thinking of jumping,” he said solemnly. “Even if suicide were a rational option, I can tell you right now that two floors isn’t high enough. It’ll hurt, but unless you land on your head it’ll probably just cripple you, not kill you.”
“I’m not going to jump, Blackjack. What made you think that? You don’t jump to Heaven. You walk there.”
“Pardon?”
“I had an idea,” Luther explained. “It came to me yesterday, right after they took Moses’ body away. I was down in the alley itself, sniffing around where he’d been lying, and I could still smell him.”
“Of course you could. The weather’s been clear, so there’s no reason why the scent should fade quickly. What does that have to do with Heaven?”
“Well,” said Luther, “I was standing there thinking, ‘If I can smell Moses’ body, I wonder if I could sniff out his soul.’ And then I thought, ‘What if I could sniff out Heaven itself?’ “
“Oh . . .” Understanding was beginning to dawn.
“So I came up here, you see, to scent for Heaven. I suppose a taller building would have been better, but I like this spot, and Moses did too.
“Anyway,” he continued, “for a long time I didn’t get anything. All last night and this morning there was nothing but exhaust smell from the Lower City. And then, just a few hours ago, a breeze sprang up, and it brought a new smell. Very faint, but it was there.
“I smelled Heaven, Blackjack! It’s up north. Up north so far that I’m not even sure the world quite reaches it, but I think I can make it . . . or we can, if you want to come with me.”
Blackjack watched Luther nervously during this entire thought-speech, and soon realized that there was no way he was going to talk him out of making the journey. Every possible argument—that Heaven didn’t exist, that if it did exist there would be no way to reach it alive, that it probably wasn’t worth rushing to anyway—was blown away by the slightly romantic, slightly crazed look in Luther’s eyes. He realized also, grudgingly, that his own somewhat tarnished but still honorable conscience would not allow him to stay behind while Luther went out into a world he was too innocent to survive in alone.
“Tell me one thing,” Blackjack said, trying to resign himself to the idea of the journey and knowing he would get no sleep tonight.
“Sure,” replied Luther, wagging his tail. “What do you want to know?”
“This Heaven place. What did it smell like?”
“Like rain,” Luther told him wonderingly. “Rain and hills.”
“Gee,” said Blackjack. “That sounds just swell.”
V.
They left three days later. Most of the other neighborhood dogs, and some of the cats, gathered to see them off. Good-byes were exchanged, good luck wished, and then they were on the move. Malcolm accompanied them for the first mile, reeling off some last-minute advice that was mostly intended for Luther.
“ . . . Now remember that you don’t have collars, neither of you. That ain’t a bad thing at all, ain’t no man ever put a collar on me, but the ’catchers will know you for strays right off. Keep a sharp eye out for them, and remember that some of them can gun at you from a distance.
“Also,” he said cautiously, as if crossing thin ice, “you got to watch out for ’Breds.”
“ ’Breds?” asked Luther. What are those?”
“Purebreds,” said Blackjack, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. “Purebred dogs.”
“What are—”
“Has to do with blood, mostly,” Malcolm told him. “Me, I got blood from three or four strains of dog in me. You, Luther, you got even more—so much that it’d likely take God and a helper to get it all straight. But a Purebred—that’s a dog with only one strain, or so much of one that he can pretend that’s all he’s got. It’s called havin’ pedigree, and they think it makes them better than those that don’t have it.”
“But how can you tell who has pedigree, if it’s just the blood? By smell?”
“Oh, you’ll know, Luther. Purebreds come in a lot of types, a lot of flavors, you might say, but all the ones of the same type look the same. Not exactly the same, mind you, but there’s a normal, a perfect, that they’re trying to be. And they hate dogs like us. Mixes.”
“Are all Purebreds like that?”
“No,” Blackjack interjected. “He’s exaggerating.”
“Not by much, cat,” insisted Malcolm. “Not by much at all. But you’ll know the really bad ones—the ones that want to kill you—by a thought in their minds. You’ll hear that thought clear as a bell, even if they’re tryin’ to cover it up with other thoughts.”
“What thought?”
“Mange,” Malcolm said. “That’s what they call us. Mange. You hear that thought in another dog’s mind, you feel it, smell it, taste it, then you’ll know that dog is your enemy. Get away from him as fast as you can, kill him if you have to.”
“Kill him?” Luther’s eyes were wide with shock. “A dog that kills another dog lets Raaq into his heart, Malcolm. You know that. You can’t—”
“Mayhap Raaq does get in. But as long as a dog’s still alive, he can still hope to get Raaq back out. A dog killin’ another dog happens all the time, Luther. And you know that.”
Luther said nothing. He knew it, all right, but he also knew, as, Moses had taught him, that things didn’t have to be that way.
“Mange,” Malcolm repeated, with a distaste that he did not try to hide. “You remember that word, Luther. Write it on your heart. And listen for it.”
They had reached the outer limits of their home territory. Familiar smells faded into obscurity and were replaced by strange new ones. Other animals, other things.
“This is as far as I go,” Malcolm told them. “You all remember what I told you, though, and take care. I’ll miss you, Luther. Mayhap I’ll even miss you, cat. You’re no son of a bitch, but you do grow on a fellow.”
“I’m flattered beyond belief,” Blackjack said.
>
“Don’t say good-bye, Malcolm,” Luther said. “You never know, we might be back someday.”
“I don’t think so, Luther. Not that I don’t want it that way, but that ain’t how it feels.”
“Making predictions about the future now?” Blackjack chided him. “I suppose that’s appropriate, since we’re heading off to find a mythical place.”
“That’s one thing about you, cat,” replied Malcolm. “For a smart animal, you surely are stupid sometimes. How do you know I can’t read the future? Ain’t I read you pretty well? The future’s a darker glass, less clear, but it ain’t all secret.”
“And you don’t think we’ll be back?” Luther said, saddened.
“No,” said Malcolm. “You got big things ahead of you, Luther. Who knows, mayhap Heaven is waitin’ for you out there. But I doubt as we’ll meet again in this world.”
“If there’s another world besides this one,” put in Blackjack, “I’ll probably be in so much shock that I’ll even be glad to see your ugly muzzle again, Malcolm. You are a son of a bitch, but I suppose you grow on a fellow, too.”
“Take care then, cat. You too, Luther. Good-bye now.”
“Good-bye, Malcolm,” Luther said, and turned away. Blackjack followed at his heel.
Night was falling as they left. The sky was overcast but rainless, and the clouds glowed dully with the light reflected from Manhattan to the south. Malcolm stood at the edge of the home territory, his territory, and watched until both dog and cat had vanished into the gathering darkness.
As he walked back alone to the church, a light wind began to blow.
PRINCESS AURORA · · ·
I.
On the morning that his daughter was due to leave for her last year of college, Walter Smith rose ahead of the sun, dressing quietly and slipping out into the chill Wisconsin morning before dawn could get a grip on the sky. Walt was a factory worker rather than a dairy farmer—and a retired factory worker at that—but his property bordered on one of the biggest cow pastures in the state. He headed there now, vaulting two fences and wading a shallow stream in defiance of his age. Arthritis had mercifully passed him over, for now, but he suspected that not even painful joints could have kept him indoors. Early morning was his time of rebellion. Especially this morning.
Hopelessly ordinary in most respects, Walter Smith’s life could have served as a definition for the word average. Born in the early Twenties to Lutheran parents who were neither rich nor poor, he had lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the McCarthy witch hunts, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate Era, national upheavals from which he felt barely a tremor. He married at twenty-five, settling on the outskirts of the sleepy Wisconsin town where he and his wife and daughter still lived. The next forty years of his life were spent working at a production plant for the Great Midwest Paint Company (and the most exciting event at the plant in those forty years had been the introduction of a brand new line of wood stains—Great Midwest Wood Stains, they were called). Walt had become a recognized and respected face in town, not the sort of person you’d vote for for mayor, but one you’d be sure to invite to your church social. A good, run-of-the-mill type fellow.
That was what everyone thought, anyway. Not even Walter’s wife Prudence knew of his occasional habit of doing things that were, well, not quite so run-of-the-mill. These digressions, as Walter had come to call them in his mind, were never very frequent or large-scale. He knew in his heart that he was not cut out to be anything but regular, but over the years he had come to feel a deep appreciation for those lucky individuals who broke the mold. The digressions were a salute of sorts, a tip of the hat to rebelliousness, craziness . . . differentness.
Perhaps the impulse had always been in him, like a latent kidney disorder, but it had come into its own rather late in his life. Walter would never forget the day in 1955 when he had first fallen down the rabbit hole of unorthodoxy, driven to the breaking point by the ruthlessness of Dick Stark, an ex-marine and newly hired manager at the Great Midwest Paint Plant, who must surely have numbered Attila the Hun among his ancestors. Walter’s Primal Digression was simple; it involved nothing more than jumbling the numbers on Stark’s weekly delivery manifest, the huge, pale green ledger in which the paint orders were logged. Pure chance brought Walt to Stark’s open and unguarded office, and he seemed to barely think as he performed his act of sabotage, but the results were wondrous to behold: over the course of the next two weeks, a Detroit funeral parlor undergoing renovation received a triple order of cheerful Lemon Yellow Latex; the congregation of a newly built church in Onio found itself awash in Electric Purple; a Great Midwest Paint store in downtown Milwaukee got truckload after truckload of Susan B. Anthony Pink . . . a shade not unlike that of the pink slip that Dick Stark was given, unceremoniously, at the end of the month.
Walter had spent a good deal of time worrying over his sanity after this stunt—it was the first time he had ever done something even remotely out of line with the Straight and Narrow (and what a first!)—but the incident also filled him with a strange sense of elation. For those few moments in the Delivery Office, franticaly altering the manifest, Walter Smith had had a taste of the World of Unorthodoxy, and though it was not his world, it surely did feel grand all the same.
Large-scale “digressions” such as this had remained few and far between in the many years since then, but Walt had managed to pick up one or two daily quirks as well. One was the habit of getting up very early and going out to walk while the rest of Wisconsin—even the dairy farmers—still slept. And now, in the age of his ret rement, he had discovered something else, something deliciously rebellious and perfectly suited for the dark, private hours of pre-dawn.
Sitting on a lonely tree stump at the border of the cow pasture, Walter Smith reached into his jacket pocket for a plastic ziplock bag. Inside the bag were four pre-rolled mar juana cigarettes. He bought them from an old factory buddy named Don Mezz for a dollar apiece, coming out to the stump and getting a buzz on on those mornings when the spirit moved him. Don had been completely taker off guard the first time Walter approached him to make a purchase, and Wah was particularly pleased with the memory of that reaction.
He took out one of the joints, placing the bag on the stump beside him. Lighting it with a tarnished Zippo, Walt inhaled deeply to get the coal going.
He held the smoke in his lungs for as long as he could, exhaling a clean white column. He was getting good at this; he no longer coughed after each drag.
For the next twenty minutes Walter did nothing but smoke. Usually he limited himself to one joint, but this morning he went considerably further than that; this morning he was worried about his daughter. His one and only daughter, whom he had often prayed would turn out to be a true rebel, not just a part-timer.
She had come into the world on a seemingly endless night some twenty-one years ago. The labor had lasted thirteen hours, and at one point Walt had wandered out of the waiting room in a nervous fit, looking for something unusual to do. He wound up buying a pack of Marlboros from a nearby candy store—in those days the thought of marijuana had not even crossed his mind, but as he was a non-smoker, tobacco was digressive enough—and nearly choked to death on his first inhale. Then, walking back to the hospital, he had looked up at the night sky and seen a glow: the Northern Lights, come down from Canada for a guest appearance.
The baby girl was christened Aurora Borealis Smith.
II.
“—so Brian said he thought that was a pretty sick thing, having magazines like that for sale in a family store where kids can walk right up and look at them, and Mr. Garfield said maybe that was true, but it wasn’t Brian’s store, and Brian could take his business elsewhere if he didn’t like it. Then Brian asked him what he’d do if a lot of people started taking their business elsewhere. That’s when it really started heating up Mr. Garfield started talking about the First Amendment, and Brian whipped out his Bible, and they were
arguing for the next hour or so—”
She was tall, pale, with blond hair that hung almost to her shoulders. Her lips were thin and pleasant, her cheeks well formed, her eyes bright blue like the noon reflection on a lake, or a cornflower in the lapel of a Duchess. Everything was nearly just right, as if she needed only one more ingredient to take her from pretty to beautiful.
Walter Smith watched Aurora as she made breakfast, not really hearing her words. Mrs. Smith was still in bed, suffering though her annual Cornell sick-in. At the beginning of Aurora’s freshman year they had all driven out to Ithaca together, and their first sight driving into North Campus had been that of two women, standing on the East Avenue bridge above Fall Creek and exchanging an open-mouth kiss in broad daylight. Furthermore—as if God were trying to emphasize some point—they were an interracial couple, in addition to being homosexual. Walter had conceived great hopes for Cornell’s radicalizing potential as a result of this, but his wife Prudence had nearly fainted. Now she grew violently ill every year as the beginning of the fall term approached, and had refused to set foot on the campus again until Aurora’s graduation day.
“—afterwards we walked around and talked for a while. I wasn’t really feeling too good about what had happened. Brian was right, of course, but scaring an old man like Mr. Garfield . . . well, you’ve got to think about him, too, not just about some kids who might pick up a Penthouse. I mean, somebody must buy them for him to have them in the first place, and maybe he thinks he needs the business—”
Walt was still playing touch-and-go with reality. He’d overdone it on the stump, smoking two joints and getting a good start on a third, not realizing until too late how hard it was going to hit him. He felt numb all over, his thoughts heavy-limbed; the most annoying property of a marijuana high was that it became impossible to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and even that one thing had a way of slipping out from under you.