by Reyna Favis
I stopped walking and glared at him. “I’ve always been kind to children. What in the hell are you talking about? I wouldn’t be in SAR if I didn’t care about other people.”
“Who taught you? I can only conclude that there is either something lacking in your training or something lacking in your morality and ethics. So, which is it?”
“Taught me? I learned from my team and I read a lot of SAR manuals. Is that what you’re talking about? And by the way, I don’t appreciate you denigrating the work my team put into me. I do okay.” I stopped walking, warming to the fight and jabbing my finger into his chest. “As for my morality and ethics, at least I don’t have a dangerous dog that could go after someone at any time.”
Cam cocked an eyebrow at me. “Has she ever growled at you? Bared her teeth?” As I shook my head no, he continued. “Then what has she done to you to make you feel so unsafe?”
“She--- she looked at me.” I was stuttering and instantly realized how lame that sounded. “What I mean is… I don’t know what I mean. I can’t explain it, but there’s something really wrong with that dog.”
“More likely, something wrong with you. I think she looked at you and found you wanting. You were judged unfit.”
At that, my mouth opened and closed uselessly as I struggled to find a way to defend myself. I finally just asked the obvious question. “Why am I unfit?”
“You were very unkind to that other boy. I was shocked by your behavior. I think if Zackie were going to bite you, it would have happened then. So, back to the paradox. Why did you behave so distastefully to the first boy, yet act the very picture of a saint with the second?”
“What first boy? That thing in the woods? Is that what you’re talking about?” I stopped walking and threw my hands up in disgust and frustration. Turning his head, Cam pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, trying to maintain calm. Eventually, he took a deep breath and looked back at me.
“I really hate that you refer to them as things. He is not a thing, he was a living boy once.” Cam looked steadily into my eyes, gauging my comprehension as he went on. “He was frightened and alone….” As I stared back at him with incredulity, Cam dropped his eyes and sighed. Finally, looking up again and he met my eyes. “You were never taught, were you?” He nodded his head as if he finally understood. “Look, I’m starving. After the debrief for the search, we should get something to eat and talk a bit. Things cannot go on as they have.”
CHAPTER 3
Cam fed Zackie in the parking lot of the fast food restaurant and then left her to doze in the car while we ate. The restaurant was largely empty at this hour, most customers preferring to satisfy late night cravings using the drive through. We chose a booth at the back and while my stomach was nervous, I was still able to easily devour my food. I am not a picky eater and because of one thing or another in my life interfering with regular meals or draining my energy, I am almost always starving. These conditions in combination create the potential for awkward moments during meals, since lessons in the normal social graces were never a high priority during my childhood. I prefer to eat alone rather than risk displaying what must be appalling table manners. As I caught myself in the mirrors surrounding the booth, I saw a pale young woman with deeply shadowed eyes and dark russet hair messily pulled into what remained of a braid. My cheeks were stuffed with food like a hamster. I looked away and tried to swallow. In deference to what I thought might be British sensibilities, I refrained from speaking with my mouth full, leaving Cam an opening to start the conversation.
“Right then.” He concentrated on wiping the grease from his hands with a napkin, avoiding looking at my distended face. “I was taught by my maternal grandmother and she was taught by hers. This has been the way of it in my family for every generation where I have been able to trace back. I was the first male in three hundred years to be provided this education.” There was no trace of either pride or shame in this statement. He was merely presenting it as fact. “Was there no one in your family who was willing to teach you?” He looked steadily at my eyes as he asked this.
I was loath to reveal anything about myself, but this felt like a transaction and the only way that I was going to get any information was to provide it. After some hesitation, I responded. “I was adopted.” At this, he began nodding again, as if he could possibly understand my situation.
He pointed to his right cheek. “You have a little ketchup.” As I scrubbed my face with the napkin, he sat forward and continued. “Do you know anything about your biological parents?”
“Nothing. All I know is that I was adopted as an infant.”
“And how did your adoptive family take to your abilities?”
“They sent me to psychiatrists.” I shrugged and feigned indifference. “Made me take drugs.”
“Risperdal?”
I nodded numbly and slipped in my first lie. “They did everything just short of actually having me committed.”
“If they believed you were insane, why didn’t they commit you?”
“They were going to. I left before they could do it.” By omitting the word ‘again’ from my answer, I committed my second lie.
“Ahhh…” Sitting back, he continued the inquisition. “And how have you avoided the same fate now that you are a free range human?”
I shrugged again and tried to assume a poker face. “I lie. A lot.”
“And are you so certain of your own sanity?”
We stared at each other for a moment and then I finally broke. “Not always. But today’s events seem to support my view of reality. You saw it too, after all. More importantly, Zackie saw it.”
“Again, not an it.” He raised his eyebrows and nodded to me to make sure I got it. “In my book, harboring doubts about one’s sanity are points in your favor. But, while Zackie and I did see him, this proves nothing. Did you know there was a case of a shared psychotic disorder involving a dog? The dog’s owner was an elderly woman with psychosis. She most definitely saw things that weren’t there and her dog displayed behavioral responses conditioned by her delusional beliefs.”
I quirked an eyebrow at Cam. “Shared psychotic disorder involves closely related individuals, like a parent and child, husband and wife, siblings… It’s also extremely rare. Since you’re a canine handler team, it’s possible that you and Zackie might be sharing a delusion.” I put the eyebrow down and leaned forward. “But we’ve never met before and I know for a fact that we both saw something that looked like a boy. I’ll bet if we each independently wrote down a description of what we saw, they’d be identical.” I sat back and folded my arms across my chest. “I’ll also bet that people like us spend a lot of time trying to self-diagnose by reading books on psychiatry.”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile and he spoke softly. “You understand that I need to be careful here. By agreeing with you about what we saw and not trying to convince you to return to your family and take your meds, I could be doing you harm. There are far more people in this world who see things and need the meds than there are people like you and me.”
Sighing, I pushed the hair out of my eyes and looked askance. “How can you be sure that we don’t both need the meds?”
Cam responded with a grin. “To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a banana is just a banana… and sometimes a ghost is just a ghost.” That made me smile and for the first time in a long time, I began to relax a little.
I finally asked him again the question that was burning in my mind since the encounter in the woods. “How do you make them go away?”
“I don’t.” He jutted his chin towards the parking lot. “That’s all Zackie’s doing.”
“What, is she like a guard dog that protects you from these things?”
He sighed dramatically and slouched down tiredly in the seat. “I can see we have a lot of work ahead of us. You persist in thinking of them as objects. You need to think of them as people if you’re to do any good. And no, Zackie does not guard me fro
m them.” Cam was back to studying me now. Tilting his head, he said, “You’ve had some experience with her now. What do you really think Zackie is?”
“She’s not a dog.” I sat quietly for a moment and examined what my senses told me. “Other than being able to say what she’s not, I can’t say what she is. Really, all I can say for sure is that she scares the crap out of me.”
“You’ve had a bad start with her, but I think we can remedy that. She’s nothing if not patient. You made the mistake of doing harm to one of her charges and this is something you must never, never do again. I can’t protect you from her if you decide to be foolish.” He gave me a penetrating look to see if his words had any impact. I felt my brow wrinkle with worry and I swallowed reflexively. I did not want to find out what would happen if I did something ‘foolish.’ Seeing that I was taking his warning seriously, he nodded and asked, “Do you know what a psychopomp is?”
“I – I’ve never heard the term before.” I was stuttering again, unsure of myself and almost hoping that he wouldn’t tell me.
“Zackie is a psychopomp.” Folding his forearms on the table, he leaned forward to explain. “She conveys the dead to the afterlife. Every culture has sacred stories that speak about these beings. Most relate to animals. In religious texts from around the world, these guides have been described as everything from dolphins, to birds, bees and foxes. The stories from the Aztecs and the Greeks have dogs who serve as the escort. Think Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades, with a singular appetite for living flesh, only allowing the spirits of the dead to freely enter the underworld.” I swallowed and nodded for him to go on. “Sometimes, there are human representations, like the Norse Valkyries or the Roman Charon, ferrying the dead across the river Styx. The Grim Reaper with his scythe is all over headstones from the Victorian era. These beings can take on any form they choose.”
I sat there in stunned silence. Even after all that I have gone through with the unseen world, I would not have believed him if I had not had firsthand experience with her disapproval.
He looked at me and gave me a second before he continued. “Do you understand the nature of your offense?”
“I interfered with what is rightfully hers.”
“More than that. She protects and shepherds these souls. She saw you take out your anger on one of her flock. What did that dead child do to elicit such a response from you?”
“It – he kept grabbing my hands and pulling on my clothing. I was afraid Steve, the guy I was training with, would notice. Things can go downhill fast if that happens. I’d have to move. It’s happened to me before.” Gritting my teeth to keep my emotions in check, I tried to explain. “The dead see me and they’re all over me. If I don’t push them away, if I don’t punch, kick and scream to get them off of me, I stop seeing my world. What they see and feel takes over and it’s always a horror show of their last minutes before dying.” I roughly yanked the bangs back and out my eyes and forced myself to keep my voice low. “If someone sees me when any of this is going on, the best thing that happens is that they want to medicate the hell out of me. My own family tried to put me away, for shit’s sake.” I took a deep breath to try to regain some calm. “Look, I don’t want to have to move again, and I can’t risk being sent back to the psychiatrists.”
Cam looked steadily at me until I was calm enough to listen. “This child died because he ran into the woods to escape a bear. He was panicked and he lost his way. After days of wandering, he could not find his way back and eventually succumbed to exposure. He died cold and frightened and crying for his mother. He kept grabbing your hands because he was trying to slip his hand into yours. He grabbed your clothing because it was like hanging on to his mother’s skirt. He wanted you to take him home.”
Cam paused to give me time to process what he was saying and then continued. “If you found a little boy lost in the mall and he tried to take your hand, would you push him to the ground and strike him? This is what Zackie saw.”
My gut churned and the meal threatened to come back up. I whispered my question, afraid of the answer. “Will she kill me for what I’ve done?” I felt deserving of death, but frightened nonetheless.
“No. If she wanted your life, you’d right now be a pile of cooling meat in the woods.”
He let me chew on that a bit and I thought back to other encounters, reinterpreting them in light of what I had just been told. I remembered the teenager in the subway, pushing me closer and closer to the edge of the platform as the train came rushing through. Was he trying to show me what happened to him? Did he need me to tell someone that he had been pushed, that it wasn’t suicide? I thought about the charred and blackened remains of a young girl that crawled towards me along the floor of my dorm room. I freaked out and my roommate immediately made the request to move to another room. I learned later that someone had died in a dorm fire on that campus. Did she want me to know that she tried to do all the right things to escape the blaze, staying low to avoid the smoke and desperately trying to make it to an exit? Did she just want someone to help her to finally make it out of the burning building?
My face crumpled with remorse and the tears were about to flow. Relaxing his posture, Cam stretched his long legs under the table and kicked me lightly in the shins to get my attention. He looked at me with a faint smile. “You haven’t asked the obvious question.”
“Huh?” I was startled out of my downward spiral and took a moment to focus on him.
Having my attention now, Cam posed the question. “Is Zackie her real name? Seems a bit informal, don’t you think?” I had to agree and nodded my head slightly. He began fiddling with a straw, occasionally glancing at me as he spoke. “It’s something of an inside joke between her and me. I had no idea what to call her when she first came into my life. I was traveling in the hills of North Carolina at the time and ran across a backwoods hunter. Most humans are too insensible to understand her power and, sure enough, he offered to buy her from me.” Slipping into an Appalachian twang, Cam continued. “Said she was a fine looking Plott hound and would be great to hunt bear with. He’d name her Zackie if I’d sell her to him. He promised me that he would never use Zackie as a coon hound. ‘Damned waste of the breed,’ he said.” In his normal voice, Cam finished the story. “From that day on, she was Zackie to me. I think this proves she has a sense of humor, since I still walk among the living.” He winked at me and smiled more openly.
Just then, a restaurant worker came to mop the floor near our feet. “Are you folks about done? We’d like to close up.” Stretching tired limbs and marshalling our trash, we left the restaurant and walked into the night.
I stopped Cam before we reached the parked cars. “What’s next?”
“What’s next, indeed?” Yawning and stretching, he drawled out the instructions for my future. “You will start your apprenticeship tomorrow.”
As we exchanged cell phone numbers and discussed where to meet, I glanced uneasily at Cam’s truck. “I should say something to her.” Nodding, he opened the tailgate. Zackie lounged comfortably on a thick blanket and did not deign to rise as I approached her. Blurting out what I had to say, I was unable to meet her eyes. “I’m sorry.” I quickly turned to go to my car.
# # #
At home, I peeled off my clothes and immediately hit the shower. As physically and emotionally drained as I felt, I still could not allow ticks to attach and exchange bodily fluids with me. Every week, it seemed that a new incurable tick-borne disease was being heralded by the evening news. I forced myself through the ritual of checking my scalp and all the cracks and crevices in my body for unwanted passengers. As much as I scrubbed, I didn’t feel cleansed. I finally admitted the futility of this and stepped out of the shower to towel off. Collapsing into bed, I closed my eyes and tried to let tomorrow worry about itself.
The more I tried to relax, the more Cam’s words started to come back to me. I turned on my side, took a deep breath and tried to clear my thoughts. No good. My monkey brai
n kept churning. Flipping to my other side, I berated myself, thinking that I can’t make this right. I worried about what it would take to learn Cam’s lessons. Could I trust him, or was he leading me into something really dangerous? Was I prepared to devote myself to the lessons? If I didn’t, would I even have a life worth living if things went on like this? No matter how committed he was to teaching me, it was entirely possible that I would never pass muster.
I had a long history of not passing muster. A colicky baby from the start, I was a thorn in the side of my adoptive parents from the get-go. They lost a lot of sleep as I shrieked for hours at a time. I tend to think that the dead were coming to me even then, although I do not have clear memories of this time. As an older child, I lacked the good sense to keep my mouth shut. At first, my parents chalked it up to a vivid imagination, but they were disturbed by the graphic images of death and injury I described. I was taken to many, many child psychiatrists to try to straighten me out. Diagnoses of psychosis resulted and when you hear that kind of thing from many different experts, you tend to believe them.
My parents thought they could keep everything under control and deal with the visions and voices in my head through logical, calm discussion paired with frequent doses of antipsychotics. We started with a daily regimen of 300 milligrams of Clozaril, 100 milligrams of Thorazine, 900 milligrams of Lithium and two antihistamine pills and then moved on to ever increasing doses of Risperdal, Olanzapine and Haloperidol. I spent my days in a drug-induced stupor, listening to my parents parrot the phrases provided by the psychiatrists. ‘I want you to know that I’m here for you. How can I help you?’ and my all time favorite, ‘Tell me what I can do to support you.’
We hung on like that for a while until the bruises appeared. This was followed in short order by bites and scratches, broken bones, deep puncture wounds and lacerations and that required stitches. While my parents and the doctors panicked that I was inflicting harm on myself, the truth was that the antipsychotics made me vulnerable to attacks from the dead. I was no longer able to use even my child’s abilities to defend myself in a small measure. To everyone concerned, I was a psychotic child with bizarre and morbid auditory and visual hallucinations that I could no longer master. They were out of options. They had me committed to a children’s psychiatric hospital, immobilized in five point restraints and force-fed meds every few hours. I was completely incapacitated and defenseless.