by Stephen King
“Huh?”
She pressed her face against his neck. “It seems to make him feel just fine. That’s what the song says, anyway. Can you make me feel fine, Stu?”
Smiling, he picked her up. “Well,” he said, “I guess I could try.”
At quarter past two the next afternoon, Glen Bateman burst straight into the apartment without knocking. Fran was at Lucy Swann’s house, where the two women were trying to get a sourdough sponge started. Stu was reading a Max Brand western. He looked up and saw Glen, his face pale and shocked, his eyes wide, and tossed the book on the floor.
“What’s wrong?” He asked Glen sharply. “Is it . . . did someone find her?”
“No,” Glen said. He sat down abruptly as if his legs had just given out. “It’s not bad news, it’s good news. But it’s very strange.”
“What? What is?”
“It’s Kojak. I took a nap after lunch and when I got up, Kojak was sleeping on the porch. He’s beat to shit, Stu, he looks like he’s been through a Mixmaster with a set of blunt blades, but it’s him.”
“You mean the dog? That Kojak?”
“That’s who I mean.”
“Are you sure?”
“Same dog-tag that says Woodsville, N.H. Same red collar. Same dog. He’s really scrawny, and he’s been fighting. Dick Ellis—Dick was overjoyed to have an animal to work on for a change—he says he’s lost one eye for good. Bad scratches on his sides and belly, some of them infected, but Dick took care of them. Gave him a sedative and taped up his belly. Dick said it looked like he’d tangled with a wolf, maybe more than one. No rabies, anyhow. He’s clean.” Glen shook his head, and two tears spilled down his cheeks. “That damn dog came back to me. I wish to Christ I hadn’t left him behind to come on his own, Stu. That makes me feel so friggin bad.”
“It couldn’t have been done, Glen. Not with the motorcycles.” “Yes, but ... he followed me, Stu. That’s the kind of thing you read about in Star Weekly . . . Faithful Dog Follows Master Two Thousand Miles. How could he do a thing like that? How?”
“Maybe the same way we did. Dogs dream, too. Didn’t you ever see one lying fast asleep on the kitchen floor, chasing rabbits?”
Glen shook his head in a dazed way. “You’re saying he dreamed—”
“I’m not sayin anything funnier than what you were talking last night,” Stu reproached him.
Glen grinned and nodded. “Oh, I can talk that stuff for hours on end. I’m one of the great all-time bullshitters. It’s when something actually happens ”
“Awake at the lectern and asleep at the switch.”
“Fuck you, east Texas. Want to come over and see my dog?”
“You bet.”
Glen’s house was on Spruce Street, about two blocks from the Boulderado Hotel. The climbing ivy on the porch trellis was mostly dead, as were all the lawns and most of the flowers in Boulder— without daily watering from the city mains, the arid climate had triumphed.
Kojak was lying on the porch, his tattered snout laid peacefully on his forepaws. The dog was rack-thin and pitifully chewed, but Stu recognized him, even on short acquaintance. He squatted and began to stroke Kojak’s head. Kojak woke up and looked happily at Stu. In the way that dogs have, he seemed to grin.
“Say, that’s a good dog,” Stu said, feeling a lump in his throat. He thought of all the dogs he’d had since the pup his dad had given him when he was four. A dog was a good thing to have, and, so far as he knew, Kojak was the only dog in Boulder. He glanced up at Glen and glanced down quickly. He guessed even old bald sociologists didn’t like to get caught leaking around the eyes.
“Good dog,” he repeated, and Kojak thumped his tail against the porch boards, presumably agreeing that he was, indeed, a good dog.
“Going inside for a minute,” Glen said thickly. “Got to use the bathroom.”
“Yeah,” Stu said, not looking up. “Hey, good boy, say, ole Kojak, wasn’t you a good boy? Ain’t you a one?”
Kojak’s tail thumped agreeably.
“Can you roll over? Play dead, boy. Roll over.”
Kojak obediently rolled over on his back, rear legs splayed out, front paws in the air. Stu’s face grew concerned as he ran his hand gently over the stiff white concertina of bandage Dick Ellis had put on. Further up, he could see red and puffy-looking scratches that undoubtedly deepened to gores under the bandages. Something had been at him, all right. Wolfpack maybe, but Stu doubted if Kojak could have gotten away from a pack. Whatever, he had been lucky not to be disemboweled.
The screen banged as Glen came back out on the porch.
“Whatever it was got at him didn’t miss his vitals by much,” Stu said. He patted Kojak on the rump and Kojak rolled back onto his belly. “How is it almost all the dogs are gone and there’s still enough wolves or coyotes in one place to set on a good dog like this?”
“I guess we’ll never know,” Glen said. “Any more than we’ll know why the goddamned plague took the horses but not the cows and most of the people but not us. I’m not even going to think about it. I’m just going to lay in a big supply of Gainesburgers and keep him fed.”
“Yeah.” Stu looked at Kojak, whose eyes had slipped closed. “He’s tore up, but his doings are still intact—I saw that when he rolled over. We could do worse than to keep our eye out for a bitch, you know it?”
“Yes, that’s so,” Glen said thoughtfully. “Want a warm gin and tonic, east Texas?”
“Hell no. I may never have gone any further than one year of vocational-technical school, but I’m no fucking barbarian. Got a beer?”
“Oh, I think I can scare up a can of Coors. Warm, though.”
“Sold.” He started to follow Glen into the house, then paused to look back at the sleeping dog. “You sleep good, ole boy,” he told the dog. “Good to have you here.”
He and Glen went inside.
But Kojak wasn’t asleep.
He lay somewhere between, where most living things spend a good deal of time when they are hurt badly, but not badly enough to be in the mortal shadow. A deep itch lay in his belly like heat, the itch of healing. Glen would have to spend a good many hours trying to distract him from that itch so he wouldn’t scratch off the bandages, reopen the wounds, and reinfect them. But that was later. Just now Kojak (who still thought of himself occasionally as Big Steve, which had been his original name) was content to drift in the place in between. The wolves had come for him in Nebraska, while he was still sniffing dejectedly around Mother Abagail’s house. The scent of THE MAN—the feel of THE MAN—led to this place and then stopped. Where had he gone? Kojak didn’t know. And then the wolves, four of them, had come out of the corn like ragged spirits of the dead. Their eyes blazed at Kojak, and their lips wrinkled back from their teeth to let out the low, ripping growls of their intent. Kojak had retreated before them, growling himself, the hair along his back stiffed up into hackles, his tail drooping low and bushed out over his tensed-up balls, his paws stiff-out and digging at the dirt of Mother Abagail’s dooryard. To the left hung the tire-swing, casting its depthless round shadow. The lead wolf had attacked just as Kojak’s hindquarters slipped into the shadow cast by the porch. It came in low, going for the belly, and the others followed. Kojak sprang up and over the leader’s snapping muzzle, giving the wolf his underbelly, and as the wolf began to bite and scratch, Kojak fastened his own teeth on the wolf’s throat, his teeth sinking deep, letting blood, and the wolf howled and tried to struggle away, its courage suddenly gone. As it pulled away, Kojak’s jaws closed with lightning speed on the wolf’s tender muzzle, and the wolf uttered a howling, abject scream as its nose was laid open to the bores and pulled to tatters and strings. It fled yipping with agony, shaking its head crazily from side to side, spraying droplets of blood to the left and right, and in the crude telepathy that all animals of like kind share, Kojak could read its over-and-over thought clearly enough: wasps in me o the wasps the wasps in my head wasps are up my head o; and then the others hit him,
one from the left and another from the right like huge blunt bullets, the last of the trio submarining in low, grinning, snapping, ready to pull out his intestines. Kojak had broken to the right, baying hoarsely, wanting to deal with that one first so he could get under the porch. If he could get under the porch he could stand them off maybe forever. Lying on the porch now, he relived the battle in a kind of slow motion: the growls and howls, the strikes and withdrawals, the smell of blood that had gotten into his brain and had gradually turned him into a kind of fighting machine, unaware of his own wounds until later. He sent the wolf that had been on his right the way of the first, one of its eyes dead and a huge, gouting, and probably mortal wound in the side of its throat. But the wolf had done its own damage in return; most of it was superficial, but two of the gores were extremely deep, wounds that would heal to hard and twisting scar-tissue like a scrawling lower-case t. Even when he was an old, old dog (and Kojak lived another sixteen years, long after Glen Bateman died), those scars would pain and throb on wet days. He had fought free, had scrambled under the porch, and when one of the two remaining wolves, overcome with bloodlust, tried to wriggle in after him, Kojak sprang on it, pinned it, and ripped its throat out. The other retreated almost to the edge of the corn, whining uneasily. If Kojak had come out to do battle, it would have fled with its tail between its legs. But Kojak didn’t come out, not then. He was done in. He could only lie on his side, panting rapidly and weakly, licking his wounds and growling deep in his chest whenever he saw the shadow of the remaining wolf draw near. Then it was dark, and a misty halfmoon rode the sky over Nebraska. And each time the last wolf heard Kojak alive and presumably still ready to fight, it shied away, whining. Sometime after midnight it had left, leaving Kojak alone to see if he would live or die. In the early morning hours he had felt the presence of some other animal, something that terrified him into a series of soft whimpers. It was a thing in the corn, a thing walking in the corn, hunting for him, perhaps. Kojak lay shivering, waiting to see if this thing would find him, this horrible thing that felt like a Man and a Wolf and an Eye, some dark thing like an ancient crocodile in the corn. Some unknown time later, after the moon went down, Kojak felt that it was gone. He fell asleep. He had laid up under the porch for three days, coming out only when hunger and thirst drove him out. There was always a puddle of water gathered below the lip of the handpump in the yard, and in the house there were all sorts of rich scraps, many of them from the meal Mother Abagail had cooked for Nick’s party. When Kojak felt he could go on, he knew where to go. It was not a scent that told him; it was a sense of heat that had come out of his own deep and mortal time, a glowing pocket of heat to the west of him. And so he came, limping most of the last five hundred miles on three legs, the pain always gnawing at his belly. From time to time he was able to smell THE MAN, and thus knew he was on the right track. And at last he was here. THE MAN was here. There were no wolves here. Food was here. There was no sense of that dark Thing ... the Man with the stink of a Wolf and the feel of an Eye that could see you over long miles if it happened to turn your way. For now, things were fine. And so thinking (so far as dogs can think, in their careful relating to a world seen almost wholly through feelings), Kojak drifted down deeper, now into real sleep, now into a dream, a good dream of chasing rabbits through the clover and timothy grass that was belly-high and wet with soothing dew. His name was Big Steve. This was the north forty. And oh the rabbits are everywhere this gray and endless morning—
As he dreamed, his paws twitched.
Chapter 43
Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting
August 17, 1980
This meeting was held at the home of Larry Underwood on South Forty-second Street in the Table Mesa area. All members of the committee were present. . .
The first item of business concerned having the ad hoc committee elected as the permanent Boulder Committee. Fran Goldsmith was recognized.
Fran: “Both Stu and I agreed that the best, easiest way for us all to get elected would be if Mother Abagail endorsed the whole slate. It would save us the problem of having twenty people nominated by their friends and possibly upsetting the applecart. But now we’ll have to do it another way. I’m not going to suggest anything that isn’t perfectly democratic, and you all know the plan anyway, but I just wanted to re-emphasize that each of us has to make sure we have someone who will nominate and second us. We can’t do it for each other, obviously—that would look too much like the Mafia. And if you can’t find one person to nominate you and another to second you, you might as well give up anyway.”
Glen Bateman said that he had intended to address the committee on the subject of our scouts or spies or whatever you want to call them, but that he wanted to make a motion instead that we meet to discuss that on the nineteenth.
Stu asked him why and Glen said: “Because we might not all be here on the nineteenth.” That was good for a moment of silence, and then the committee voted, 7-0, to meet on the nineteenth—as a Permanent Committee—to discuss the question of the scouts ... or spies ... or whatever.
Stu was recognized to put a third item of business before the committee, concerning Mother Abagail.
Stu: “As you know, she’s gone off for reasons of her own. Her note says she’ll ‘be gone for a while,’ which is pretty vague, and that she’ll be back ‘if it’s God’s will.’ Now, that’s not very encouraging. We’ve had a search-party out for three days now and we haven’t found a thing. We don’t want to just drag her back, not if she doesn’t want to go, but if she’s lying up somewhere with a busted leg or if she’s unconscious, that’s a lot different. Now part of the problem is that there just aren’t enough of us to search all the wildlands around here. But another part of it is the same thing that’s slowing us down at the power station. There’s just no organization. So what I’m looking for is permission to put this search-party on the agenda of the big meeting tomorrow night, same as the power station and the burial crew. And I’d like to see Harold Lauder in charge, because it was his idea in the first place.”
Glen said that he didn’t think any search-party was going to find very good news after a week or so. After all, the lady in question is 108 years old. The committee as a whole agreed with that, and then voted in favor of the motion, 7-0, as Stu had put it. To make this record as honest as possible, I should add there were several expressions of doubt over putting Harold in charge . . . but as Stu pointed out, it had been his idea to begin with, and to not give him command of the search-party would be a direct slap in the face.
Nick: “I withdraw my objection to Harold, but not my basic reservations. I just don’t like him very much.”
Ralph Brentner asked if either Stu or Glen would write out Stu’s motion about the search-party so he could add it to the agenda, which he plans to print at the high school tonight. Stu said he’d be glad to.
Larry Underwood then moved that we adjourn, Ralph seconded it, and it was voted, 7-0.
Frances Goldsmith, Secretary
The turnout for the meeting the next evening was almost total, and for the first time Larry Underwood, who had only been in the Zone a week, got an idea of just how large the community was becoming. It was one thing to see people coming and going on the streets, usually alone or by twos, and quite another thing to see them all gathered together in one place—the Chautauqua Auditorium. The place was full, every seat taken and more people sitting in the aisles and standing at the back of the hall. They were a curiously subdued crowd, murmuring but not babbling. For the first time since he had gotten to Boulder it had rained all day long, a soft drizzle that seemed to hang suspended in the air, fogging you rather than wetting you, and even with the assemblage of close to six hundred, you could hear the quiet sound of rain on the roof. The loudest sound inside was the constant riffle of paper as people looked at the mimeographed agendas that had been piled up on two card tables just inside the double doors.
Larry found that his nervous hands ha
d been busy folding this agenda, which he knew nearly word for word, into a paper airplane. Being on the ad hoc committee was sort of fun, like a game— children playing at the parliamentary process in someone’s living room, sitting around and drinking Cokes, having a piece of the cake Frannie had made, talking things over. Even the part about sending spies over the mountains and right into the dark man’s lap had seemed like a game, partly because it was a thing he couldn’t imagine doing himself. You’d have to have lost most of your marbles to face such a living nightmare. But in their closed sessions, with the room comfortably lit with Coleman gas lanterns, it had seemed okay. And if the Judge or Dayna Jurgens or Tom Cullen got caught, it seemed —in those closed sessions, at least—a thing no more important than losing a rook or a queen in a chess game.
But now, sitting halfway down the hall with Lucy on one side and Leo on the other (he had not seen Nadine all day, and Leo didn’t seem to know where she was, either; “Out” had been his disinterested response), the truth of it came home, and in his guts it felt as if a battering ram was in use. It was no game. There were 580 people here and most of them didn’t have any idea that Larry Underwood wasn’t no nice guy, or that the first person Larry Underwood had attempted to take care of after the epidemic had died of a drug overdose.
His hands were damp and chilly. They were trying to fold the agenda into a paper plane again and he stopped them. Lucy took one of them, squeezed it, and smiled at him. He was only able to respond with something that felt like a grimace, and in his heart he heard his mother’s voice: There’s something left out of you, Larry.
He began to feel panicky. Was there a way out of this, or had things already gone too far? He didn’t want this millstone. He had already made a motion in closed session that could send Judge Farris to his death. If he was voted out and someone else was voted into his seat, they’d have to take another vote on sending the Judge, wouldn’t they? Sure they would. And they’d vote to send someone else. When Laurie Constable nominates me, I’ll just stand up and say I decline. Sure, nobody can force me, can they? Not if I decide I want out. And who the fuck needs this kind of hassle?