Timbuktu
Page 14
Such was the marital turmoil that Mr. Bones had stumbled into. Sooner or later, something was bound to give, but until Polly woke up to herself and finally pushed that piker out the door, the atmosphere would continue to be charged with intrigues and buried animosities, the plots and counterplots of dying love. Mr. Bones did his best to adjust to all this. So much was still new to him, however, so many things still had to be studied and made sense of, that the ups and downs of Polly’s marriage occupied no more than a small fraction of his energies. The Joneses had introduced him to a different world from the one he had known with Willy, and not a day went by when he didn’t experience some sudden revelation or feel some pang about what had been missing from his former life. It wasn’t just the daily rides in the van, and it wasn’t just the regular meals or the absence of ticks and fleas from his coat. It was the barbecues on the back patio, the porterhouse steak bones he was given to gnaw on, the weekend outings to Wanacheebee Pond and the swims with Alice in the cool water, the overall feeling of splendor and well-being that had engulfed him. He had landed in the America of two-car garages, home-improvement loans, and neo-Renaissance shopping malls, and the fact was that he had no objections. Willy had always attacked these things, railing against them in that lopsided, comic way of his, but Willy had been on the outside looking in, and he had refused to give any of it a chance. Now that Mr. Bones was on the inside, he wondered where his old master had gone wrong and why he had worked so hard to spurn the trappings of the good life. It might not have been perfect in this place, but it had a lot to recommend it, and once you got used to the mechanics of the system, it no longer seemed so important that you were tethered to a wire all day. By the time you had been there for two and a half months, you even stopped caring that your name was Sparky.
5
THE CONCEPT OF THE FAMILY VACATION was entirely unknown to him. Back in Brooklyn as a pup, he had sometimes heard Mrs. Gurevitch use the word vacation, but never in any way that could be connected to the word family. Suddenly breaking off from her housework, Mom-san would plop down on the sofa, throw her feet up on the coffee table, and let out a long, passionate sigh. “That’s it,” she would say. “I’m on vacation.” According to this usage, the word seemed to be a synonym for sofa, or perhaps it was simply a more elegant way to describe the act of sitting down. In either case, it had nothing to do with families—and nothing to do with the idea of travel. Travel was what he did with Willy, and in all the years they had spent on the road together, he couldn’t remember a single instance in which the word vacation had crossed his master’s lips. It might have been different if Willy had been gainfully employed somewhere, but except for a few odd jobs picked up along the way (sweeping floors in a Chicago bar, messenger-service trainee for an outfit in Philadelphia), he had always been his own boss. Time had flowed without interruption for them, and with no need to break down the calendar into work periods and rest periods, no particular call to observe national holidays, anniversaries, or religious feast days, they had lived in a world apart, free of the clock-watching and hour-counting that took up so much of everyone else’s time. The only day of the year that had stood out from the others was Christmas, but Christmas wasn’t a vacation, it was a workday. Come December twenty-fifth, no matter how exhausted or hungover Willy might have been, he had always climbed straight into his Santa Claus costume and spent the day walking around the streets, spreading hope and good cheer. It was his way of honoring his spiritual father, he said, of remembering the vows of purity and self-sacrifice he had taken. Mr. Bones had always found his master’s talk about peace and brotherhood a bit too sappy for his taste, but painful as it sometimes was to see their dinner money wind up in the hands of a person who was better off than they were, he knew there was a method to Willy’s madness. Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise—and these were Willy’s exact words—why bother to go on living?
Alice was the one who first spoke the words family vacation to him. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and she had just come out to the yard with a clear plastic bag filled with turkey leftovers and stuffing—more miracles from Polly’s white kitchen. Before Alice emptied the food into his bowl, she squatted down beside him and said, “It’s all set, Sparky. We’re going on a family vacation. Next month when I’m off from school, Daddy’s taking us to Disney World.” She sounded so happy and excited about it that Mr. Bones assumed it was good news, and since it never occurred to him that he wasn’t included in Alice’s we and us, he found himself more interested in the food he was about to eat than in the possible consequences of this new term. It took him about thirty seconds to polish off the turkey, and then, after lapping up half a bowl of water, he stretched out on the grass and listened to Alice as she filled him in on the details. Tiger was going to love seeing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, she said, and even though she’d outgrown those childish things herself, she could remember how much she’d loved them when she was small, too. Mr. Bones knew who this Mickey Mouse character was, and based on the things he’d been told, he wasn’t too impressed. Who ever heard of a mouse with a pet dog? It was laughable, really, an insult to good taste and common sense, a perversion of the natural order of things. Any half-wit could have told you that it should be the other way around. Big creatures lorded it over small creatures, and if there was one thing he was certain about in this world, it was that dogs were bigger than mice. How puzzling it was for him, then, as he lay on the grass that Saturday afternoon in late November, to hear Alice talk so enthusiastically about their impending trip. He simply couldn’t understand why people would want to travel hundreds of miles just to see a pretend mouse. There might not have been many advantages to living with Willy, but no one could accuse Mr. Bones of not having traveled. He had been everywhere, and in his time he had seen just about everything. It wasn’t for him to say, of course, but if the Joneses were looking for an interesting place to visit, all they had to do was ask, and he happily would have led them to any one of a dozen lovely spots.
Nothing more was said about the subject for the remainder of the weekend. On Monday morning, however, when the dog overheard Polly talking to her sister on the phone, he realized how badly he had misunderstood what Alice had told him. It wasn’t just a matter of driving down to see the mouse and then turning around and heading home, it was two weeks of discombobulation and movement. It was airplanes and hotels, rental cars and snorkeling equipment, restaurant bookings and family discount rates. Not only was there Florida, there was North Carolina as well, and as Mr. Bones listened to Polly discuss the arrangements for spending Christmas in Durham with Peg, it finally dawned on him that wherever this family vacation was going to take them, he wasn’t going along. “We need a break,” Polly was saying, “and maybe this will do us some good. Who the hell knows, Peg, but I’m willing to give it a shot. My period’s ten days late, and if that means what I think it does, then I have some pretty fast thinking to do.” Then, after a short silence: “No. I haven’t told him yet. But this trip was his idea, and I’m trying to read that as a good sign.” Another silence followed, and then, at last, he heard the words that told him what family vacation really meant: “We’ll put him in a kennel. There’s supposed to be a nice one about ten miles from here. Thanks for reminding me, Peg. I’d better get started on it right away. Those places can get awfully crowded around Christmastime.”
He stood there and waited for her to finish, watching her with one of those dreary, stoical looks that dogs have been giving to people for forty thousand years. “Don’t worry, Spark Plug,” she said, hanging up the phone. “It’s only two weeks. By the time you start to miss us, we’ll already be back.” Then, bending down to give him a hug, she added: “Anyway, I’m going to miss you a lot more than you miss me. You’ve gotten under my skin, old doggy, and I can’t live without you.”
All right, they were coming back. He was fairly confident
of that now, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have preferred to go with them. Not that he had any great longing to be cooped up in a Florida hotel room or to ride in the baggage compartments of airplanes, but it was the principle of the thing that bothered him. Willy had never left him behind. Not once, not under any circumstances, and he wasn’t used to this kind of handling. Perhaps he had been spoiled, but in his book there was more to canine happiness than just feeling wanted. You also had to feel necessary.
It was a setback, but at the same time he knew it wasn’t the end of the world. He had learned that now, and all things being equal, Mr. Bones probably would have recovered from his disappointment and served out his prison term with docile good grace. He had been through worse hardships than this one, after all, but three days after receiving the bad news, he felt the first of several painful twinges in his abdomen, and over the next two and a half weeks the pains spread into his haunches, his limbs, and even into his throat. Evil spirits were lurking inside him, and he knew that Burnside was the one who had put them there. The quack had been too busy looking at Polly’s legs to examine him properly, and he must have missed something, must have forgotten to run a test or look at his blood under the right microscope. The symptoms were still too vague to produce any outward manifestations (no vomiting, no diarrhea, no seizures as of yet), but as the days wore on, Mr. Bones felt less and less like himself, and instead of taking this family vacation business in his stride, he began to sulk and brood about it, to worry it into a thousand component parts, and what at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune.
It wasn’t that the kennel was such a bad place. Even he could see that, and when Alice and her father deposited him there on the afternoon of December seventeenth, Mr. Bones had to admit that Polly had done her homework. Dog Haven was no Sing Sing or Devil’s Island, no internment camp for abused and neglected animals. Situated on a twenty-acre property that had once been part of a large tobacco plantation, it was a four-star rural retreat, a canine hotel designed to accommodate the needs and whims of the most indulged and demanding pets. The sleeping cages lined the east and west walls of a cavernous red barn. There were sixty of them, with ample space provided for each of the boarders (more ample, in fact, than Mr. Bones’s doghouse at home), and not only were they cleaned every day, but each one came with a soft, freshly laundered quilt and a chewable rawhide toy—in the shape of a bone, a cat, or a mouse, depending on the owner’s preference. Just beyond the back door of the barn, there was an enclosed two-acre meadow that served as an exercise field. Special diets were available, and weekly baths were given at no extra charge.
But none of that mattered, at least not to Mr. Bones. These new surroundings failed to impress him, to arouse even the slightest show of interest, and even after he was introduced to the owner, the owner’s wife, and various members of the staff (all of them solid, pleasant pro-doggers), he still had no desire to stay. That didn’t prevent Dick and Alice from leaving, of course, and while Mr. Bones wanted to howl out his objections to the rotten thing they’d done to him, he certainly couldn’t find fault with Alice’s tearful and loving farewell. In his own terse way, even Dick seemed a little sorry about having to say good-bye. Then they climbed into the van and took off, and as Mr. Bones watched them chug down the dirt road and disappear behind the main house, he had his first inkling of the kind of trouble he was in. It wasn’t just a case of the blues, he realized, and it wasn’t just because he was scared. Something was seriously wrong with him, and whatever mayhem had been brewing in him lately was about to come to a full boil. His head hurt, and his belly was on fire, and a weakness had invaded his knees that suddenly made standing difficult. They gave him food, but the thought of food made him sick. They offered him a bone to chew on, but he turned his head away. Only water was acceptable, but when they pushed the water in front of him, he stopped drinking after two sips.
He was put in a cage between a wheezing ten-year-old bulldog and a luscious golden Lab. Ordinarily, a female of that caliber would have sent him into spasms of lustful sniffing, but that night he barely had the strength to acknowledge her presence before dropping onto his quilt and passing out. Within moments of losing consciousness, he was dreaming about Willy again, but this dream was nothing like the ones that had come before it, and instead of gentle encouragements and soothing rationalities, he was given a full taste of his master’s wrath. Perhaps it was the fever burning inside him, or perhaps something had happened to Willy in Timbuktu, but the man who came to Mr. Bones that night was not the Willy he had known in life and death for the past seven and three quarters years. This was a vengeful and sarcastic Willy, a devil Willy, a Willy bereft of all compassion and kindness, and poor Mr. Bones was so terrified of this person that he lost control of his bladder and peed on himself for the first time since he was a pup.
To confuse matters even more, the false Willy was identical in appearance to the true Willy, and when he turned up in the dream that night he was wearing the same tattered Santa Claus gear that the dog had seen him in for the past seven Christmases. Even worse, the dream wasn’t set in some familiar place from the past—like the one in the subway car, for instance—but in the present, in the very cage where Mr. Bones was spending the night. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again in the dream, there was Willy, sitting in the corner just two feet away from him, leaning his back against the bars. “I’m only going to say this once,” he began, “so listen up and keep your trap shut. You’ve turned yourself into a joke, a tired and disgusting joke, and I forbid you to let me into your thoughts anymore. Don’t forget that, mutt. Emblazon it upon the doorposts of your palace, and never use my name again—not in vain, not in love, not in any way at all. I’m dead, and I want to be left in peace. All this complaining, all this bitching about what’s happened to you—do you think I don’t hear it? I’m sick of listening to you, dog, and this is the last time you’ll ever see me in your dreams. Do you understand that? Let go of me, birdbrain. Give me some room. I have friends now, and I don’t need you anymore. You got it? Butt out of my business and stay out. I’m finished with you.”
By morning, the fever had shot up so high that he was seeing double. His stomach had been turned into a battleground of warring microbes, and every time he moved, stirred even an inch or two from where he was lying, another attack would begin. It felt as if depth charges were being detonated inside his bowels, as if poison gases were eating away at his inner organs. He had woken up several times during the night, retching uncontrollably until the pains had been appeased, but none of these lulls had lasted very long, and when day finally broke and light came pouring down through the rafters of the barn, he saw that he was surrounded by half a dozen puddles of vomit: little clumps of dried-out mucus, half-digested meat fragments, specks of congealed blood, yellowish broths that had no name.
A great racket was swirling around him by then, but Mr. Bones was too ill to take notice. The other dogs were up and about, barking in anticipation of the day ahead, but the best he could do was lie there in his torpor, contemplating the bollix his body had made of things. He knew that he was sick, but exactly how sick, and exactly where this sickness was taking him, he had no idea. A dog could die from a thing like this, he told himself, but a dog could also recover and be good as new in a couple of days. Given the choice, he would have preferred not to die. In spite of what had happened in the dream last night, he still wanted to live. Willy’s unprecedented cruelty had stunned him, had made him feel miserable and unspeakably alone, but that didn’t mean that Mr. Bones wasn’t ready to forgive his master for what he had done. You didn’t turn your back on a person for letting you down just once—not after a lifetime of friendship, you didn’t, and especially not if there were extenuating circumstances. Willy was dead, and who knew if dead people didn’t grow bitter and nasty after they had been dead for a while? Then again, maybe it hadn’t been Willy at all. The man in the dream could have be
en an impostor, a demon dressed in
Willy’s form who had been sent from Timbuktu to trick Mr. Bones and turn him against his master. But even if it had been Willy, and even if his remarks had been stated in an excessively hurtful and mean-spirited way, Mr. Bones was honest enough to admit that they contained a germ of truth. He had spent too much time feeling sorry for himself lately, had frittered away too many precious hours pouting over infinitesimal slights and injustices, and that kind of behavior was unseemly in a dog of his stature. There was much to be thankful for, and much life still to be lived. He knew that Willy had told him never to think about him again, but Mr. Bones couldn’t help it. He was in that churning, semi-delirious state that high fevers bring, and he could no more control the thoughts that flitted in and out of his head than he could stand up and unlock the door of his cage. If Willy happened to be in his thoughts now, there wasn’t much he could do about it. His master would just have to cover his ears and wait until the thought went away. But at least Mr. Bones wasn’t complaining anymore. At least he was trying to be good.
Less than a minute after thinking about the door of his cage, a young woman came and undid the latch. Her name was Beth, and she was wearing a puffy blue nylon parka. Chubby thighs, an inordinately round face, Little Lulu haircut. Mr. Bones remembered her from the day before. She was the one who had tried to feed him and give him water, the one who had patted him on the head and told him he would feel better in the morning. A nice girl, but not much of a diagnostician. The piles of vomit seemed to alarm her, and she crouched down and entered the cage to take a closer look. “Not such a good night, was it, Sparky?” she said. “I think maybe we should show you to Dad.” Dad was the man from yesterday, he remembered, the one who had given them the tour of the grounds. A burly guy with black bushy eyebrows and no hair on his head. His name was Pat—Pat Spaulding or Pat Sprowleen, he couldn’t recall which. There was a wife in the picture as well, and she had accompanied them on the first part of the walk. Yes, now it was coming back to him, the odd thing about the wife. Her name was Pat, too, and Mr. Bones remembered that Alice had found that funny, had even laughed a little when she heard the two names together, and Dick had pulled her aside and told her to remember her manners. Patrick and Patricia. Pat and Pat for short. It was all so confusing, so terribly inane and confusing.