Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  My family suffered. We moved many, many times, and for days on end I was away from whatever home we had newly made.

  My son and daughter were not particularly aware of the physical changes that I had undergone—at least not at first—but Katherine, my wife, had to confront them each time we were alone. Stoically, heroically, she accepted the passion that drove me to alter myself toward the machine, even as she admitted that she did not understand it. She never recoiled from me because of my strangeness, and I was grateful for that. I have always believed that human beings discover a major part of the meaning in their lives from, in Pound’s phrase, “the quality of the affections,” and Katherine could see through the mechanical artifice surrounding and buttressing Nicholas Parsons to the man himself. And I was grateful for that, too. Enormously grateful.

  Still, we all have doubts. “Why are you doing this?” Katherine asked me one night. “Why are you letting them change you?”

  “Tempus fugit. Time’s winged chariot. I’ve got to do everything I can before there’s none left. And I’m doing it for all of us—for you, for Peter, for Erin. It’ll payoff. I know it will.”

  “But what started all this? Before the aneurysm—”

  “Before the aneurysm, I’d begun to wake up at night with a strange new sense of power. I could go inside the heads of dogs and read what their lives were like. I could time-travel in their minds.”

  “You had insomnia, Nick. You couldn’t sleep.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t just that. I was learning about time by riding around inside the head of that Great Dane that came into my classroom. We went everywhere, every when. The aneurysm had given me the ability to do that—when it ruptured, my telepathic skill went, too.”

  Katherine smiled. “Do you regret that you can’t read dogs’ minds anymore?”

  “Yes. A little. But this compensates, what I’m doing now. If you can stand it a few more years, if you can tolerate the physical changes in me, it’ll pay off. I know it will.”

  And we talked for a long time that night, in a tiny bedroom in a tiny apartment in a big Texas city many miles from Van Luna, Kansas; or Cheyenne, Wyoming; or Colorado Springs; or Athens, Georgia.

  Tonight, nearly seventeen years after that thoughtful conversation, I am free-falling in orbit with my trace-mate Canicula, whom I sometimes call Threasie (or 3C, you see, short for Cybernetic Canine Construct). We have been up here a month now, in preparation for our flight to the star system Sirius eight months hence.

  Katherine has found this latest absence of mine particularly hard to bear. Peter is a troubled young man of twenty, and Erin is a restless teenager with many questions about her absent father. Further, Katherine knows that shortly the Black Retriever will fling me into the interstellar void with eight other trace-teams. Recent advances in laser-fusion technology, along with the implementation of the Livermore-Parsons Drive, will no doubt get us out to Sirius in no time flat (i.e., less than four years for those of you who remain Earthbound, a mere fraction of that for us aboard the Black Retriever), but Katherine does not find this news at all cheering.

  “Tempus fugit,” she told me somewhat mockingly during a recent laser transmission. “And unless I move to Argentina, God forbid, I won’t even be able to see the star you’re traveling toward.”

  In Earth orbit, however, both Canicula and I find that time drags. We are ready to be off to the small Spartan world that no doubt circles our starfall destination in Canis Major. My own minute studies of the “wobble” in Sirius’s proper motion have proved that such a planet exists; only once before has anyone else in the scientific community detected a dark companion with a mass less than that of Jupiter, but no one doubts that I know what I am doing.

  Hence this expedition.

  Hence this rigorous though wearying training period in Earth orbit. I do not exempt even myself, but dear God how time drags.

  Canicula is my own dark companion. He rescues me from doubt, ennui, and orbital funk. He used to be a Great Dane. Even now you can see that beneath his streamlined cybernetic exterior a magnificent animal breathes. Besides that, Canicula has wit.

  “Tempus fugit,” he says during an agonizingly slow period. He rolls his eyes and then permits his body to follow his eyes’ motion: an impudent, free-fall somersault.

  “Stop that nonsense, Threasie,” I command him with mock severity. “See to your duties.”

  “If you’ll remember,” he says, “one of my most important ones is, uh, hounding you.”

  I am forty-six. Canicula-Threasie is seven.

  And we’re both learning new tricks.

  ###

  I AM THIRTY-EIGHT: Somewhere, perhaps, Nicholas Parsons is a bona fide astronaut-in-training, but in this tributary of history—the one containing me now—I am nothing but a writer projecting himself into that grandiose wish-fulfillment role. I am an astronaut in the same dubious way that John Glenn or Neil Armstrong is a writer. For nearly eleven years, my vision has been on hold. What success I have achieved in this tributary I have fought for with the sometimes despairing tenacity of my talent and a good deal of help from my friends. Still, I cannot keep from wondering how I am to overcome the arrogance of someone for whom I am only a name, not a person, and how dangerous any visionary can be with a gag in the mouth to thwart any intelligible recitation of the dream.

  Where in my affliction is encouragement or comfort? Well, I can always talk to my dog. Nickie is dead, of course, and so is Pepper, and not too long ago a big yellow school bus struck down the kindly mongrel who succeeded them in our hearts. Now we have B.J., a furrow-browed beagle. To some extent he has taken up the slack. I talk to him while Katherine works and Peter and Erin attend their respective schools. B.J. understands very little of what I tell him—his expression always seems a mixture of dread and sheepishness—but he is a good listener for as long as I care to impose upon him; and maybe when his hind leg thumps in his sleep, he is dreaming not of rabbit hunts but of canine heroics aboard a vessel bound for Sirius. In my capacity as dreamer I can certainly pretend that he is doing so . . .

  ###

  A SUMMER’S READING, 1959: The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London. Bob, Son of Battle by Alfred Ollivant. Eric Knight’s Lassie Come Home. Silver Chief Dog of the North by someone whose name I cannot recall. Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders. Lad, a Dog and its various sequels by Albert Payson Terhune. And several others.

  All of these books are on the upper shelf of a closet in the home of my mother and stepfather in Wichita, Kansas. The books have been collecting dust there since 1964. Before that they had been in my own little grey bookcase in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  From the perspective of my thirty-eight or forty-sixth year, I suppose that it is too late to try to fetch them home for Peter and Erin. They are already too old for such stories. Or maybe not. I am unable to keep track of their ages because I am unable to keep track of mine.

  In any event, if Peter and Erin are less than fourteen, there is one book that I do not want either of them to have just yet. It is a collection of Stephen Crane’s short stories. The same summer that I was blithely reading London and Terhune, I read Crane’s story “A Small Brown Dog.” I simply did not know what I was doing. The title lured me irresistibly onward. The other books had contained ruthless men and incidents of meaningless cruelty, yes, but all had concluded well: either virtue or romanticism had ultimately triumphed, and I was made glad to have followed Buck, Lassie, and Lad through their doggy odysseys.

  The Crane story cut me up. I was not ready for it. I wept openly and could not sleep that night.

  And if my children are still small, dear God I do not want them even to see the title “A Small Brown Dog,” much less read the text that accompanies it.

  “All in good time,” I tell myself. “All in good time.”

  ###

  I AM TWELVE: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Coming home from school, I find my grown-and-married stepsister’s collie lying against the curbing in front of a neighb
or’s house. It is almost four in the afternoon, and hot. The neighbor woman comes down her porch when she sees me.

  “You’re the first one home, Nicholas. It happened only a little while ago. It was a cement truck. It didn’t even stop.”

  I look down the hill toward the grassless building sites where twenty or thirty new houses are going up. Piles of lumber, sheetrock, and tar paper clutter the cracked, sunbaked yards. But no cement trucks. I do not see a single cement truck.

  “I didn’t know what to do, Nicholas. I didn’t want to leave him—”

  We have been in Tulsa a year. We brought the collie with us from Van Luna, Kansas. Rhonda, whose dog he originally was, lives in Wichita now with her new husband.

  I look down at the dead collie, remembering the time when Rhonda and I drove to a farm outside Van Luna to pick him out of a litter of six.

  “His name will be Marc,” Rhonda said, holding him up. “With a c instead of a k. That’s classier.” Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. At the time, though, we both sincerely believed that Marc deserved the best. Because he was not a registered collie, Rhonda got him for almost nothing.

  Now I see him lying dead in the street. The huge tires of a cement truck have crushed his head. The detail that hypnotizes me, however, is the pool of gaudy crimson blood in which Marc lies. And then I understand that I am looking at Marc’s life splattered on the concrete.

  At supper that evening I break down crying in the middle of the meal, and my mother has to tell my stepfather what has happened. Earlier she had asked me to withhold the news until my father has had a little time to relax. I am sorry that my promise is broken, I am sorry that Marc is dead.

  In a week, though, I have nearly forgotten. It is very seldom that I remember the pool of blood in which the collie’s body lay on that hot spring afternoon. Only at night do I remember its hypnotizing crimson.

  ###

  ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO IN RUSSIA: One night before the beginning of spring I go time-traveling—spirit-faring, if you like—in the mind of the Great Dane who once stalked into my classroom.

  I alter his body into that of a hunting hound and drop him into the kennels on the estate of a retired Russian officer. Hundreds of my kind surround me. We bay all night, knowing that in the morning we will be turned loose on an eight-year-old serf boy who yesterday struck the general’s favorite hound with a rock.

  I jump against the fence of our kennel and out bark dogs even larger than I am. The cold is invigorating. My flanks shudder with expectation, and I know that insomnia is a sickness that afflicts only introspective university instructors and failed astronaut candidates.

  In the morning they bring the boy forth. The general orders him stripped naked in front of his mother, and the dog-boys who tend us make the child run. An entire hunting party in full regalia is on hand for the festivities. At last the dog-boys turn us out of the kennels, and we surge across the estate after our prey.

  Hundreds of us in pursuit, and I in the lead.

  I am the first to sink my teeth into his flesh. I tear away half of one of his emaciated buttocks with a single ripping motion of my jaws. Then we bear the child to the ground and overwhelm his cries with our brutal baying. Feeble prey, this; incredibly feeble. We are done with him in fifteen minutes.

  When the dog-boys return us slavering to our kennels, I release my grip on the Great Dane’s mind and let him go foraging in the trashcans of Athens, Georgia.

  Still shuddering, I lie in my bed and wonder how it must feel to be run down by a pack of predatory animals. I cannot sleep.

  * * *

  APPROACHING SIRIUS: We eight men are physical extensions of the astrogation and life-support components of the Black Retriever. We feed on the ship’s energy; no one must eat to stay alive, though, of course, we do have delicious food surrogates aboard for the pleasure of our palates. All our five senses have been technologically enhanced so that we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste more vitally than do you, our brethren, back on Earth.

  Do not let it be said that a cybernetic organism sacrifices its humanity for a sterile and meaningless immortality. Yes, yes, I know. That’s the popular view, but one promulgated by pessimists, cynics, and prophets of doom.

  Would that they nay-sayers could wear our synthetic skins for only fifteen minutes. Would that they could look out with new eyes on the fierce cornucopian emptiness of interstellar space. There is beauty here, and we of the Black Retriever are a part of it.

  Canicula-Threasie and the other Cybernetic Canine Constructs demonstrate daily their devotion to us. It is not a slavish devotion, however. Often they converse for hours among themselves about the likelihood of finding intelligent life on the planet that circles Sirius.

  Some of their speculation has proved extremely interesting, and I have begun to work their suggestions into our tentative Advance Strategem for First Contact. As Threasie himself delights in telling us, “It’s good to be ready for any contingency. Do you want the tail to wag the dog or the dog to wag the tail?” Not the finest example of his wit, but he invariably chuckles. His own proposal is that a single trace-team confront the aliens without weapons and offer them our lives. A gamble, he says, but the only way of establishing our credibility from the start.

  Late at night—as we judge it by the shipboard clocks—the entire crew gathers around the eerily glowing shield of the Livermore-Parsons Drive Unit, and the dogs tell us stories out of their racial subconscious. Canicula usually takes the lead in these sessions, and my favorite account is his narrative of how dog and man first joined forces against the indifferent arrogance of a bestial environment. That story seems to make the drive shield burn almost incandescently, and man and dog alike—woman and dog alike—can feel their skins humming, prickling, with an unknown but immemorial power.

  Not much longer now. Sirius beckons, and the long night of this journey will undoubtedly die in the blaze of our planet-fall.

  ###

  I AM FIFTEEN: When I return to Colorado Springs to visit my father the year after Nick’s fall from the rocks, I find the great Labrador strangely changed.

  There is a hairless saddle on Nick’s back, a dark grey area of scar tissue at least a foot wide. Moreover, he has grown fat. When he greets me, he cannot leap upon me as he has done in past years. In nine months he has dwindled from a panther into a kind of heartbreaking and outsized lap dog.

  As we drive home from the airport my father tries to explain:

  “We had him castrated, Nicholas. We couldn’t keep him in the house—not with the doors locked, not with the windows closed, not with rope, not with anything we tried. There’s always a female in heat in our neighborhood and he kept getting out. Twice I had to drive to the pound and ransom him. Five bucks a shot.

  “Finally some old biddy who had a cocker spaniel or something caught him—you know how gentle he is with people—and tied him to her clothesline. Then she poured a pan of boiling water over his back. That’s why he looks like he does now. It’s a shame, Nicholas, it really is. A goddamn shame.”

  The summer lasts an eternity.

  ###

  TWENTY-SEVEN, AND HOLDING: Behind our house on Virginia Avenue there is a small, self-contained apartment that our landlord rents to a young woman who is practice-teaching. This young woman owns a mongrel bitch named Tammi.

  For three weeks over the Christmas holidays Tammi was chained to her doghouse in temperatures that occasionally plunged into the teens. Katherine and I had not volunteered to take care of her because we knew that we would be away ourselves for at least a week, and because we hoped that Tammi’s owner would make more humane arrangements for the dog’s care. She did not. She asked a little girl across the street to feed Tammi once a day and to give her water.

  This, of course, meant that Katherine and I took care of the animal for the two weeks that we were home. I went out several times a day to untangle Tammi’s chain from the bushes and clothesline poles in the vicinity of her doghouse. Sometim
es I fed her, sometimes played with her, sometimes tried to make her stay in her house.

  Some days it rained, others it sleeted. And for the second time in her life Tammie came into heat.

  One night I awoke to hear her yelping as if in pain. I struggled out of bed, put on a pair of blue jeans and my shoes, and let myself quietly out the back door.

  A monstrous silver-black dog—was it a Great Dane?—had mounted Tammi. It was raining, but I could see the male’s pistoning silhouette in the residual glow of the falling raindrops themselves. Or so it seemed to me. Outraged by the male’s brutality, I gathered a handful of stones and approached the two dogs.

  Then I threw. I struck the male in the flank. He lurched away from Tammi and rushed blindly to a fenced-in corner of the yard. I continued to throw, missing every time. The male saw his mistake and came charging out of the cul-de-sac toward me. His feet churned in the gravel as he skidded by me. Then he loped like a jungle cat out our open gate and was gone. I threw eight or nine futile stones into the dark street after him. And stood there barechested in the chill December rain.

  For a week this went on. New dogs appeared on some nights, familiar ones returned on others. And each time, like a knight fighting for his lady’s chastity, I struggled out of bed to fling stones at Tammi’s bestial wooers.