Brothers

by David Clerson

  The brother moved closer, growling, starving. The bitch raised her head. He growled again, and she moved away. He went over to the bone, dragged it toward him, and chewed at it hungrily. The other dog looked at him from a distance, her ears flattened.

  When he finished his meal, the brother, exhausted, returned to his doghouse. He didn’t want to think about the past or the future: he only wanted to sleep.

  When he awoke, vague memories came back to him: people rescuing him from the bottom of his boat, dumping him in a wheelbarrow, and pushing him over winding roads.

  He didn’t know if he should feel lucky to have survived, but in the end it didn’t matter much: he wasn’t so unhappy here, comfortable in his doghouse. Life seemed organized, predictable: he had nothing to fear. He stretched his aching limbs. Outside, fat flies buzzed close to the ground, weighed down by the summer heat. He poked his head out into the sun, where he was happy to find a bowl of lukewarm water and lapped from it thirstily. He stretched out, his head outside the doghouse, and shocked himself by licking a scratch, probably a wound sustained during the storm. Then he fell back asleep.

  It was the smell of food that woke him. He saw a fat woman emptying a bucket of bones and table scraps a few metres from his doghouse, and he stood up and ran toward her, a little awkward on four legs. “Awake at last! It’s about time,” she said. He looked at her. She seemed to be waiting for something. He thought it wise to bark; she seemed satisfied: “Good boy. I have a feeling you and I are going to get along.” And she left.

  The brother gnawed at the bones for a long time, wagging his tail. The grey dog was looking at him, sitting apart. When he had finished his meal, he heard her come over to eat his leftovers. She had a nice pelt, he thought; next time, he would try to leave her a little more meat.

  Then he went to sleep, again: his recent ordeal had exhausted him.

  At night, he was awakened by howls. Wolves, he thought, or coyotes. He fell back into a nervous sleep.

  The next day, in front of the doghouse, he saw the fat woman and six round, red-faced children wearing horizontally striped shirts. Piglets, he thought to himself, pig-children. “You see, kids, he’s a good dog. You, come here. Do you think you could explain what you were doing on that boat? That doesn’t really happen, a dog on a boat. Come on, don’t be afraid, come…” He came closer. “See how nice he is. Who wants to give him a bone?”

  “I do! I do!” the children cried in unison.

  The oldest and roundest of the children handed him a bone, the biggest he had ever seen in his bitch of a life. The boy held it out with a malicious smile, taunting him with a little squealing sound. The brother came closer. The boy inched back. The brother moved closer. The boy moved back again, still squealing. The brother got to the end of his chain and growled. It made the children laugh, but the fat woman came up and kicked him in the ribs. He retreated, stung. “Growl all you want, but not at the children!” He understood her words, but he was mesmerized by the bone; he wanted the bone very badly. Still, he dropped his head, chastened. “Good! You can give him the bone,” she told her oldest son. The child approached and tossed the bone a couple of metres away from the older brother, who yanked on his chain but couldn’t reach it. Finally, the fat woman shoved the bone at him with her foot. He grabbed it and crawled back through the dust to his doghouse.

  In the days that followed, he was gentler and more understanding with the children, and the fat woman almost never kicked him. Still, he was taken aback when the children decided to take him for a walk. Did they really like him? He didn’t believe it. He was their toy, at the mercy of their whims, a poorly tamed beast held captive by a children’s circus.

  There were five or six of them, walking slowly under the sun, waddling like little pigs, but too clean, as if they had given up rolling in the mud. Their faces were red and fat. The brother followed along on his four legs, increasingly accustomed to using the fourth normally, like a cripple learning to walk again.

  The day was unbearably hot. The children wore straw hats to protect themselves from the sun. They walked unevenly, like drunks, weaving left and right and turning on themselves in their striped shirts, like they took nothing seriously, always with slightly stupid smiles on their faces. The oldest squealed away at the head of the pack, flies landing on his forehead.

  They led the older brother to a large coastal village, almost a town, with paved streets the likes of which he had never seen. He was used to the muddy, trash-lined roads in the village where the leech-boys lived.

  Along the way, dogs barked their heads off at him, running toward him, jerking at the end of their leashes; all sorts of canines with bone-crushing jaws: short, aggressive bulldogs, hateful basset hounds, tall, scraggy bouviers with droopy lips. The brother could smell their hatred and reacted to their provocations, growling or barking back, but each time the children yanked his leash to shut him up his collar squeezed his throat and he dropped his head in silence, a thin string of saliva seething between his teeth.

  Now and then, the fattest of the children would amuse himself by stabbing a sharp stick into his back, and when they sat on the dock, sharing fat chunks of sausage, he even poked him under the eye because he had been so bold as to beg for his share.

  Only when they were done eating did they flick him the casings, which he ate without complaint. The heat of the sun on the children’s red faces made them sweat and covered them in a varnished sheen.

  Shortly before they left the village, they passed a heap of wooden planks piled at the edge of the port. The brother recognized the split wood of his boat, of his and his brother’s masterpiece, and he looked at it as one looks at the remnants of an era better left behind without regret. At the top of the stack stood the head of Puppet, with a few last strands of seaweed still attached to his chin. Someone had painted the wooden face black and white, disfigured it, with a wide, smiling mouth, toothy and laughing. The work of a child, the brother thought, or a simpleton.

  Seeing Puppet’s grin at the top of the heap, the pig-children laughed too.

  13

  A few days later, as he was circling the grey dog in the humid heat of the summer afternoon, the brother suddenly wanted to smell her hindquarters, and she quickly also smelled his. Seeing them, the children writhed with strangled laughter. “The world is a cruel place,” the brother thought, his muscles tensed, and he roared inside.

  On his four legs, he felt complete, more sure of himself than ever. He began to find his fangs, acquiring a taste for biting. He was no longer afraid when he heard coyotes and wolves howl in the night. He was growing more ferocious, with the ferocity of an adult male, as he had so often imagined his father.

  He no longer thought of his brother, or very little. He no longer thought of his past life, a life spent in fear, being small in the world, crushed by the weight of the sky and the enormity of the ocean.

  Sometimes, the children untied him and let him run free in the fields. He chased groundhogs and hares, breaking their necks with a single bite.

  “The world is a cruel place,” his mother had told him. He remembered, but he was no longer afraid to face it alone. At night, he dreamed of himself only as an animal, and in his sleep he chased over never-ending plains, chasing creatures that grew larger every night, bounding over red, blood-soaked earth.

  He had learned to obey his masters, but he also noticed every beat of the pulse in their jugular veins.

  One night, with a hard heat in the pit of his belly, he mounted the grey bitch, imitating the ram he had seen when villagers brought the animal to inseminate his mother’s goats.

  He didn’t linger, retreating to his doghouse, the taste of disgust in his mouth: he pictured his dog of a father mounting his mother like that, and all the suffering of his birth washed over him, the incomprehension of what he was. Alone in his doghouse, an irrational numbness filled his left arm, his wooden arm, a numbness
that marked hours of insomnia while an offshore wind blew wet over the fields and up to his doghouse.

  14

  He fell asleep to the repulsive image of his dog of a father lying on top of his mother, and his father, that stray dog, came to him again in his sleep, the wide head slipping through the doghouse door, invading it, enormous, taking up all the space. His breath turned the air sour, his gums were wet and slimy, and his snout sniffed at the brother, recognizing him as his own, his own line, and he was satisfied, proud of his dog of a son.

  The next night, when he saw the grey dog, the brother sniffed her ass and mounted her again, this time with true pleasure. They lay together for a long time, their warm bodies entwined on the bedding of his doghouse, and they found themselves speaking. Like him, she was the daughter of a dog of a father, a passing male that had impregnated her mother. She had looked for him for years, and had found him, but it had gotten her nowhere, she had become a bitch in his image, a dog turned wild, often injured and starving. She had been beaten and had learned to fight, before ending up here, in this doghouse, finding the brother, his smell and hers, the beating of their hearts, their breath on each other, and the feeling of invincibility that would lead them somewhere they didn’t yet know.

  In the days that followed, they shared their meals, chewing the same bones together. Wrapped around each other, they slept in the same doghouse. “Look at the lovebirds,” the piglets goaded them. And they were right: they made a good couple, he in spite of his worn pelt, and she despite being so thin, her body worn out by flight and hunger.

  The brother liked to feel her next to him. He found a proximity he hadn’t known for a long time, and it brought him back to childhood, reminding him of his brother walking by his side like a part of him he never thought he would lose. He remembered and, despite the grey dog close to him, he felt alone again, he felt the absence of his brother, and a wave of nausea rose from his stomach as he remembered that he had abandoned him. Then he turned to his companion, licking her snout, huddling against her and thinking to himself that maybe he loved her. It was a new feeling for him, different than what he had felt for his mother or his brother, different than the uncertain affection he sometimes felt for his dog of a father, yet similar, a feeling of unreasonable attachment, with no real cause, which neither blood nor desire were enough to explain. A feeling he wished could last forever, something sacred, as his mother and his brother had been.

  They rolled around together in the sand or on the bedding, tussled gently over a bone, told each other stories of their escapades—his sea odyssey, the unfamiliar lands she had crossed—but the brother told himself that it wouldn’t last, and sometimes he saw in her eye a disquieting glimmer that led him to believe that she didn’t hold out much hope either that they would love each other for long.

  15

  They saw it arrive in a wheeled cage pulled by an old donkey, driven by a small, dry man. They saw it arrive and it was prodigious, a big, black thing, muscular, with tiny, deep-set eyes, nearly invisible, lodged in a head that was all jaw, all teeth. It was a pure and primeval breed, a monstrous canine, a caged dog that no one wanted to set free.

  The brother couldn’t help but think back to the monster he and his brother had found dead in the high marsh grass. The dog wasn’t as big, nor surprising, but he suspected it could be as aggressive. This was a creature he would have preferred to encounter defanged, harmless, a simple hunk of flesh left to the scavengers, but the animal was very much alive, and he could only surmise it had bad intentions.

  It had arrived a few days earlier and had made its way through the village before coming there with the piglets and their sow of a mother. The dog had been admired in the village square, not far from the dock, always caged, and then, in exchange for cash or crates of smoked herring or stacks of wheat, it had been mated with almost every bitch in the village in the hope of producing combative bastards, big guard dogs to keep away foxes and thieves, even if many of the mothers would die whelping.

  The ritual was repeated: each female was brought into the cage; the male dominated her and mounted her as his masters watched. Then she was taken quickly from the cage for fear that, in a rage, the dog might kill her.

  Now it was the grey dog’s turn.

  She knew what awaited her. The brother, meanwhile, pulled on his chain and barked frantically, powerless, but nobody paid any attention.

  The piglets’ fat mother, along with the dog’s owner, walked toward the grey female. The children watched at a distance, eyes wide in their fat, blood-red faces.

  “You’ll see, little one, you’re going to give us nice pups,” said the fat woman as she approached the dog. The grey female bent her head submissively, prepared to be sacrificed. Her mistress held out her hand. The brother barked even louder. The children snickered. Suddenly, the grey dog raised her head and dug her fangs into her mistress’s white hand, felt her blood run into her mouth. The scene froze for a moment in the bright afternoon light, then the fat woman backed away, with a long cry of pain, a long, almost animal cry, a sow getting a taste of the slaughterhouse.

  In his doghouse, the brother couldn’t help but be proud of the grey female, but he suffered with her as a stick came down on her back once, twice, three times, and he heard her whimper, an almost human whimper, in proud, desperate pain. And he wondered how much of his father’s blood really ran in his veins, and whether he would have been able to accomplish even a fraction of the exploits his brother had attributed to him: slaying monsters, stopping storms, flying like a flame through the sky.

  He saw the injured dog struggling to crawl toward her doghouse, and for the first time since the shipwreck he thought about the day he had awakened in the boat with his brother gone. He felt his throat constrict. He thought of the wave that must have washed over them and taken his brother without him even realizing, without being able to help, he had already probably given in, he had abandoned his younger brother, born of his body, part of him, his flesh, and he decided that he would not abandon the grey bitch like his dog of a father had abandoned his mother.

  He remembered his brother’s laugh and his words when he spoke of their father: “Don’t worry. You’ll see, one day, we’ll find him.” Hopeful words, when there was no more hope. Everything had seemed dead around their grey clapboard house with their mother who was forever dying, but here too there was always death, and everywhere else. Maybe all he had left was the grey female, who, wounded, had retreated to her doghouse. Everything was death, but he wanted to bite. He would do it for her. No one anywhere was waiting for him. She might be all he had.

  16

  Mating had been postponed to the next day. They would take precautions, muzzle and hold the dog so that she would not be able to bite or fight back.

  In the dead of night, the brother withdrew his hand from the right paw of his dog pelt. It was bloodless and curled up, like the foot of a dead chicken. He stretched his fingers, felt heat come back into them, brought his hand to his neck and undid his collar. Then he put his hand back in his pelt and went out of his doghouse. He walked to the other doghouse and slipped inside. “How do you feel? Come on, we have to go.” Her left ear was mangled and she likely had a broken rib, but, she assured him, she could still run, not as fast as usual, but fast enough for them to be far away by daybreak. The older brother felt tenderly toward her, a human tenderness, he wanted to take her in his arms, but they couldn’t wait, he told her, it was time to go.

  They went out under the vast starry sky, a universe of possibilities open over their heads, and he remembered standing with his brother before a pond in the middle of the night, watching the reflection of the stars in the water and wanting to dive in, to swim in the infinite sky.

  Close to the house, they saw the cage of the sleeping animal, fantasized for an instant about killing it from the outside, sliding spikes between the bars and stabbing it through the heart, but they chose to flee. />
  Behind the house, the fields opened up. They walked around the barn to avoid being seen and they heard a squeal, a familiar squeal, and above them they saw the fat, round head of the oldest, the fattest and roundest of the piglets, his flesh squeezing out from under his striped shirt. He was sitting in the barn’s second-floor window, his legs dangling over the ledge. His face was painted grotesquely, with broad strokes like on Puppet’s head. “I’ve been watching you for a long time,” he told them. “What do you think you are? Human? You’re dogs, with a dog’s life.” They said nothing, but both looked at him like a piece of throbbing flesh. It would have been so easy to make him bleed. “I know you’d like to leave. You can’t keep still. But we’re going to tame you!” And he jumped down, falling like a ball to block their way, a stick in his hand.

  The two dogs growled. The boy windmilled the stick, laughing and squealing, proud to have trapped them, skipping gleefully around on his two legs, his stick whistling through the air, forcing them to drop their heads to the ground, and they were frightened, stupidly, these supposedly fierce creatures, deferential before a stick, trapped by a child, and they backed away, and the brother in his dog pelt told himself that they must not give in, that he had put on the skin of a predator, that he carried in him the ferocity of the most vicious dogs. His brother had told him that they came from a world of giants, their father’s world, his brother had given him the tools of his deliverance.

  He lifted his left paw, his wooden paw, which blocked the child’s stick as he swung, and he stood straight up, like a man, and like an animal he bit into the fat throat of the child who squealed as he crumpled, a pig’s squeal, a squeal that rang out for a long time as they ran across the fields.