by Tony Earley
So he whistled along, twirling his Saturday hat on his finger, hoping now for a taller tale, until he reached a good-sized creek spanned by a narrow bridge. As he stepped onto the planking he savored for a moment a breath of vestigial excitement, the anticipation he had once felt every time he crossed a bridge. Perhaps this first step would presage not only a pedestrian traveling from here to there, but a crossing over from this into that, a passing into proper story. He hoped briefly for a troll to flummox, but remembered that trolls were now extinct, save for a non-breeding pair locked up in a zoo in Romania.
Jack was halfway across the creek when a large black dog rose up out of the bridge, simply squeezed itself into being out of the bridge’s black wood. Jack pulled up fast. He wasn’t afraid—startled a little, maybe, at the dog’s sudden appearance, but not afraid. Over the years he had learned that nothing really bad ever happened to him, that he was impervious to injury, if not embarrassment, no matter how formidable the adversary or unexpected its appearance. Learning that he didn’t have to be afraid had, however, in an almost tragic irony, also robbed him of the corollary excitement. Why, the last time he had rousted out a giant—however long ago that had been—it was all he could do to make himself run.
“Grr,” said the dog.
“Howdy,” said Jack. (It was his experience that sometimes animals could talk, and sometimes they couldn’t, but that it always paid to find out.) He could see the dog’s white teeth as it snarled, could see its slobber-lapping, lengthy red tongue.
“Hello, Jack.” The dog had a low voice and spoke wetly, deep in its throat.
“So tell me,” Jack said, noting that the dog knew his name, but still wanting to get on with things, “why are you impeding my progress across this here bridge?”
“Because that is my solitary calling.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“I’m not sure. It was elsewhere or about, but that is all I can know.”
Jack nodded. “Limited omniscient narrator,” he said. “My point of view.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
The two spent an expectant moment in silence, as if they were actors strutting and fretting, each thinking that the other had forgotten the next line. Jack finally clamped his hat on top of his head.
“Well, Skippy, or whatever your name is,” he said, “this has been interesting and all, but why don’t you step to one side and let me pass so I can get along with my setting out?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
A flicker of impatience flared distantly behind Jack’s eyeballs. He remembered that he was still drunk, but not pleasantly so; that the farmer, simpleton though he was, had smoked him out of dipping his wick; that the summer night was still chokingly close and humid. A liquorous headache began to mold itself into something that felt like a thumb, and to jab repeatedly against the backside of his forehead bone.
“Look,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I don’t know what kind of story you think this is, but I can see in the dark, and I was enjoying it, even though I’m drunk but not pleasantly so, and I don’t want to fool with no talking dog.”
“You don’t have any choice,” the dog said.
“What do you mean, I ain’t got a choice? By God, I’m Jack. I’ve always got a choice.”
“Not tonight you don’t. I’m going to bite you before you get off this bridge. That’s how this story goes.”
“Shit,” said Jack. “You ain’t going to bite me.”
The dog sank into a crouch. “Jack, I was put on this earth to bite you.”
“Whoa, now,” Jack said, spitting out a laugh as if it tasted bad. “You ain’t supposed to bite me. There ain’t never been nobody to bite me, not ever, in lo all these many years.”
“Grr,” the dog said.
“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “Just hold what you got and let me think.” His setting out had arrived at an arrival he was unprepared to ponder. He hadn’t met an old man on the road to tell him he would meet a dog on a bridge and give him a silver sword or magic words with which to kill it. (Jack had always counted on the utilitarian, if narratively implausible, appearance of the old man bearing implements and instruction, but somewhere along the way the old man had disappeared, too.) He was by himself in the middle of a bridge in the middle of the night, beset with tiredness and discouragement. His mind was lightly fogged by odd-tasting liquor, and he struggled to think of a way to outsmart a talking dog. He looked around. There wasn’t even a non-magical stick lying about, or a tree to climb in the corn bottoms. Still, in his younger days this problem wouldn’t have given him pause. Come on, Jack, he thought, you’re Jack. Think of something.
“This is the last Jack tale,” the dog said, inching closer. “The end of the story.”
Jack backed up a step. “Just hold on there, Spot. Before you bite me, I need to know something. Are you mad?”
The dog stopped. “Angry? Somewhat, I suppose.”
“No,” Jack said. “I mean rabid.”
“Hmm,” said the dog. “I think so, yeah. I feel a little hindered in the hindquarters.”
“So once you bite me I’ll die a slow and excruciatingly painful death.”
“That seems to be the idea.”
Jack frantically searched through his overalls but found only four dollars. He didn’t even have a pocketknife.
Without further warning the dog scrabbled forward and leapt at Jack, who managed to take a step backward as it leapt and wrap his hands around its neck mid-leap and keep it at arm’s length; he fell down on top of it, pinning the dog’s head and chest to the bridge.
“Ow,” said the dog.
As the dog jockeyed with its back legs, trying to find purchase, Jack squeezed its neck as hard as he could. Each of his fingers sought its correspondent on the other hand and interlocked as if playing the child’s game of building a church. (Here’s the people, Jack thought.) He felt the dog gathering its front legs underneath its body, testing Jack’s weight. Jack soon realized he could neither choke the dog to death nor hold it for very long. It was one big dog.
“Damn you, dog,” Jack panted. “You should not have done that.” He felt the dog calmly push up against his chest, preparatory to bucking him off.
“You’re done,” the dog said. “Once I stand up, it’s all over.”
“I am not done,” Jack said. “For the last time, I am JACK!”
“Which means nothing.”
“I’m important to people.”
“Not anymore. Not in any substantive way. The day is soon coming when your stories will be told only by faux mountaineers in new overalls to ill-informed tourists at storytelling festivals.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s ersatz, Jack.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means you’re dead already and you don’t even know it.”
When the dog pushed itself to its feet, Jack grabbed a fistful of fur in each hand. He spun in a tight circle, lifted the dog off the ground by its head, and with a great shout he threw it off the bridge.
Then Jack ran.
By the time he heard the dog crash into the tangled hell of laurel on the creek bank he had already left the bridge behind. Jack didn’t know where he was going, only that going seemed to be a good idea, that his setting out needed to be speeded up. Hiding seemed advisable. He ran a few steps down the road, angling toward the creek bottom, gaining speed with each stride, and leapt from the road, over the gully, his legs running through the air, his arms waving in a vain search for flight; he landed on both feet in the sandy soil of the bottom, and with another step crashed into the thick corn. Behind him, he knew, the dog would soon struggle up through the matted underbrush along the creek bank and set itself on his trail.
The corn was fully tasseled, six and eight feet tall, its ears hardening, two hot weeks away from coming ripe. It reached out and grabbed Jack as he fought through it; it struck at him with i
ts thin, pointed fists; it slid its thick stalks and ropy roots beneath his feet to trip him; it became a congregation of angry Baptists—preachers and deacons and teetotalers and desiccated spinsters and dentists and disaffected, undipped Methodists, rattling with judgment and contempt as he fought through it.
Jack, the corn called in multitudinous chorus, you’re a fornicator and a murderer and a thief!
“Let me go, corn!” Jack spat. He lowered his head and struck back wildly with his arms.
And you’re a ne’er-do-well and a swindler and a liar!
“I am not a swindler!”
The truth is not in you, Jack! For shame! Why, you swindled your own brothers!
“They had it coming.”
You disappointed your mother.
“Don’t you talk about Mama.”
Repent! cried the corn. Repent!
“Go shuck yourself,” snarled Jack.
Behind him he could hear—or thought he could hear, imagined he could hear—the dog huffing with deadly inevitability, bulling after him in a rabid, straight line.
Jack fled and fought and cursed with the rage of the unredeemed and the panic of the pursued. He struggled through miles and hours and years and lifetimes of corn and space break and the exposition implied therein, and imagined with each step the rabid fangs of the black dog inches from his hamstrings. After an age and a day he crashed suddenly and unexpectedly out of the corn and sprawled headlong into a prairie of golden wheat. For a long moment he lay facedown on the ground, his nose filled with the rich, anesthetic smells of earth and grain, and considered falling simply into sleep, dog or no dog. He had come a long way. But as soon as he thought about the death that awaited him should the dog catch him—or any death at all, for that matter—he climbed wearily to his feet and stared toward the horizon, where he could at least make out a tree line, no more than a smudge between the field and the sky, who knew how many miles distant, but a destination to aim for nonetheless, a place to flee to. He took a first leaden step toward the trees, and a young girl, maiden age, sprang with a yelp from the wheat in front of him and lit out across the field. Before Jack could even cry out, the wheat around him exploded with girls—hundreds, thousands, multitudes of girls—flushed like succulent quail, bounding toward the distant trees. They cried out, “Help me! Somebody help me!” as they leapt gracefully through the wheat.
Maidens! Jack thought, breaking unconsciously into a jog. Look at all the maidens!
Maidens with glowing complexions of peach and cream and alabaster and ivory, clad uniformly in simple country dresses of virginal white, each dress cut perhaps a size too small and a smidge too short; maidens whose firm flanks fetchingly swayed and flounced, their downy bosoms heaving and swelling; maidens whose flaxen and wheat and chestnut and mahogany and ebony and sable and scarlet and crimson hair billowed and flowed and streamed out behind them; maidens whose panted exhalations were sweet and soft and breathy and catching; maidens whose mysterious and dark and depthless and cerulean and emerald eyes were flashing and shining. In other words, lots and lots of maidens. Tired no longer, Jack vaulted youthfully into full pursuit. He loved nothing more than maidens. He crazily wondered if it were possible to herd all of the girls into one place, like a pasture, or a feedlot. “Hey!” he called. “Come back!”
Jack soon gained ground and fell in behind a pair of twins whose fair hair cascaded behind them in fragrant waves. The girls capered and frisked in step; their silken hair undulated in hypnotic unison. Jack watched their hair for some distance—the girls seemed to have no idea that he was there—but the moment his eyes strayed below their narrow waists the girls stopped and whirled on him so quickly that he almost crashed into them. He managed to bring himself to a teetering, arm-waving halt.
“What do you think you’re doing?” asked one.
“Doing?” Jack panted. “I’m running away from a black dog that can talk. What do you think I’m doing?”
“That’s not what she meant,” said the other. “What she meant was, ‘What do you think you’re looking at?’”
“Looking at?” Jack said, averting his eyes. “I’m not looking at anything.”
“Liar,” said the first.
“You were looking at our fair nether parts,” said the second.
“Asses,” said her sister.
“I was not.”
“You were, too.”
“Then tell me this,” Jack said shrewdly. “If you were running away from me, how can you know I was looking at your fair nether asses?”
“Because we know, Jack. We know.”
“You think we don’t know, but we know.”
“Girls always know.”
“Hmm,” Jack said. “I guess I knew that.”
“Next you’re going to look at our breasts,” the first said.
“I am not.”
“You are, too,” said the second.
The twins stared at Jack until he blinked. Then he looked at their chests. He tried not to, but he did. And there they were, maiden bosoms. Downy. Tumescent. Firm. The ripe pomegranates of the Old Testament. The top buttons of the girls’ dresses strained nobly to restrain them.
Jack thought, Dah-um. He thought, God Almighty, italics his. He felt his manhood stirring. Or his loins. He could never tell them apart.
“See?” said one.
“Told you,” said the other.
Jack smiled what he hoped was an old-fashioned Jack smile. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Do you know us,” said one, shaking her head sadly. “Do you know us.”
“Oh, you know us,” said the other. “The first time we set eyes on you, you came whistling down the road, looking for a job of work, after your setting out.”
“You had the dinner your poor, old mama made for you slung over your shoulder on a pole. But the dust on the road had made you powerful thirsty and you had not a drop to drink.”
“Mama never remembered to send along water,” Jack said. “It was a shortcoming.”
“You came upon me first. I was sitting by the roadside, weaving a basket of golden straw for to carry eggs to the market. You asked me to draw you a dipper of water from the well.”
“And I was sitting in the doorway of our daddy’s sturdy cabin, churning a bait of butter for to bake a cake. Then you asked me to draw you a cup of water from the well.”
“You sure did drink a lot of water.”
“Was your daddy a farmer?” Jack asked.
“Miller,” said both.
“Ah,” Jack said. For one sweet moment he sensed more than remembered the rhythmic rumble of a turning wheel, the gentle shush shush shush of water splashing, a slant of silver moonlight, an intake of breath as soft as the noise made by the wings of a moth, but he couldn’t conjure the face of a girl. So many maidens, so many mills. Twins, though. He thought he would’ve remembered twins.
“That night at supper, while our daddy was eating his vittles and eyeballing his shooting-gun leaning by the doorstop, you tricked him into giving you his silver sword and ten bags of gold.”
“We still don’t know how you pulled that one off.”
“Then you slipped him a sleeping draught that made him snore so that the door joggled and the roof shook and nobody never heard the like, then or now.”
“You met me in the mill when the black cat mewled, and lay with me in the moonlight on the tow sacks of meal our daddy had ground by day.”
“Then you lay with me on the same tow sacks when the old owl hooted three times in the sweet gum tree.”
Jack tasted a whiff of the bad liquor he had drunk. He felt another stirring, not of loin but of remorse. The feeling was unfamiliar, and he did not care for it. What was wrong with him? If the three of them managed to get away from this dog why couldn’t he lie with them again? He was Jack, after all, that Jack. But instead he swallowed. He said, “Forgive me, but I’m not…”
“…Sure you remember us?”
“I—I’m sorry, no, I…”
He leaned forward and looked intently into the eyes of one girl and then the eyes of the other.
“They’re not limpid pools of amber, Jack,” said the first.
“They’re light brown.”
“And they’re not shining or flashing or burning with passion.”
“They’re just eyes.”
Jack glanced back and forth between their lovely faces with increasing consternation. Why couldn’t he remember?
“It’s just as well you don’t recollect us.”
“We were fifteen, Jack. Fifteen.”
“I know,” he said. “I mean, were you? I mean, I guess I know that now because you just told me.”
The girls stared at him, their brows slowly lowering.
“It was wrong, what happened,” he said, “wasn’t it?”
“It was wrong, Jack.”
“It was wrong before you even stepped forward into that particular setting out.”
The liquor roiled in Jack’s stomach. Inside his head he felt himself stepping off down an unfamiliar road. No good lay at its end. The way was dark and cold and he was alone and growing older with each step. He couldn’t find his shoes. Jagged stones bruised and cut his feet.