“I don’t know,” Donald Anderson said.
“Of course you do,” Miss Bintz said. “Where did all of this come from?”
None of us had realized yet that Miss Bintz’s message was political. I looked beyond Donald Anderson at the drawn window shades. Behind them were plate-glass windows, a view of stiff red-oak leaves, the smell of wood smoke in the air. Across the road from the school was an orchard, beyond that a pasture, another orchard, and then the town of Lewiston, standing on the Niagara River seven miles upstream from the long row of red brick Colonial houses that were the officers’ quarters at Fort Niagara. Duke was down by the river, probably, sniffing at the reedy edge, his head lifting when ducks flew low over the water. Once the dog had come back to our house with a live fish in his mouth, a carp. Nobody ever believed that story except those of us who saw it: me, my mother and father and brother, my grandmother.
Miss Bintz had clicked to a picture of a mushroom cloud and was now saying, “And where did the bomb come from?” We were all tired of “Fact Monday” by then. Miss Bintz walked back to where Sparky and I were sitting. “You military children,” she said. “You know where the bomb comes from. Why don’t you tell us?” she said to me.
Maybe because I was tired, or bored, or frightened—I don’t know—I said to Miss Bintz, looking her in the eye, “The bomb comes from the mother bomb.”
Everyone laughed. We laughed because we needed to laugh, and because Miss Bintz had all the answers and all the questions and she was pointing them at us like guns.
“Stand up,” she said. She made me enter the arena in front of the desks, and then she clicked the machine back to the picture of the Japanese women. “Look at this picture and make a joke,” she said. What came next was the lecture she had been aiming for all along. The bomb came from the United States of America. We in the United States were worried about whether another country might use the bomb, but in the whole history of the human species only one country had ever used the worst weapon ever invented. On she went, bombs and airplanes and bomb tests, and then she got to the missiles. They were right here, she said, not more than ten miles away. Didn’t we all know that? “You know that, don’t you?” she said to me. If the missiles weren’t hidden among our orchards, the planes from the Soviet Union would not have any reason to drop bombs on top of Lewiston-Porter Central Junior High School.
I had stopped listening by then and realized that the pencil I still held in my hand was drumming a song against my thigh. Over hill, over dale. I looked back at the wall again, where the mushroom cloud had reappeared, and my own silhouette stood wildly in the middle of it. I looked at Sparky and dropped the pencil on the floor, stooped down to get it, looked at Sparky once more, stood up, and knocked out.
Later, people told me that I didn’t fall like lumber, I fell like something soft collapsing, a fan folding in on itself, a balloon rumpling to the floor. Sparky saw what I was up to and tried to get out from behind his desk to catch me, but it was Miss Bintz I fell against, and she went down, too. When I woke up, the lights were on, the mushroom cloud was a pale ghost against the wall, voices in the room sounded like insect wings, and I was back in my life again.
“I’m so sorry,” Miss Bintz said. “I didn’t know you were an epileptic.”
At Charlie Battery, it was drizzling as my parents stood and talked with the sergeant, rain running in dark tiny ravines along the slopes of the mounds.
MacArthur and I had M&M’s in our pockets, which we were allowed to give to the dog for his farewell. When we extended our hands, though, the dog lowered himself to the gravel and looked up at us from under his tender red eyebrows. He seemed to say that if he took the candy he knew we would go, but if he didn’t perhaps we would stay here at the missile battery and eat scraps with him.
We rode back to the post in silence, through the gray apple orchards, through small upstate towns, the fog rising out of the rain like a wish. MacArthur and I sat against opposite doors in the back seat, thinking of the loneliness of the dog.
We entered the kitchen, where my grandmother had already begun to clean the refrigerator. She looked at us, at our grim children’s faces—the dog had been sent away a day earlier than was really necessary—and she said, “Well, God knows you can’t clean the dog hair out of the house with the dog still in it.”
Whenever I think of an Army post, I think of a place the weather cannot touch for long. The precise rectangles of the parade grounds, the precisely pruned trees and shrubs, the living quarters, the administration buildings, the PX and commissary, the nondenominational church, the teen club, the snack bar, the movie house, the skeet-and-trap field, the swimming pools, the runway, warehouses, the Officers’ Club, the N.C.O. Club. Men marching, women marching, saluting, standing at attention, at ease. The bugle will trumpet reveille, mess call, assembly, retreat, taps through a hurricane, a tornado, flood, blizzard. Whenever I think of the clean, squared look of a military post, I think that if one were blown down today in a fierce wind, it would be standing again tomorrow in time for reveille.
The night before our last full day at Fort Niagara, an Arctic wind slipped across the lake and froze the rain where it fell, on streets, trees, power lines, rooftops. We awoke to a fabulation of ice, the sun shining like a weapon, light rocketing off every surface except the surfaces of the Army’s clean streets and walks.
MacArthur and I stood on the dry, scraped walk in front of our house and watched a jeep pass by on the way to the gate. On the post, everything was operational, but in the civilian world beyond the gate power lines were down, hanging like daggers in the sun, roads were glazed with ice, cars were in ditches, highways were impassable. No yellow school buses were going to be on the roads that morning.
“This means we miss our very last day in school,” MacArthur said. “No goodbyes for us.”
We looked up at the high, bare branches of the hard maples, where drops of ice glimmered.
“I just want to shake your hand and say so long,” Sparky said. He had come out of his house to stand with us. “I guess you know this means you’ll miss the surprise party.”
“There was going to be a party?” I said.
“Just cupcakes,” Sparky said. “I sure wish you could stay the school year and keep your office.”
“Oh, who cares!” I said, suddenly irritated with Sparky, although he was my best friend. “Jesus,” I said, sounding to myself like an adult—like Miss Bintz, maybe, when she was off duty. “Jesus,” I said again. “What kind of office is home goddam room vice-president in a crummy country school?”
MacArthur said to Sparky, “What kind of cupcakes were they having?”
I looked down at MacArthur and said, “Do you know how totally ridiculous you look in that knit cap? I can’t wait until we get out of this place.”
“Excuse me,” MacArthur said. “Excuse me for wearing the hat you gave me for my birthday.”
It was then that the dog came back. We heard him calling out before we saw him, his huge woof-woof “My name is Duke! My name is Duke! I’m your dog! I’m your dog!” Then we saw him streaking through the trees, through the park space of oaks and maples between our house and the post gate. Later the M.P.s would say that he stopped and wagged his tail at them before he passed through the gate, as if he understood that he should be stopping to show his I.D. card. He ran to us, bounding across the crusted, glass-slick snow—ran into the history of our family, all the stories we would tell about him after he was dead. Years and years later, whenever we came back together at the family table, we would start the dog stories. He was the dog who caught the live fish with his mouth, the one who stole a pound of butter off the commissary loading dock and brought it to us in his soft bird dog’s mouth without a tooth mark on the package. He was the dog who broke out of Charlie Battery the morning of an ice storm, travelled fourteen miles across the needled grasses of frozen pastures, through the prickly frozen mud of orchards, across back-yard fences in small towns, and found the los
t family.
The day was good again. When we looked back at the ice we saw a fairy-land. The red brick houses looked like ice castles. The ice-coated trees, with their million dreams of light, seemed to cast a spell over us.
“This is for you,” Sparky said, and handed me a gold-foiled box. Inside were chocolate candies and a note that said, “I have enjoyed knowing you this year. I hope you have a good life.” Then it said, “P.S. Remember this name. Someday I’m probably going to be famous.”
“Famous as what?” MacArthur said.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Sparky said.
We had a party. We sat on the front steps of our quarters, Sparky, MacArthur, the dog, and I, and we ate all the chocolates at eight o’clock in the morning. We sat shoulder to shoulder, the four of us, and looked across the street through the trees at the river, and we talked about what we might be doing a year from then. Finally, we finished the chocolates and stopped talking and allowed the brilliant light of that morning to enter us.
Miss Bintz is the one who sent me the news about Sparky four months later. “BOY DROWNS IN SWIFT CURRENT.” In the newspaper story, Sparky takes the bus to Niagara Falls with two friends from Lewiston-Porter. It’s a searing July day, a hundred degrees in the city, so the boys climb down the gorge into the river and swim in a place where it’s illegal to swim, two miles downstream from the Falls. The boys Sparky is visiting—they’re both student-council members as well as football players, just the kind of boys Sparky himself wants to be—have sneaked down to this swimming place many times: a cove in the bank of the river, where the water is still and glassy on a hot July day, not like the water raging in the middle of the river. But the current is a wild invisible thing, unreliable, whipping out with a looping arm to pull you in. “He was only three feet in front of me,” one of the boys said. “He took one more stroke and then he was gone.”
We were living in civilian housing not far from the post. When we had the windows open, we could hear the bugle calls and the sound of the cannon firing retreat at sunset. A month after I got the newspaper clipping about Sparky, the dog died. He was killed, along with every other dog on our block, when a stranger drove down our street one evening and threw poisoned hamburger into our front yards.
All that week I had trouble getting to sleep at night. One night I was still awake when the recorded bugle sounded taps, the sound drifting across the Army fences and into our bedrooms. Day is done, gone the sun. It was the sound of my childhood in sleep. The bugler played it beautifully, mournfully, holding fast to the long, high notes. That night I listened to the cadence of it, to the yearning of it. I thought of the dog again, only this time I suddenly saw him rising like a missile into the air, the red glory of his fur flying, his nose pointed heavenward. I remembered the dog leaping high, prancing on his hind legs the day he came back from Charlie Battery, the dog rocking back and forth, from front legs to hind legs, dancing, sliding across the ice of the post rink later that day, as Sparky, MacArthur, and I played crack-the-whip, holding tight to each other, our skates careening and singing. “You’re AWOL! You’re AWOL!” we cried at the dog. “No school!” the dog barked back. “No school!” We skated across the darkening ice into the sunset, skated faster and faster, until we seemed to rise together into the cold, bright air. It was a good day, it was a good day, it was a good day.
“I understand that in your country this thing is done quite differently.”
| 1989 |
BEREAVEMENT
Behind his house, my father’s dogs
sleep in kennels, beautiful,
he built just for them.
They do not bark.
Do they know he is dead?
They wag their tails
& head. They beg
& are fed.
Their grief is colossal
& forgetful.
Each day they wake
seeking his voice,
their names.
By dusk they seem
to unremember everything—
to them even hunger
is a game. For that, I envy.
For that, I cannot bear to watch them
pacing their cage. I try to remember
they love best confined space
to feel safe. Each day
a saint comes by to feed the pair
& I draw closer
the shades.
I’ve begun to think of them
as my father’s other sons,
as kin. Brothers-in-paw.
My eyes each day thaw.
One day the water cuts off.
Then back on.
They are outside dogs—
which is to say, healthy
& victorious, purposeful
& one giant muscle
like the heart. Dad taught
them not to bark, to point
out their prey. To stay.
Were they there that day?
They call me
like witnesses & will not say.
I ask for their care
& their carelessness—
wish of them forgiveness.
I must give them away.
I must find for them homes,
sleep restless in his.
All night I expect they pace
as I do, each dog like an eye
roaming with the dead
beneath an unlocked lid.
—KEVIN YOUNG | 2009 |
BEWARE OF THE DOGS
BURKHARD BILGER
The weapons were housed in Long Island City, in a low-slung, prefabricated building on Northern Boulevard. I could hear them growling and yammering in the dark. I’d arrived well before dawn on a wet, chilly October morning, and still wasn’t sure how to proceed. A police officer had told me to meet him there at five-forty-five, but there was no bell to ring, no intercom to buzz. The building was surrounded by a ragged chain-link fence edged with spools of razor wire and posted with warnings. When I tested the gate, it was unlocked, but the entrance lay across an empty parking lot and up a wooden ramp. I wasn’t sure that I could make it to the door in time.
I’ve never been much good around dogs. In the town where I grew up, about an hour north of Oklahoma City, every other house seemed to be patrolled by some bawling bluetick or excitable Irish setter, and the locals liked to leave them unchained. When I’d fill in for my brother on his paper route, or ride my one-speed bike to a friend’s house, I could usually count on a chase along the way, some homicidal canine at my heels. The dogs didn’t seem to give my friends as much trouble. And my father had a way of puffing himself up and waving his arms that would send them scampering. But I never figured out how to show them who’s boss.
One of the satisfactions of city life has been turning that relationship around. A pet here is always on probation, its instincts curbed or swiftly incarcerated. A hound that chases children around would be considered a public menace, and even the little yappers have to be kept on a leash. In the past ten years, though, that balance of power has shifted. Since the attacks on September 11th, New York’s subways and train stations, parks and tourist destinations have been prowled by police dogs—large, pointy-eared, unnervingly observant beasts deeply unconvinced of our innocence. They sniff at backpacks and train their eyes on passersby, daring us to make a move. It’s a little unsettling but also, under the circumstances, reassuring. There are worse things to fear than getting bitten.
The New York City subway has more than four hundred stations, eight hundred miles of track, six thousand cars, and, on any given weekday, five million passengers. It’s an antiterrorism unit’s nightmare. To sweep this teeming labyrinth for bombs would take an army of explosives experts equipped with chemical detectors. Instead, the city has gone to the dogs. Since 2001, the number of uniformed police has dropped by 17 percent. In that same period, the canine force has nearly doubled. It now has around a hundred dogs, divided among the narcotics, bomb, emergency-response, and transit squads.
A good dog is a natural super-soldier: strong yet acrobatic, fierce yet obedient. It can leap higher than most men, and run twice as fast. Its eyes are equipped for night vision, its ears for supersonic hearing, its mouth for subduing the most fractious prey. But its true glory is its nose. In the 1970s, researchers found that dogs could detect even a few particles per million of a substance; in the nineties, more subtle instruments lowered the threshold to particles per billion; the most recent tests have brought it down to particles per trillion. “It’s a little disheartening, really,” Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist at the Canine Detection Research Institute, at Auburn University, in Alabama, told me. “I spent a good six years of my life chasing this idea, only to find that it was all about the limitations of my equipment.”
Just as astonishing, to Waggoner, is a dog’s acuity—the way it can isolate and identify compounds within a scent, like the spices in a soup. Drug smugglers often try to mask the smell of their shipments by packaging them with coffee beans, air fresheners, or sheets of fabric softener. To see if this can fool a dog, Waggoner has flooded his laboratory with different scents, then added minute quantities of heroin or cocaine to the mix. In one case, “the whole damn lab smelled like a Starbucks,” he told me, but the dogs had no trouble homing in on the drug. “They’re just incredible at finding the needle in the haystack.”
The New York police have two kinds of canines: detection dogs and patrol dogs. The former spend most of their time chasing down imaginary threats: terrorist attacks are so rare that the police have to stage simulations, with real explosives, to keep the dogs on their toes. Patrol dogs, on the other hand, have one of the most dangerous jobs in public life. Canine police are often called when a criminal is on the loose, and they’re far more likely than others to have a lethal encounter. “The crimes I get called out on are always in progress,” one officer told me. “The suspects are armed. They’re known to be violent. So, by the mere nature of that call, it’s going to be more dangerous.” He shrugged. “I guess I’m an adrenaline junkie. I got into canine to hunt men.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 5