Canis Major

by Jay Nichols

  * * *

  Sleeping under cars was just easier. It was a low ceiling, sure, but if you got under one after it had been running for a good thirty minutes, the warmth from the engine block kept the chills at bay—for a while, at least. The thermometer only dipped to about eighty at night, and while that may seem balmy, it isn’t. Eighty is downright frigid after a day when the red line nearly spills over the rim of the thin glass tube before sluggishly inching back down in mimicry of the sinking sun.

  Culverts offered more all-around protection, but weird things were always in them. Mike tried culverts a few times, but things—animals—kept brushing against his legs and face while he slept, making him scream out in the night and bump his head against the vaulted ceiling. Then, fully awake, he would scream even louder because he wouldn’t know where he was or how he had arrived there. Plus, culverts stank really bad. Rank, musty odors with no identifiable source made sleep nearly impossible to come by—not that Mike ever considered the possibility that he might be the source of the putrid funk.

  The boys slept in the forest, as he bade. But Mike found the woods way too noisy for any kind of recuperative sleep. The constant chittering of bugs and scraping of little critters as they moved about in their nocturnal errands made Mike remember the culverts and how the animals there had invaded his space. And he didn’t like that. He didn’t like that feeling of being forced out.

  But cars—parked cars—proved the best shelters of all. He forewent the worry tied with being discovered. He only slept three to four hours a night anyway and was always awake and gone before the owners came out. The critters never bothered him under the cars either, except for the occasional cat, which he could easily frighten away by making claws and hissing at it.

  It was under a car—Hector Graham’s Jeep Wrangler, to be exact—that Mike now awaited his nightly slumber. For the past three days, he and his friends had staked out Hector and his mother from their hiding spot behind the backyard fence. He liked spying on the Grahams. They were a lot like Russell’s and Pete’s families: they were rich. Hector wasn’t as rich as Russell or Pete. But he did have a piano, and he got to live in a house that wasn’t sinking.

  The girl Russell liked came by a lot, almost as if she were Hector’s girlfriend and not Russell’s. She’d park her gray car by the curb, walk around the side of the house, and go right in through the back door like she was family. One time, Mike almost took it upon himself to do the same, to push through those two doors and say howdy, maybe rummage through the fridge a bit—Hector and his mom always had the best food—but he was aware of how atrocious he looked. He knew that they’d scream if they saw him. Because he wasn’t ready yet. He was still changing.

  Sometimes when everybody was inside, he would approach the house and place his ear against the window. He only did with the window that never closes right, the one belonging to the room with the piano in it. If the door to that room happened to be shut (and it usually was), Mike would shift his ear six inches to the right and listen to their faraway voices routed through the structure’s wooden beams. They laughed and talked so much, he’d wish he could be in on their conversations and tell a joke or two himself. If given that opportunity, he’d reference his third leg, but he’d do it in such a casual and subtle way that no one would know he’d even made a joke, not until later—until after he had left. But he would know and he would laugh, but he’d laugh on the inside, because that’s what being clever is all about: getting your own jokes and knowing that others will get them later, when you’re away.

  Mike liked the Jeep for the same reason he liked trucks: he didn’t feel boxed in lying underneath it. He had plenty of wiggle room for his arms, and if he wanted to, he could sleep on his side. He had no idea where Hector had come back from, but the engine was nice and toasty when Mike crawled under it less than a minute after the screen door wheezed shut

  Lying in the weedy gravel, Mike listened to the reeee-reeee-reeee of the crickets and the occasional lone bark from one of his friends in the woods. Above his head, the engine clicked mysteriously, ominously. Condensation from the air conditioner dripped onto his neck and pooled warmly in the hollow below his Adam’s apple.

  Sleep was close to washing over him when his eyes registered what appeared to be chicken skin wrapped around the Wrangler’s front axle. Hoping that it might actually be chicken skin, he reached up and pulled at it, tearing a piece away but leaving the majority coiled around the greasy shaft.

  He rubbed the leathery flap between his thumb and forefinger. Whisker-like particles fell onto his chest and face.

  "I know what this is," Mike said with a smile, He scooted out from under the Jeep, into the porch light, where he could chance a closer look at the object.

  He knew he had seen its likeness before.

  But where?

  Then it came to him.

  Those first couple of days, when he and his two buddies had rambled through the wilderness like lost children, they had gone places he’d never been before. Led by Huey and Tommy, Mike had delved deep into the piney woods in search of things he hadn’t known were there. His memory of that time was hazy, since he had been mostly his old self then, and as such, couldn’t fully comprehend the gravity of the situation he was facing. All he had known for certain was that going home was no longer an option and that he had to take care of his friends. Everything else had seemed secondary.

  But he did remember the run-over dog he and his boys stumbled across not far from the play-field. Smelling its rotting decomposition from the woods, they had as one mind decided to investigate. Parting the last tangles of underbrush, they’d spotted the two-lane blacktop and the rumpled black dog spread out on top of it. Silently they’d approached, looking both ways for traffic. Arriving there, they’d formed a semicircle around the body. Mike knew right away it was a Rottweiler, but Huey and Tommy had to put their noses close and sniff the remains to know what they were dealing with. When Mike saw them do this, though, he’d reprimanded them swiftly by swatting their noses and saying, "Bad Dog! Bad Dog! Show some respect, will ya!"

  Mike had then knelt to examine the red tire tracks zigging and zagging over and through the flattened carcass. When the realization hit him, his gorge rose and he vomited bile all over the brown and black fur. Regret flooded him immediately. So disrespectful…so disrespectful…

  Animals, he’d thought. How could anybody do this to a dog?

  Then, all of a sudden, he’d needed to know the dog’s name, because if he knew his name, then maybe he could say a few words like people did at funerals. So he reached for the collar, bypassing the weird V-shaped jaw the killer had left the dog with, and read the name and address etched onto the metal tag.

  "Hmmm," he’d said, rising to his feet. Then saying "hmmm" again, he’d loped back to the woods. Huey and Tommy trailing behind. Just before they all arrived at the tree line, Mike veered left, stopped before a thick-trunked Southern Pine, and sniffed deeply of its bark.

  "I don’t think so…" he’d said, unbuttoning his fly and pushing his shorts to his knees.

  Then, arching back, he’d forced a stream of urine high up the trunk. A lot of the piss, but not all, splashed off the bark and rained onto his arms, legs, and face.

  He didn’t seem to mind.

  He didn’t even know what he was doing.

  Now, resting on his stomach in the glow of orange porch light, examining a piece of fur he had definitely seen before, he said to the chirping crickets, "Hector, Hector, Hector.…You really stepped in it this time."

  Clucking his tongue, he ran his dirty fingers over the Jeep’s tire tread. "You’ve got the worst luck, don’tchu?"

  Then, like a frisbee, he tossed the flap of doghide at the carport, where it slapped against the shed door and fell to the gravel next to the Monte Carlo’s front tires. Mike crawled back under the Wrangler and tried to sleep but found he was too excited to even close his eyes. Instead, he reached up and peeled the remainder of the skin f
rom the axle and bumper and placed it on his bare chest, hoping it would keep him warm once the heat from the engine dissipated. He knew it was a stupid thing to do, but he did it anyway. A wild impulse ricocheted through his head, telling him it would be okay to eat the skin since it looked so much like beef jerky. That, too, he surmised, would be a stupid thing to do. It didn’t even smell like something he could eat.

  Ultimately, he dug a shallow pit in the gravel and buried the assorted scraps of hide in it. He even ventured out to grab the flap he had thrown at the shed. He didn’t want there to be any evidence that he had been there and discovered Hector’s shameful, dirty secret.

  No one can know what I know yet.

  Under the ticking engine, with his hands laced under his head and an all but invisible smile on his filthy face, Mike O’Brien charted his plans of action. The framework had been set days ago, but the details he was still tweaking—even today. Nothing was set in stone yet, and Mike marveled at all the help everybody seemed to be freely giving him. They dug their own graves. All he had to do was push them in. The discovery under Hector’s Jeep had been totally fortuitous—just another sign he was on the right track. He knew he could work it in somehow.

  He was so smart.

  He was so talented.

  He was so strong.

  He’d find a way.

  It’ll be tomorrow, he thought excitedly. Tomorrow night. Then they’ll see what I’ve become. Especially Rusty, that asshole. He’ll see it all; then he’ll understand what he did to me.

  But first, I’ll need to find some paper. And a pencil. Lucky me, I know exactly where to get that kind of stuff.

  Tomorrow’s gonna be a busy day.

  I’ve got places to go and letters to write.

  Mike then drifted off into a sleep as deep and boundless as the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Tucked away in the forest, his boys did the same. They slept on the ground, too—but unlike their master, they lay huddled together in a large nest made of fallen pine needles.

  Far above the sea of triangle treetops, to the south, the constellation Scorpius poked his head over the horizon, as if to gaze upon the sleeping conspirators below. What evil deeds they were planning he did not know, but he kept his stinger poised and ready. An attack was imminent. He could sense it.