And suddenly, I didn’t want to kill her at all. I wanted to hold her. Very tight. So I did. And she was crying into my chest, and making little fists beating on my back, and then she was looking up at me and running her words all together: “Oh, Vic, I’m sorry, so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I had to, I was sent out to, I was so scared, and I love you, and now they’ve got you down here, and it isn’t dirty, is it, it isn’t the way my Poppa says it is, is it?”
I held her and kissed her and told her it was okay, and then I asked her if she wanted to come away with me, and she said yes yes yes she really did. So I told her I might have to hurt her Poppa to get away, and she got a look in her eyes that I knew real well.
For all her propriety, Quilla June Holmes didn’t much like her prayer-shouting Poppa.
I asked her if she had anything heavy, like a candlestick or a club, and she said no. So I went rummaging around in that back bedroom and found a pair of her Poppa’s socks in a bureau drawer. I pulled the big brass balls off the headboard of the bed and dropped them into the sock. I hefted it. Oh. Yeah.
She stared at me with big eyes. “What’re you going to do?”
“You want to get out of here?”
She nodded.
“Then just stand back behind the door. No, wait a minute. I got a better idea. Get on the bed.”
She lay down on the bed. “Okay,” I said, “now pull up your skirt, pull off your pants, and spread out.” She gave me a look of pure horror. “Do it,” I said. “If you want out.”
So she did it, and I rearranged her so her knees were bent and her legs open at the thighs, and I stood to one side of the door, and whispered to her, “Call your Poppa. Just him.”
She hesitated a long moment, then she called out in a voice she didn’t have to fake, “Poppa! Poppa, come here, please!” Then she clamped her eyes shut tight.
Ira Holmes came through the door, took one look at his secret desire, his mouth dropped open, I kicked the door closed behind him and walloped him as hard as I could. He squished a little, and spattered the bedspread, and went very down.
She opened her eyes when she heard the thunk! and when the stuff spattered her legs, she leaned over and puked on the floor. I knew she wouldn’t be much good to me in getting Aaron into the room, so I opened the door, stuck my head around, looked worried, and said, “Aaron, would you come here a minute, please?” He looked at Lew, who was rapping with Mrs. Holmes about what was going on in the back bedroom, and when Lew nodded him on, he came into the room. He took a look at Quilla June’s naked bush, at the blood on the wall and bedspread, at Ira on the floor, and opened his mouth to yell just as I whacked him. It took two more to get him down, and then I had to kick him in the chest to put him away. Quilla June was still puking.
I grabbed her by the arm and swung her up off the bed. At least she was being quiet about it, but man, did she stink.
“Come on!”
She tried to pull back, but I held on and opened the bedroom door. As I pulled her out, Lew stood up, leaning on his cane. I kicked the cane out from under the old fart and down he went in a heap. Mrs. Holmes was staring at us, wondering where her old man was. “He’s back in there,” I said, heading for the front door. “The Good Lord got him in the head.”
Then we were out in the street, Quilla June stinking along behind me, dry-heaving and bawling and probably wondering what had happened to her underpants.
They kept my weapons in a locked case at the Better Business Bureau, and we detoured around by my boarding house where I pulled the crowbar I’d swiped from the gas station out from under the back porch. Then we cut across behind the Grange and into the business section, and straight into the BBB. There was a clerk who tried to stop me, and I split his gourd with the crowbar. Then I pried the latch off the cabinet in Lew’s office and got the .30-06 and my .45 and all the ammo, and my spike and my knife and my kit, and loaded up. By that time Quilla June was able to make some sense.
“Where we gonna go, where we gonna go, oh Poppa Poppa Popp … !”
“Hey, listen, Quilla June, Poppa me no Poppas. You said you wanted to be with me … well, I’m goin’! Up, baby, and if you wanna go with me, you better stick close.”
She was too scared to object.
I stepped out the front of the shop, and there was that green box sentry, coming on like a whippet. It had its cables out, and the mittens were gone. It had hooks.
I dropped to one knee, wrapped the sling of the .30-06 around my forearm, sighted clean, and fired dead at the big eye in the front. One shot, spang!
Hit that eye, the thing exploded in a shower of sparks, and the green box swerved and went through the front window of The Mill End Shoppe, screeching and crying and showering the place with flames and sparks. Nice.
I turned around to grab Quilla June, but she was gone. I looked off down the street, and here came all the vigilantes, Lew hobbling along with his cane like some kind of weird grasshopper.
And right then the shots started. Big, booming sounds. The .45 I’d given Quilla June. I looked up, and on the porch around the second floor, there she was, the automatic down on the railing like a pro, sighting into that mob and snapping off shots like maybe Wild Bill Elliott in a ’40s Republic flick.
But dumb! Mother dumb! Wasting time on that, when we had to get away.
I found the outside staircase going up there, and took it three steps at a time. She was smiling and laughing, and every time she’d pick one of those boobs out of the pack her little tonguetip would peek out of the corner of her mouth, and her eyes would get all slick and wet and wham! down the boob would go.
She was really into it.
Just as I reached her, she sighted down on her scrawny mother. I slammed the back of her head, and she missed the shot, and the old lady did a little dance-step and kept coming. Quilla June whipped her head around at me, and there was kill in her eyes. “You made me miss.” The voice gave me a chill.
I took the .45 away from her. Dumb. Wasting ammunition like that.
Dragging her behind me, I circled the building, found a shed out back, dropped down onto it, and had her follow. She was scared at first, but I said, “Chick can shoot her old lady as easy as you do shouldn’t be worried about a drop this small.” She got out on the ledge, other side of the railing and held on. “Don’t worry,” I said, “you won’t wet your pants. You haven’t got any.”
She laughed, like a bird, and dropped. I caught her, we slid down the shed door, and took a second to see if that mob was hard on us. Nowhere in sight.
I grabbed Quilla June by the arm and started off toward the south end of Topeka. It was the closest exit I’d found in my wandering, and we made it in about fifteen minutes, panting and weak as kittens.
And there it was.
A big air-intake duct.
I pried off the clamps with the crowbar, and we climbed up inside. There were ladders going up. There had to be. It figured. Repairs. Keep it clean. Had to be. We started climbing.
It took a long, long time.
Quilla June kept asking me, from down behind me, whenever she got too tired to climb, “Vic, do you love me?” I kept saying yes. Not only because I meant it. It helped her keep climbing.
X
We came up a mile from the access dropshaft. I shot off the filter covers and the hatch bolts, and we climbed out. They should have known better down there. You don’t fuck around with Jimmy Cagney.
They never had a chance.
Quilla June was exhausted. I didn’t blame her. But I didn’t want to spend the night out in the open; there were things out there I didn’t like to think about meeting even in daylight. It was getting on toward dusk.
We walked toward the access dropshaft.
Blood was waiting.
He looked weak. But he’d waited.
I stooped down and lifted his head. He
opened his eyes, and very softly he said, “Hey.”
I smiled at him. Jesus, it was good to see him. “We made it back, man.”
He tried to get up, but he couldn’t. The wounds on him were in ugly shape. “Have you eaten?” I asked.
“No. Grabbed a lizard yesterday … or maybe it was day before. I’m hungry, Vic.”
Quilla June came up then, and Blood saw her. He closed his eyes. “We’d better hurry, Vic,” she said. “Please. They might come up from the dropshaft.”
I tried to lift Blood. He was dead weight. “Listen, Blood, I’ll leg it into the city and get some food. I’ll come back quick. You just wait here.”
“Don’t go in there, Vic,” he said. “I did a recon the day after you went down. They found out we weren’t fried in that gym. I don’t know how. Maybe mutts smelled our track. I’ve been keeping watch, and they haven’t tried to come out after us. I don’t blame them. You don’t know what it’s like out here at night, man … you don’t know … ”
He shivered.
“Take it easy, Blood.”
“But they’ve got us marked lousy in the city, Vic. We can’t go back there. We’ll have to make it someplace else.”
That put it on a different stick. We couldn’t go back, and with Blood in that condition we couldn’t go forward. And I knew, good as I was solo, I couldn’t make it without him. And there wasn’t anything out here to eat. He had to have food at once, and some medical care. I had to do something. Something good, something fast.
“Vic!” Quilla June’s voice was high and whining. “Come on! He’ll be all right. We have to hurry!”
I looked up at her. The sun was sinking into the darkness. Blood trembled in my arms.
She got a pouty look on her face. “If you love me, you’ll come on!”
I couldn’t make it alone out there without him. I knew it. If I loved her. She asked me, in the boiler, do you know what love is?
It was a small fire, not nearly big enough for any roverpak to spot from the outskirts of the city. No smoke. And after Blood had eaten his fill, I carried him to the air-duct a mile away, and we spent the night inside on a little ledge. I held him all night. He slept good. In the morning, I fixed him up pretty good. He’d make it; he was strong.
He ate again. There was plenty left from the night before. I didn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry.
We started off across the blasted wasteland that morning. We’d find another city, and make it.
We had to move slow because Blood was still limping. It took a long time before I stopped hearing her calling in my head. Asking me, asking me: Do you know what love is?
Sure I know.
A boy loves his dog.
AHBHU
The Passing of One Man’s Inspiration and Best Friend
Yesterday my dog died. For eleven years Ahbhu was my closest friend. He was responsible for my writing a story about a boy and his dog that many people have read. The story was made into a successful movie. The dog in the movie looked a lot like Ahbhu. He was not a pet, he was a person. It was impossible to anthropomorphize him, he wouldn’t stand for it. But he was so much his own kind of creature, he had such a strongly formed personality, he was so determined to share his life with only those he chose, that it was also impossible to think of him as simply a dog. Apart from those canine characteristics into which he was locked by his genes, he comported himself like one of a kind.
We met when I came to him at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter. I’d wanted a dog because I was lonely and I’d remembered when I was a little boy how my dog had been a friend when I had no other friends. One summer I went away to camp and when I returned I found a rotten old neighbor lady from up the street had had my dog picked up and gassed while my father was at work. I crept into the woman’s backyard that night and found a rug hanging on the clothesline. The rug beater was hanging from a post. I stole it and buried it.
At the Animal Shelter there was a man in line ahead of me. He had brought in a puppy only a few weeks old. A Puli, a Hungarian sheep dog; it was a sad-looking thing. He had too many in the litter and had brought in this one either to be taken by someone else or to be put to sleep. They took the dog inside and the man behind the counter called my turn. I told him I wanted a dog and he took me back inside to walk down the line of cages.
In one of the cages, the little Puli that had just been brought in was being assaulted by three larger dogs that had been earlier tenants. He was a little thing, and he was on the bottom, getting the stuffing knocked out of him. He was struggling mightily.
“Get him out of there!” I yelled. “I’ll take him, I’ll take him, get him out of there!”
He cost two dollars. It was the best two bucks I ever spent.
Driving home with him, he was lying on the other side of the front seat, staring at me. I had had a vague idea what I’d name a pet, but as I stared at him, and he stared back at me, I suddenly was put in mind of the scene in Alexander Korda’s 1939 film The Thief of Bagdad, where the evil vizier, played by Conrad Veidt, had changed Ahbhu, the little thief, played by Sabu, into a dog. The film had superimposed the human over the canine face for a moment, so there was an extraordinary look of intelligence in the face of the little dog. The little Puli was looking at me with that same expression. “Ahbhu,” I said.
He didn’t react to the name, but then he couldn’t have cared less. But that was his name, from that time on.
No one who ever came into my house was unaffected by him. When he sensed someone with good vibrations, he was right there, lying at their feet. He loved to be scratched, and despite years of admonitions he refused to stop begging for scraps at the table, because he had found most of the people who came to dinner at my house were patsies unable to escape his woebegone Jackie-Coogan-as-the-Kid look.
But he was a certain barometer of bums, as well. On any number of occasions when I found someone I liked, and Ahbhu would have nothing to do with him or her, it always turned out the person was a wrongo. I took to noting his attitude toward newcomers, and I must admit it influenced my own reactions. I was always wary of someone Ahbhu shunned.
Women with whom I had had unsatisfactory affairs would nonetheless return to the house from time to time to visit the dog. He had an intimate circle of friends, many of whom had nothing to do with me, and numbering among their company some of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood. One exquisite lady used to send her driver to pick him up for Sunday afternoon romps at the beach.
I never asked him what happened on those occasions. He didn’t talk.
Last year he started going downhill, though I didn’t realize it because he maintained the manner of a puppy almost to the end. But he began sleeping too much, and he couldn’t hold down his food—not even the Hungarian meals prepared for him by the Magyars who lived up the street. And it became apparent to me something was wrong with him when he got scared during the big Los Angeles earthquake last year. Ahbhu wasn’t afraid of anything. He attacked the Pacific Ocean and walked tall around vicious cats. But the quake terrified him and he jumped up in my bed and threw his forelegs around my neck. I was very nearly the only victim of the earthquake to die from animal strangulation.
He was in and out of the veterinarian’s shop all through the early part of this year, and the idiot always said it was his diet.
Then one Sunday when he was out in the backyard, I found him lying at the foot of the stairs, covered with mud, vomiting so heavily all he could bring up was bile. He was matted with his own refuse and he was trying desperately to dig his nose into the earth for coolness. He was barely breathing. I took him to a different vet.
At first they thought it was just old age—that they could pull him through. But finally they took X-rays and saw the cancer had taken hold in his stomach and liver.
I put off the day as much as I could. Somehow I just couldn’t conceive of
a world that didn’t have him in it. But yesterday I went to the vet’s office and signed the euthanasia papers.
“I’d like to spend a little time with him, before,” I said.
They brought him in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had grown so thin. He’d always had a pot-belly, and it was gone. The muscles in his hind legs were weak, flaccid. He came to me and put his head into the hollow of my armpit. He was trembling violently. I lifted his head and he looked at me with that comic face I’d always thought made him look like Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man. He knew. Sharp as hell, right up to the end, hey old friend? He knew, and he was scared. He trembled all the way down to his spiderweb legs.This bouncing ball of hair that, when lying on a dark carpet, could be taken for a sheepskin rug, with no way to tell at which end head and which end tail. So thin. Shaking, knowing what was going to happen to him. But still a puppy.
I cried, and my eyes closed as my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my arms because we hadn’t done much crying at one another. I was ashamed of myself, not to be taking it as well as he was.
I got to, pup, because you’re in pain and you can’t eat. I got to. But he didn’t want to know that.
The vet came in, then. He was a nice guy and he asked me if I wanted to go away and just let it be done.
Then Ahbhu came up out of there and looked at me.
There is a scene in Kazan’s and Steinbeck’s Viva Zapata where a close friend of Zapata’s, Brando’s, has been condemned for conspiring with the federales. A friend that had been with Zapata since the mountains, since the revolucion had begun. And they come to the hut to take him to the firing squad, and Brando starts out, and his friend stops him with a hand on his arm, and he says to him with great friendship, “Emiliano, do it yourself.”
Ahbhu looked at me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with human tongue he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look, don’t leave me with strangers.
So I held him as they laid him down and the vet slipped the lanyard up around his right foreleg and drew it tight to bulge the vein, and I held his head and he turned it away from me as the needle went in. It was impossible to tell the moment he passed over from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered shut and he was gone.
A Boy and His Dog Page 5