WHEN I WAS A BOY MY FAMILY ALWAYS HAD HUNTING dogs, always bird dogs, once a couple of blueticks, and for six years anywhere from six to fifteen beagles. But we never really got to where we liked to eat rabbit, and we tired of the club politics of hunting deer, so we penned up the beagles, added two black Labs, and figured we’d do a little duck.

Those were raucous days around the house, the big pen in the back with the beagles squawling, up on their hind legs against the fence, making noises like someone was cutting their tails off. It was their way. At night when I crept out into the yard they fell silent, their white necks exposed to the moon, their soft round eyes upon me. They made small, disturbed, guttural sounds like chickens.

Neighbors finally sent the old man to municipal court charged with something like disturbing the peace, and since my mother swore that anyway she’d never fry another rabbit, they looked like little bloody babies once skinned, she said, he farmed out the beagles and spent his Saturdays visiting this dog or that, out to Uncle Spurgeon’s to see Jimbo, the best runner of the pack. Or out to Bud’s rambling shack, where Bud lived with old Patsy and Balls, the breeder. They hollered like nuclear warning sirens when the old man drove up in his Ford.

After that he went into decline. He liked the Labs but never took much interest, they being already a hollow race of dog, the official dog of the middle class. He let them lounge around the porch under the ceiling fan and lope around the yard and the neighborhood, aimless loafers, and took to watching war movies on TV in his room, wandering through the house speaking to us like we were neighbors to hail, engage in small talk, and bid farewell. He was a man who had literally abandoned the hunt. He was of the generation that had moved to the city. He was no longer a man who lived among dogs.

It wasn’t long after that I moved out anyway, and got married to live with Lois in a dogless suburban house, a quiet world that seemed unanchored somehow, half inhabited, pale and blank, as if it would one day dissolve to fog, lines blurring, and seep away into air, as indeed it would. We bought a telescope and spent some nights in the yard tracking the cold lights of the stars and planets, looking for patterns, never suspecting that here were the awful bloody secrets of the ancient human heart and that every generation must flesh them out anew. Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we’ve placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned. He is who he is, and his only task is to assert this. If he. desires the company of another dog, or if he wishes to mate, things can get a little complex. But the ways of settling such things are established and do not change. And when they are settled and he is home from his wandering he may have a flickering moment, a sort of Pickett’s Charge across the synaptic field toward reflection. But the moment passes. And when it passes it leaves him with a vague disquietude, a clear nose that on a good night could smell the lingering presence of men on the moon, and the rest of the day ahead of him like a canyon.

THE DOG CAME TO THE CURB’S EDGE AND STOPPED. The man holding on to his halter stopped beside him. Across the street, the signal flashed the words “Don’t Walk.” The dog saw the signal but paid little notice. He was trained to see what mattered: the absence of moving traffic. The signal kept blinking. The cars kept driving through the intersection. He watched the cars, listened to the intensity of their engines, the arid whine of their tires. He listened for something he’d become accustomed to hearing, the buzz and tumbling of switches from the box on the pole next to them. The dog associated it with the imminent stopping of the cars. He looked back over his right shoulder at the man, who stood with his head cocked, listening to the traffic.

A woman behind them spoke up.

“Huh,” she said. “The light’s stuck.”

The dog looked at her, then turned back to watch the traffic, which continued to rush through the intersection without pause.

“I’m going down a block,” the woman said. She spoke to the man. “Would you like me to show you a detour? No telling how long this light will be.”

“No, thank you,” the man said. “We’ll just wait a little bit. Right, Buck?” The dog looked back over his shoulder at the man, then watched the woman walk away.

“Good luck,” the woman said. The dog’s ears stood up and he stiffened for just a second.

“She said ‘luck,’ not ‘Buck,’ ” the man said, laughing easily and reaching down to scratch the dog’s ears. He gripped the loose skin on Buck’s neck with his right hand and gave it an affectionate shake. He continued to hold the halter guide loosely with his left.

The dog watched the traffic rush by.

“We’ll just wait here, Buck,” the man said. “By the time we go a block out of our way, the light will’ve fixed itself.” He cleared his throat and cocked his head, as if listening for something. The dog dipped his head and shifted his shoulders in the halter.

The man laughed softly.

“If we went down a block, I’ll bet that light would get stuck, too. We’d be following some kind of traveling glitch across town. We could go for miles, and then end up in some field, and a voice saying, ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve summoned you here.’ ”

It was the longest they’d ever stood waiting for traffic to stop. The dog saw people across the street wait momentarily, glance around, then leave. He watched the traffic. It began to have a hypnotic effect upon him: the traffic, the blinking crossing signal. His focus on the next move, the crossing, on the implied courses of the pedestrians around them and those still waiting at the opposite curb, on the potential obstructions ahead, dissolved into the rare luxury of wandering attention.

The sounds of the traffic grinding through the intersection were diminished to a small aural dot in the back of his mind, and he became aware of the regular bleat of a slow-turning box fan in an open window of the building behind them. Odd scents distinguished themselves in his nostrils and blended into a rich funk that swirled about the pedestrians who stopped next to them, a secret aromatic history that eddied about him even as the pedestrians muttered among themselves and moved on.

The hard clean smell of new shoe leather seeped from the air-conditioned stores, overlaying the drift of worn leather and grime that eased from tiny musty pores in the sidewalk. He snuffled at them and sneezed. In a trembling confusion he was aware of all that was carried in the breeze, the strong odor of tobacco and the sharp rake of its smoke, the gasoline and exhaust fumes and the stench of aging rubber, the fetid waves that rolled through it all from garbage bins in the alleys and on the backstreet curbs.

He lowered his head and shifted his shoulders in the harness like a boxer.

“Easy, Buck,” the man said.

Sometimes in their room the man paced the floor and seemed to say his words in time with his steps until he became like a lulling clock to Buck as he lay resting beneath the dining table. He dozed to the man’s mumbling and the sifting sound of his fingers as they grazed the pages of his book. At times in their dark room the man sat on the edge of his cot and scratched Buck’s ears and spoke to him. “Panorama, Buck,” he would say. “That’s the most difficult to recall. I can see the details, with my hands, with my nose, my tongue. It brings them back. But the big picture. I feel like I must be replacing it with something phony, like a Disney movie or something.” Buck looked up at the man’s shadowed face in the dark room, at his small eyes in their sallow depressions.

On the farm where he’d been raised before his training at the school, Buck’s name had been Pete. The children and the old man and the woman had tussled with him, thrown sticks, said, “Pete! Good old Pete.” They called out to him, mumbled the name into his fur. But now the man always said “Buck” in the same tone of voice, soft and gentle. As if the man were speaking to himself. As if Buck were not really there.

“I miss colors, Buck,” the man would say. “It’s getting harder to remember them. The blue planet. I remember that. Pictures from space. From out in the blackness.”

Looking up from the intersection, Buck saw birds dart through the sky between buildings as quickly as they slipped past the open window at dawn. He heard their high-pitched cries so clearly that he saw their beady eyes, their barbed tongues flicking between parted beaks. He salivated at the dusky taste of a dove once he’d held in his mouth. And in his most delicate bones he felt the murmur of some incessant activity, the low hum beyond the visible world. His hackles rose and his muscles tingled with electricity.

There was a metallic whirring, like a big fat June bug stuck on its back, followed by the dull clunk of the switch in the traffic control box. Cars stopped. The lane opened up before them, and for a moment no one moved, as if the empty-eyed vehicles were not to be trusted, restrained only by some fragile miracle of faith. He felt the man carefully regrip the leather harness. He felt the activity of the world spool down into the tight and rifled tunnel of their path.

“Forward, Buck,” said the man.

He leaned into the harness and moved them into the world.

AGNES MENKEN, MISSING HER LEFT EYE, AND BOB the bulldog, missing his right, often sat together on their porch, Agnes in her straight-backed rocking chair and Bob in her lap. Together they could see anything coming, Bob to one side and Agnes to the other. They always seemed to be staring straight ahead but really they were looking both ways.

Whereas Bob’s bad right eye was sewn up, Agnes had a false one that roved. It was obvious to her that people often had trouble telling which eye was the good one, so sometimes she would look at them awhile with the good one, and then when they’d become comfortable with this she switched and looked at them with the false one, which was clear and had the direct hard-bearing frankness of detachment. In her good eye’s peripheral vision she could see the general distress that this caused.

Despite his years and his sewn-up eye, Bob was as stout and fit as a young dog. He stayed that way naturally, as dogs of his type will, having the metabolism of all small muscular animals. He was tight, compact— much like her late husband, Pops, but just the opposite of Agnes, who was lanky. Officially, he had been Pops’s dog, the son he’d never had, she supposed. In that way Agnes had felt at best like a stepmother, standing just a little apart. Pops and Bob had understood one another, shared a language of some kind that only they’d understood, whereas Agnes could never tell if Bob was listening to her or not.

Nevertheless, she and Bob had become closer in the year since Pops had died. They had their routine together. Bob ate twice a day, morning and evening. He got to stay outside in the fenced backyard as long as he wanted during the day. At night he slept on Agnes’s bed, down near the footboard. And every evening, once early and once late, she let him out to pee in the yard. A neighbor wandered out back to look at the moon would see the light on her back.porch snap on, the door creak open, see Bob come flying out onto the grass, snarling and grunting the way Boston bulldogs do, dashing around in the dark near the back of the yard. But Agnes hadn’t the patience with him Pops’d had, how Pops would sit at the kitchen table smoking, sipping coffee, waiting till Bob sauntered back up to the door and barked to be let back in. Now, Bob would hardly have time to pee before the door creaked open on its hinges again and Agnes started in on him, saying, “Where are you? What are you doing back there? Go on, now. Go on and do what you’re gonna do. What are you doing? Come on. Come on in here and finish up your supper. I want to go to bed. Come on in this door. Where are you? Please, Bob. I’m tired, boy. What are you doing out there? Come on in here. Come on. Come on.” Then Bob would stop, sniff around, shoot a quick stream into the monkey grass, lob a fading arc to the bark of the popcorn tree, and then leap back into the light of the porch. And she would pull the door shut, turn all three dead bolts, snap off the kitchen light, and feel her way along the hallway to bed.

THAT AFTERNOON HER HUSBAND DROVE THEM OUT the old Birmingham highway in the wagon, a 1985 Ford LTD Country Squire he’d bought on a lark in these, the latter days of what she called her great gestation. It was a big, safe car. He drove slowly as always, taking it easy, never straining the wagon’s enormous transmission. The car sailed over humps in the road like a yacht over swells in the ocean, and plowed into low-lying dips with a grave and leveling balanced distribution of load.

They sat on the broad front seat as small as children, as if their feet weren’t actually touching the floor. The car’s long, broad interior even made her feel small, with her swollen middle and engorged, stretch-marked, leaky sacs — once girlish breasts she could cup in her palms. Sitting there, she felt like a penitent, pregnant twelve-year-old on an outing with her dad.

After a few miles her husband turned on the wagon’s left blinker, looked in the rearview mirror, checked once over his left shoulder, and turned, releasing a convoy of impatient vehicles gathered behind him. In her visor’s vanity mirror she caught flashes of the angry faces of drivers who watched the Ford mosey off down the little blacktop road.

It was getting toward late afternoon, the sun dropping in the sky and yellowing in the haze. On the left appeared a lush, rolling pasture where two piebald horses grazed in the shade of a grove and flicked their tails at horseflies.

“Oh, look,” she said. “Pintos. Let’s stop, just for a minute.” She’d ridden horses as a girl, and hoped she would again someday, with their child. Her husband eased the wagon onto the shoulder and came around to help her get out. He held her by the arm while she steadied her legs and rolled her weight from the ball of one swollen foot to another, over to the barbed-wire fence. The wire was rusty. They didn’t touch it or try to cross it into the pasture. He whistled a couple of times for the ponies, who looked up from grazing to gaze at them briefly. The smaller one toggled its ears in their direction, and then both bent back down to the sweet-looking grass.

“I wish we had an apple or something,” she said.

“We’d better get on,” he said. “We’ll be late.”

She lingered a moment. “It’s a good omen,” she said, “seeing the ponies.”

Omens weren’t as important to him as to her, she knew, but he was not unaffected by them. Once, after a breakup, she saw an early star right next to the moon, which was full and distinct as a white communion wafer she might reach up, take, and place upon her tongue. She hadn’t taken communion since she was a girl. It had been a very good sign.

He helped her back to the car, and they drove on down the road to a T intersection, where he turned right onto a bumpy lane pocked with potholes and ragged on the edges, as if it had been ripped from the middle of a better road and patched with surplus asphalt. The car jolted and rattled over a washed-out stretch. He slowed even more and looked over at her. She put both hands on her middle as if to steady it.

“I’m okay,” she said, patting herself. “Good shocks.”

They descended into a wooded ravine and crossed a small bridge over a creek. The water rushed beneath them over what looked like slate and plunged into a lower cut off to their left, disappearing into the thick, intertwined foliage of the woods. She wondered at what sort of wildlife crept in there, what strange small animals. Manimals, she’d called animals when she was a toddler. She’d had a sonogram a couple of months back, and was awed and a little frightened by the baby’s alien image on the screen, its wide dark eye sockets and oddly reptilian attitude in the womb. In some ways it was like the grainy, negative image of a nightmare, and yet she felt a profound and overwhelming love the moment she saw it. She was superstitious, she knew, because she had a vulnerable imagination.

The car rose, like an airliner groaning into flight, up the steep other side of the ravine. At the top of the hill he turned right again, onto a hard-packed dirt-and-gravel road that wound into the woods, climbed, and ended in a clearing on top of a knoll from which two narrow drives dropped away.

“I think we take the left one here,” her husband said. The drive he indicated, half the width of the dirt-and-gravel road, seemed to lead off into the air at the treetop level of broadleafs that grew down in the canyon. He eased the wagon up to the edge and they peered over it, where they saw a steep and rutted drive that curved sharply at the bottom into a clearing. Through the trees they could see part of a house and beyond that the slanting late-afternoon light glinting on water.

“There must be lakes all through these old canyons,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind living out here.”

The wagon’s engine idled alternately high and low, adjusting to the condenser cycling on and off. He turned off the air and rolled down every window in the car, using the control panel on his armrest, then turned off the car. The engine ticked like a conductor’s baton upon the music stand, the silence of the woods settled into their ears, and they began to hear the desultory drone of insects, the oddly loud, staccato songs of birds, and some low sound they couldn’t distinguish: water, a breeze in the trees, or both.

“It’s so quiet.”

“I could get used to it,” he said.

“Be careful with this dog, okay?”

“I will. I won’t get out if it doesn’t look right.”

“Okay,” she said.

“We don’t have to get another dog right now, if you don’t want to. It’s not really important.”

“No, it’s all right. I know you miss Rowdy.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I miss him.”

“I just want to make sure this dog’s — I don’t know — good-natured.”

“He’s got a hard act to follow.”

“I know. Rowdy was the best.”

“Yep,” he said. “He was.”

They peered again over the edge of the drive. The car was perched just there.

“Well,” he said, “we’d better get on.”

He didn’t crank the car again, but merely turned the ignition switch to On, dropped the gearshift to Neutral, and allowed the wagon to roll slowly off the knoll and down the narrow drive. It was steep and rutted with erosion, most of its gravel had washed away. The experience was like a slow-motion bronco ride. They were pressed forward into their seat belts and shoulder straps so that her arms actually hung forward toward the dash. She felt a faint, quick wave of nausea and almost wished she hadn’t come along.

At the bottom of the hill they turned into a muddy clearing in front of a small brick home and immediately were rushed by three friendly, barking, tail-wagging dogs. As he got out of the car, the dogs mobbed him, rising on their hind legs and raking his clothes with muddy paws, licking his hands. The dogs were so absurdly happy that she couldn’t suppress a rush of pleasure at seeing them. They wagged their whole rears, spines curling, tails whipping, and ran back and forth between her open window and her husband, desperate for both their attentions at once, transported into happy madness at their arrival. He looked back at her, delighted, and she laughed out loud.

“What great dogs,” she called out the window. Her husband was smiling, tussling with two of the dogs, a big thick-coated shepherd-husky mix with a massive head, and a medium-sized shorthaired dog with white and brown splotches like birthmarks: a plain mutt. The two dogs nipped at his hands and his wrists and pants cuffs. A smaller dog, like a Welsh corgi but surely some mongrel collie mix, wriggled around them, vying for space.

She felt it was safe to get out of the car, so she opened the door and, by rocking backwards a little bit first, rolled out onto her feet. The dogs rushed her but held back, as if sensing she required gentler handling. They brushed and bumped their shoulders and rumps against her, twining themselves around her knees and through her legs, whining in barely suppressed fits of joy. She reached down to scratch the little collie’s head and the dog went still, its soft brown eyes looking up into hers. A sudden heaviness in her chest almost brought tears to her eyes.

She knew what this was about, understood mood swings, irrational fears, hormonal problems. She was even brighter probably than her husband, who had earned his Ph.D. but kept his job teaching high school chemistry because he believed it was where he was most needed. She watched him tussle with the dogs, who’d trotted back over to him. She would have become a teacher, too, but for her somewhat fragile selfesteem, which combined with stage fright and sullen students to make the task impossible. Such failure made her angry and impatient with herself. She did not want to seem weak. In regular jobs she was disillusioned by the cynicism people used to survive; they wielded it like medieval broadswords, without grace and with callous indifference to what incidental damage might be done. The small, still dog whose soft coat she stroked with her palm was innocent of all that.

The other two dogs had come back to her, crowding out the smaller dog, and she knelt with determination into the chaos of whipping tails and thrusting snouts, braved the wet swipe of broad pink tongues across her face. She saw her husband straighten up and face the house, brushing his hands off on his khaki trousers as a short, thick man walked around the comer and approached them. He wore a neat flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of knee-high white rubber boots over the jeans leggings. His broad square face was cleanshaven and his hair was cut in a careless, outgrown flattop. She guessed his age at about fifty. The butt of a small pistol protruded from a short leather holster on his belt.

“Hello,” her husband said. “We called about buying a dog?”

The man nodded.

“Which one you want?”

Her husband paused, then looked at her.

“Well,” he said, looking at the dogs, who were wriggling and trotting back and forth between them and the man. The man paid the dogs no attention. “I spoke to someone — your wife? — and I think she said you had a young retriever mix. A golden.”

The man pointed briefly at the big dog.

“How about him?”

Her husband reached down to stroke the shepherd-husky’s head, and then looked at his wife where she knelt carefully, allowing the little collie and the brown-and-white dog to nuzzle her. She glanced at the house and saw that shades were drawn over the windows. Where there’d once been shrubs around the house were bare brown stalks, the gray earth around them worn and pocked with smooth depressions where she guessed the dogs lay cooling during the day. The screened door of a back porch hung open, its wire sections browned and splayed from their frames. She put her hands on her knees and pushed herself to her feet.

“Is the retriever around?” she said.

“Well, the retriever,” the man said, “I sold him.”

“That’s too bad,” her husband said after a moment. “When we spoke to your wife this morning she said we could come and get the retriever this afternoon.”

“Well,” the man said, reaching down to pick up a small fallen branch and toss it into the brush at the edge of the yard, “she don’t know what’s here and what ain’t. I had to get rid of that dog. He give me some trouble this morning.”

Her husband became somber and closed. He fixed his eyes on the other man, who then looked up and regarded them with disdain, it seemed: first her husband, and then her. It alarmed her to be looked at so directly. His eyes held no trace of compassion. He cared no more for them than he did for these dogs.

“All right, then,” her husband said. “You want to sell us one of these dogs?”

“No,” the man said. “Just take whichever one you want.”

“You’re giving them away?”

“That’s right.”

“We’d be glad to pay. I understood from your wife they’ve had their shots.”

The man seemed distracted. He hawked and spat an amoeboid glob onto the dirt.

“It really don’t make any difference to me,” he said. “These strays come up out the woods. She can’t stand their barking and carrying on. Take them all if you want to. Put them in that big station wagon and take them off.” He squared off and looked each of them in each face. “I don’t give a tinker’s damn. It wadn’t my ad in the paper.”

She saw her husband’s face slowly darken with anger. He pushed his hands into his pants pockets and she saw his lips tighten.

After a moment he said, “I can see there’s been a misunderstanding. I think we’ll just call it off.”

“Suit yourself,” said the man. He went back around the comer of the house. The big dog followed him, then in a second came trotting back to them.

Her husband had stood there a moment, looking at the ground, his face clenched, both fists jammed into his pockets. “We ought to take them all, that son of a bitch,” he said. He kneeled to pet the dogs again and they leapt to him, each desperately trying to get all of his attention. The little collie, squeezed out, began to growl. It tried to work its head in between the big dog and the brown-and-white dog and, when they wouldn’t let it, snarled and lunged for the brown-and-white dog’s throat.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Her husband jumped back and stood up. The collie growled and hung on to the brown-and-white dog’s throat, and the brown-and-white dog tried to get away by holding its head up and hopping backwards. But the little collie, pulled up onto its hind legs with the other dog’s hopping, held on tight. The brown-and-white dog began to cry in high, piercing yelps.

“Stop it,” the woman shouted at them. Her husband shouted, “Hey!” and clapped his hands. But the dogs, their wild eyes inches apart, ignored them.

The big dog, the shepherd-husky mix, tried to shoulder the collie away from the brown-and-white dog, failed, and then trotted happily over to her husband again, tail wagging.

The brown-and-white dog had lowered its neck to the ground and tried to roll over in submission, but the little collie, instead of letting go, yanked hard, and the brown-and-white dog hollered, loudly this time, and got back to its feet.

The owner came walking back around the comer from behind the house.

“She just attacked him,” the woman said.

The man reached down and grabbed the collie by the nape of the neck and pulled, but it hung on to the brown-and-white dog, who hollered even louder, yelping in pain. She could see small grooves of pink flesh where the collie’s teeth had tom the brown-and-white dog’s skin.

“She’s hurting him,” she said.

The man finally spoke.

“Goddamn you little bitch,” he said to the little dog.

“Can I help?” her husband said. “Where’s your water hose?” He stood a few feet apart from the dogs and the man, his arms helplessly at his sides.

The man reached to his waist and drew the small pistol and put it to the little dog’s head.

“No!” she said. The man looked at her.

“Jesus,” her husband said.

“You want her to kill him?” the man said to her. “Which one you want to die?”

She was in tears.

“Just make them stop,” she said.

“Get those dogs away from my wife,” her husband said, his voice strange with emotion. “Don’t shoot that gun. Get those dogs out of here.”

The man turned to her husband and said, “Just where the hell do you think you are?”

They stared at one another and she felt her heart seize down in her chest.

“No,” she said, almost to herself.

The two dogs, their eyes rolled back, were frozen in their struggle, the little dog’s teeth locked onto the other dog’s neck. For a moment, no one moved. The big dog, the shepherd-husky mix, paced nervously among them.

The man shoved the pistol back into its holster and grabbed both dogs by the loose skin behind their necks. He lifted them into the air and carried them, still attached teeth-to-throat, the brown-and-white dog crying the whole way, around back of the house to the lake. The woman and her husband followed partway and stopped as the man waded into the lake carrying the two dogs and then plunged them both into the water. When he brought them up again, the little dog had let go.

“Thank God,” she whispered. Her mouth and throat had gone dry with fear.

The brown-and-white dog paddled to shore and shook himself hard, the droplets clear and distinct as tiny glass beads in the slanting afternoon sunlight. He trotted away down the bank. The man waded out deeper with the collie, put both hands around her neck, shoved her under the water, and held her there.

Even from where they stood she could see him struggling to hold her under. His shirt was wet, and she could see the muscles on his thick shoulders bunch together with the strain. She could see air bubbles break the surface above where he held her. She could see the man’s neck turn a deep red.

She tried to speak but couldn’t. The muscles in her throat wouldn’t respond. She wanted to call out and claim the little dog, try to save her life, but she couldn’t move.

It took a long time. The late sunlight broke through the trees on the high ridge across the lake as if through a prism. The moment was incomprehensibly beautiful, full of grief. She felt the knotted fear in her heart dissolve, and a strange and deeply seated sense of loss washed through her. She wept in broken, childlike sobs and held her husband tight, his frame bent over her middle as if for protection, his lips next to her ear quietly saying shh, shh, shh, but she was lost in this. When she was done they were alone, the water’s surface undisturbed, and the sun gone down behind the high ridge across the lake.

Together they walked back to the car. He opened her door and helped her get in. They rode back up the steep and rutted drive without speaking. At the top of the hill, the brown-and-white dog and the shepherd-husky plunged from the woods and ran alongside the car down the dirt road, silent, and then dropped back, and stood in the road with their tongues out, watching them go.

When the car turned onto the blacktop road again the low sun’s light shot through gaps in the trees and hit the windshield straight-on, exploding. The glare was like a blow to her eyes. Her husband held his hand out before him and slowed the car to a crawl. She’d thrown up her own hands instinctively, but now she lowered them and held her eyes open. She saw a hot white hole bum into the air, the world around it black as smoldering paper. She felt the light go into her brain. She felt it move down through her and into her child, like the infusion of knowledge.

I HAD MY GEAR ALL PACKED WHEN IVAN KNOCKED. A group of us was going down to his family’s farm on the Louisiana line. He came in, wearing his down vest and hunting boots, smoking a Marlboro in the side of his mouth, one eye squinted against the smoke.

“Ready?” he said.

“Yeah. Who’s riding with us?”

“Just you and me, in the pickup.”

I thought maybe the others had already gone on down in Ivan and MaeRose’s Caddy, a 1972 Seville, powder blue. I looked at him and he shrugged.

“What?” I said.

So then he told me, blurting it out in about two sentences, this huge story: He and Eve had been having an affair, she told Dave about it last night, and Dave called up MaeRose and told her.

Jesus Christ.

“It’s been going on awhile, she couldn’t stand it anymore,” Ivan said. He looked at me, then looked away. “Look, I’ll make a confession. We’ve been meeting each other here in your place the last couple of months. I don’t know, maybe longer.”

“Here?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d loaned Ivan a key so he could use my computer while I was at school. Or so he’d said.

“In my bed?” I said.

“In the bed, yeah.” He patted the sofa cushion. “On the couch. On the floor, on that rug there. Out on the screened porch. In the car, one day, down by the bamboo, when you were home.”

I went to the window and looked down there.

“I didn’t see you.”

Ivan stood up and went into the bathroom, dropped his cigarette into the toilet, took a piss, flushed. He came back out and sat down on the sofa. “The fact is, I’m going to need a place to stay for a while. MaeRose asked me not to come back until she leaves. She’s gonna stay with her parents for a while.”

“Will you try to work it out?”

He shook his head, looked at his watch.

“She’s filing for divorce right about now, I imagine.” He lit another cigarette. “You know, she hasn’t been exactly immaculate, herself.”

I didn’t know anything about it. Ivan got up to go into the kitchen. He rummaged in the cabinet for the bourbon, found my bottle of Ezra, pulled the cork and took a swig, corked it, and put it back into the cabinet. He came back into the living room. He was looking around at the walls, as if there was something missing, a painting or a window or something.

“So, you still want to go?” he said. “I’m going. I got to get away until this all calms down a little bit.”

I stood in the living room trying to comprehend it all. You think you know what’s going on around you, what your friends are up to, and then they turn out to have these secret lives. I couldn’t believe he and Eve had been fucking in my bed. When was the last time I’d gotten laid in that bed? As a matter of fact, I myself had fantasized about Eve in that bed, because she’d flirted with me at a party. In fact, she’d flirted with me in front of Dave, and I’d wondered what the hell she was up to. Another time, during a party at their house, Eve and I had been in her study, talking. Dave opened the side door, from the bathroom, stuck his head in, glared at us, then pulled his head out and slammed the door. So, yeah, I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what. I wondered what the hell she was up to.

Fucking Ivan the whole time. I was a little depressed by the news. I’d been depressed in general for something like five or six years. This little setback, of course, was different. Nothing like the real thing. But it all adds up. I’d gone back to school, and I was hanging in there but not too well. I hadn’t gone in with a plan. I’d tried moving in with a buddy of mine and that didn’t work, I couldn’t suppress my desire to hole up, hide. I’d moved into this apartment when the old fellow living here died, he’d been holed up chainsmoking in it for twenty years. He was a retired professor of mathematics, a recluse who’d scrawled his last message on a scrap of notebook paper in shaky pencil: “Gone out — be back in a few minutes.” And then he didn’t go out, he took an overdose of pills and went to bed and died. A friend of mine who lived across the hall from him, in the habit of checking on him, found his body and called the police. She was shaken as she showed me around the next day. We found his note and a large half-empty bottle of phenobarbital. One thin dark suit clung to a closet hanger as if to a frame of old bones. Nothing at all in the chest of drawers. Not a morsel of food in the apartment. No roaches. No reason for them to hang around. He lived off cigarettes and coffee and barbiturates.

I moved in and scrubbed streaks of tobacco smoke residue off all the woodwork with Formula 409. The stove was dusty but otherwise clean. The refrigerator was empty except for a two-month-old carton of half-and-half stuck to the shelf. I stripped up the old stained indoor-outdoor carpet from the floors and sanded the wood down to reveal a beautiful blond oak. I rubbed in Johnson’s Wax with my hands, buffed it with a rented machine, and then I lay out in the middle of the empty, polished expanse of narrow oak boards, my eye to the floor, each board like a golden lane leaping up and away down a gleaming runway. I marveled at the almost tactile sense of starting over, the clarity of vision, the simplicity and beauty of the big open room. From where I lay, the windows looked out upon open sky, a great big protective bubble of opportunity. I’d gone back to school to make something of my life, I could do anything in the world. I’d concentrate and get it done. But within two weeks all the bad stuff had seeped back in. The staying home and skipping classes, the looking out windows at people in cars at the stoplight, at people walking by on the sidewalk, at people on the sidewalk stopped to talk, at people who glanced up and saw me watching them, spoke to one another, and then looked up as I stood there looking back. Strangers.

I figured the old professor probably had a pretty good life when he was about my age, and this unnerved me. I wished I’d kept his phenobarbital, just to keep myself calm. I’ve never had the slightest leaning toward suicide. I always think if I can wait it out, things will change. I wondered how long the old professor had felt that way.

“What about it, Jack?” Ivan said. “We going?”

I thought about it, and said, “Sure.”

“Don’t get so excited,” he said.

“I was just thinking about things.”

“You’re in no shape to do that,” he said. I had to laugh, a little anyway. I picked up my bags and we went downstairs. It was one of those cold and windy, drizzly days and we hurried across the yard. Ivan’s truck had a camper shell over the bed, and I tossed my stuff in there next to his young retriever, Mary, who stood there with her head ducked, wagging her tail. There were sliding windows from there to the cab, and Mary stuck her head through and let her tongue drip onto the seat between us as we got settled and strapped on the seat belts.

I said, “So you get Mary?”

“Sure,” Ivan said. “That’s an old trick. They leave you with all the stuff, even the animals, and you can’t get rid of them or don’t want to, and you’ve got all this shit reminding you of how you fucked up, and these dogs or cats or squawking parakeets or whatever reminding you of everything you did together, and so when they’ve gone they’ve cut themselves completely loose, no strings, clean slate. You’ve got all the baggage. Next time you see them, they’ve lost weight and cut their hair and feel just great about themselves, got their teeth cleaned, stopped biting their nails. They’ve got the soul of a bluebird. You realize they were absolutely miserable with you all along.”

Ivan passed me a little skinny he’d rolled up earlier. I lit it, poured myself a cup of coffee from his heavy green thermos, and we pulled out, rolling past the thick stand of bamboo that rose up tall beside the old Victorian apartment house, the sharp-leaved tops tossing in the wind. They were as tall as the eaves and their leaves brushed against my screened porch. The blackbirds and grackles that had ventured from that protective thicket were already returning in little squadrons of threes and fours. As we turned onto the boulevard to the highway, I rolled down my window and let out a whoop, just like a kid. Ivan looked at me and laughed. We knew this retreat would be a success.

WILHELMINA, EIGHTY-SEVEN, LIVED ALONE IN THE same town as her two children, but she rarely saw them. Her main companion was a trembling poodle she’d had for about fifteen years, named Bill. You never hear of dogs named Bill. Her husband in his decline had bought him, named him after a boy he’d known in the Great War, and then wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He’d always been Wilhelmina’s dog. She could talk to Bill in a way that she couldn’t talk to anyone else, not even her own children.

Not even her husband, now nearly a vegetable out at King’s Daughters’ Rest Home on the old highway.

She rose in the blue candlelight morning to go see him about the dog, who was doing poorly. She was afraid of being completely alone.

There were her children and their children, and even some great-grandchildren, but that was neither here nor there for Wilhelmina. They were all in different worlds.

She drove her immaculate ocean-blue Delta 88 out to the home and turned up the long, barren drive. The tall naked trunks of a few old pines lined the way, their sparse tops distant as clouds. Wilhelmina pulled into the parking lot and took two spaces so she’d have plenty of room to back out when she left. She paused for a moment to check herself in the rearview mirror, and adjusted the broad-brimmed hat she wore to hide the thinning spot on top of her head.

Her husband, Howard, lay propped up and twisted in his old velour robe, his mouth open, watching TV. His thick white hair stood in a matted knot on his head like a child’s.

“What?” he said when she walked in. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Hello!’ Wilhelmina replied, though she’d said nothing.

She sat down.

“I came to tell you about Bill, Howard. He’s almost completely blind now and he can’t go to the bathroom properly. The veterinarian says he’s in pain and he’s not going to get better and I should put him to sleep.”

Her husband had tears in his eyes.

“Poor old Bill,” he said.

“I know,” Wilhelmina said, welling up herself now. “I’ll miss him so.”

“I loved him at Belleau Wood! He was all bloody and walking around,” Howard said. “They shot off his nose in the Meuse-Argonne.” He picked up the remote box and held the button down, the channels thumping past like the muted thud of an ancient machine gun.

Wilhelmina dried her tears with a Kleenex from her handbag and looked up at him.

“Oh, fiddle,” she said.

“Breakfast time,” said an attendant, a slim copper-colored man whose blue smock was tailored at the waist and flared over his hips like a suit jacket. He set down the tray and held his long delicate hands before him as if for inspection.

He turned to Wilhelmina.

“Would you like to feed your husband, ma’am?”

“Heavens, no,” Wilhelmina said. She shrank back as if he intended to touch her with those hands.

When the attendant held a spoonful of oatmeal up to her husband’s mouth he lunged for it, his old gray tongue out, and slurped it down.

“Oh, he’s ravenous today,” said the attendant. Wilhelmina, horrified, felt for a moment as if she were losing her mind and had wandered into this stranger’s room by mistake. She clutched her purse and slipped out into the hall.

“I’m going,” she called faintly, and hurried out to her car, which sat on the cracked surface of the parking lot like an old beached yacht. The engine groaned, turned over, and she steered down the long drive and onto the highway without even a glance at the traffic. A car passed her on the right, up in the grass, horn blaring, and an enormous dump truck cleaved the air to her left like a thunderclap. She would pay them no mind.

When she got home the red light on her answering machine, a gift from her son, was blinking. It was him on the tape.

“I got your message about Bill, Mama. I’ll take him to the vet in the morning, if you want. Just give me a call. Bye-bye, now.”

“No, I can’t think about it,” Wilhelmina said.

Bill was on his cedar-filled pillow in the den. He looked around for her, his nose up in the air.

“Over here, Bill,” Wilhelmina said loudly for the dog’s deaf ears. She carried him a Milk-Bone biscuit, for his teeth were surprisingly good. He sniffed the biscuit, then took it carefully between his teeth, bit off a piece, and chewed.

“Good boy, good Bill.”

Bill didn’t finish the biscuit. He laid his head down on the cedar pillow and breathed heavily. In a minute he got up and made his halting, wobbling way toward his water bowl in the kitchen, but hit his head on the doorjamb and fell over.

“Oh, Bill, I can’t stand it,” Wilhelmina said, rushing to him. She stroked his head until he calmed down, and then she dragged him gently to his bowl, where he lapped and lapped until she had to refill it, he drank so much. He kept drinking.

“Kidneys,” Wilhelmina said, picking up the bowl. “That’s enough, boy.”

Bill nosed around for the water bowl, confused. He tried to squat, legs trembling, and began to whine. Wilhelmina carried him out to the backyard, set him down, and massaged his kidneys the way the vet had shown her, and finally a little trickle ran down Bill’s left hind leg. He tried to lift it.

“Good old Bill,” she said. “You try, don’t you?”

She carried him back in and dried his leg with some paper towels.

“I guess I’d do anything for you, Bill,” she said. But she had made up her mind. She picked up the phone and called her son. It rang four times and then his wife’s voice answered.

“You’ve reached two-eight-one,” she began.

“I know that,” Wilhelmina muttered.

“. We can’t come to the phone right now. ”

Wilhelmina thought that sort of message was rude. If they were there, they could come to the phone.

“. leave your message after the beep.”

“I guess you better come and get Bill in the morning,” Wilhelmina said, and hung up.

Wilhelmina’s husband had been a butcher, and Katrina, the young widow who’d succeeded him at the market, still brought meat by the house every Saturday afternoon steaks, roasts, young chickens, stew beef, soup bones, whole hams, bacon, pork chops, ground chuck. Once she even brought a leg of lamb. Wilhelmina couldn’t possibly eat it all, so she stored most of it in her deep freeze.

She went out to the porch and gathered as much from the deep freeze as she could carry, dumped it into the kitchen sink like a load of kindling, then pulled her cookbooks from the cupboard and sat down at the kitchen table. She began looking up recipes that had always seemed too complex for her, dishes that sounded vaguely exotic, chose six of the most interesting she could find, and copied them onto a legal pad. Then she made a quick trip to the grocery store to find the items she didn’t have on hand, buying odd spices like saffron and coriander, and not just produce but shallots and bright red bell peppers, and a bulb of garlic cloves as big as her fist. Bill had always liked garlic.

Back home, she spread all the meat out on the counter, the chops and steaks and ham, the roast and the bacon, some Italian sausage she’d found, some boudin that had been there for ages, and even a big piece of fish filet. She chopped the sweet peppers, the shallots, ground the spices. The more she worked, the less she thought of the recipes, until she’d become a marvel of culinary innovativeness, combining oils and spices and herbs and meats into the most savory dishes you could imagine: Master William’s Sirloin Surprise, Ham au Bill, Bill’s Leg of Lamb with Bacon Chestnuts, Bill’s Broiled Red Snapper with Butter and Crab, Bloody Boudin a la Bill, and one she decided to call simply Sausage Chops. She fired up her oven, lit every eye on her stove, and cooked it all just as if she were serving the king of France instead of her old French poodle. Then she arranged the dishes on her best china, cut the meat into bite-sized pieces, and served them to her closest friend, her dog.

She began serving early in the evening, letting Bill eat just as much or as little as he wanted from each dish. “This ought to wake up your senses, Bill.” Indeed, Bill’s interest was piqued. He ate, rested, ate a little more, of this dish and that. He went back to the leg of lamb, nibbling the bacon chestnuts off its sides. Wilhelmina kept gently urging him to eat. And as the evening wore on, Bill’s old cataracted eyes gradually seemed to reflect something, it seemed, like quiet suffering — not his usual burden, but the luxurious suffering of the glutton. He had found a strength beyond himself, and so he kept bravely on, forcing himself to eat, until he could not swallow another bite and lay carefully beside the remains of his feast, and slept.

Wilhelmina sat quietly in a kitchen chair and watched from her window as the sun edged up behind the trees, red and molten like the swollen, dying star of an ancient world. She was so tired that her body felt weightless, as if she’d already left it hollow of her spirit. It seemed that she had lived such a long time. Howard had courted her in a horse-drawn wagon. An entire world of souls had disappeared in their time, and other nameless souls had filled their spaces. Some one of them had taken Howard’s soul.

Bill had rolled onto his side in sleep, his tongue slack on the floor, his poor stomach as round and taut as a honeydew melon. After such a gorging, there normally would be hell to pay. But Wilhelmina would not allow that to happen.

“I’ll take you to the doctor myself, old Bill,” she said.

As if in response, a faint and easy dream-howl escaped Bill’s throat, someone calling another in the big woods, across empty fields and deep silent stands of trees. Oooooooo, it went, high and soft. Oooooooo.

Wilhelmina’s heart thickened with emotion. Her voice was deep and rich with it.

Hoooooo, she called softly to Bill’s sleeping ears.

Ooooooo, Bill called again, a little stronger, and she responded, Hoooooo, their pure wordless language like echoes in the morning air.

THE GRIZZLED BITCH LAY ON HER SIDE IN THE FADING sunlight in Sam’s front yard, her black wrinkled teats lumped beside her like stillborn pups. It had been a sunny late-October day but now cool evening crept along the edge of the sky and Sam could see the dog’s sides shiver as she labored to breathe. Her dark coat was patchy with mange and her eyes looked bad. When Sam walked closer they went to slits and a low growl came from her throat. He could smell her from ten feet away: a ripe, sweet rotten smell. Sam went back inside and called the pound.

When the pound truck cruised slowly by the house at dusk the dog had disappeared. Sam, fresh from the shower and drinking a can of Miller Lite, walked out to the street and told the two men in the truck what the dog looked like. The driver adjusted his cap, spat out the window past Sam, and said likely she went off into the woods to die. He looked at the can of Lite, nodded at Sam, and pulled away. At the spot where the dog had lain in the yard, Sam saw maggots curling and uncurling on the grass.

That night he was awakened by a long yowling moan beneath the floorboards. A latent, heavy loneliness welled in his chest. He went out to the porch. A good breeze had stirred up, and he thought for just a second he could smell the dog. Except for the wind rattling the dry leaves it was quiet.

The next morning, Saturday, Sam went out back with the shovel. There was a big hole in the crawlspace wall near the back door where cats went beneath the house sometimes to have their litters. It somehow made sense a dog would go there to die. Sam started digging.

He heard a truck pull up in front and stuck the shovel into the hard clay of the shallow hole. A UPS man stood in the street behind his van, writing on a clipboard pad, his paper flipping in the wind.

“Sam Beamon?”

Sam nodded. “Something for me?”

“Yes, sir,” said the man, a small black fellow whose crewcut head sloped upward toward the crown like a tilted egg. His name tag said “Henry.”

“Sign right here on the line, please.”

“What is it?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“You sure it’s for me?”

“If you’re Sam Beamon.”

“Well,” Sam said. “What the hell.”

Sam signed. Henry hopped up into the truck and grabbed a wooden crate that came up to his belt.

“It’s heavy,” he said, sliding the crate toward the lift. He hopped down, flipped a chrome toggle switch; there was a high grinding whine and the lift descended with the crate to the street. Sam stepped onto the platform and knocked on the wood.

“I guess I could use this box to bury the dog in, if I wanted to.” He looked at Henry. “Seems kind of undignified, to be buried without a box, doesn’t it? Uncivilized.”

“I don’t know,” said the man. “For a dog.”

“It’s not really my dog,” Sam said. “But she died here, I think. Under the house.”

Henry shrugged and looked at the box, then gazed off at the trees. The breeze gently rattled the leaves.

He heaved at the dolly. Sam directed him up the porch, through the living room, and into a comer of the dining room, which sat between the living room and the kitchen. The house was an old frame home with creaky floors, and the three rooms ran straight back shotgun-fashion, bedrooms off to the right. The kitchen had a door to the backyard.

Sam watched Henry unstrap the dolly and set the crate in the dining room. He wondered if he should have Henry move it to the garage, instead. No way to know, until he knew what it was.

“Where’d this come from?” he said.

Henry checked the ticket.

“New Orleans.”

“New Orleans?” Sam said. He looked at the crate again.

Henry said, “You going to open it now?”

Sam looked at him absently.

“Hmm? Oh. I don’t know.”

They both looked at the box for a moment.

“Well,” Henry said. “Got to go.” He checked his clipboard again, then wrapped the loose straps around the dolly’s frame. He pulled it behind him to the front door and looked back.

“It’s an unusual box, you know,” he said.

Sam didn’t answer, not comprehending.

“Bigger, I mean,” Henry said. “Made of wood like that, heavy.”

They both looked again at the box.

“Well,” Henry said. “Have a nice day.” Then he went out, leaving the front door open. Sam heard the dolly rattle down the steps, heard the van door slide shut, then walked out onto the porch and watched him drive away. He went back in and stood beside the crate. He thought he could smell the dog underneath the house, faintly, but then again wasn’t sure, thought it could have been his imagination. If he could smell it up here already, it would be bad getting her out of the crawl space. He should be finishing the grave. He had almost decided to do this when the box spoke up.

“Sam?”

He felt his skin go cool.

“Who’s there?” he said.

There was laughter from the box.

“Sam,” the voice said. “It’s me, Marcia.”

“Marcia?”

A small plug in the box’s side began to wiggle its way out and then dropped to the floor, rolling a few inches to the wall. Sam knelt down warily and brought his eye up to the hole. A brown eye stared back at him. He smelled gardenias. Her perfume. He sat back onto the floor. The sight of her eye, so close, the smell of gardenias. He felt aroused, then ridiculous. Sitting in his dining room with a woman inside a packing crate.

“I don’t know what to say.” He stood up. “I guess I could get you out of there.”

“I can let myself out, Sam,” Marcia said. “There’s a latch. But if you don’t mind, I’d sort of like to stay in here a minute, first. I want to talk first.

“I mean,” she said after a moment, “before I get out and we see each other again, I want to talk about things.”

“Oh, God,” Sam mumbled.

“Aside from the fact that you never write letters, why didn’t you answer any of mine?”

“Why?” Sam said. “You took off. You left. You went to New Orleans.”

“That’s not the issue,” Marcia said.

“It’s not the issue?”

“No, it’s not,” she said. “I tried to work it out with you before I left but you were intractable.”

“Interesting word choice,” Sam said.

“You were the one who wouldn’t give,” Marcia said. “You wouldn’t change your ways the least little bit. I’m sorry, but intractable is the right word.”

“I think you’d better look that word up again,” Sam said.

There was a pause.

“I hate it when you do that, Sam.”

“I hate it when you’re so goddamn self-righteous.”

“Me?” She paused again, and in a moment he heard her breathing slowly and heavily. “Okay, Sam,” she said, “I had to go away for a while, and you know it. You knew it. And we were going to correspond.”

Sam tried to think of how to say he couldn’t write letters because he couldn’t bear to read what he wrote in them, and he hadn’t the courage to not read them after writing them, but he didn’t say anything because he knew how Marcia would respond.

“Sam, I thought maybe that a little while alone would help you to admit some things about our relationship. About yourself. And I thought maybe a little distance, and putting it into letters, would make us more candid. You know.”

“About myself,” Sam said, unable to stop himself. “Of course.”

“Oh, boy,” Marcia said. “This was a mistake. You really know how to fuck up a reunion, Sam.”

“Look,” Sam said, and he stopped, not even sure of what he wanted to say. Then he laughed.

“What?” she said.

“You know,” he said, “I’m wondering. Why did you ship yourself here in a box?”

“Why not?” she said. He could hear the familiar irony in her voice, the ironic resignation. “I thought, a little creative punch, you know. Something weird. I thought it might break things down a little.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam said, and meant it. They sat a moment without talking.

“Look,” he said then. “I’m going to go out back for a while.”

“What are you doing?”

“Well, this dog died underneath the house last night, I think.”

“Oh, no,” Marcia said. “What dog?”

“I don’t know, a strange dog,” Sam said. “Anyway, I’m going to bury it out back. The pound came by, but they left, and I don’t want to give them the poor thing anyway, because I hear they just dump them in a ditch outside of town somewhere. Anyway, I’ve got to dig the hole and get her out to it. And then I’ve got to start dinner. Some people are coming over tonight. And so I guess if you want to leave, this would be a good time. But, look, if you want to stay, that would be fine.” He stopped for a moment, then said, “I’m sorry about this. I mean, this argument.”

He started to leave the room.

“Who’s coming over?”

“Dick and Merle.”

“Ah, God,” Marcia said. “Dick and Merle? You’ve been hanging out with Dick and Merle?”

“No, I haven’t been ‘hanging out’ with them,” Sam said. “I haven’t been hanging out with anybody. I just felt like having some company.”

“Ah, Christ, Sam,” Marcia said. “Dick and Merle. Jesus.”

Sam stared at the box and held his tongue.

“I’m going out back,” he said, and left the room.

“Sam,” he heard her calling from the box. “You’ve got to open your heart up a little bit, Sam.”

He walked out through the kitchen and into the backyard, where he stood and let his eyes adjust to the bright sunlight. Then he walked over to the shallow hole and started digging again, widening and lengthening it. He worked slowly, his mind wandering all over the place. The dirt piled up and the sun sank into the oak tree leaves. He tried to let the work clear his head. The leaves rustled in the breeze, and they moved in dark relief against the sun. He worked through the afternoon, shaping the sides of the grave as carefully as an archaeologist. Finally, he stepped up out of the hole, knocked the dirt off his boots with the spade. At his job, he covered the city beat — council meetings and small-town political intrigue, constant complex and trivial bullshit. What gave him pleasure was a simple job, such as digging a hole. A worthwhile job, such as providing a grave for a homeless stray dog. He went over to look in the hole in the wall where the dog had to have gone in.

Kneeling there with his head and his shoulders underneath the house, he could smell the dog’s stench, and he listened for the sound of someone moving around on the old creaky floorboards above. But in the dank emptiness there was only silence and the stench of the carcass whose vague shape he thought he could see back near a brick piling, lying still. He hadn’t the heart to go in after it just then, though. He decided it could wait until the morning. He’d bury the dog on a Sunday.

ON THE LONG GREEN LAWN THAT LED DOWN TO THE lake, Bailey’s boy tumbled with their two chocolate Labs, Buddy and Junior. The seven of us sat on Bailey’s veranda sipping bourbon and watching the boy and his dogs, watching partly because of what Bailey had just told us about the younger dog, Buddy’s progeny, a fat brute and a bully. Bailey had chosen Buddy’s mate carefully, but the union had produced a pure idiot. A little genetic imbalance, Bailey said, hard to avoid with these popular breeds.

Watching Junior you could see that this dog was aggressively stupid. A reckless, lumbering beast with no light in his eyes, floundering onto old Buddy’s back, slamming into the boy and knocking him down. The boy is about ten or eleven and named Ulysses though they call him Lee (sort of a joke), thin as a tenpenny nail, with spectacles like his mama. He was eating it up, rolling in the grass and laughing like a lord-god woodpecker, Junior rooting at him like a hog.

“I hate that dog,” Bailey said. “But Lee won’t let me get rid of him.”

The slow motions of cumulus splayed light across the lawn and lake in soft golden spars, the effect upon me narcotic. My weight pressed into the Adirondack chair as if I were paralyzed from the chest down. Bailey planned this place to be like an old-fashioned lake house, long and low with a railed porch all around. Jack McAdams, with us this day, landscaped the slope to the water, then laid St. Augustine around the dogwoods, redbuds, and a thick American beech, its smooth trunk marked with tumorous carvings. Three sycamores and a sweet gum line the shore down toward the woods. The water’s surface was only slightly disturbed, like the old glass panes Bailey bought and put in his windows.

Russell took our glasses and served us frosty mint juleps from a silver tray. Silent Russell. The color and texture of Cameroon tobacco leaf, wearing his black slacks and white serving jacket. I am curious about him to the point of self-consciousness. I try not to stare, but want to gaze upon his face through a onesided mirror. I see things in it that may or may not be there and I’m convinced of one thing, this role of the servant is merely that: Russell walks among us as the ghost of a lost civilization.

Bailey says Russell’s family has been with his since the latter’s post-Civil War Brazilian exile, when Bailey’s great-great-grandfather fled to hack a new plantation out of the rain forest. Ten years later he returned with a new fortune and workforce, a band of wild Amazonians that jealous neighbors said he treated like kings. Only Russell’s small clan lingers.

I looked at Russell and nodded to him.

“Russell,” I said.

He looked at me a long moment and nodded his old gray head.

“Yah,” he said, followed in his way with the barely audible “sah.” After he’d handed drinks out all around, he went back inside the house.

“Russell makes the best goddamn mint julep in the world,” said Bailey, his low voice grumbly in the quiet afternoon, late summer, the first thin traces of fall in the air.

I could see two other men of Russell’s exact coloring working at the barbecue pit down in the grove that led to the boathouse. Russell’s boys. They’d had coals under the meat all night, Bailey said, and now we could see them stripping the seared, smoked pork into galvanized tubs. Beyond them, visible as occasional blurred slashing shadows between the trunks and limbs and leaves of small-growth hardwoods, were Bailey’s penned and compromised wild pigs, deballed and meat sweetening in the lakeside air. He looked to be building up a winter meatstock, product of several hunting trips to the north Florida swamps with Skeet Bagwell and Titus Smith, who were seated next to me on Bailey’s side. It seemed an unusual sport, to catch and castrate violent swine and pen them until their meat mellowed with enforced domesticity, and then to slit their throats. Russell’s boys partially covered the rectangular cooking pit with sheets of roofing tin and carried the tubs of meat around back of the house to the kitchen. Along the veranda we drank our mint juleps — McAdams, Bill Burton, Hoyt Williams, Titus, Skeet, Bailey, and me — arranged in a brief curving line in Bailey’s brand-new Adirondack chairs. Russell came out with more mint juleps, nodded, and slipped away.

“A sad, beautiful meditation on love, loss, and dogs. Watson’s best writing is full of an unusual sort of lugubrious humor and depth.”

— Los Angeles Times

“A book for those of us who like our dogs doggy — that is, unsentimentalized, unanthropomorphized, decent-in-their-hearts vomit-eaters — and our people the same way. The prose is crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence.”

— Pinckney Benedict

“[T]he dogs are not pets so much as fully realized characters, the equals — sometimes the betters — of the men and women stirring up today’s Deep South. Watson writes with surprising emotional force.”

— Amy Hempel, Elle

“Stunning. superb. Should become essential to the canon.”

— Commercial Appeal [Memphis, Tennessee]

“Brad Watson’s prose is exciting, superb. Not a dull story here. Dogs? Well, often they’re more interesting than their masters, certainly more abiding. Watson’s people are the wretched dreams of honorable dogs. I read these pieces with great pleasure.”

— Barry Hannah

“[B]racing prose, heralding the arrival of a new talent on the literary scene.”

— Tuscaloosa [Alabama] News

“Brad Watson is a writer still mystified by his own immense talent. How could he not be? He writes sentences you wait a lifetime for. Tells stories you’ve never heard. Last Days of the Dog-Men is the best I’ve read in ages. Mercy for none, but salvation for all.”

— Robert Olmstead

“Watson is a writer keenly aware of the duality of canine nature — the familiar, loving, always accepting domesticate, and the feral, wandering, howling wild animal. Extraordinary.”

— Clarion [Mississippi] Ledger

“Last Days of the Dog-Men observes without blinking the inevitable, necessary, and bewildering relationships between people and dogs, between men and women. Brad Watson writes brilliantly and knows what he is talking about.”

— Fred Chappell

“The very nature of Last Days of the Dog-Men—a gathering of ‘dog’ tales that exploits both the loyal and the feral nature of man’s best friend — reflects Brad Watson’s comically dark and deceptively wry vision in a prose as accurate as it is lovely.”

— Allen Wier

“Brad Watson’s stories are wholly original — humorous and heartbreaking; there is a compassion for both humans and dogs and the world as they know it that reduces the focus to life’s bare minimums: food, shelter, and companionship. Last Days of the Dog-Men is a powerful debut by a master storyteller.”

— Jill McCorkle

“Consider me a serious fan of Watson’s brilliant storytelling. He’s as bull-hearted and true a writer as any of the Southern masters.”

— Bob Shacochis

“In the pages of his quietly crafted prose, Watson digs with a persistence only a canine tracing a scent can match, into piles of the familiar and intractable emotions of his characters, their relationships, and their dogs.”

— San Francisco Review

“[W]ry commentary on the base nature of humanity.”

— Macon [Georgia] Telegraph

“Stunning.”

— Spectator [Raleigh, N.C.]

“The insight and beauty with which [Watson] writes reveals a deep love for both dogs and people, and yet his unflinching gaze at their abiding foibles seems to have provoked in him an intense anger at their unpardonable sins.”

— Trenton [New Jersey] Times

“A powerful debut collection.”

— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Watson has uncanny insight.”

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

BRAD WATSON is the award-winning author of two collections of stories and two novels, The Heaven of Mercury, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award, and Miss Jane (2016). His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Electric Literature, and Idaho Review, among other publications. He teaches at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.

In each of these “weird and wonderful stories” (Boston Globe), Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. “Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts” (New York Newsday), Watson’s vibrant prose captures the animal crannies of the human personality — yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment.

Pinckney Benedict praises Watson’s writing as “crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence,” and Fred Chappell calls his stories “strong and true to the place they come from.” This powerful debut collection marks Watson’s introduction into “a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford” (The State, Columbia, S.C.).