(Matt had been so excited, his cheeks flushed in that way that made his eyes glow. The left sleeve of his leather jacket, of the sweatshirt underneath it, had been sliced open, the skin below cut from wrist to shoulder by a claw the size of a tennis racket. He hadn’t cared, had barely noticed as Ransom had washed the wound, inspected it for any of the fluid (blood?) that had spattered the jacket, and wrapped it in gauze. Outside, whoops and hollers of celebration had filled the morning air. You should have come with us, Matt had said, the remark less a reproach and more an expression of regret for a missed opportunity. My plan worked. They never saw us coming. You should have been there. Despite the anxiety that had yet to drain from him, pride had swelled Ransom’s chest. Maybe everything wasn’t lost. Maybe his son. Yes, well, Ransom had said, someone has to be around to pick up the pieces.)
Ransom continued around the front lawn to what they had called the side yard, a wide slope of grass that stretched from the road up to the treeline of the rise behind the house. If the wreckage across the street was difficult to ignore, what lay beyond the edge of the yard compelled his attention. Everything that had extended north of the house: his next door neighbor Dan’s red house and barn, the volunteer fire station across from it, the houses that had continued on up both sides of the road to Wiltwyck, was gone, as was the very ground on which all of it had been built. As far ahead as Ransom could see, to either side, the earth had been scraped to bare rock, the dull surface of which bore hundred-yard gouges. Somewhere beyond his ability to guesstimate, planes of light like the one on the other side of his house were visible on the horizon. Ransom could not decide how many there were. Some days he thought at least four, staggered one behind the other; others he was certain there was only the one whose undulations produced the illusion of more. Far off as the aurora(e) was, its sheer size made the figures that occasionally filled it visible. These he found it easier to disregard, especially when, as today, they were something familiar: a quartet of tall stones at the top of a rounded mountain, one apparently fallen over, the remaining three set at irregular distances from one another, enough to suggest that their proximity might be no more than a fluke of geology; from within the arrangement, as if stepping down into it, an eye the size of a barn door peered and began to push out. Instead, he focused on the garden into which he, Matt, and a few of his neighbors had tilled the side yard.
While Ransom judged the crab capable of leaping the dry moat and clambering up the wire fence around the garden, it preferred to wait for him to set the plank over the trench, cross it, and unlock the front gate. Only then would it scuttle around him, up the rows of carrots and broccoli, the tomatoes caged in their conical frames, stopping on its rounds to inspect a leaf here, a stalk there, tilting its shell forward so that one of the limbs centered in its back could extend and take the object of its scrutiny in its claw. In general, Ransom attributed the crab’s study to simple curiosity, but there were moments he fancied that, prior to its arrival in his front yard the morning after Matt’s departure, in whatever strange place it had called home, the crab had tended a garden of its own.
Latching but not locking the gate behind him, Ransom said, “What about Bruce? That was what we called our dog. the only dog we ever had. Heather picked out the name. She was a huge Springsteen fan. The dog didn’t look like a Bruce, not in the slightest. He was some kind of weird mix, Great Dane and greyhound, something like that. His body. it was as if the front of one dog had been sewed to the back of another. He had this enormous head — heavy jowls, brow, huge jaws — and these thick front legs, attached to a skinny trunk, back legs like pipe cleaners. His tail — I don’t know where that came from. It was so long it hung down almost to his feet. I kept expecting him to tip over, fall on his face. I wanted to call him Butch, that or something classical, Cerberus. Heather and Matt overruled me. Matt was all in favor of calling him Super Destroyer, or Fire Teeth, but Heather and I vetoed those. Somehow, this meant she got the final decision, and Bruce it was.”
The beer traps next to the lettuce were full of the large red slugs that had appeared in the last week. One near the top was still moving, swimming lazily around the PBR, the vent along its back expanding and contracting like a mouth attempting to speak. The traps could wait another day before emptying; he would have to remember to bring another can of beer with him tomorrow. He said, “Heather found the dog wandering in the road out front. He was in pretty rough shape: his coat was caked with dirt, rubbed raw in places; he was so thin, you could’ve used his ribs as a toast rack. Heather was a sucker for any kind of hard case; she said it was why she’d gone out with me, in the first place. Very funny, right? By the time Matt stepped off the schoolbus, she’d lured the dog inside with a plateful of chicken scraps (which he devoured), coaxed him into the downstairs shower (after which, she said, he looked positively skeletal), and heaped a couple of old blankets into a bed for him. She tried to convince him to lie down there, and he did subject the blankets to extensive sniffing, but he refused to allow Heather out of his sight. She was. at that point, she tired easily — to be honest, it was pretty remarkable that she’d been able to do everything she had — so she went out to the front porch to rest on the rocking chair and wait for Matt’s bus. When she did, the dog — Bruce, I might as well call him that; she’d already settled on the name — Bruce insisted on accompanying her. He plopped down beside her, and remained there until Matt was climbing the front steps. I would have been worried. concerned about how Bruce would react to Matt, whether he’d be jealous of Heather, that kind of thing. Not my wife: when Matt reached the top of the stairs, the dog stood, but that was all. Heather didn’t have to speak to him, let alone grab his collar.”
The lettuces weren’t ready to pick, nor were the cabbages or broccoli. A few tomatoes, however, were sufficiently red to merit plucking from the plants and dropping into the canvas bag. The crab was roaming the top of the garden, where they’d planted Dan’s apple trees. Ransom glanced over the last of the tomatoes, checked the frames. “That collar,” he said. “It was the first thing I noticed about the dog. Okay, maybe not the first, but it wasn’t too long before it caught my eye. This was after Matt had met me in the driveway with the news that we had a guest. The look on his face. he had always been a moody kid — Heather and I used to ask one another, How’s the weather in Mattsville? — and adolescence, its spiking hormones, had not improved his temperament. In all fairness, Heather being sick didn’t help matters any. This night, though, he was positively beaming, vibrating with nervous energy. When I saw him running up to the car, my heart jumped. I couldn’t conceive any reason for him to rush out the side door that wasn’t bad: at the very best, an argument with his mother over some school-related issue; at the very worst, another ambulance ride to the hospital for Heather.”