“Now, Buster,” the woman was saying, pressing her hand to the mesh where a white-faced retriever crouched over its bad hips, “Buster's the sweetest thing you'd ever want to see. He'd make a perfect house dog. And he loves kids. You two have kids?”
Sess was right there with her, but he didn't seem to hear her. He was focused on a dog in the back of the cage, a lean big-headed thing with paws like griddles that couldn't have been more than eight or ten months old. “That one,” he said, “can I see that one?”
The woman looked dubious. “You mean Peaches? That's Peaches,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Pamela. “He's not a house dog, but if you live in the country and you've got some space, well, I guess he'd be fine. He's shy, that's all.”
“That's because he's got wolf in him,” Sess said, and his mood had lifted-she could hear it in his voice. “You see the angularity of those back legs, Pamela? And the snout? The pointy snout means he's got longer vertebrae so his chest muscles fan out and he can really cover ground. That's a fast dog there. And he'll pull too.” And then he was in the cage, three or four dogs swarming at his hands, tails whacking. The wolf dog shrank back in the corner and Sess went down into a crouch, squatting over his knees and extending his right hand. “Peaches,” he said, his voice burnished and low, “what kind of a name is that for a dog? Come here, boy, come on.” It took a minute, Pamela and the woman watching from outside the cage, and then the dog came to him, five feet across the cement floor, in the submissive posture of a wolf, creeping on its elbows and dragging its belly. Sess smoothed back its ears, ran a hand over its snout. “I'll take this one,” he said.
At the grocery he wouldn't let her get more than they could carry on their backs, and he didn't offer any explanations and he didn't bother coming in with her to push the stainless steel cart up and down the aisles of plenty like every other husband and wife in creation. He stayed out in the dirt lot with the dog-at the very end of it where it trailed off into knee-high weed-and though he'd brought a homemade leather leash and collar along, he didn't use it, not yet. He controlled the dog with his voice alone, and when she went in the store he was just squatting there, watching it, the soft soothing flow of his words working on the animal like an incantation. She could have bought the store out, but she had to settle for some cosmetics, toothpaste, fresh fruit and vegetables-which she was already starved for-and as much pasta and stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce as she reasonably thought they could carry. When she came out of the store wheeling a cart, Sess rose to his feet and crossed the lot to her, never even glancing back at the dog, but the dog put its head down and followed him.
On the way back, he was nothing short of exuberant, chattering away at her as if he'd just won the lottery. The groceries were stuffed down behind the seat, and the dog-he wouldn't demean it by calling it “Peaches”-sat like a tensed coil in her lap, its head out the window. He drove slower now, but still shot ahead in bursts and cranked through the gears as if he wanted to rip them out of the transmission, slamming into potholes and flinging up sheets of coffee-colored water as if the car were a skiff shearing across a muddy inlet. Every other minute he'd reach out a hand to stroke her arm or pat the dog. Before long, he was whistling.
“Trotter,” he said, “what about Trotter? That's a good name. Descriptive, you know? Or Lucius. I've always liked Lucius. As a name, I mean-”
She'd almost forgotten they were in a stolen car, playing a dangerous game with a man who put bullets in the skulls of another man's dogs and that there was retribution to come, because she was in this moment, now, and they were both working on fresh beers to celebrate the fact of this sterling dog in her lap and the two others Sess had paid five dollars each for against the day he'd be back with Richard Schrader's pickup. “How about Yukon King?” she said.
He let out a laugh and reached again to stroke the dog, which reeled its head in to give him a look of subjection and fealty. “Never thought of that one. But sure, I mean, what could be more fitting than to name a real dog after some actor dog that probably couldn't get out of the way of a sled if it ran him over, and by the way, did you know that Lassie is really three different dogs and they're all male?”
She didn't know. But she did know the origin of the feud between him and the black-haired man, because he'd told her over his second morose shot of Wild Turkey at the Pumphouse while she read off the descriptions of the dogs for sale or trade or “free to good home,” and he rejected them one after another before she could get to the end of the first line. Two winters ago Joe Bosky had appeared in Boynton dressed up like something out of the pages of _National Geographic__ in a caribou-skin parka lined with wolf and a rifle slung over one shoulder. The plane that delivered him hadn't even refueled yet for the return trip to Fairbanks, and he was already hip-deep in bullshit at the Nougat, with the deed to Tilda Runyon's cabin spread out on the bar-the cabin she'd left to her half-breed son, who was a drunk and a gambler, a thief and liar, and who'd apparently been in the Corps with Bosky. What was he doing in the country in the middle of February? He was going to live wild, that was what. And he moved into Tilda Runyon's cabin, chopped wood, drank to excess and lived off what the mail plane brought him two days a week. By the first summer he was building himself a cabin on Woodchopper Creek and making money hand over fist flying tourists and fishermen into the backcountry in the Cessna 180 he floated in on one fine day, and by the fall he was wandering the hills and watercourses, scouting out the country for signs of fur. He settled finally on Roy Sender's trapline, the trapline Roy Sender had cleared and maintained and expanded over the course of forty-odd years and ceded to Sess when he left the country. The first winter, it was stolen bait and sprung traps and no evidence of a man's footprints in the snow, as if the perpetrator could fly, because Joe Bosky was clever and a quick study and the country grew out of his skin. By the second winter, he was running his own traps and poaching from Sess's.
“You didn't know that about Lassie? You really didn't?”
She shook her head. “You read it someplace?”
“I read it someplace. _TV Guide,__ most likely.”
“_TV Guide?__ Why in god's name would you read _TV Guide__ when you've never had a TV in your adult life and never will?”
He gave her a look. Shrugged. “I was flat broke one winter when I was still in Fairbanks-remember, I told you? Drinking too much, and out of money for drink. This bookstore had a box of old _TV Guide__s they were giving away. I must have read every one cover to cover. Twice. At least twice. You know _Citizen Kane__?”
A black-and-white image came into her head, the darkened room, the roll and flicker of the tube and her mother with her feet up, doing her nails, the jowly glow of Orson Welles's face, the stark rectilinear halls of a mansion whole armies could camp in. “I've seen it. Or parts of it, anyway.”
“Nineteen forty-one. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Welles. Four stars. _The Mummy's Ghost__? Nineteen forty-four. Lon Chaney Jr. Two stars. _The Savage Innocents,__ Anthony Quinn, 1960-and they must have played that one six times a week-three stars. I could tell you the ratings for every movie ever made, but I doubt if I've seen more than maybe fifty of them in my whole life-and that was when I was a kid at home with my parents.”
The dog shifted in her lap. “You miss it-TV, movies?”
She expected him to say no, to give her the usual bush crazy's party line-too busy out there, too beautiful, the whole natural world better than anything you could ever hope to see on a little screen and the aurora borealis blooming overhead in living color too-but he surprised her. “On a moonless January night with the stove so hot the iron glows and the floor so cold you don't want to get out of bed to save your life, you miss just about everything.”