“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.