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 OF BOB
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.
EXCEPT FOR THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR ON HER EAST SIDE, where the professor lived with with his wife and two little girls, this seemed to Agnes like a neighborhood of widows. Next door on the west side was Lura Campbell, eighty-four, who insisted on driving every day. She did all right once she got out of her azalea-lined driveway, but she had the worst time trying to back herself out. On this morning, Agnes lay in bed and listened to Lura’s old Impala wheeze to a start, clank into Reverse, back up a little ways, and then screee, into the azaleas. Clank clank, into Drive, pull forward. Clank clank, into Reverse, back up. Screee, into the azaleas. Clank clank, into Drive, pull forward. Clank clank, into Reverse, back up. Screee, into the azaleas. All the way down her driveway. Drove Agnes crazy. She’d said to Lura, I don’t see why you feel like you got to get out and go every morning. Well, I like to go, Lura said. I don’t see any sense in going just to be going, Agnes said. Well, Lura said, I just have to get out and go somewhere, I can’t sit here at the house.
Agnes did not want to end up like Lura, an aimless, doddering wanderer driving down the middle of the street in her ancient automobile threatening dogs and children. She hoped that something would happen to ease her on out of the world before she got that way, that she would die in her sleep or simply somehow disappear, whisked into thin air by the hand of God. She had made her peace with God, though she’d never liked religion. She certainly wasn’t afraid of God, like she had been once without realizing it. She would face God like she would anybody else, with dignity and demanding a little respect in return. She’d never willingly offended God, had only ignored Him a little, like everyone else. But recently she had silently said, If it comes a time when it’s convenient to You, go ahead.
She thought, Maybe I’ll see Pops, and with two good eyes.
She fished her glass one out of the little dish of solution on the bedside table, popped it in, and eased her legs off the side of the bed. As soon as her toes touched the cool bare floor, Bob was there, leaping into the air around her like a circus dog.
“Get,” she waved at him, shuffling into the kitchen to make coffee. “Get.”
The coffee made, she poured a cup, took it out to the porch, and no sooner had her bottom touched the chair than Bob jumped into her lap, circled, and settled in his sphinxlike pose to observe the traffic.