But there was nothing to be done. It was what was.
The dun scratched out a burrow nearly twice her width and length and crawled into it. She lay on her side, panting. Her abdomen began to cramp.
In the darkness, Orph crept closer to the den. He settled a dozen paces from its mouth. He lay with his ears pricked, listening to the bitch.
The first pup was squeezed from her body half an hour after the contractions began. The size of a man's hand, eyes tightly shut, face rumpled, little legs tucked against its body, it was encased in a wet sac.
The dun tore the sac open and pulled it away from the twitching little form. She scissored the umbilical cord with her teeth. She ate the sac then licked the puppy carefully from head to rear. She nosed it in gentle tumbles several moments, and it began to breathe. It wriggled clumsily and laboriously up against her warmth and rooted around her belly with weak, tiny squeaks until it had one of her dugs in its mouth. The bitch laid her head down to rest. She breathed heavily.
Shortly another pup edged toward birth. She yelped as it emerged, panted when it was out, opened the sac and ate it, cleaned the pup.
At dawn, there were six pups piled against her belly and the exhausted but consummated bitch was sleeping.
Orph had not slept. He'd watched and listened to the burrow through the night. He was charged by each tiny little cry. He could bear it no longer.
He went to peer into the den.
The bitch snarled out at him.
He walked away. His blood understood what he had smelled. There was sense.
A few hours after sunrise the bitch crawled into the light, relieved herself and went to the stream to drink. There was whimpering from the den.
The bitch watched Orph and the other two dogs closely while she drank.
She was back in the hole again in moments.
In the late afternoon Orph and the black and the spotted left to hunt.
It was dark when they returned. Orph had eaten much of the kill. He stood at the entrance of the burrow and whined. The bitch crawled out.
She sniffed, licked his jaws. She opened her mouth wide. He regurgitated into it. She ate and went back down to the pups.
The next afternoon the black emptied its stomach for her.
The pack disappeared from national news in days, was relegated to minor status in state news shortly after. It remained a volatile issue in Queensbridge County and a crisis in Covington. Harry Wilson's paper and radio station drummed it daily. Civilians shot two vagabond dogs and crippled half a dozen more with clubs. Neighbors wouldn't speak to each other. There were fistfights in bars. Children threw stones at tied and fenced dogs. The city council tentatively approved a modified version of Wilson's dog proposals and Wilson announced his candidacy for the state legislature.
A few armed men were arrested in the woods, one after he'd shot at movement in a ravine and wounded a sheriff's deputy in the leg. No sign of the dogs was found. Colonel Mulcahey's confident optimism seeped from his press releases. He promised the hunt would continue until the animals were dead, but, by degrees, the costly manpower was withdrawn from the mountains. Harry Wilson's editorials condemned everyone from the governor to the American Kennel Club.
Bauer no longer wondered. The hard evidence was scanty-McPhee's description of the dog and a pinch of hair gathered from the site of the Stokes killing that Elizabeth Collier identified as German shepherd-but his apprehension solidified into conviction, and with it came an anguished guilt, a paralyzing despondency.
I did this, he thought. Through my own feckless ness my own will-less ness My hands are filthy with the death of a man and with the horror of my own child. He turned from himself in revulsion.
Santo DiGiovanni's letter brought him to his knees.
It was printed in pencil. The lines wavered with age.
Dear Mr. Bauer:
Today makes five years exactly that my Anthony has been in jail. My heart is broken and I have been dead all this time, but my body will not lay down and let me sleep yet. I hope you thought about Anthony this day because it would be terrible for a man to condemn another man to spend his life in prison and not even remember that he did that.
Anthony did wrong. And he must answer to the law and God for that. But you knew him before he murdered. You knew the other bad things he was doing. You knew what he might do. You could have stopped him or you could have told others who would stop him. But you didn't. You did nothing. You waited until Anthony killed, and then you came forward.
You are free now. You can make love and drink wine and please yourself with your work and go and do whatever you like. Anthony cannot.
Anthony is in a little room like your closet with steel bars and my son will stay in his cage until he grows old and his teeth fall out and he makes water in his pants and can't stand up by himself and then dies.
I do not hate you. I am only an old man who waits for death and the day his soul can be with the soul of his son. But I do not forgive you either. If that can be ever done, only you can do it, and you will have to find the way how. I would not like to live with your heart. It must hurt you very bad.
I cannot wish you well, but I do not wish you evil either. I wait only to die and my pain to end.
Goodbye Mr. Bauer.
Santo DiGiovanni Bauer had no substance. He was dust in the wind. He had given way, always.
He had drunk equivocation and starved his will. Renunciation had shriveled his soul.
He lay stunned in his cabin. Grayish stubble spread over his cheeks.
He took a little water, watching his hand raise a glass to his mouth, an immense, slow feat of strength, and he saw signs of his passage-a hardening crust of bread scalloped by his teeth, a broken cup on the floor-but he could not recall them and could hardly understand them.
How he longed for nothingnessl
No. He forced himself to shower.
He forced himself to shave his face, to clean his mouth, to dress his body in fresh clothes, to control the external and compel its order inward. He ate. In moderation, but still his stomach threw the food out. He waited a little and ate again, and this time he gagged up some of it, but most remained.
Kathy appeared at the cabin. With a tall golden boy whose name he couldn't fix. She touched him. They laughed. Their teeth were brilliantly white.
They talked to him and he heard them, but couldn't speak, and Kathy thought it would be fun and wonderful if all three of them took off their clothes and went into his bedroom and made love to each other, but he didn't answer, he looked at them with a still face, and the boy frowned in gathering anger, and Kathy brought her face close to Bauer's and slipped in through the small holes of his pupils and said Hey are you tripping or something and after long moments of emptiness she grew annoyed but then she recovered her laughter because she could experience abrasive emotions only in flickers and she shrugged in silliness and went up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek and said smiling Okay we'll split I'll catch you later all right? and she left with the boy and he heard the boy say, "He's obliterated, man. Totally obliterated. Jesus."
He got his car keys off the dresser and went out. The day was ending and he turned the headlights on. He drove to Elizabeth's. The lights were on in her living room.
She opened the door and said, "Hi, Alex," puzzled.
"I need you," he said. He took her in his hands.
She tried to pull back and said, "What do you think you're doing?" but he was too strong, he hurt her, and she realized she could be hurt much worse, and that eliminated the possibility of her escaping this, and as he set to her clothes she remained resistant and unwilling but didn't struggle as if her life were at stake because she thought that it might be if she did. He spoke but wasn't coherent. She didn't recognize anything in him or the manner in which he seemed to be beating at his own body, and he couldn't penetrate even though she presented him with no impediment, he was impotent, and he got off her and raised his fists and opened his mouth, as if he would scream, as if he would wail, or hurl some great violent noise out, but he didn't, and he lowered his hands and looked down at her with an expression of unendurable grief.