Names don’t do it either, of course. I had named Aberfan myself. The vet’s assistant, when he heard it, typed it in as Abraham.
“Age?” he had said calmly, even though he had no business typing all this into a computer, he should have been in the operating room with the vet.
“You’ve got that in there, damn it,” I shouted.
He looked calmly puzzled. “I don’t know any Abraham …”
“Aberfan, damn it. Aberfan!”
“Here it is,” the assistant said imperturbably. Katie, standing across the desk, looked up from the screen. “He had the newparvo and lived through it?” she said bleakly.
“He had the newparvo and lived through it,” I said, “until you came along.”
“I had an Australian shepherd,” I told Mrs. Ambler.
Jake came into the Winnebago, carrying the plastic bucket. “Well, it’s about time,” Mrs. Ambler said, “Your coffee’s getting cold.”
“I was just going to finish washing off Winnie,” he said. He wedged the bucket into the tiny sink and began pumping vigorously with the heel of his hand. “She got mighty dusty coming down through all that sand.”
“I was telling Mr. McCombe here about Taco,” she said, getting up and taking him the cup and saucer. “Here, drink your coffee before it gets cold.”
“I’ll be in in a minute,” he said. He stopped pumping and tugged the bucket out of the sink.
“Mr. McCombe had a dog,” she said, still holding the cup out to him. “He had an Australian shepherd. I was telling him about Taco.”
“He’s not interested in that,” Jake said. They exchanged one of those warning looks that married couples are so good at. “Tell him about the Winnebago. That’s what he’s here for.”
Jake went back outside. I screwed the longshot’s lens cap on and put the vidcam back in its case. She took the little pan off the miniature stove and poured the coffee back into it. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said to her back.
She didn’t turn around. “He never liked Taco. He wouldn’t even let her sleep on the bed with us. Said it made his legs cramp. A little dog like that that didn’t weigh anything.”
I took the longshot’s lens cap back off.
“You know what we were doing the day she died? We were out shopping. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but Jake said she’d be fine. It was ninety degrees that day, and he just kept on going from store to store, and when we got back she was dead.” She set the pan on the stove and turned on the burner. “The vet said it was the newparvo, but it wasn’t. She died from the heat, poor little thing.”
I set the Nikon down gently on the formica table and estimated the settings.
“When did Taco die?” I asked her, to make her turn around.
“Ninety,” she said. She turned back to me, and I let my hand come down on the button in an almost soundless click, but her public face was still in place: apologetic now, smiling, a little sheepish. “My, that was a long time ago.”
I stood up and collected my cameras. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said again. “If I don’t, I’ll come back out.”
“Don’t forget your briefcase,” she said, handing me the eisenstadt. “Did your dog die of the newparvo, too?”
“He died fifteen years ago,” I said. “In ninety-three.”
She nodded understandingly. “The third wave,” she said.
I went outside. Jake was standing behind the Winnebago, under the back window, holding the bucket. He shifted it to his left hand and held out his right hand to me. “You get all the pictures you needed?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think your wife showed me about everything.” I shook his hand.
“You come on back out if you need any more pictures,” he said, and sounded, if possible, even more jovial, open-handed, friendly than he had before. “Mrs. Ambler and me, we always cooperate with the media.”
“Your wife was telling me about your chihuahua,” I said, more to see the effect on him than anything else.
“Yeah, the wife still misses that little dog after all these years,” he said, and he looked the way she had, mildly apologetic, still smiling. “It died of the newparvo. I told her she ought to get it vaccinated, but she kept putting it off.” He shook his head. “Of course, it wasn’t really her fault. You know whose fault the newparvo really was, don’t you?”
Yeah, I knew. It was the communists’ fault, and it didn’t matter that all their dogs had died, too, because he would say their chemical warfare had gotten out of hand or that everybody knows commies hate dogs. Or maybe it was the fault of the Japanese, though I doubted that. He was, after all, in a tourist business. Or the Democrats or the atheists or all of them put together, and even that was One Hundred Percent Authentic—portrait of the kind of man who drives a Winnebago—but I didn’t want to hear it. I walked over to the Hitori and slung the eisenstadt in the back.
“You know who really killed your dog, don’t you?” he called after me.
“Yes,” I said, and got in the car.
I went home, fighting my way through a fleet of red-painted water tankers who weren’t even bothering to try to outrun the cameras and thinking about Taco. My grandmother had had a chihuahua. Perdita. Meanest dog that ever lived. Used to lurk behind the door waiting to take Labrador-sized chunks out of my leg. And my grandmother’s. It developed some lingering chihuahuan ailment that made it incontinent and even more ill-tempered, if that was possible.
Toward the end, it wouldn’t even let my grandmother near it, but she refused to have it put to sleep and was unfailingly kind to it, even though I never saw any indication that the dog felt anything but unrelieved spite toward her. If the newparvo hadn’t come along, it probably would still have been around making her life miserable.
I wondered what Taco, the wonder dog, able to distinguish red and green at a single intersection, had really been like, and if it had died of heat prostration. And what it had been like for the Amblers, living all that time in a hundred and fifty cubic feet together and blaming each other for their own guilt.
I called Ramirez as soon as I got home, breaking in without announcing myself, the way she always did. “I need a lifeline,” I said.
“I’m glad you called,” she said. “You got a call from the Society. And how’s this as a slant for your story? ‘The Winnebago and the Winnebagos.’ They’re an Indian tribe. In Minnesota, I think—why the hell aren’t you at the governor’s conference?”
“I came home,” I said. “What did the Society want?”
“They didn’t say. They asked for your schedule. I told them you were with the governor in Tempe. Is this about a story?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you run a proposal past me before you write it. The last thing the paper needs is to get in trouble with the Society.”
“The lifeline’s for Katherine Powell.” I spelled it.
She spelled it back to me. “Is she connected with the Society story?”
“No.”
“Then what is she connected with? I’ve got to put something on the request-for-info.”
“Put down background.”
“For the Winnebago story?”
“Yes,” I said. “For the Winnebago story. How long will it take?”
“That depends. When do you plan to tell me why you ditched the governor’s conference? And Taliesin West. Jesus Maria, I’ll have to call the Republic and s they’ll trade footage. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have shots of an extinct RV. That is, assuming you got any shots. You did make it out to the zoo, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I got vidcam footage, stills, the works. I even used the eisenstadt.”