Outside, the autumn afternoon swelled golden, and the children squirmed in their desks. They looked grubby, their clothes rumpled, their hair greasy. I assumed their parents were distracted by the dog epidemic — everyone was. Because the students gabbled of nothing else, most teachers had given in to their obsession. We designed dog-themed lesson plans. The principal arranged for specialists to speak in the auditorium. Some even made classroom visits. Earlier that day, in my world history class, we’d watched a film on the history of canine domestication, learning that around a hundred thousand years ago, the first dogs had split from wolf species, emerging from forests to lurk near human territories — not put off by Homo sapiens’ decadent stink, eventually creeping up to human fires, dazzled by smells of roasting meat. In a time-lapse sequence, a wolf morphed into a German shepherd, which morphed into a collie, which morphed into a teacup Chihuahua, sending the children into howls of laughter.
But now in English class a warm miasma of boredom settled on my students. Eyelids fluttered. Heads drooped. The restless among them jogged their knees, tapped their pencils, and glanced toward windows. Tammy Harley, swatting the air in front of her frown, said that Bobby Banes had cut one. A sly smile smoldered on Bobby’s freckled face — poor little Bobby, whose father hosed down the gut room at the poultry plant with scalding bleach water. And then three football players blasted long farts, timing their stunt with hand signals. Children covered their noses. They gasped and pretended to faint. Several cheerleaders scrambled from their seats to the air-conditioning vent, stood panting over it, screaming “Pigs!” and rolling their mascara-crusted eyes.
My heart beat faster. I shivered. I felt a tingling sensation in my spine. Suddenly, I could detect the salty, rank smell of dogs and I wondered if some of the animals had been sleeping under my portable classroom. Seconds later, Tonya Gooding spotted a dog pack leaping from the trash-strewn copse that separated our school yard from a Burger King parking lot, splitting the day wide open with its barking and feral verve.
“Damn!” she cried. “Looks like they flying.”
Though I motioned for the kids to keep their rears glued to their seats, all but Jebediah Jinks, a preteen preacher with eleven siblings, flew to the windows. I took my usual station at the door, sniffing what was now almost palpable in the air.
“Does anybody smell that?” I asked my students.
“Smell what?” said Tonya Gooding.
“‘As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor,’” Jebediah preached from his desk. “A sign of the end times. A plague like frogs or locusts, except only with dogs, or like them swine Jesus put the demons in. We got war, we got AIDS and hurricanes, we got terrorists and obesity and homosexuality and dogs. You think God’s trying to tell us something?”
The other kids just tittered.
And the dogs came romping and snarling, tussling and woofing: mongrels big as panthers and little as squirrels, balding curs with skin like burnt cheese, mutts with lions’ manes, canines with dreadlocks matted over their eyes. Short dogs waddled on stumpy legs. Tall dogs loped like spooked gazelles. And the big, rangy fighters led the pack, nipping their inferiors.
“‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel,’” croaked Jebediah, ogling Tammy Harley’s leopard-print miniskirt. “‘He that dies of Ahab in the city the dogs shall eat; and he that dies in the field, the birds of the sky will devour.’”
Then I saw Dr. Vilkas sprinting from the woodlet after the pack, camera hoisted, lank hair streaming. My heart lurched. My ears burned. I stepped out onto the porch and locked the children inside. I could barely hear their muffled screams, so loud was the clamor of dogs. The air smelled of Fritos and urine. And hot winds blew, as though the mongrels had brought their own weather. I gripped the railing and watched Dr. Vilkas creep up on a skirmish between two alphas.
In the middle of the playground, two gape-mouthed fighters were hurling themselves at each other — a liver-colored pit bull against a spotted mastiff. I could hear the clack of their teeth. The dogs growled, retreated, and flew together again, lifting a cloud of orange dust. Dr. Vilkas stood two yards from them, squinting into his camera. When the dust cloud dispersed, the triumphant pit bull was dancing around the fallen mastiff. But then the creature stopped cold, sniffed the wind, and looked right at me. As though fired from a cannon, it flew toward my portable, leapt over a stunted juniper, and landed in the sad little place right below my porch where my children had spit a thousand loogies.
The dog snarled at me. When it opened its rank maw, I gasped at the sight of its jumbled teeth. Its slimy bug eyes watched me. Breath flowed from the beast in thick wheezes. The animal growled. I fingered the keys in my pocket, backing toward the door. The children, watching this spectacle from within, yelled and pounded on the windows. And Dr. Vilkas scrambled toward me, holding some object in both hands, his camera, I thought, figuring he’d film my disembowelment.
I dropped my keys, heard them clatter against the wooden porch and bounce onto the ground. The pit bull’s neck hackles shot up. Its gums quivered. The creature sprang three feet into the air, then fell on its side, flopped around in the dust, and rolled into a motionless heap.
“You okay?” Dr. Vilkas stood beside the dog.
“Did you kill it?”
“Stunned it with a portable electrode dart.” Dr. Vilkas waved his newfangled aluminum gun. “The animal will revive in five to ten minutes.”
“I’m glad you didn’t kill it.”
“Really?” He smiled. “You know it’s illegal to shoot them with real guns.”
“I know. Actually, my. . I mean, someone I know bought a tranquilizer gun.”
Dr. Vilkas fixed me with his mismatched eyes. His gaunt cheeks were scruffed with faint stubble. He had a beautiful mouth, wide and full. He stooped to pluck my keys from the ground.
Sirens took the air again and the dogs started howling. The pack scrambled east, as though fleeing the sun. The fallen pit bull let out a little croak and twitched its hind legs.
“Better get inside your classroom,” said Dr. Vilkas, “before this beast revives.”
I slipped back into my portable, where the children had turned off the lights to see better.
They cheered for me. Girls pressed in to hug me, wet-eyed, smelling of french fries and imitation designer perfumes.
I found my husband on the back stoop, hunched over his new tranquilizer gun, three beer cans methodically crushed and stacked at his feet, ready to be boxed and hauled to the scrap-metal recycling center.
“You’re almost an hour late,” he said.
“Emergency meeting,” I said. “The dogs came back to school today.”
For some reason, this made my husband frown.
“You left three lights on. The kitchen faucet was dripping. You forgot to padlock the garbage cans.”
“We had a meeting before school and one after — about the new safety procedures. And then the dogs came, so the meeting was delayed.”
“I needed you here. I wanted to run through the drill.”
“Drill?”
“With the cages. Remember? We’ve got to get the fallen dogs into cages within twenty minutes. That’s how long the tranquilizer darts last, on average, and for some of the larger species, who knows what our window of op will be.”
“Why don’t we run through it now?”
“Because it’s dusk. The dogs always show up at dusk, or else after midnight. Haven’t you noticed that?”