McGuinn lowered himself on all fours. He rumbled a low growl and panted unblinkingly. His haunches remained bunched and taut, as if readying to launch at the stranger.
“What’s his name?” the man asked again.
Twilly told him.
“Sounds Irish,” the man remarked. His eyes cut back and forth between Twilly and the dog. “You Irish?” he said to Twilly.
“You’ll have to do better than this.”
The stranger acted innocent. “What do you mean? I’m just trying to be friendly.”
Twilly said, “Cut the shit.”
The weather was coming up on them fast. A cold raindrop hit the side of Twilly’s neck. The man with the spiky hair took a fat one on the nose. He wiped it dry with the sleeve of his jacket.
“Rain’ll ruin those shoes of yours,” Twilly said, “in about two minutes flat.”
“Let me worry about the footwear,” the stranger said, but he glanced down anyway at his feet. Twilly knew he was thinking about how much the brown leather shoes had cost.
“McGuinn! Let’s go.” Twilly clapped his hands loudly.
The dog wouldn’t move, wouldn’t shift his stare from the man in the musty-smelling suit. The Labrador had retained little from his short-lived time as a hunting dog in training, but one thing that had stayed with him was an alertness to guns. A human with a gun carried himself in a distinctly different manner. The Palmer Stoat who clomped through the marsh with a 20-gauge propped on his shoulder practically was a separate species from the Palmer Stoat who each night clipped McGuinn to a leash and covertly led him next door to crap on the neighbor’s garden. To Stoat and his human hunter friends, the transformation in themselves—bearing, gait, demeanor and voice—was so subtle they didn’t notice, yet it was glaringly obvious to McGuinn. A visual sighting of the gun itself was superfluous; humans who carried them had an unmistakable presence. Even their perspiration smelled different—not worse, for in the ever-ripe world of dogs there was hardly such a thing as a bad odor. Just different ones.
For a moment the stranger acted as if he wanted to make friends. He reached a hand beneath his moldy-smelling coat and said, “Here, boy. I’ve got something you’ll like… ”
McGuinn, cocking his head, licking his chops, never taking his hopeful brown eyes off the stranger’s hand, which emerged from under the coat with…
The gun. Had to be.
Now, from behind, the Labrador heard the young man say:
“Stay, boy. Don’t move!”
Never had McGuinn detected such urgency in a command. He decided, on a whim, to obey.
There was another gun-toting human on Toad Island: Krimmler, who had taken to carrying a loaded.357 after Robert Clapley’s hired freak accosted him in the Winnebago.
The pistol added to Krimmler’s nervousness, and he had plenty of time to be nervous. Construction on the Shearwater resort project remained suspended? and the lush new quiet on the island made Krimmler restless and edgy—it was the very sound of Nature, gradually reclaiming the ground plowed up by his beloved bulldozers. One morning he was appalled to find a green shoot sprouting in the old dirt tracks of a front-end loader. A baby tree! Krimmler thought, ripping it from the soil. A baby tree that would otherwise grow to be a tall chipmunk-harboring tree!
The tranquillity that had once merely annoyed Krimmler now turned him into a paranoid basket case. At night he slept with the.357 under his pillow, half-certain he accidentally would shoot off his own ear while groping for the gun in a moment of dire need. By day he tucked it in the front of his pants, half-certain he accidentally would shoot off his genitals if danger surfaced.
Krimmler did not, as it turned out, shoot off any of his own body parts. He went for the.357 exactly once, dislodging it from his waistband and knocking it all the way down his baggy right pants leg. It landed with a clunk on the flimsy floor of the construction trailer, where it was retrieved by the smiling bald-headed bum with the racing flag around his waist.
“You rascal,” the bum said to Krimmler.
“Gimme that!” Krimmler exclaimed.