That was when I screamed. ‘Help! Please! Help me! Please, please help me!’
Mister D turned away as if all that screaming was hurting his poor hot ears, and went on staggering across the floor. He must have seen the hole in the screen, he must have had enough eyesight left for that, because he set sail for it and slipped out through it.
I went after him, still screaming.
THEN:
Eddie
‘What’s wrong with him, George?’ I shouted. Mister Dillon had managed to get on his feet again. He was turning slowly around, the smoke rising from his fur and coming out of his mouth in gray billows. ‘What’s happening to him?’
Shirley came out, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘Help him!’ she shouted. ‘He’s burning up!’
Huddie joined us then, panting as if he’d run a race. ‘What the hell is it?’
Then he saw. Mister Dillon had collapsed again. We walked cautiously toward him from one side. From the other, Shirley came down the steps from the stoop. She was closer and reached him first.
‘Don’t touch him!’ George said.
Shirley ignored him and put a hand on D’s neck, but she couldn’t hold it there. She looked at us, her eyes swimming with tears. ‘He’s on fire inside,’ she said.
Whining, Mister Dillon tried to get on his feet again. He made it halfway, the front half, and began to move slowly toward the far side of the parking lot, where Curt’s Bel Aire was parked next to Dicky-Duck Eliot’s Toyota. By then he had to have been blind; his eyes were nothing but boiling jelly in their sockets. He kind of paddled along, pulling himself with his front paws, dragging his rump.
‘Christ,’ Huddie said. ‘Look at that.’
‘Help him!’ Shirley cried. By then the tears were pouring down her face and her voice was so choked it was hard to make out what she was saying. ‘Please, for the love of God, can’t one of you help him?’
I had an image then, very bright and clear. I saw myself getting the hose, which Arky always kept coiled under the faucet-bib on the side of the building. I saw myself turning on the spigot, then running to Mister D and slamming the cold brass nozzle of the hose into his mouth, feeding water down the chimney that was his throat. I saw myself putting him out.
But George was already walking to him, toward the dying ruin that had been our barracks dog, taking his gun out of his holster as he went. D, meanwhile, was still paddling mindlessly along toward a spot of nothing much between Curt’s Bel Aire and Dicky-Duck’s Toyota, moving in a cloud of thickening smoke. How long, I wondered, before the fire inside broke
through and he went up in flames like one of those suicidal Buddhist monks you used to see on television during the Vietnam war?
George stopped and held his gun up so Shirley could see it. ‘It’s the only thing, darlin.
Don’t you think?’
‘Yes, hurry,’ she said, speaking very rapidly.
NOW:
Shirley
For me, it was the worst part — hearing Eddie tell how I agreed with George that only a bullet would serve. I turned to Ned, who was sitting there with his head down and his hair hanging on his brow. I put my hand on his chin and tilted it up so he’d have to look at me.
‘There was nothing else we could do,’ I said. ‘You see that, don’t you?’
For a moment he said nothing and I was afraid. Then he nodded.
I looked at Sandy Dearborn, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Curtis’s boy, and I’ve rarely seen him with such a troubled expression.
Then Eddie started talking again and I sat back to listen. It’s funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only . . .
Only who really wants to?
THEN:
Eddie
In the end there was no more melodrama, just a Trooper in a gray uniform and the shadow of his big hat shielding his eyes bending and reaching out like you might reach out your hand to a crying child to comfort him. He touched the muzzle of his Ruger to the dog’s smoking ear and pulled the trigger. There was a loud Pow! and D fell dead on his side. The smoke was still coming out of his fur in little ribbons. It was as if he’d swallowed a hotspring.
George bolstered his weapon and stood back. Then he put his hands over his face and cried something out. I don’t know what it was. It was too muffled to tell. Huddie and I walked to where he was. Shirley did, too. We put our arms around him, all of us. We were standing in the middle of the parking lot with Unit 6 behind us and Shed B to our right and our nice barracks dog who never made any trouble for anybody lying dead in front of us. We could smell him cooking, and without a word we all moved farther to our right, upwind, shuffling rather than walking because we weren’t quite ready to lose hold of one another. We didn’t talk. We waited to see if he’d actually catch on fire like we thought he might, but it seemed that the fire didn’t want him or maybe couldn’t use him now that he was dead. He swelled some, and there was a gruesome little sound from inside him, almost like the one you get when you pop a paper lunchsack. It might have been one of his lungs. Anyway, once that happened, the smoke started to thin.
‘That thing from the Buick poisoned him, didn’t it?’ Huddie asked. ‘It poisoned him when he bit into it.’
‘Poisoned him my ass,’ I said. ‘That pink-hair motherfucker firebombed him.’ Then I remembered that Shirley was there, and she never had appreciated that kind of talk. ‘Sorry,’ I said.
She seemed not to have heard me. She was still looking fixedly down at Mister D. ‘What do we do now?’ she asked. ‘Does anyone have any ideas?’
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘This situation is totally out of control.’
‘Maybe not,’ George said. ‘Did you cover up the thing in there, Hud?’
‘Yeah.’
‘All right, that’s a start. And how does it look out in Poteenville, Shirl?’
‘The kids are out of danger. They’ve got a dead bus driver, but considering how bad things looked at first, I’d say . . .’ She stopped, lips pressed together so tight they were almost gone, her throat working. Then she said, ‘Excuse me, fellas.’
She walked stiff-legged around the corner of the barracks with the back of her hand pressed against her mouth. She held on until she was out of sight — nothing showing but her shadow — and then there came three big wet whooping sounds. The three of us stood over the smoking corpse of the dog without saying anything, and after a few minutes she came back, dead white and wiping her mouth with a Kleenex. And picked up right where she’d left off. It was as if she’d paused just long enough to clear her throat or swat a fly. ‘I’d say that was a pretty low score. The question is, what’s the score here?’
‘Get either Curt or the Sarge on the radio,’ George said. ‘Curt will do but Tony’s better because he’s more level-headed when it comes to the Buick. You guys buy that?’
Huddie and I nodded. So did Shirley. ‘Tell him you have a Code D and we want him here as soon as he can get here. He should know it’s not an emergency, but he should also know it’s damn dose to an emergency. Also, tell him we may have a Kubrick.’ This was another piece of slang peculiar (so far as I know) to our barracks. A Kubrick is a 2001, and 2001 is PSP code for ‘escaped prisoner’. I had heard it talked about, but never actually called.
‘Kubrick, copy,’ Shirley said. She seemed steadier now that she had orders. ‘Do you — ‘
There was a loud bang. Shirley gave a small scream and all three of us turned toward the shed, reaching for our weapons as we did. Then Huddle laughed. The breeze had blown the shed door closed.
‘Go on, Shirley,’ George said. ‘Get the Sarge. Let’s make this happen.’
‘And Brian Lippy?’ I asked. ‘No APB?’
Huddie sighed. Took off his hat. Rubbed the nape of his neck. Looked up at the sky. Put his hat back on. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But if one does go out, it won’t be any of us who puts it out. That’s the Sarge’s call. It’s why they pay him the big bucks.’
‘Good point,’ George said. Now that he saw that the responsibility was going to travel on, he looked a little more relaxed.