“That’s right. If they smell it on you, they know they’ve got you. Then they’re merciless. You have to stand up to them.”
Marty approached the dog. It looked up at him testily: he stared back.
“Don’t try and outstare him,” Lillian advised. “It makes the dog aggressive. Just let him get your scent, so he knows you.”
Saul sniffed at Marty’s legs and crotch through the mesh, much to Marty’s discomfort. Then, apparently satisfied, he wandered away.
“Good enough,” said Lillian. “Next time, no wire. And in a while, you’ll be handling him.” She was taking some pleasure in Marty’s unease, he was sure of it. But he said nothing; just let her lead the way into the largest of the sheds.
“Now you must meet Bella,” she said.
Inside the kennels the smell of disinfectant, stale urine and dogs was overpowering. Lillian’s entrance was greeted with another sustained round of barking and wire-pawing. The shed had a walkway down the center, with cages off to the right and left. Two of these held a single dog, both bitches, one considerably smaller than the other. Lillian rolled off the details as they passed each cage-the dogs’ names, and their place on the incestuous family tree. Marty attended to all she was saying, and immediately forgot it again. His mind was otherwise occupied. It wasn’t just the intimate presence of the dogs that unnerved him, but the suffocating familiarity of this interior. The walkway; the cells with their concrete floors, their blankets, their bare bulbs: it was like home from home. And now he began to see the dogs in a new light; saw another meaning in Job’s baleful glance as he looked up from his ablutions; understood, better than Lillian or Whitehead ever could, how these prisoners must view him and his species.
He stopped to look into one of the cages: not out of any particular interest, but to focus on something other than the anxiety he felt in this claustrophobic hut.
“What’s this one called?” he asked.
The, dog in the cage was at the door; another sizable male, though not on the scale of Saul.
“That’s Laurousse,” Lillian replied.
The dog looked friendlier than the others, and Marty overcame his nerves and went down on his haunches in the narrow corridor, extending a tentative hand toward the cage.
“He’ll be fine with you,” she said.
Marty put his fingers to the mesh. Laurousse sniffed them inquisitively; his nose was damp and cold.
“Good dog,” Marty said. “Laurousse.”
The dog began to wag its tail, happy to be named by this sweating stranger.
“Good dog.”
Down here, closer to the blankets and the straw, the smell of excrement and fur was even stronger. But the dog was delighted that Marty had come down to its level, and was attempting to lick his fingers through the wire. Marty felt the fear in him dispelled by the dog’s enthusiasm: far from meaning him harm, it showed unalloyed pleasure.
Only now did he become aware of Whitehead’s scrutiny. The old man was standing a few feet off to his left, his bulk entirely blocking the narrow passage between the cages, watching intently. Marty stood up self-consciously, leaving the dog to whine and wag below him, and followed Lillian further down the line of cages. The dog-keeper was singing the praises of another member of the tribe. Marty tuned in to her conversation:
“-and this is Bella,” she announced. Her voice had softened; there was a dreamy quality in it that he hadn’t caught before. When Marty reached the cage into which she was pointing, he saw why.
Bella half-lay and half-sat in the mesh shadows at the end of her cage, arranged like a black-snouted Madonna on a bed of blankets and straw, with blind pups suckling at her teats. Setting eyes on her, Marty’s reservations about the dogs evaporated.
“Six pups,” Lillian announced as proudly as if they were her own, “all strong and healthy.”
More than strong and healthy, they were beautiful; fat balls of contentment nestling against each other in the luxury of their mother’s lap. It seemed inconceivable that creatures so vulnerable could grow into iron-gray lords like Saul, or suspicious rebels like Job.