Dog Read Online Free Page A

lightning—were sunk into Jennifer’s leg rolled away, injured, even as another took its place. The branch had broken.
    The lightning showed me a piece of metal siding—something the bus had lost in its rolling—and I had it in my hand and was swinging it, too, shouting “Help!” at the top of my lungs in both languages, though the roar of torrential rain and thunder made the shout a whisper.
    Would Jennifer in her shock and pain faint? Would the shadows get to her face and throat?
    â€œLean on me! We need to get to the others!”
    As I kept swinging, knocking forms away from her, we moved downhill toward the bus. There, people seemed to have a light and were shouting back and forth.
    I saw something else then—something bigger than the coyote-pigs—long-legged, heavier than any Doberman and hungry because (a voice whispered to me) Death calls it.
    We were going to die. The creature was too big, the wrinkles in its face too terrible. The creatures were nipping at her legs—mine now, too, so I would trip—and now the bigger shadow was trotting toward us.
    Then a man—a big man with a piece of metal in his hands, too—and three smaller men were beside us, asking in accented English, “You okay?”
    â€œThere are javalinas .…” I muttered, dizzy.
    â€œThere are no javalinas .”
    â€œThere are javalinas !” I said again.
    The big man ignored me. He and the other three shined flashlights on Jennifer, all over her, then to her bad leg, which one of the smaller men crouched beside, inspecting it. They spoke fast “kitchen” Spanish to each other, called to someone by the bus for a blanket, and within seconds had Jennifer cradled in it, one man at each corner of the serape as they climbed up the ravine with her.
    When I looked back, the forms were gone.
    Sometimes, I remember thinking deliriously, you can defeat Death. People can help you do it.
    *   *   *
    Jennifer lost her leg. Too much necrotic tissue, the doctors said, and nerve and marrow damage, and more osteomyelitis than they’d expected. It was the saddest thing I’d ever known, and neither of us did well when she had the surgery. She had to learn how to walk on just one leg, and prostheses were not very sophisticated in those days. She did her best, and, as her body healed—and her mind tried to—I spent every moment I could with her. With the loss of her federal teaching job, I had to take a part-time job at a discount department store. Friends spelled me, and her mother—without telling her father, who’d been mad at Jennifer since she married me—and was somehow mad at her even now—sent us some money to help us through.
    After six months, her spirits began to return. Writing thank-you notes to everyone who’d been there for her helped, as did funny movies, the drop-bys of friends at all hours, and visits from her mom and mine.
    Then the dogs found us again.
    We lived in an apartment building not far from the Upper Bay. There were parks between us and the water, and the Upper Bay was connected to estuaries, a creek, and marshlands where coyotes and bobcats and other wildlife felt safe enough to make forays into the residential areas.
    I stepped outside one night, and there at the top of our outside stairs one of them—fat and dark and short-legged—sat in the dim light of the one porch bulb. I shouted, but it didn’t move. I went inside to get a hammer, and when I came back, it was gone.
    I didn’t tell Jennifer because I didn’t want to believe it. It could have been any ugly dog, couldn’t it? And there was only one, not a pack.
    A week later, at a park, toward sunset—picnicking with friends from college—Jennifer went to the restroom by herself. A moment later she screamed.
    â€œThey’re here!” she babbled when I reached her. Our friends, who’d run over to her with me, had no