Dog Read Online Free Page B

idea what she meant.
    I didn’t argue. I’d seen one on the stairs. She’d just seen three. They’d followed her into the restroom. One had darted toward her good leg, and she’d struck it with her cane.
    â€œDogs,” we explained to our friends. “We had a scare with them in Morelos. We’re still shaky.”
    *   *   *
    I still hadn’t yet given the dog bowl to Tony for the simple reason that I wasn’t sure what I felt about it now, wasn’t sure whether it was something you should give a friend.
    Before we left Mexico I’d told Jennifer what the anthropologist had said—about not taking it with us. She’d laughed too. “Of course we’re taking it with us,” she’d declared.
    The night of the restroom event, however, she said to me in the darkness of our bedroom:
    â€œI’m scared. They’re not ordinary dogs, David. I think we should get rid of the bowl.…”
    â€œI agree.”
    We got up, turned on the lights, and put newspaper down on the living room rug. We broke the dog-bowl into tiny pieces with a hammer, then threw everything into the building’s dumpster. Then we smudged the apartment with sage smoke. Why? Because that is what our New Age friends did with ghosts and other supernatural things. What else could we do?
    *   *   *
    Two nights later there were four of them on our stairs, and a week later one of them knocked Jennifer over by the car in broad daylight as we were getting in to go shopping. When we called animal control, they didn’t believe us. Why would they?
    We called her mother, told them she missed home, her family, even her dad, how she wasn’t doing very well, and could they take us in for a couple of months until her spirits improved?
    Her father softened, especially after we talked a couple of times. The idea of her coming home seemed to touch him. Her parents had a carriage house we could stay in, in a very nice development called Anderson Place. Woods of pine and oak bordered the development. The neighborhood of course had dogs, but we’d be two thousand miles away from our apartment and the border.
    We’d been there for just two weeks when Jennifer disappeared. She’d gone out to get something from the car, which was parked on the gravel driveway by the woods.
    Her body was found two days later in those woods. Something had torn it to pieces, removing the belly. I saw the photographs, but much later. They wouldn’t let me see the body.
    I couldn’t think for weeks. I couldn’t feel a thing, but I did what I could. I functioned. My nightmares had more than enough feeling to them.
    There were police interviews and local media interviews, and finally the world stepped back.
    I stayed with her parents for a while. They were devastated and perhaps felt guilty, as parents do.
    I needed to walk the woods—in the day and in the night, with a flashlight and a rifle I’d bought—looking for them, for any evidence of them, and, when I found nothing, to let go of this too.
    It wasn’t the bowl, I realized in the end.
    It was Jennifer.
    Death had chosen her—the anthropologist would have told me—and we’d thwarted it for a time. But the dogs knew, he’d say, that she’d been chosen—“Death always tells them”—and would not give up.
    Yes, we’d brought the ancient bowl back, and we shouldn’t have, but there was more—something much more important:
    The civilization begun by the Chichimec, the Dog People, had stretched from Mexico up as far north as St. Louis and east to Louisiana. Their descendants had been, among other tribes, the Natchez—
    â€”her family’s secret.
    They were in her blood.
    â€œThe dogs knew,” Rocha would have said.
    *   *   *
    I returned to Morelos and have been teaching English here for decades now. But this isn’t really why