One Good Dog Read Online Free Page B

to light, meaningless leashes, happily gazing up at the faces of those who held the ends. They were usually dragged away to one side as the gladiators lumberedby, the fear in their people telegraphing caution to those at the end of the leash. The occasional lifted lip, not in challenge, but in submission. They were a hoot. Can you imagine?
    I could, and, increasingly, I did. I was good in the pit, but I knew that there would always be the day when I’d be beaten—either by another fellow or by my boys. Beaten as punishment for being beaten. It’s what happened to Dad at least twice in my life.
    But there was another sort of fellow that I met on a more regular basis, the one that lived an entirely independent life: the street dog. Usually more intelligent than the occasional leash dog, these street dogs were savvy. They understood the freedom of a life lived naturally. If they were often cold, hungry, and in danger of being run over, they lived their lives as they pleased. Unfortunately for them, they were also an easy target; put a plate of food out and, wham bam, they were snagged. Not just by my boys and their ilk but by the authorities, the men or women who made such dogs disappear in exactly the same way as my boys. One minute licking their hindquarters on the sidewalk, the next in a cage. But their stories were the best. High adventure, travel, frequent mating. Oh boy. It was rumored that the street dogs who were captured by the authorities only made it out if they were charming. Those who weren’t charming didn’t. But it’s hard to know charming when your whole life has been directed toward being irascible. No one knew where they went, but it didn’t take a standard poodle to figure it out. The odor of charring meat and bones that threaded through the miasma of scents that filled the city air was enough of a clue. Through the diesel and effluvia, doughnuts and wieners, the sweaty population and itsoverlay of artificial scent, working its way like a winding river of finality, the smoke of oblivion.
    I was resting in my cage after a particularly challenging bout. My opponent had nearly prevailed, until by sheer bull force I pushed him over the line that demarcates winning. They thrust the breaking stick between my jaws and the game was over. I was sliced up pretty good, and one of the boys had made a squeamish attempt to stitch up the gash on my chest. The stitches pulled the skin together something like a badly made baseball. I licked at them, tasting the rough edges of my blood-crusted trussed skin, but I couldn’t reach the worst of it. My opponent lay on a pile of newspapers, his head flung back like he was baying at the moon. There was still a light in his eye, so I knew he hadn’t yet bled to death. I snortled an apology through the bars of my cage and he lifted his head. He snortled back, a kind of absolution for just doing my job. We’re a brutish lot, but we don’t hate one another.
If we had hands, we could break out of here.
He agreed, then laid his head down, and I watched as his spirit lifted away.
    A pounding above our heads. Mom sat up, dispersing her latest litter onto the bottom of her cage.
The men. The men are here.
We’d heard about them, the men who come and our kind disappear. We’d heard they removed us to bigger cages, smaller cages; to fight us with other species, to simply cut our throats. Rumors of the men circulated most often after one of us died. A dime is dropped and things happen.
    We heard the percussion of big boys’ feet upstairs, dashing toward the back of the apartment, clambering down the backstairs. I knew that there was a door to the outside, to the square of dirt where we were allowed to defecate twice a day. None of the boys ever stepped foot out there in the field of shit. We who used the yard, trotting around the perimeter, sniffing out one another over and over again, raising our legs against one another’s mark, we knew how to skirt the worst of the mess. If we