At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (43 page)

The house nearby is massive, a graceful collection of Edwardian gingerbread work and oriel windows and green roof tiles. The garden is large, with a low fence just tall enough to keep a Maltese in. Or out. A woman answers the doorbell. Linna can feel the Maltese vibrate in her arms at the sight of the woman: excitement, not fear.

“Is this your dog?” Linna asks with a smile. “I found her outside, scared.”

The woman’s eyes flicker to the dog and away, back to Linna’s face. “We don’t have a dog,” she says.

(We like our slaves mute. We like to imagine they love us and they do. But they are also with us because freedom and security war in each of us, and sometimes security wins out. They love us. But.)

In those words Linna has already seen how this conversation will go, the denials and the tangled fear and anguish and self-loathing of the woman. Linna turns away in the middle of the woman’s words and walks down the stairs, the brick walkway, through the gate and north toward North Park.

The dog’s name is Sophie. The other dogs are kind to her.

(The story is, that when George Washington died, his will promised freedom for his slaves, but only after his wife had also passed on. A terrified Martha freed them within hours of his death. Though the dogs love us, thoughtful owners can’t help but wonder what they think when they sit on the floor beside our beds as we sleep, teeth slightly bared as they pant in the heat. Do the dogs realize that their freedom hangs by the thread of our lives? The curse of speech, the things they could say and yet choose not to say, makes that thread seem very thin.

(Some people keep their dogs even after the Change. Some people have the strength to love, no matter what. But many of us only learn the limits of our love when they have been breached. Some people keep their dogs. Many do not.

(The dogs who stay seem to tell no stories.)

4. One Dog Catches Possums.

This is the same dog. She is very hungry because her master forgot to feed her, and there’s no good trash because the possums have eaten it all. “If I catch the possums,” she says, “I can eat them now and then the trash later, because the they won’t be getting it all.”

She knows that possums are very hard to catch, so she lies down next to a trash bin and starts moaning. Sure enough, when the possums come to eat trash, they hear her and waddle over.

“Oh, oh, oh,” moans the dog. “I told the rats a great secret and now they won’t let me rest.”

The possums look around but they don’t see any rats. “Where are they?” the oldest possum asks.

One Dog says, “Everything I eat ends up in a place inside me like a giant garbage heap. I told the rats and they snuck in, and they’ve been there ever since.” And she let out a great howl. “Their cold feet are horrible!”

The possums think for a time and then the oldest says, “This garbage heap, is it large?”

“Huge,” One Dog says.

“Are the rats fierce?” says the youngest.

“Not at all,” One Dog tells the possums. “If they weren’t inside me, they wouldn’t be any trouble even for a possum. Oh! I can feel one dragging bits of bacon around.”

After whispering among themselves for a time, the possums say, “We can go in and chase out the rats, but you must promise not to hunt us ever again.”

“If you catch any rats, I’ll never eat another possum,” she promises.

One by one the possums crawl into her mouth. She eats all but the oldest, who is too tough and stringy to be worth it.

“This is much better than dog food or trash,” she says.

(Dogs love us. We have bred them to do this for ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years. It’s hard to make a dog hate people though we have at times tried, with our junkyard guards and our attack dogs.

(It’s hard to make dogs hate people but it is possible.)

Another day, just at dusk, the sky an indescribable violet. Linna has a hard time telling how many dogs there are now, ten or twelve perhaps. The dogs around her snuffle, yip, bark. One moans, the sound of a husky trying to howl. Words float up:
dry, bite, food, piss.

The husky continues its moaning howl, and one by one the others join in with drawn-out barks and moans. They are trying to howl as a pack but none of them know how to do this, nor what it is supposed to sound like. It is a wolf-secret and they do not know any of those.

Sitting on a picnic table, Linna closes her eyes to listen. The dogs out-yell the trees’ restless whispers, the river’s wet sliding, even the hissing roaring street. Ten dogs, or fifteen. Or more. Linna can’t tell because they are all around her now, in the brush, down by the Kaw’s muddy bank, behind the cottonwoods, beside the tall fence that separates the park from the street.

The misformed howl, the hint of killing animals gathered to work efficiently together—it awakens a monkey-place somewhere in her amygdala or even deeper, stained into her genes. Adrenaline hits hot as panic. Her heart beats so hard that it feels as though she’s torn it. Her monkey-self opens her eyes to watch the dogs through pupils constricted enough to dim the twilight; it clasps her arms tight over her soft belly to protect the intestines and liver that are the first parts eaten; it tucks her head between her shoulders to protect her neck and throat. She pants through bared teeth, fighting a keening noise.

Several of the dogs don’t even try to howl. Gold is one of them. The howling would have defined them before the poisoned gift of speech, but the dogs have words now. They will never be free of stories though their stories may free them. Gold may understand this.

(They were wolves once, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years ago. And before we were men and women, we were monkeys and fair game for them. After a time we grew taller and stronger and smarter: human, eventually. We learned about fire and weapons. If you can tame it a wolf is an effective weapon, a useful tool. If you can keep it. We learned how to keep wolves close.

(But we were monkeys first and they were wolves. Blood doesn’t forget.)

After a thousand heartbeats fast as birds’, long after the howl has decayed into snuffling and play-barks and speech, Linna eases back into her forebrain. Alive and safe. But not untouched. Gold tells a tale.

5. One Dog Tries to Become Like Men.

This is the same dog. There is a party, and people are eating and drinking and using their clever fingers to do things. The dog wants to do everything they do, so he says, “Look, I’m human,” and he starts barking and dancing about.

The people say, “You’re not human. You’re just a dog pretending. If you wanted to be human, you have to be bare with just a little hair here and there.”

One Dog goes off and bites his hairs out and rubs the places he can’t reach against the sidewalk until there are bloody patches where he scraped off his skin as well.

He returns to the people and says, “Now I am human,” and he shows his bare skin.

“That’s not human,” the people say. “We stand on our hind legs and sleep on our backs. First you must do these things.”

One Dog goes off and practices standing on his hind legs until he no longer whimpers when he does it. He leans against a wall to sleep on his back, but it hurts and he does not sleep much. He returns and says, “Now I am human,” and he walks on his hind legs from place to place.

“That’s not human,” the people say. “Look at these, we have fingers. First you must have fingers.”

One Dog goes off and he bites at his front paws until his toes are separated. They bleed and hurt and do not work well, but he returns and says, “Now I am human,” and he tries to take food from a plate.

“That’s not human,” say the people. “First you must dream, as we do.”

“What do you dream of?” the dog asks.

“Work and failure and shame and fear,” the people say.

“I will try,” the dog says. He rolls onto his back and sleeps. Soon he is crying out loud and his bloody paws beat at the air. He is dreaming of all they told him.

“That dog is making too much noise,” the people say and they kill him.

Linna calls the Animal Control the next day, though she feels like a traitor to the dogs for doing this. The sky is sullen with the promise of rainstorms and even though she knows that rain is not such a big problem in the life of a dog, she worries a little, remembering her own dog when she was a little girl, who had been terrified of thunder.

So she calls. The phone rings fourteen times before someone picks it up. Linna tells the woman about the dogs of North Park. “Is there anything we can do?”

The woman barks a single unhappy laugh. “I wish. People keep bringing them—been doing that since right after the Change. We’re packed to the rafters and they
keep
bringing them in, or just dumping them in the parking lot, too chickenshit to come in.”

“So—” Linna begins but she has no idea what to ask. She can see the scene in her mind, a hundred or more terrified angry confused grieving hungry thirsty dogs. At least the dogs of North Park have some food and water, and the shelter of the underbrush at night.

The woman has continued, “—they can’t take care of themselves—”

“Do you know that?” Linna asks but the woman talks on.

“—and we don’t have the resources—”

“So what do you do?” Linna interrupts. “Put them to sleep?”

“If we have to,” the woman says, and her voice is so weary that Linna wants suddenly to comfort her. “They’re in the runs, four and five in each one because we don’t have anywhere to put them, and we can’t get them outside because the paddocks are full. It smells like you wouldn’t believe. And they tell these stories… .”

“What’s going to happen to them?” Linna means all the dogs, now that they have speech, now that they are equals.

“Oh, hon, I don’t know.” The woman’s voice trembles. “But I know we can’t save them all.”

(Why do we fear them when they learn speech? They are still dogs, still subordinate to us. It doesn’t change who they are or their loyalty.

(It is not always fear we run from. Sometimes it is shame.)

6. One Dog Invents Death.

This is the same dog. She lives in a nice house with people. They do not let her run outside a fence and they did things to her so that she can’t have puppies, but they feed her well and are kind, and they rub places on her back that she can’t reach.

At this time, there is no death for dogs. They live forever. After a while One Dog becomes bored with her fence and her food and even the people’s pats. But she can’t convince the people to allow her outside the fence.

“There should be death,” she decides. “Then there will be no need for boredom.”

(How do the dogs know things? How do they frame an abstract like
thank you
or a collective concept like chicken? Since the Change, everyone has been asking that question. If awareness is dependent on linguistics, an answer is that the dogs have learned to use words, so the words themselves are the frame they use. But it is still
our
frame,
our
language. They are still not free of it.

(Any more than we are.)

It is a moonless night and the hot wet air blurs the streetlights so that they illuminate nothing except their own glass globes. Linna is there though it is very late. She no longer attends her classes and has switched to the dogs’ schedule, sleeping the afternoons away in the safety of her apartment. She cannot bring herself to sleep in the dogs’ presence. In the park she is taut as a strung wire, a single monkey among wolves; but she returns each dusk and listens, and sometimes speaks. There are at least fifteen dogs now, though she’s sure more hide in the bushes, doze, or prowl for food.

“I remember,” a voice says hesitantly. (
Remember
is a frame. They did not “remember” before the word, only lived in a series of nows longer or shorter in duration. Memory breeds resentment, or so we fear.) “I had a home, food, a warm place, something I chewed—a, a blanket. A woman and a man and she gave me all these things, patted me.” Voices in assent: pats remembered. “But she wasn’t always nice. She yelled sometimes. She took the blanket away. And she’d drag at my collar until it hurt sometimes. But when she made food she’d put a piece on the floor for me to eat. Beef, it was. That was nice again.”

Another voice in the darkness: “Beef. That is a hamburger.” The dogs are trying out the concept of
beef
and the concept of
hamburger
and they are connecting them.

“
Nice
is not being hurt,” a dog says.

“Not-nice is collars and leashes.”

“And rules.”