The Sound and the Furry (25 page)

I churned my legs, one paw poking through the net and then another, rose up and up.
But maybe not fast enough, because now my chest felt like it was getting pressed by
something heavy. Air! I needed air and I needed it right away! All I had to do was
open my mouth and take in a big, big gulp—

No, Chet! Hold on and swim, just swim!

But what about the feeling in my throat, a feeling that I had to breathe this very
moment?

Hold on!

I churned and churned, all this crushing going on against my chest, my eyes stretching
like they were getting pressed right out of my head—not that, please!—and then suddenly
there was a loud splash, and I felt air.

Air! So wonderful! I’d never given a thought to the wonderfulness of air and wasn’t
about to start now. My nose was stuck in one of the holes in the netting. I raised
it as high as I could and just breathed. I breathed and breathed and breathed, paddling
gently in warm calm water. But on the surface: that was the point. I paddled on the
surface, breathing the soft warm air and filling up my whole body with it, paddled
and breathed until I started sinking again, sinking out of the air. A terrible jolt
of something—I wouldn’t like to call it fear—shot through me and I thrashed my way
back up to the top.

What was going on? Wasn’t I a good swimmer? Hadn’t Bernie said so? Then that was that.

Think, big guy.

Good idea. I thought. And right away I thought about the
net. It hadn’t given up yet, still wanted to carry me down. The net wasn’t made of
heavy stuff, but taken all together it was heavy enough to sink me if I was paddling
gently along. So therefore?

Paddle harder, Chet.

Perfect! And so quick, just when I needed it. Bernie handled the so-therefores, possibly
a detail you’re familiar with. I paddled harder, all my legs sticking through the
net now, and stayed on the surface, no problem at all, although I wished the net hadn’t
got hold of my tail so tight, keeping me from moving it even the littlest bit.

I turned my head, although not as easily as usual, on account of the net having gotten
twisted up in my collar. All I saw was the night, blackness everywhere, not a single
light showing—a sight I’d seen once or twice on cloudy nights way out in the desert,
so it shouldn’t have bothered me. But it did sort of bother me. The desert was my
home.

No time for home thoughts at that moment. I paddled, not my hardest but pretty hard,
and kept myself, or at least my eyes and nose, above the surface. From time to time
a bit of water splashed in my mouth. It tasted salty—saltier than the water in the
bayou although not as salty as the ocean at San Diego. Bernie had told me not to drink
that salty San Diego water. What about this water, not quite so salty? I tried some—not
bad at all—and was realizing how thirsty I was when the clouds parted and out came
the moon again.

It stunned me. Had I ever seen anything as beautiful? So big and round and white and
shining: it reminded me of Bernie, the shining part. And all around me sprang up tiny
moons, bobbing on the water as far as I could see in every direction, beauties piled
on beauty.

Whoa: every direction? There was water around me for as far as I could see in every
direction? That couldn’t be good. I was fine for now, paddling along, but wasn’t getting
back on solid land the
goal? Where was I even supposed to aim for? What if I ended up swimming in the wrong—

I stopped right there, not even letting that thought get a foothold—just another one
of my strengths. The point was, I had to keep swimming, and swimming pretty hard,
if I wanted to keep my nose in the air. And I did want that, wanted it more than anything.
I swam, and swam some more. Not so bad: I had the moon for company.

The moon slid across the sky the way it does, too slowly to see, except whenever you
checked it again it wasn’t in the same place. Bernie had explained the whole thing
to Charlie once, using a basketball, a tennis ball, and a golf ball. The fun we’d
had with that, even though basketballs are just about impossible for me. But that
day, the great day of the moon explanation, was when I figured out that by curling
back my upper lip I could get one of my long teeth—humans called them dogteeth! What
a life!—into a nice position for poking it through the skin of the basketball, which
promptly shrinks down to manageable size.

Charlie had laughed and laughed. Not Bernie; at least not right away.

I checked the moon. Someplace different, just as I’d thought. A breeze sprang up,
and right away waves rose on the water, not too big, maybe as high as my buddy Iggy,
back home. The problem was that both the breeze and the waves were in my face. How
come they couldn’t have been coming from different directions? Not that I was complaining,
but with the net trying to drag me down, it was easier to turn around and paddle in
the exact opposite way, with the wind and waves at my back. So that was what I did.

I paddled along, glancing at the moon now and then, and after some time realized it
was moving right along with me. That
felt pretty good: always nice to have a buddy. One funny thing: the water, which had
been nice and warm at the beginning, now seemed colder. Not a problem: I was a pretty
big dude—a hundred-plus pounder, in case I haven’t mentioned that already—and could
handle the cold. But what was this? All of a sudden I was shivering? Shivering for
the first time in my life: I only knew what shivering even was from seeing Charlie
step out of a cold shower, the day Bernie had made a cost-saving adjustment to the
water heater pipes, all fixed by the plumber in no time.

I stopped paddling, rose up and down on the waves, and shivered, forgetting for a
moment about the net. But the net—which was showing signs of getting heavier—hadn’t
forgotten about me, and as soon as it realized no paddling was going on, it dragged
me down under. I snapped out of the whole shivering thing and got my legs churning.
I churned and churned away but didn’t reach air. Instead, things got darker and darker.
That made me kind of wild, twisting and flailing around in the cold blackness, and
in the twisting and flailing I happened to see where the moonlight was coming from:
the exact direction I’d been churning away from! How crazy was that! I got a grip,
told myself never to lose it again, and swam my hardest toward the moonlight, surprisingly
far away. I swam and swam, the chest-crushing now hitting me even worse than before,
that feeling in my throat telling me I had to breathe growing stronger and stronger,
and all of a sudden it was the strongest thing I’d ever met up with in my whole life,
stronger than me. Yes, much stronger than me. I opened my mouth and bubbles flew out
and I breathed.

Oh, no: not air, but cold salty water was what I breathed. I choked and gagged and
then splashed up onto the surface, felt the air, choked and gagged some more, and
finally puked up water, lots of it. And felt better right away, always the way with
puking. I paddled on, after a while realizing I was now paddling into
the wind and the waves. Hadn’t I decided to go the other way? I circled around and
swam.

Get the picture, net? I’m swimming

I only forgot to keep swimming a few more times, hard to say how many, but more than
two, and always because of getting distracted by the shivering. Would you believe
it was the same thing every time: the net pulling me under; swimming in the wrong
direction, down instead of up; racing to the surface; fighting the urge to breathe
until it couldn’t be fought anymore; puking in the warm night air? Although the truth
was the air no longer felt so warm on my head—by that time poking completely through
the hole in the net where just my nose had been stuck before, but twisted even tighter
than ever in my collar—plus the wind was blowing harder and the waves had risen. I
checked the moon once more—it was swimming, too, just like me except across the sky!—and
maybe on account of waves being on my mind just then I got hit by what Bernie calls
a brainwave. Possibly my very first: I couldn’t think of another. That didn’t matter.
What mattered was the brainwave itself: all I had to do was keep my eye on the moon!
If I kept my eye on the moon at all times, the net couldn’t pull me under. The truth
was I really didn’t want the net to pull me down again even once more. Inside that
truth was another truth I didn’t even want to think about, namely the possibility
that the next time I wouldn’t have the strength to—

I remembered I didn’t want to think about that and stopped on a dime. Bernie could
shoot dimes right out of the sky: I’d seen him do it. I paddled along, my eyes on
the moon and my mind on Bernie shooting dimes out of the sky, and then simply on Bernie.
I felt pretty good, maybe not tip-top, but no complaints. After a while Bernie’s face
appeared on the moon, as clear as day. Then I did feel tip-top. I paddled along and
watched Bernie. Sometimes
he gave me a smile. My tail would have wagged if it hadn’t been so tightly caught
in the net. It tried anyway. How crazy was that?

I kept my eyes on Bernie-in-the-moon. His lips weren’t moving, but I could hear his
voice:
Doin’ good, Chet, doin’ good.
I got so caught up in that that I forgot the other thing I was supposed to be doing,
besides keeping my eyes on Bernie-in-the-moon. What was it, again?

Swim.

Swim, that was it! What was with me, forgetting a simple thing like that? I swam and
kept my eyes where they had to be to make sure the net didn’t get its way. Also I
shivered, an extra thing I didn’t actually have to do. It happened anyway. So I was
doing one more than two things, which would make . . . Hey! I was right on the edge
of what would you call it? A breakthrough? Would the answer be—

On, no. Not a noseful of cold salty water. Was I sinking again? I really didn’t think
I could—

Churn, big guy, churn! Churn for your life!

I churned, better believe it. I churned up that water big-time with my legs, or at
least kept them moving a bit, and my nose rose up out of the waves, and I breathed
in the lovely air. I was doing not bad. Getting my legs to cooperate—which I’d never
even thought of before—now took some extra effort; other than that, no problems. I
told my legs in no uncertain terms, whatever that might have meant, to do their stuff,
and they sort of did. But perhaps, what with all that extra effort, it took me longer
than it should have to notice that the moon was gone, although Bernie’s face was still
there, drifting in the sky. Not long after finally getting with the program on that,
I also grew aware that the sky itself was no longer dark, but quite lightish, almost
like it was day. Right around then a real big wave raised me high up and I saw . . .
green? Was green
one of the colors I wasn’t supposed to be good at? I was pretty sure I saw some green
in the distance, and even if not it really didn’t matter, because I smelled green:
green, green, unmistakable green, specifically the rot all the green had in these
parts. Had I ever smelled anything so beautiful? I didn’t even try remembering. I
just swam toward the green, my legs pitching in on their own when they felt like it.
Bernie faded very slowly from the sky. I watched him till he was completely gone and
then for some time longer. Meanwhile, the green rot smell grew more and more powerful.
I finally took my eyes off the sky and had a look around.

Hey! I wasn’t out in open water anymore, instead had green on both sides, and not
so far away. I could see trees and that mossy stuff, and even an old falling-apart
dock. Plus the waves had died down and the water didn’t taste so salty. I was in a
bayou! Loved these bayous. What a place! I got myself turned sideways—only one of
my legs in on the action at the moment, the others maybe too tangled in the net, or
having a nice little rest—and headed for the old dock.

I’d taken a stroke, maybe even two, when I caught my first whiff of that froggy snaky
scent with the peppery poopy add-on. The green rot smell came from the land; this
other one was drifting up from down below. Kind of interesting, but I had more important
things on my mind, namely getting to that dock, so I ignored this smell from down
below. Except I really couldn’t on account of how it was getting so strong. A bubble
popped up right in front of my face and when it burst it was just absolutely full
of that smell.