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Authors: Kij Johnson

At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (45 page)

BOOK: At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

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One Dog comes to a parking lot which has nothing in it but the legs of dogs. The legs walk from place to place but they cannot see or smell or eat. None of them are her legs, so she walks on. After this she finds a parking lot filled with the ears of dogs, and then one filled with the assholes of dogs, and the eyes of dogs and the bodies of dogs; but none of the ears and assholes and eyes and bodies are hers, so she walks on.

The last parking lot she comes to has nothing at all in it except for little smells like puppies. She can tell one of the little smells is hers, so she calls to it and it comes to her. She doesn’t know where the little smell belongs on her body, so she carries it in her mouth and walks back past the parking lots and through the culvert.

One Dog cannot leave the culvert because a man stands in the way. She puts the little smell down carefully and says, “I want to go back.”

The man says, “You can’t unless all your parts are where they belong.”

One Dog can’t think of where the little smell belongs. She picks up the little smell and tries to sneak past the man but the man catches her and hits her. One Dog tries to hide it under a hamburger wrapper and pretend it’s not there but the man catches that, too.

One Dog thinks some more and finally says, “Where does the little smell belong?”

The man says, “Inside you.”

So One Dog swallows the little smell. She realizes that the man has been trying to keep her from returning home but that the man cannot lie about the little smell. One Dog growls and runs past him and returns to our world.

There are two police cars pulled onto the sidewalk before North Park’s main entrance. Linna takes in the sight of them in three stages: first, she has seen police everywhere today so they are no shock; second, they are
here
, at
her
park, threatening
her
dogs, and this is like being kicked in the stomach; and third, she thinks:
I have to get past them
.

North Park has two entrances. Linna walks down a side street and enters the park by the little narrow dirt path from Second Avenue.

The park is never quiet. There’s busy Sixth Street just south, and the river and its noises to the north and east and west; trees and bushes hissing with the hot wind; the hum of insects.

But the dogs are quiet. She’s never seen them all in the daylight but they’re gathered now, silent and loll-tongued in the bright daylight. There are forty or more. Everyone is dirty now. Any long fur is matted. Anything white is dust-colored. Most of them are thinner than they were when they arrived. The dogs face one of the tables, as orderly as the audience at a string quartet, but the tension in the air is so obvious that Linna stops short.

Gold stands on the table. There are a couple of dogs she doesn’t recognize in the dust nearby, lying flat with their sides heaving, tongues long and flecked with white foam. One is hunched over; he drools onto the ground and retches helplessly. The other dog has a scratch along her flank. The blood is the brightest thing Linna can see in the sunlight, a red so strong it hurts her eyes.

The Cruz Park cordon was permeable, of course. These two managed to slip past the police cars. The vomiting one is dying.

She realizes suddenly that every dog’s muzzle is swiveled toward her. The air snaps with something that makes her back-brain bare its teeth and scream, her hackles rise. The monkey-self looks for escape but the trees are not close enough to climb and she is no climber, the road and river too far away. She is a spy in a gulag. The prisoners have little to lose by killing her.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” Gold says.

“I came to tell you. Warn you.” Even through her monkey-self’s defiance, Linna weeps helplessly.

“We already know.” The pack’s leader, the German Shepherd, says. “They’re killing us all. We’re leaving the park.”

She shakes her head, fighting for breath. “They’ll kill you. There are police cars on Sixth. They’ll shoot you however you get out. They’re
waiting.”

“Will it be better here?” Gold asks. “They’ll kill us anyway with their poisoned meat. We
know.
You’re afraid—”

“I’m not—” Linna starts but he breaks in.

“We smell it on
everyone,
even the people who take care of us or feed us. Even you. We must leave.”

“They’ll
kill
you,” Linna says again.

“Some of us may make it.”

“Wait! Maybe there’s a way,” Linna says and then: “I have stories.”

In the stifling air, Linna can hear the dogs pant even over the street noises. “People stories are only good for people,” Gold says at last. “Why should we listen to yours?”

“We made you into what we wanted; we owned you. Now you are becoming what you want. You belong to yourselves. But we have stories and we learned from them and maybe they will help you. Will you listen?”

The air shifts, but whether it is the first movement of the still air or the dogs shifting, she can’t tell.

“Tell your story,” says the German Shepherd.

Linna struggles to remember half-read textbooks from a sophomore course on folklore, framing her thoughts as she speaks them. “We used to tell a lot of stories about Coyote. The animals were here before humans were, and Coyote was one of them. He did a lot of stuff, got in a lot of trouble. Fooled everyone.”

“I know about coyotes,” a dog says. “There were some by where I used to live. They eat puppies sometimes.”

“I bet they do,” Linna says. “Coyotes eat everything. But this wasn’t
a
coyote, it’s
Coyote
. The one and only.”

The dogs murmur. She hears them work it out:
Coyote
is the same as
This is the same dog.

“So. Coyote disguised himself as a bitch so that he could hang out with a bunch of other females just so he could mate with them. He pretended to be dead and then when the crows came down to eat him, he snatched them up and ate every one. When a greedy man was keeping all the animals for himself, Coyote pretended to be a very rich person and freed them all so that everyone could eat. He—” She pauses to think, looks down at the dogs all around her. The monkey-fear is gone. She is the storyteller, the maker of thoughts. They will not kill her, she knows. “Coyote did all these things and a lot more. I bet you’ll think of some too.

“I have an idea of how to save you,” she says. “Some of you might die but some chance is better than no chance.”

“Why would we trust you?” says the mastiff-cross who has never liked her, but the other dogs are with her. She feels it and answers.

“Because this trick, maybe it’s even good enough for Coyote. Will you let me help?”

We people are so proud of our intelligence, but that makes it easier to trick us. We see the white-truck men and we believe they’re whatever we’re expecting to see. Linna goes to U-Haul and rents a pickup truck for the afternoon. She digs out a white shirt she used to wear when she ushered at the concert hall. She knows
clipboard with printout
means
official responsibilities,
so she throws one on the dashboard of the truck.

She backs the pickup to the little entrance on Second Street. The dogs slip through the gap in the fence and scramble into the pickup’s bed. She lifts the ones that are too small to jump so high. And then they arrange themselves carefully, flat on their sides. There’s a certain amount of snapping and snarling as later dogs step on the ears and ribcages of the earlier dogs, but eventually everyone is settled, everyone able to breathe a little, every eye tight shut.

She pulls onto Sixth Street with a truck heaped with dogs. When the police stop her she tells them a little story. Animal Control has too many calls these days: cattle loose on the highways, horses leaping fences that are too high and breaking their legs—and the dogs, the scores and scores of dogs at Cruz Park. Animal Control is renting trucks now, whatever they can find. The dogs of North Park were slated for poisoning this morning.

“I didn’t hear about this in briefing,” one of the policemen says. He pokes at the heap of dogs with a black club. They shift like dead meat. They reek; an inexperienced man might not recognize the stench as mingled dog breath and shit.

Linna smiles, baring her teeth. “I’m on my way back to Animal Control,” she says. “They have an incinerator.” She waves an open cell phone at him and hopes he does not ask to talk to whoever’s on the line because there is no one.

But people believe stories and then they make them real. The officer pokes at the dogs one more time and then wrinkles his nose and waves her on.

Clinton Lake is a vast place, trees and bushes and impenetrable brambles ringing a big lake: beyond that, open country in every direction. When Linna unlatches the pickup’s bed, the dogs drop stiffly to the ground and stretch. Three died of overheating, stifled beneath the weight of so many others. Gold is one of them but Linna does not cry. She knew she couldn’t save them all but she has saved some of them. That has to be enough. And the stories will continue. Stories do not easily die.

The dogs can go wherever they wish from here, and they will. They and all the other dogs who have tricked or slipped or stumbled to safety will spread across Kansas, the world. Some will find homes with men and women who treat them not as slaves but as friends, freeing themselves as well. Linna herself returns home with little shivering Sophie and sad Hope.

Some will die, killed by men and cougars and cars and even other dogs. Others will raise litters. The fathers of some of those litters will be coyotes. Eventually the Changed dogs will find their place in the changed world.

(When we first fashioned animals to suit our needs, we treated them as though they were stories and we the authors, and we clung desperately to an imagined copyright that would permit us to change them, sell them, even delete them. But some stories cannot be controlled. Perhaps we started them but they change and they are no longer ours, if they ever were. A wise author or dog owner listens and learns and says at last, “I never knew that.”)

11. One Dog Creates the World.

This is the same dog. There wasn’t any world when this happens, just a man and a dog. They lived in a house that didn’t have any windows to look from. Nothing had any smells. The dog shit and pissed on a paper in the bathroom, but not even this had a smell. Her food had no taste, either. The man suppressed all these things. This was because the man didn’t want One Dog to create the world and he knew it would be done by smell.

One night One Dog was sleeping and she felt the strangest thing that any dog has ever felt. It was the smells of the world pouring from her nose. When the smell of grass came out, there was grass outside. When the smell of shit came out, there was shit outside. She made the whole world that way. And when the smell of other dogs came out, there were dogs everywhere, big ones and little ones all over the world.

“I think I’m done,” she said, and she left.

Publication History

“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,”
Asimov’s Magazine,
July 2008.

“Fox Magic,”
Asimov’s Magazine,
December 1993.

“Names for Water,”
Asimov’s Magazine,
October/November 2010.

“The Bitey Cat,” published here for the first time.

“The Horse Raiders,”
Analog,
May 2000.

“Dia Chjerman’s Tale,”
Tales for the Long Rains,
Scorpius Digital, 2001

“My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in my Wife’s Character—The Nature of the Bird—Her Final Disposition,” www.kijjohnson.com.