Impossible Things (4 page)

“Jake says the great outdoors is our home,” she said. I gave up trying to get a picture of her and snapped a few high-quality detail stills for the papers: the “Pilot” sign taped on the dashboard in front of the driver’s seat, the crocheted granny-square afghan on the uncomfortable-looking couch, a row of salt and pepper shakers in the back windows—Indian children, black Scottie dogs, ears of corn.

“Sometimes we live on the open prairies and sometimes on the seashore,” she said. She went over to the sink and hand-pumped a scant two cups of water into a little pan and set it on the two-burner stove. She took down two turquoise Melmac cups and flowered saucers and a jar of freeze-dried and spooned a little into the cups. “Last year we were in the Colorado Rockies. We can have a house on a lake or in the desert, and when we get tired of it, we just move on. Oh, my, the things we’ve seen.”

I didn’t believe her. Colorado had been one of the first states to ban recreational vehicles, even before the gas crunch and the multiways. It had banned them on the passes first and then shut them out of the national forests, and by the time I left, they weren’t even allowed on the interstates.

Ramirez had said RVs were banned outright in forty-seven states. New Mexico was one, Utah had heavy restricks, and daytime travel was forbidden in all the western states. Whatever they’d seen, and it sure wasn’t Colorado, they had seen it in the dark or on some unpatrolled multiway, going like sixty to outrun the cameras.
Not exactly the footloose and fancy-free life they tried to paint.

The water boiled. Mrs. Ambler poured it into the cups, spilling a little on the turquoise saucers. She blotted it up with the dishtowel. “We came down here because of the snow. They get winter so early in Colorado.”

“I know,” I said. It had snowed two feet, and it was only the middle of September. Nobody even had their snow tires on. The aspens hadn’t turned yet, and some of the branches broke under the weight of the snow. Katie’s nose was still sunburned from the summer.

“Where did you come from just now?” I asked her.

“Globe,” she said, and opened the door to yell to her husband. “Jake! Coffee!” She carried the cups to the table-that-converts-into-a-bed. “It has leaves that you can put in it so it seats six,” she said.

I sat down at the table so she was on the side where the eisenstadt could catch her. The sun was coming in through the cranked-open back windows, already hot. Mrs. Ambler got onto her knees on the plaid cushions and let down a woven cloth shade, carefully, so it wouldn’t knock the salt and pepper shakers off.

There were some snapshots stuck up between the ceramic ears of corn. I picked one up. It was a square Polaroid from the days when you had to peel off the print and glue it to a stiff card: The two of them, looking exactly the way they did now, with that friendly, impenetrable camera smile, were standing in front of a blur of orange rock—the Grand Canyon? Zion? Monument Valley? Polaroid had always chosen color over definition. Mrs. Ambler was holding a little blur in her arms that could have been a cat but wasn’t. It was a dog.

“That’s Jake and me at Devil’s Tower,” she said, taking the picture away from me. “And Taco. You can’t tell from this picture, but she was the cutest little thing. A chihuahua.” She handed it back to me and rummaged behind
the salt and pepper shakers. “Sweetest little dog you ever saw. This will give you a better idea.”

The picture she handed me was considerably better, a matte print done with a decent camera. Mrs. Ambler was holding the chihuahua in this one, too, standing in front of the Winnebago.

“She used to sit on the arm of Jake’s chair while he drove, and when we came to a red light she’d look at it, and when it turned green she’d bark to tell him to go. She was the smartest little thing.”

I looked at the dog’s flaring, pointed ears, its bulging eyes and rat’s snout. The dogs never come through. I took dozens of pictures, there at the end, and they might as well have been calendar shots. Nothing of the real dog at all. I decided it was the lack of muscles in their faces—they could not smile, in spite of what their owners claimed. It is the muscles in the face that make people leap across the years in pictures. The expressions on dogs’ faces were what breeding had fastened on them—the gloomy bloodhound, the alert collie, the rakish mutt—and anything else was wishful thinking on the part of the doting master, who would also swear that a color-blind chihuahua with a brain pan the size of a Mexican jumping bean could tell when the light changed.

My theory of the facial muscles doesn’t really hold water, of course. Cats can’t smile either, and they come through. Smugness, slyness, disdain—all of those expressions come through beautifully, and they don’t have any muscles in their faces either, so maybe it’s love that you can’t capture in a picture because love was the only expression dogs were capable of.

I was still looking at the picture. “She is a cute little thing,” I said, and handed it back to her. “She wasn’t very big, was she?”

“I could carry Taco in my jacket pocket. We didn’t name her Taco. We got her from a man in California that named her that,” she said, as if she could see herself that
the dog didn’t come through in the picture. As if, had she named the dog herself, it would have been different. Then the name would have been a more real name, and Taco would have, by default, become more real as well. As if a name could convey what the picture didn’t—all the things the little dog did and was and meant to her.

Names don’t do it either, of course. I had named Aberfan myself. The vet’s assistant, when he heard it, typed it in as Abraham.

“Age?” he had said calmly, even though he had no business typing all this into a computer—he should have been in the operating room with the vet.

“You’ve got that in there, damn it,” I shouted.

He looked calmly puzzled. “I don’t know any Abraham.…”

“Aberfan, damn it. Aberfan!”

“Here it is,” the assistant said imperturbably.

Katie, standing across the desk, looked up from the screen. “He had the newparvo and lived through it?” she said bleakly.

“He had the newparvo and lived through it,” I said, “until you came along.”

“I had an Australian shepherd,” I told Mrs. Ambler.

Jake came into the Winnebago, carrying the plastic bucket. “Well, it’s about time,” Mrs. Ambler said. “Your coffee’s getting cold.”

“I was just going to finish washing off Winnie,” he said. He wedged the bucket into the tiny sink and began pumping vigorously with the heel of his hand. “She got mighty dusty coming down through all that sand.”

“I was telling Mr. McCombe here about Taco,” she said, getting up and taking him the cup and saucer. “Here, drink your coffee before it gets cold.”

“I’ll be in in a minute,” he said. He stopped pumping and tugged the bucket out of the sink.

“Mr. McCombe had a dog,” she said, still holding
the cup out to him. “He had an Australian shepherd. I was telling him about Taco.”

“He’s not interested in that,” Jake said. They exchanged one of those warning looks that married couples are so good at. “Tell him about the Winnebago. That’s what he’s here for.”

Jake went back outside. I screwed the longshot’s lens cap on and put the vidcam back in its case. She took the little pan off the miniature stove and poured the coffee back into it. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said to her back.

She didn’t turn around. “He never liked Taco. He wouldn’t even let her sleep on the bed with us. Said it made his legs cramp. A little dog like that that didn’t weigh anything.”

I took the longshot’s lens cap back off.

“You know what we were doing the day she died? We were out shopping. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but Jake said she’d be fine. It was ninety degrees that day, and he just kept on going from store to store, and when we got back she was dead.” She set the pan on the stove and turned on the burner. “The vet said it was the newparvo, but it wasn’t. She died from the heat, poor little thing.”

I set the Nikon down gently on the Formica table and estimated the settings.

“When did Taco die?” I asked her, to make her turn around.

“Ninety-six,” she said. She turned back to me, and I let my hand come down on the button in an almost soundless click, but her public face was still in place: apologetic now, smiling, a little sheepish. “My, that was a long time ago.”

I stood up and collected my cameras. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said again. “If I don’t, I’ll come back out.”

“Don’t forget your briefcase,” she said, handing me the eisenstadt. “Did your dog die of the newparvo, too?”

“He died fifteen years ago,” I said. “In ninety-eight.”

She nodded understandingly. “The third wave,” she said.

I went outside. Jake was standing behind the Winnebago, under the back window, holding the bucket. He shifted it to his left hand and held out his right hand to me. “You get all the pictures you needed?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think your wife showed me about everything.” I shook his hand.

“You come on back out if you need any more pictures,” he said, and sounded, if possible, even more jovial, openhanded, friendly than he had before. “Mrs. Ambler and me, we always cooperate with the media.”

“Your wife was telling me about your chihuahua,” I said, more to see the effect on him than anything else.

“Yeah, the wife still misses that little dog after all these years,” he said, and he looked the way she had, mildly apologetic, still smiling. “It died of the newparvo. I told her she ought to get it vaccinated, but she kept putting it off.” He shook his head. “Of course, it wasn’t really her fault. You know whose fault the newparvo really was, don’t you?”

Yeah, I knew. It was the communists’ fault, and it didn’t matter that all their dogs had died, too, because he would say their chemical warfare had gotten out of hand or that everybody knows commies hate dogs. Or maybe it was the fault of the Japanese, though I doubted that. He was, after all, in a tourist business. Or the Democrats or the atheists or all of them put together, and even that was One Hundred Percent Authentic—portrait of the kind of man who drives a Winnebago—but I didn’t want to hear it. I walked over to the Hitori and slung the eisenstadt in the back.

“You know who really killed your dog, don’t you?” he called after me.

“Yes,” I said, and got in the car.

I went home, fighting my way through a fleet of red-painted water tankers who weren’t even bothering to try to outrun the cameras and thinking about Taco. My grandmother had had a chihuahua. Perdita. Meanest dog that ever lived. Used to lurk behind the door waiting to take Labrador-sized chunks out of my leg. And my grandmother’s. It developed some lingering chihauhua ailment that made it incontinent and even more ill-tempered, if that was possible.

Toward the end, it wouldn’t even let my grandmother near it, but she refused to have it put to sleep and was unfailingly kind to it, even though I never saw any indication that the dog felt anything but unrelieved spite toward her. If the newparvo hadn’t come along, it probably would still have been around making her life miserable.

I wondered what Taco, the wonder dog, able to distinguish red and green at a single intersection, had really been like, and if it had died of heat prostration. And what it had been like for the Amblers, living all that time in 150 cubic feet together and blaming each other for their own guilt.

I called Ramirez as soon as I got home, breaking in without announcing myself, the way she always did. “I need a lifeline,” I said.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “You got a call from the Society. And how’s this as a slant for your story? The Winnebago and the Winnebagos.’ They’re an Indian tribe. In Minnesota, I think—why the hell aren’t you at the governor’s conference?”

“I came home,” I said. “What did the Society want?”

“They didn’t say. They asked for your schedule. I told them you were with the governor in Tempe. Is this about a story?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you run a proposal past me before you write
it. The last thing the paper needs is to get in trouble with the Society.”

“The lifeline’s for Katherine Powell.” I spelled it.

She spelled it back to me. “Is she connected with the Society story?”

“No.”

“Then what is she connected with? I’ve got to put something on the request-for-info.”

“Put down background.”

“For the Winnebago story?”

“Yes,” I said. “For the Winnebago story. How long will it take?”

“That depends. When do you plan to tell me why you ditched the governor’s conference?
And
Taliessin West. Jesus Maria, I’ll have to call the
Republic
and see if they’ll trade footage. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have shots of an extinct RV. That is, assuming you got any shots. You did make it out to the zoo, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I got vidcam footage, stills, the works. I even used the eisenstadt.”

“Mind sending your pictures in while I look up your old flame, or is that too much to ask? I don’t know how long this will take. It took me two days to get clearance on the Amblers. Do you want the whole thing—pictures, documentation?”

“No. Just a resume. And a phone number.”

She cut out, still not saying good-bye. If phones still had receivers, Ramirez would be a great one for hanging up on people. I highwired the vidcam footage and the eisenstadts in to the paper and then fed the eisenstadt cartridge into the developer. I was more than a little curious about what kind of pictures it would take, in spite of the fact that it was trying to do me out of a job. At least it used high-res film and not some damn two-hundred-thousand-pixel TV substitute. I didn’t believe it could compose, and I doubted if the eisenstadt would be able to
do foreground-background either, but it might, under certain circumstances, get a picture I couldn’t.

The doorbell rang. I answered the door. A lanky young man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggies was standing on the front step, and there was another man in a Society uniform out in the driveway.

“Mr. McCombe?” he said, extending a hand. “Jim Hunter. Humane Society.”