Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (36 page)

“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.”

“Being inside and only coming out to shit and piss.”

“People are nice and not nice,” says the first voice. Linna finally sees that it belongs to a small dusty black dog sitting near the roots of an immense oak. Its enormous fringed ears look like radar dishes. “I learned to think and the woman brought me here. She was sad, but she hit me with stones until I ran away, and then she left. A person is nice and not nice.”

The dogs are silent, digesting this. “Linna?” Hope says. “How can people be nice and then not nice?”

“I don’t know,” she says, because she knows the real question is,
How can they stop loving us?

(The answer even Linna has trouble seeing is that
nice
and
not-nice
have nothing to do with love. And even loving someone doesn’t always mean you can share your house and the fine thread of your life, or sleep safely in the same place.)

 

“Why is she here?”

It’s one of the new dogs, a lean Lab-cross with a limp. He doesn’t talk to her but to Gold, and Linna sees his anger in his liquid-brown eyes, feels it like a hot scent rising from his back. He’s one of the half-strays, an outdoor dog who lived on a chain. It was no effort at all for his owner to unhook the chain and let him go; no effort for the Lab-cross to leave his owner’s yard and drift across town killing cats and raiding trash cans, and end up in North Park.

There are thirty dogs now and maybe more. The newcomers are warier around her than the earlier dogs. Some, the ones who have taken several days to end up here, dodging police cruisers and pedestrians’ Mace, are actively hostile.

“She’s no threat,” Gold says.

The Lab-cross says nothing but approaches with head lowered and hackles raised. Linna sits on the picnic table’s bench and tries not to screech, to bare her teeth and scratch and run. The situation is as charged as the air before a thunderstorm. Gold is no longer the pack’s leader—there’s a German Shepherd dog who holds his tail higher—but he still has status as the one who tells the stories. The German Shepherd doesn’t care whether Linna’s there or not; he won’t stop another dog from attacking if it wishes. Linna spends much of her time with her hands flexed to bare claws she doesn’t have.

“She listens, that’s all,” says Hope: frightened Hope standing up for her. “And brings food sometimes.” Others speak up:
She got rid of my collar when it got burrs under it. She took the tick off me. She stroked my head.

The Lab-cross’s breath on her ankles is hot, his nose wet and surprisingly warm. Dogs were once wolves; right now this burns in her mind. She tries not to shiver. “You’re sick,” the dog says at last.

“I’m well enough,” Linna says through clenched teeth.

Just like that the dog loses interest and turns back to the others.

(Why does Linna come here at all? Her parents had a dog when she was a little girl. Ruthie was so obviously grateful for Linna’s love and the home she was offered, the old quilt on the floor, the dog food that fell from the sky twice a day like manna. Linna wondered even then whether Ruthie dreamt of a Holy Land, and what that place would have looked like. Linna’s parents were kind and generous, denied Ruthie’s needs only when they couldn’t help it; paid for her medical bills without too much complaining; didn’t put her to sleep until she became incontinent and messed on the living-room floor.

(Even we dog-lovers wrestle with our consciences. We promised to keep our pets forever until they died; but that was from a comfortable height, when we were the masters and they the slaves. Some Inuit tribes believe all animals have souls—except for dogs. This is a convenient stance. They could not use their dogs as they do—beat them, work them, starve them, eat them, feed them one to the other—if dogs were men’s equals.

(Or perhaps they could. Our record with our own species is not so exemplary.)

 

Linna has been sleeping the days away so that she can be with the dogs at night, when they feel safest out on the streets looking for food. So now it’s hot dusk, a day later, and she’s just awakened in tangled sheets in a bedroom with flaking walls: the sky a hard haze, air warm and wet as laundry. Linna is walking past Cruz Park, on her way to North Park. She has a bag with a loaf of day-old bread, some cheap sandwich meat, and an extra order of French fries. The fatty smell of the fries sticks in her nostrils. Gold never gets them anymore, unless she saves them from the other dogs and gives them to him specially.

She thinks nothing of the blue and red and strobing white lights ahead of her on Mass Street until she gets close enough to see that this is no traffic stop. There’s no wrecked car, no distraught student who turned left across traffic because she was late for her job and was T-boned. Half a dozen police cars perch on the sidewalks around the park, and she can see reflected lights from others otherwise hidden by the park’s shrubs. Fifteen or twenty policemen stand around in clumps, like dead leaves caught for a moment in an eddy and freed by some unseen current.

Everyone knows Cruz Park is full of dogs—sixty or seventy according to today’s editorial in the local paper, each one a health and safety risk—but very few dogs are visible at the moment, and none look familiar to her, either as neighbors’ ex-pets or wanderers from the North Park pack.

Linna approaches an eddy of policemen; its elements drift apart, rejoin other groups.

“Cruz Park is closed,” the remaining officer says to Linna. He’s a tall man with a military cut that makes him look older than he is.

It’s no surprise that the flashing lights, the cars, the yellow CAUTION tape, and the policemen are about the dogs. There’ve been complaints from the people neighboring the park—overturned trash cans, feces on the sidewalks, even one attack when a man tried to grab a stray’s collar and the stray fought to get away. Today’s editorial merely crystalized what everyone already felt.

Linna thinks of Gold, Sophie, Hope. “They’re just dogs.”

The officer looks a little uncomfortable. “The park is closed until we can address current health and safety concerns.” Linna can practically hear the quote marks from the official statement.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

He relaxes a little. “Right now we’re waiting for Animal Control. Any dogs they capture will go to Douglas County Humane Society; they’ll try to track down the owners—”

“The ones who kicked the dogs out in the first place?” Linna asks. “No one’s gonna want these dogs back, you know that.”

“That’s the procedure,” he says, his back stiff again, tone harsh. “If the Humane—”

“Do you have a dog?” Linna interrupts him. “I mean, did you? Before this started?”

He turns and walks away without a word.

Linna runs the rest of the way to North Park, slowing to a lumbering trot when she gets a cramp in her side. There are no police cars up here, but yellow plastic police tape stretches across the entry: CAUTION. She walks around to the side entrance, off Second Street. The police don’t seem to know about the break in the fence.

 

(Whatever else it is, the Change of the animals—mute to speaking, dumb to dreaming—is a test for us. We pass the test when we accept that their dreams and desires and goals may not be ours. Many people fail this test. But we don’t have to, and even failing we can try again. And again. And pass at last.

(A slave is trapped, choiceless and voiceless; but so is her owner. Those we have injured may forgive us, but how can we know? Can we trust them with our homes, our lives, our hearts? Animals did not forgive before the Change; mostly they forgot. But the Change brought memory, and memory requires forgiveness, and how can we trust them to forgive us?

(And how do we forgive ourselves? Mostly we don’t. Mostly we pretend to forget, and hope it becomes true.)

At noon the next day, Linna jerks awake, monkey-self already dragging her to her feet. Even before she’s fully awake, she knows that what woke her wasn’t a car’s backfire. It was a shotgun blast, and it was only a couple of blocks away, and she already knows why.

She drags on clothes and runs to Cruz Park, no stitch in her side this time. The flashing police cars and CAUTION tape and men are all still there, but now she sees dogs everywhere, twenty or more laid flat near the sidewalk, the way dogs sleep on hot summer days. Too many of the ribcages are still; too many of the eyes open, dust and pollen already gathering.

Linna has no words, can only watch speechless; but the men say enough. First thing in the morning, the Animal Control people went to Dillon’s grocery store and bought fifty one-pound packages of cheap hamburger on sale, and they poisoned them all, and then scattered them around the park. Linna can see little blue styrene squares from the packaging scattered here and there, among the dogs.

The dying dogs don’t say much. Most have fallen back on the ancient language of pain, wordless yelps and keening. Men walk among them, shooting the suffering dogs, jabbing poles into the underbrush looking for any who might have slipped away.

People come in cars and trucks and on bicycles and scooters and on their feet. The police officers around Cruz Park keep sending them away—“a health risk” says one officer; “safety,” says another, but the people keep coming back, or new people.

Linna’s eyes are blind with tears; she blinks and they slide down her face, oddly cool and thick.

“Killing them is the answer?” says a woman beside her. Her face is wet as well, but her voice is even, as if they are debating this in a class, she and Linna. The woman holds her baby in her arms, a white cloth thrown over its face so that it can’t see. “I have three dogs at home, and they’ve never hurt anything. Words don’t change that.”

“What if they change?” Linna asks. “What if they ask for real food and a bed soft as yours, the chance to dream their own dreams?”

“I’ll try to give it to them,” the woman says, but her attention is focused on the park, the dogs. “They can’t do this!”

“Try and stop them.” Linna turns away tasting her tears. She should feel comforted by the woman’s words, the fact that not everyone has forgotten how to love animals when they are no longer slaves, but she feels nothing. And she walks north, carved hollow.