Thereby Hangs a Tail (12 page)

We went over to Suzie’s car. The windows were open. Bernie peered inside, keeping the flashlight off. I smelled treats. And also Suzie’s smell—a very nice smell, soap, lemons, and something else that was just Suzie. The scent came in tiny waves through the driver’s side window, but wait a minute: was it also coming—

Bernie made a quiet clicking sound in his mouth. That meant we were moving on. We stepped up onto a kind of sidewalk made of wooden planks, heading toward the saloon doors, but those wooden planks creaked under Bernie’s very first step. He stopped dead, listened for a moment. I listened, too, heard nothing but the wind. We backed down onto the street, walked to a narrow alley that led along the side of the saloon. Very dark in the alley, with lots of strange shadows, some of which could have been men, but from the lack of human smell, except for Bernie’s, I knew they weren’t. We walked along, real quiet. We liked the night, me and Bernie.

At the end of the alley lay a flat stretch of desert and then the low hills, not as low as they’d looked from a distance. We approached the saloon from the back. The door was missing, and most of the wall as well. Inside I could make out a long, narrow room with a bar along one side and a cracked mirror behind it, the mirror lighter than everything else, almost glowing to my eyes. And in the glow, it was easy for me to see a man sitting on a stool facing those swinging doors, his back to us, a cowboy hat on his head, a rifle across his knees. Could Bernie see him, too?

Yes: he was pulling the .38 Special from his belt. Bernie took one more step, raised the gun, and spoke in a calm clear voice. “Rifle on the floor,” he said. “Stand up, hands raised and open.” The man didn’t move. “I’ve got a gun on you,” Bernie said. “Don’t make me use it.”

The man remained still. Then, from right behind us, came another voice, also calm and clear, but it made the hair on my neck rise up. “You’re in the exact same situation, buddy boy. Drop it.”

Bernie lowered the gun but didn’t drop it. He turned; me, too. A man stood in the shadows, nothing clear but the gleam of his gun, pointed right at Bernie’s head.

“Drop it or you’re a dead man,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

“Arrest?” said Bernie.

“Sheriff ’s Department, Rio Loco County,” said the man.

I heard quick footsteps. Bernie said, “Then we’re on the same side. I’ll need to see your—” And then the man in the cowboy hat was right behind him, rifle up high, like a baseball bat.

“Don’t take to gettin’ drawed down on,” he said.

I leaped at him, not quite quick enough. The rifle butt cracked down on Bernie’s head. Bernie fell. I hit the man in the cowboy hat hard in the chest, knocked him to the floor, got on top of him, lunged forward toward his neck, teeth bared. The man in the cowboy hat screamed in fear.
Scream away, buddy boy: no one does
that to Bernie.
Then something hard cracked against my head, too, and the world went black.

ELEVEN

I
came out of a deep deep darkness and opened my eyes. Bernie? Where was Bernie? I got up, stumbling a little, which took me by surprise, and felt a pain in my head, a kind of heavy, throbbing pain. It made me want to puke, so I did.

After that, I felt a bit better, although the pain didn’t go away. I looked around. Just after dawn—I could tell from the silvery light, fresh and weak at the same time—and I was standing on a weathered and dirty wooden floor in a long, narrow room with a cracked mirror on one side. That cracked mirror brought everything back: the ghost town saloon and what had happened in the night.

Bernie? Where was Bernie?

I trotted back and forth across that dirty floor, picked up Bernie’s scent right away, traced it to the falling-down back wall of the saloon where we’d come in, then turned and followed it the other way, toward those swinging doors at the front. I ducked under them and hurried onto the rough wood-plank sidewalk. His scent—the very best human scent I’d ever known, a lovely mix of apples, bourbon, salt and pepper—got stronger, mixed up with the nasty smells of two other men. I remembered those two other men, oh yeah. Out on the dirt-packed street lay two sets of footprints, the type made by cowboy boots, and between them ran a kind of smooth track, as though . . . as though what? Something bad, like they’d been dragging . . . I didn’t want to think the thought.

All those markings, easy to track, and I tracked them past the alley Bernie and I had gone down the night before, and into a barn at the end of the street, a doorless barn, sagging and crooked. Light leaked through cracks in the walls, dust drifting through the rays. The markings, all of them—the two walkers and that smoothness between them—reached some tire tread tracks and came to an end. The tire tread tracks—grooves thick and deep, maybe some kind of truck—led toward the far wall, which was mostly missing, and outside. I followed them, nose to the ground.

They led me around a corner, onto the main drag of this horrible place, and stopped outside the saloon. There they got all confused with a bunch of other tire tracks. I trotted around in circles, hoping for—what? I wasn’t sure. But Bernie! Where was he? And I was still trotting around like that, faster and faster, when the sun poked up over the low hills, and everything turned bright and golden. That made me pause and look up, and when I did I noticed that the Porsche was gone. Not long after, I realized that Suzie’s car was gone, too.

I kept sniffing, hoping to pick up something: Bernie’s smell, or Suzie’s, or even the treats in her car. Those chew strips had an amazingly powerful smell, carried for huge distances. But no, nothing. Hold on: nothing but a very faint whiff of burned oil, a scent I knew very well. The Porsche. I stuck my nose right in the dirt. Yes, for absolute sure.

The burned-oil smell—by now I was into my trot, not the real fast one, but not the real slow one either; this was the medium trot I can keep up forever—led me down the street to the desert track we’d driven in on. After a short way, the tread marks vanished in the hard stony ground, and a little later I caught one last whiff of burned oil, and then no more. I slowed to a walk, and then stopped. All of a sudden I felt sick, and puked again. This time not much came out, just some watery stuff. It pooled on the ground and some ants appeared out of nowhere. They stood on the edge of the sour-smelling pool I’d made, feeling at the liquid with their tiny feet. I was getting ready to step on them when I heard a tiny distant squeak.

At first I thought it might be the ants! Wasn’t that crazy? Shows how I really wasn’t quite myself at that moment. I moved away from the puke and ants, looked around. The movement made my head hurt, but I forgot about it right away. In one direction lay the low hills, with Clauson’s Wells, the ghost town, at their base. In all the other directions, desert, as far as I could see, and maybe in the far distance, away from the sun, some mountains. So: my job was to—

That squeak. I heard it again. A kind of whimper, really, maybe the wind. And maybe not. Facts first, theories later, Bernie always said. Wasn’t sure what he meant, but I loved when he talked like that. Bernie: always the smartest human in the room. I headed back to the ghost town. The sun rose higher. We were past the real heat, but out here in the desert it was still plenty hot. My tongue felt hard and dry. What had Bernie said? “Last water for two hundred miles.” So where was it? I sniffed the ground as I trotted down the main street, toward the saloon, smelled no water. Then I remembered Bernie also saying, “If there’s any left.” But there had to be. Bernie worried about water, but we always ended up having it out the ying—

The squeak, this time very near, coming, in fact, from inside the saloon; and not a squeak, but a whimper for sure. Bernie? Bernie would never whimper, no matter what. But what if—? The thought of something so awful it made Bernie whimper almost made me whimper. I squeezed under those swinging doors and went inside.

Bright sunlight shone into the saloon through the missing slats in the back wall. I noticed things I hadn’t seen before: cobwebs everywhere, a rickety staircase leading up to another level, a few turds on the floor. I went over and smelled them: coyote. Not fresh. Didn’t matter anyway—I wasn’t afraid of coyotes; they were afraid of me. Sniffing at the coyote turds—interesting in their own right for reasons I couldn’t explain—I heard the whimper again. It came from above.

Those stairs, all warped and slanted, didn’t look good. Don’t forget I’m a hundred-pounder, meaning pretty big. I started up. The stairs creaked under me with every step. After going real slow on the bottom ones, I couldn’t stand the creaking and charged right up. One stair board came loose and fell through, landing with a clatter somewhere below, but by that time I was at the top, standing in a dusty corridor. I listened, heard nothing; and got the strange feeling that someone else was listening, too.

Most of the light in the corridor came from a window at the end. The window glass was gone, all except a narrow sharp-pointed shard sticking up from the bottom. The sight gave me a strange feeling down the middle of my chest and stomach. In my line of work, you had to jump out of windows from time to time. But not this window—important to remember that, boy, if the time came. Bernie sometimes called me that:
boy. C’mon, boy.
I could hear him saying it in my head. I liked the sound, listened to him say it a few more times.

Then I made my way down the corridor. Slow and quiet, boy. I knew how to do this, ears up, listening hard, paws coming down softly, all weight on the pads, claws hardly touching the floor. First came a room with an open door, in fact, no door at all. I looked in: completely empty, except for dust, grime, cobwebs. The next door was closed tight. The door after that, last one, stood open a little bit, not enough for me to squeeze through. I paused, listened, sniffed. Nothing to hear, but I caught a faint scent. It reminded me of someone. After a moment or two, I thought: Babycakes. But then I got another whiff. Not like Babycakes at all, much more peppery, for one thing, a pepperiness I liked. I put my shoulder to the door, gave it a soft push. It swung open a bit, and I could see into the room beyond.

An empty room, just like the first one, with only cobwebs, dirt, and—but no. Something else, in a shadowy corner: a tiny something with big dark eyes. Princess! I’d found her, me, Chet the Jet! Then I remembered I’d been looking for Bernie at the moment, not Princess, and I quieted down inside.

Princess lay on a pillow, not at all like her satin pillow; this one stained and filthy. I barked at her, a soft muffled bark I have, just saying hi. Princess didn’t bark back, didn’t make any sound at all, stayed right where she was on the pillow, gazing at me with those eyes. Hey. She was shaking, her whole body quivering as though cold, when in fact it was hot and stuffy in this room. I crossed over to her, wagged my tail just to show her—I wasn’t exactly sure what.

But something friendly, anyway. Princess didn’t seem to get the friendly part. She kept shaking, maybe even harder. I didn’t know what to do. Had that ever happened to me before? Not that I could remember. I always did something. Staying in this room—what was that expression of Bernie’s? A nonstarter. And leaving without Princess? That was a nonstarter, too. I had only one idea, and that was to give myself a good shake, so I did, the kind that begins at my nose, goes all the way to my tail and then back again. Whew. I felt great when that was over, and as a bonus my headache had vanished. A snack would be nice, and a long drink of cool—but what was this? Princess had shrunk away on the other side of the pillow, right against the wall, as far from me as she could get, and she was quivering even more. I got the crazy idea she was afraid of me. How was that possible? I was one of the good guys, here to help. I lowered my head and gave her a soft bump with my nose.

What the hell? Had that really happened? She’d bared her tiny teeth at me? Had I actually felt a nip at the end of my nose? Enough of this. I snatched her up by the scruff of the neck, none too gentle, and headed for the door. I suppose Princess thrashed around some, but I didn’t feel it. She was so light, hardly weighed anything at all. How could anything so tiny even be? Then right away I remembered ants, probably from seeing them so recently, gathering around that pool of puke, and ants were certainly a lot smaller than Princess, and what about ticks, disgusting things I hated having on me and—I kind of lost the thread.

I carried Princess out the door, along the corridor, and down the stairs. She stopped thrashing on the staircase, went very still, especially when I had to step over the missing stair. Princess had no idea of what I could do. Just to show her, I leaped over the last few stairs, landing lightly on the saloon floor. Princess squealed, a funny little sound, part fear and part something else, maybe even plain excitement. A fun sound. I tried to think of something I could do that would make her squeal again, but nothing came to mind. So, failing that, as Bernie liked to say—not sure what he meant, but this was the kind of time he said it—I crossed the saloon, crouched under the front doors, and dropped Princess on the hard-packed street.