Bones Omnibus (54 page)

“Easy there, Bones. You’re a lot more hurt than you realize.”

Bones didn’t seem to notice or care. He continued to lick at Lionel’s face, and Lionel let him. After a moment, the old man climbed down off the stool and sat on the linoleum floor next to Bones, running his hands over the dog’s back, shoulders, forelegs, haunches, paws, throat, snout, and even tail, hunting for injuries the doctors might have missed. Lionel frowned when he felt the dozens of small cuts in the pads of all four of Bones’s feet but was gratified to find that a large one over his right eye was already beginning to heal, which he felt boded well for the others. When he’d finally finished his inspection, he shook his head.

“You’re a real hard case, you know that, Bones?” Lionel said. “It’s guys on the force like you who made me retire when I did; figured your gung-ho, rushing-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread bullshit was going to get me shot. But you did a good job of work today. That thing was apparently trying to drill straight down to the earth’s core to get to the heat. It wasn’t even supposed to be here. Some idiot pulled it up from a hydrothermal vent under the Arctic. Only then Mr. Einstein accidentally brought it in contact with some heavy-duty industrial macronutrient fertilizers and then took them home with him for the weekend.”

Lionel turned to Bones with a wry grin. “
Whoops
.”

“They said it’s some kind of big chemistry set down there and that all life on Earth probably originated around hydrothermal vents, but I told them they were lucky their little monster decided to wreak havoc on land, ’cause my dog doesn’t like to swim and they’d have been fucked, eh, Bones?”

Bones was now lying at Lionel’s feet. It looked like the exertion of his greeting had wiped him out all over again. Lionel smiled.

“Well, you get some more rest, Bones. Officially, Pittsburgh, the military, everybody else, they’re going all Three Mile Island, saying it was some kind of gas cloud and oh-what-a-tragedy. ‘Unprecedented.’ More safety regulations on the mining industry, etc. Upshot is, the mayor’s not going to be giving you a medal in front of the courthouse any time soon. Sorry about that. Worse, they’re going to retire you just because they’re assholes. Well, mainly because your injuries are so bad but also because they’re assholes. They asked me if I could take you, but I told them the truth; I’m an old man now. They’d find you eating my fingers in a few months when I had a stroke in the shower. I think we’re cooking up another solution, though. You might find it appealing.”

Lionel looked down at Bones for his reaction, but the shepherd was already fast asleep.

Ryan knew the rules. Don’t tell the other kids or teachers what you saw or did because they won’t believe you and they’ll just freak out. Uncle Norman and Aunt Ronelle know some but not all of the story, and it’d probably be better to keep it that way. If anyone puts two and two together of where you’re actually transferring in from and starts asking questions, the best thing to do is say that you got knocked out during the “toxic event” and only remember things beginning after you woke up in the hospital.

As he got ready for his second week of school, now in Morgantown, three counties away from Duncan and just across the state line into West Virginia, Ryan ran through everything the government social worker, Mr. Wieseltier, had told him back at the hospital about how things were going to be once he got out. He had told Mr. Wieseltier that all he wanted to do was go home, get his things, bury his dog. See his mom and sister. Mr. Wieseltier had gone silent for a moment but then told Ryan that they would make arrangements for him to do this, but it might take time.

Ryan knew this meant never.

“Ryan? You’re going to miss your bus,” came the voice of Aunt Ronelle from downstairs.

Ryan gathered his books – math and a social studies reader – and stuffed them into his backpack before remembering his spelling homework, which was still on his desk. He grabbed it, added it to the mix, and headed downstairs, stepping funny when he turned back around. He winced and started to grab for his leg, but then just took a deep breath and let the pain recede away. He hadn’t noticed when it happened, but when the flesh-eaters knocked the paddy wagon he was riding in over onto the highway, Ryan had been launched off the steel bench he’d been sitting on, only to bash his leg into the bench on the opposite side of the van. By the time he had reached the hospital that would be his home for the next couple of weeks, doctors told him that the wound had cut deep enough to cause damage to both the soleus and gastrocnemius muscles in his right calf as well as a handful of nerves. It was so bad, in fact, that once it healed completely, Ryan was scheduled for at least two skin graft operations.

“Coming, Ronelle,” Ryan called down, then headed towards the stairs.

As soon as he reached the first floor, though, he saw through the front window that the yellow school bus had just pulled away from the curb. His aunt, having seen the same thing, was walking in from the kitchen with an exasperated look on her face, which she instantly transformed into a smile when she saw her nephew.

“That’s okay, sweetie,” she said, reassuringly. “Just let me find my keys, and I’ll give you a ride.”

“Nah, I’ll walk,” Ryan replied, heading for the back door.

“Oh, honey, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. Your leg.”

Ryan took a couple of practice steps to show that his leg was just fine.

“I think I can manage. I’m supposed to exercise it, right?”

Ronelle looked him up and down for a moment but then nodded in agreement.

“Okay. You won’t get lost, will you?”

“I’ll be fine,” Ryan said, managing a smile.

Ryan walked out the back door, slinging his backpack over his shoulder as he headed to a fenced-in enclosure at the back of the yard. Even though the entirety of the large, suburban backyard was fenced in, there was a separate, smaller, dog-run-style section closed off against the back fence, complete with a doghouse. In front of the house was Bones, lying down with his nose in the grass. When Ryan approached, he quickly got to his feet.

“Missed my bus. Want to walk me to school?”

Bones eyed Ryan expectantly. Ryan smiled and opened the gate. Bones quickly bounded through it, and the pair headed for the side gate that led out to the driveway.

As they walked through the neighborhood, Ryan kept an eye on Bones, who sniffed this hedge or that, urinated on a couple of telephone poles, and completely ignored the barked warnings of half a dozen house dogs along the way, ones Ryan figured Bones would eat for breakfast if they actually tried anything.

They moved from the neighborhood into a small wooded area that separated the residential subdivision from the nearby schools (an elementary and junior high sharing the same large parcel of land). A well-worn footpath had been cut through the stand of trees and crossed a narrow creek before emptying out directly onto the practice field behind Ryan’s new school.

Bones trailed along a few feet back but still shadowed Ryan pretty closely. As they crossed the creek, the shepherd inhaled the various scents of the animals that used the creek as a source of water – raccoons and possum, mostly. He was still sniffing at these when Ryan reached the edge of the woods, just at the edge of the practice field, and stopped. He looked down at Bones, whose whiskers were still twiddling in the air, and then kneeled beside him.

“You could jump the fences at Uncle Norman’s house like they were nothing,” he said quietly. “But you think you have to keep looking out for me.”

Bones just stared at Ryan, panting quietly.

“If you want to stay, that’s fine,” Ryan continued. “I’ll see you at home when I get back from school. But if you don’t…”

Ryan reached into his backpack and retrieved a battered strip of cloth, Bones’s Pittsburgh Bureau of Police collar with his name on it. He reached around Bones’s neck and put the collar back on, snapping the little plastic clasp in place.

“This is so nobody thinks you’re a stray and everybody’ll know your name.”

Ryan petted the area between Bones’s ears, his wounds now as healed as they were going to be, but then he hugged the German shepherd close to him. Bones didn’t like this and tried to squirm away, but Ryan held him tight for only a moment longer before letting him go. Ryan started to tear up.

“Well, I love you, Bones.”

Ryan got back to his feet, looked at Bones one more time, and then turned and walked across the practice field. As he went, his footfalls gently creasing the closely cropped grass, he fought the urge to cry. His eyes became glassy with tears and his nose began to run, but he wiped off both with his sleeve. Only when he reached the other side of the field did he allow himself to look back, half-expecting Bones to be three steps behind him, having not understood what Ryan had told him.

But Bones was long gone.

Bones had stayed within the trees as he walked, following the creek as far as he could, but about a mile down it stopped at an underground drainage pipe, and that was the end of that. He’d ostensibly been following the scent of a raccoon, but wasn’t hungry and wouldn’t have done much more than tease the thing if he’d caught up to it. Climbing up the sides of the creek bed, he saw that the trees had momentarily fallen away as the pipe ran under a rural, four-lane highway that cut through the woods. On the opposite side from where he was standing, Bones could see that not only did the trees start up again, but there were also no signs of houses or businesses or people for a ways, just the endless thicket of a state forest.

Bones waited until a lumbering tractor-trailer, the only vehicle on the road, passed by, then took a tentative step onto the road. After another second, he galloped across, disappearing into the trees on the other side. As he ran, the exhaust and oil smells of the highway faded away and were replaced by the sweet scent of mountain laurel and rhododendron. It wasn’t long before he found another creek to follow that was weaving through the chestnut trees. He played with a frog, urinated against a picnic table, barked at a chipmunk. Took a nap in the afternoon, raided a trailside garbage can for dinner, and then slept under the stars.

When he woke up the next morning, he found another creek.

Lupus in fabula

T
here is an old joke in high-end real estate that compares selling a space in Manhattan to Los Angeles. A New York realtor will show a loft to a perspective client, pointing out the view, explaining the history of the neighborhood, who may live in the building, what’s close by, but will ultimately always close with, “It’s the total New York experience.”

In Los Angeles, it’s all trees, hills, canyons, high fences, and privacy, where the potential buyer is finally told, “You won’t even know you’re in L.A.”

Los Angeles is a city of isolation. In New York, the subways, the buses, and the sidewalks force a sort of egalitarian integration among the classes. In Los Angeles, cars are king because of how far everything is from each other, making it easy for people to stay within their self-selected residential pocket. You’re East Side, West Side, Valley, the Hills, Culver, downtown, LBC, the Marina.

During the Rodney King riots, LAPD officers in riot gear enforced these divisions by forming a shoulder-to-shoulder human barricade on Wilshire Boulevard to prevent looters from crossing north into Beverly Hills. This at a time when law enforcement was letting other parts of the city burn. Families will live in an area they can afford but then rent a cheap apartment elsewhere to establish residency in the school district they want to send their kids to. Micro-cities within Los Angeles like West Hollywood have seceded to make certain that their tax dollars only go to their own services and not to pay off the city’s burgeoning debt, making for wealthy, crimeless duchies throughout the disparate megalopolis that only consider themselves Los Angelenos when the Lakers are in the playoffs.

Then along came a great equalizer.

When it arrived, it was hardly a surprise. The City of Los Angeles regularly posts bus shelter ads and billboards begging its citizenry to prepare for emergencies by creating “earthquake kits” just in case. These were recommended to contain important documents and cash, with water and nonperishable food not far away. Even more so, in the eight months leading up to the quake, water mains routinely broke around the city, and cautionary stories floated around the Internet that this was the result of a trembling along the famed San Andreas Fault, where the Pacific Plate rammed up against the North American Plate, resulting in unending tension. About a hundred magnitude-1 and -2 earthquakes began rattling California throughout the winter and into the new year.

But even then, Los Angelenos were dismissive along local lines.

“It’ll probably hit out in Pasadena,” someone would say. “We won’t feel it in Los Feliz.”

“Luckily, we’re right on the water, like
right
on the water. It’ll suck for everybody crammed in downtown, but we’ll be okay.”

“Good thing we’re in the city proper, because it’s not the quake but the fires that will break out in the hills when all the gas lines snap that is really going to do the most damage.”

“It’ll be the worst for the poor. Those buildings they live in haven’t even been retrofitted. They’re going to flatten, and you know there’s like twenty people living in each one. Jesus.”

“Man, the beaches. When aid rolls in, they’re the furthest out. They’ll be cut off.”

In the end, everyone turned out to be right.

T
here had been a point in the winter when the hikers quit coming, which forced Bones to switch from his diet of trash-can leftovers to a steady stream of wildlife. He’d assiduously avoided what some of the animals of the Ohiopyle woods did when the snows came, an ever-closer march towards civilization, whether rest stops or winter cabins, in order to continue scavenging off man’s leftovers. Instead, Bones pushed even deeper into the forest, happy to be shy of people for awhile. Mice were easy enough to catch, but not filling. Rabbits became a staple. He’d killed a turkey once, but when the feathers poked at his gums and took root between his teeth, he had decided to stick to mammals in the future. Having become a keen hunter relatively quickly during his time in the woods, Bones even found himself going after the odd lynx or bobcat from time to time.