Surrender (15 page)

He got to his feet, slapped his thigh for the dog. I felt delirious, desperate, aghast. The air swilled and cracked with peril. “Where are you going?” I asked. “What are you going to do?”

“There’s only one thing I can do.”

“What — you’re leaving? You’re abandoning me?”

His hand was on the top of the fence — in a moment he would leap and be gone. He cast me a dismissive glance and only answered, “You wish.”

Open your eyes. Gabriel. Open your eyes.

I know he isn’t asleep.

I fold my arms: I can wait.

This room hasn’t changed since I was last here. It is square; it is white. The floor is checkered in ivory and ash. The bed frame is silver, the metal smoothly curved. A curtain covers the window. From the ceiling hangs a lightbulb bubbled by a plastic shade. Beside the bed stands a glittering spike, the skeleton of a crane. The spike holds a pouch that bulges with liquid. A tube runs from the pouch to a needle that’s buried in the angel’s right arm.

This is what he looks like: a creature hardly there. His face is gaunt, the skull showing through; his skin is bloodless and blue. His face is white as a lamb’s.

His hair is longer than it used to be. It was once the color of roadside sand — now it’s the same as the moon. Locks of it curl like snail shells round his chin. His chest doesn’t lift, as far as I can see. I can’t hear him breathing.

He’s not much more than a collection of bones. I see sockets, clavicle, wrists. The nightshirt must cover nothing but gristle and rib cage. I’ve never seen a living thing so lean. In this bone town, he could be prince. He is a disgusting sight.

Gabriel!

I know he hears.

Some things about him are the same as ever. He still looks painfully angelic. His lips still have a sore, swollen look to them, as if they’ve been hit with a bottle.

There’s an antiseptic smell in the room. Also: trepidation. Also: me.

Finally he opens his eyes. Their color’s the same — gasoline-blue.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost
, I say; he smiles and says,
Finnigan
.

He looks the same as he always did. As if he can bend the world to his will.

It’s not like seeing an old friend; nor is it like encountering an enemy. His year of absence slips away — it’s as if I saw him yesterday. He’s brought to the room his unforgotten smell. My blood feels warmer with recognition.

He shrugs off a coat that he’s stolen from somewhere, and sits on the end of the bed. The weight feels strange and unpleasant, I think the bed pitches like a boat. I shift my hands as much as I’m able, wrap my fingers around the bed’s frame. He watches this, my nerviness, and smiles. The hyena is still there in him — he’s still single-minded, sole of purpose. He still has darkness around the eyes. He says, “You don’t look good.”

I answer, “You do.”

And he does, which surprises me. I had thought that, without me, he would somehow fade. We blink at each other, smile, say nothing: inside the room there’s silence but for the sigh of the sheets. Outside, however, the disquiet continues — the crackle of flames, the flaring of light, the rags of passing conversation. Finnigan taps his fingers on the bed. “You heard about the bones,” he says.

“. . . Yes, I did.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Yes, I realize.”

Our silence resumes. Finnigan’s gaze coasts the water jug, the cupboard, the undecorated walls. He notes the tray that catches my cough and the cloths that soak up the blood. He looks at the bruise that the needle has raised. He twitches, as if for a twinlike moment he experiences pain. He looks at me and I see he’s uncharacteristically perturbed. Abruptly he says, “Surrender’s outside.”

“Oh?”

“Want me to call him?”

“He’s your dog,” I say. “Do what you like.”

Surrender was always more free than I. Neither of us owned our lives, but Surrender’s freedom lay in not knowing it. Surrender knew no laws; to him, the world was a place made to give him room to run. The short balmy nights of summer were lit by stars underneath which he raced. Nights brought out foxes to harass, possums to bail up in trees; they stir-crazied the mad-eyed feral cats, which, lawless like himself, were wisely left alone. The sultriness of night drugged the hens, which teetered dazedly in their coops; it made horses and heifers skittish, and easy to stampede. Best of all, the nights’ heat made the fat sheep sluggish, and slow to get to their feet. My own life lived in shackles, I could not bring myself to chain the dog — not when he came home with wool in the buckle of his collar, not when he yawned and showed rooster feathers snagged between his canines. Finnigan accused me of hypocrisy, I who’d vowed always to do what was right and proper. I sighed
I know it
, and my intentions were good, but still the chain lay unused in the grass. I did not say that while Surrender roamed at liberty, so did some shadow of myself: that the dog brought home stories of all he’d sniffed, heard, and seen, his dusty coat and road-sore paws telling cavalier tales of wit and piracy that widened the world for me. I’d pick the burrs and dandelion seeds from his coat, brush out the muck from cow fields, patch his many battle wounds. Free, he was enviably, brightly alive; through him, so was I.

I knew, inside, that I was walking the road to grief, but still I couldn’t bring myself to chain him.

A dog that kills is also killed. It’s a fact of life. Still I didn’t use the chain.

A tethered thing is a dead thing, anyway.

I know it was he who broke into the coop of our neighbor Tutter down the road. A fox got the blame for that, but there was bird blood on my dog’s paws. And the morning after I argued with Finnigan between the ramshackle fence and the chicken shed, Surrender brought home a small slain piglet, which I buried in a race against the sun, which rose unstoppably, like a vengeful spirit, to expose the crime. “Surrender,” I whispered, “be careful,” but the dog was already sleeping on the lawn, worn out by his escapades.

The first few days after he’d jumped the fence and gone, I’d kept an eye out for Finnigan. He had departed in such a rage that part of me feared I would never see him again — and part of me feared I most certainly
would
. In the days before our argument behind the chicken coop, I’d come as close to serenity as I had ever been; now I was walking a razor blade. One evening, seeing Evangeline alone in the park, I changed course and scuttled away, lest Finnigan be saving his reappearance for the moment I spoke to her. I saw that he was winning — that, even in absence, he was getting his wish. He was separating me from her without saying a word. I shivered in his angry shadow, chewed my nails till they bled. At night I thought of Surrender running beneath the moon, of the heat of the chase, the smell of the fear, the violent pleasure of the kill. When I slept I dreamed of Vernon, heard the soft thumping of fists.

When the front door was hammered I thought it might be him.

Dawn light buttered the walls when I opened my eyes; blearily I gathered my dressing gown and hurried down the hall. The fingers of the grandfather clock pointed to just before six. The hammering seemed loud enough to wake the dead, and I hissed through my teeth. From his bedroom came sounds of my father staggering about; no noise came from my mother’s room but I knew she would have snapped awake like a bird. Despite the trouble he was causing and would cause, I knew I’d be glad when I opened the door and saw Finnigan.

But it wasn’t him: it was a man with a gun.

The gun was a rifle; the man was Dockie May. Dockie was a farmer from up in the sheep hills. The Mays were rough-cut but fair people, who kept their property tidy and paid their bills on time. To see, on the doorstep, broad Dockie instead of lithe Finnigan seemed to damage my eyes. I shielded them and stepped away, away from the gun and from him. The morning sun was rich and blinding, lighting the man and the yard. “Where’s your dog, son?” asked Dockie.

My shoulder knocked the wall as Father shunted me aside. He was wearing his silk dressing gown, ludicrous beside Dockie’s patched shirt. He had combed his hair with his fingers, and oily tracks of their progress remained. He did not bother with greetings. He said, “Why do you want that dog, May?”

Dockie jerked his chin. “Come to my place, see. It’s cut five kids to pieces.”

The summer air swelled through the doorway, flipped a doily from the hall stand. Leaves tumbled and scattered across the lawn. Beyond Dockie’s shoulders was a mango-orange sky, crossed with streaks of charcoal. For a moment I thought the farmer meant children, then realized he spoke of goats.

And something like a wound opened in me, and poured out dread.

My father’s cheek was creased from sleep. He raised his eyebrows. “I’m a man of law, Mr. May. You need proof before you accuse even a dog of a crime. What makes you think it was our dog that killed your kids?”

“I know your dog. I seen it running loose before. I seen it in town and in this yard. I seen it this morning, just at daybreak, on the hills, running my goats to death. I fetched my gun, and I’m not sorry. Dog took off when I went after it, and I chased it back here. It’s disappeared now, hiding somewhere, but the dog is yours.”

My father scoffed. “You saw a dog on the hills at dawn. Lots of dogs look like our dog, especially from a distance. Our dog’s four-legged and brown like the rest.”

Dockie’s lip jerked. He had not spent his life suffering fools. “I can prove what’s right,” he said. “I put a bullet in the dog that ripped my kids. Winged his shoulder, maybe his head. Your dog got a wound, it’s your dog I want. The job’s half-done. It needs finishing now.”

“You
shot
him?”

“Go to your room,” said my father to me: I shut my mouth and huddled to the wall. Father turned his gaze on the farmer. “Get on home to your goats, Dockie May. If the dog’s been hurt he’ll be hiding, and he’ll stay hidden until you’re gone.”

“What about my kids? What about my losses?”

Father raised an imperious hand. “I’m not finished, May. If our dog turns up carrying a bullet wound, then we’ll talk about your losses.”

“The job needs finishing. I won’t have more stock lost to him.”

“If he’s wounded, the job will be finished. You’ll have no more trouble there.”

I swayed in the hallway, a thousand hooks in my skin. I had stopped breathing long ago. Dockie was nodding grudgingly; my father stood tall and severe. As he closed the door he told the farmer, “My sympathy in regard to your goats.”

I turned, then, and flew through the house. I knew where Surrender would hide. I ran barefooted across the yard, rose petals swilling in my wake. In a corner of the yard stood a woodshed where Father kept his gardening tools. I dropped to the dust by its door and peered into the space below the floor. At first I saw nothing but stars and fearsome colors swirling inside my head. Then the colors cleared and I saw his shape, the mountain range he could be. He lifted his head as high as the floor would allow, and stared at me. I reached under the shed but could not touch him. Bindi-eye dug into my knees. “Come here, Surrender,” I pleaded. “Come here. . . .”

Surrender shuddered, and tucked himself tighter. Both of us heard my father’s tread across the lawn — only Surrender glanced sideways to see. Each footfall brought my father closer: I wanted to whisper,
Surrender, stay there
.

But it had to be done.

Father stopped behind me. “Here, dog,” he said, and slapped his knee. Surrender groaned and hesitated. Then, because he too knew it had to be done, he crept painstakingly forward. I sat back as the dog struggled out from the space and neither Father nor I said anything when we saw the red on his paws and then on his shoulder and then, when he stood, the hole in his neck. The bullet had buried under the spine, where the muscles and tendons were rope. The heat of the morning had dried the blood, clagging Surrender’s coat into spikes. There was a leaf stuck in the hole, and a strand of green snapstick. I plucked these off, and Surrender twitched. I ran a hand down his head and his back, and his tail waved sorrowfully. “Good dog,” I said. “Good dog.”

I wiped my eyes with the heel of a hand. My father stood mute behind me. Finally he spoke: “Tie him up,” he said. “When the hour’s decent I’ll have to borrow a gun.”