The Very Best of F & SF v1 (25 page)

Before
I met you my name was Dira.

He said it in
his native tongue. Stack could not pronounce it.

“Before you met
me. What is it now?”

Snake.

Something
slithered past the mouth of the cave. It did not stop, but it called out with
voice of moist mud sucking down into a quagmire.

“Why did you put
me
down there? Why did you
come to me in the first place? What spark? Why can’t I remember these other
lives or who I was? What do you want from me?”

You
should sleep. It will be a long climb. And cold.

“I slept for two
hundred and fifty thousand years, I’m hardly tired,” Stack said. “Why did you
pick me?”

Later.
Now sleep. Sleep has other uses.

Darkness
deepened around Snake, seeped out around the cave, and Nathan Stack lay down
near the warming-stone, and the darkness took him.

13

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

This is an essay
by a writer. It is clearly an appeal to the emotions. As you read it, ask
yourself how it applies to the subject under discussion. What is the writer
trying to say? Does he succeed in making his point? Does this essay cast light
on the point of the subject under discussion? After you have read this essay,
using the reverse side of your test paper, write your own essay (500 words or
less) on the loss of a loved one. If you have never lost a loved one, fake it.

AHBHU

Yesterday my dog
died. For eleven years Ahbhu was my closest friend. He was responsible for my
writing a story about a boy and his dog that many people have read. The story
was made into a successful movie. The dog in the movie looked a lot like Ahbhu.
He was not a pet, he was a person. It was impossible to anthropomorphize him,
he wouldn’t stand for it. But he was so much his own kind of creature, he had
such a strongly formed personality, he was so determined to share his life with
only those
he
chose, that it was also impossible to think of him as simply a dog. Apart from
those canine characteristics into which he was locked by his genes, he
comported himself like one of a kind.

We met when I
came to him at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter. I’d wanted a dog because I
was lonely and I’d remembered when I was a little boy how my dog had been a
friend when I had no other friends. One summer I went away to camp and when I
returned I found a rotten old neighbor lady from up the street had had my dog
picked up and gassed while my father was at work. I crept into the woman’s
backyard that night and found a rug hanging on the clothesline. The rug beater
was hanging from a post. I stole it and buried it.

At the Animal
Shelter there was a man in line ahead of me. He had brought in a puppy only a
few weeks old. A Puli, a Hungarian sheep dog: it was a sad-looking little
thing. He had too many in the litter and had brought in this one either to be
taken by someone else or to be put to sleep. They took the dog inside and the
man behind the counter called my turn. I told him I wanted a dog and he took me
back inside to walk down the line of cages.

In one of the
cages, the little Puli that had just been brought in was being assaulted by
three larger dogs that had been earlier tenants. He was a little thing, and he
was on the bottom, getting the stuffing knocked out of him. He was struggling
mightily.

“Get him out of
there!” I yelled. I’ll take him, I’ll take him. get him out of there!”

He cost two
dollars. It was the best two bucks I ever spent.

Driving home
with him, he was lying on the other side of the front seat, staring at me. I
had had a vague idea what I’d name a pet, but as I stared at him, and he stared
back at me, I suddenly was put in mind of the scene in Alexander Korda’s 1939
film
The Thief of Bagdad,
where the evil vizier, played by Conrad Veidt, had changed Ahbhu,
the little thief, played by Sabu, into a dog. The film had superimposed the
human over the canine face for a moment, so there was an extraordinary look of
intelligence in the face of the dog. The little Puli was looking at me with
that same expression. “Ahbhu. I said.

He didn’t react
to the name, but then he couldn’t have cared less. But that was his name, from
that time on.

No one who ever
came into my house was unaffected by him. When he sensed someone with good
vibrations, he was right there, lying at their feet. He loved to he scratched,
and despite years of admonitions he refused to stop begging for scraps at the
table, because he had found most of the people who came to dinner at my house
were patsies unable to escape his woebegone Jackie-Coogan-as-the-Kid look.

But he was a
certain barometer of bums, as well. On any number of occasions when I found
someone I liked, and Ahbhu would have nothing to do with him or her, it always
turned out the person was a wrongo. I took to noting his attitude toward
newcomers, and I must admit it influenced my own reactions. I was always wary
of someone Ahbhu shunned.

Women with whom
I had had unsatisfactory affairs would nonetheless return to the house from
time to time—to visit the dog. He had an intimate circle of friends, many of
whom had nothing to do with me, and numbering among their company some of the
most beautiful actresses in Hollywood. One exquisite lady used to send her
driver to pick him up for Sunday afternoon romps at the beach.

I never asked
him what happened on those occasions. He didn’t talk.

Last year he
started going downhill, though I didn’t realize it because he maintained the
manner of a puppy almost to the end. But he began sleeping too much, and he
couldn’t hold down his food—not even the Hungarian meals prepared for him by
the Magyars who lived up the street. And it became apparent to me something was
wrong with him when he got scared during the big Los Angeles earthquake last
year. Ahbhu wasn’t afraid of anything. He attacked the Pacific Ocean and walked
tall around vicious cats. But the quake terrified him and he jumped up in my
bed and threw his forelegs around my neck. I was very nearly the only victim of
the earthquake to die from animal strangulation.

He was in and
out of the veterinarian’s shop all through the early part of this year, and the
idiot always said it was his diet.

Then one Sunday
when he was out in the backyard, I found him lying at the foot of the stairs,
covered with mud, vomiting so heavily all he could bring up was bile. He was
matted with his own refuse and he was trying desperately to dig his nose into
the earth for coolness. He was barely breathing. I took him to a different vet.

At first they
thought it was just old age... that they could pull him through.

But finally they
took X-rays and saw the cancer had taken hold in his stomach and liver.

I put off the
day as much as I could. Somehow I just couldn’t conceive of a world that didn’t
have him in it. But yesterday I went to the vet’s office and signed the
euthanasia papers.

“I’d like to
spend a little time with him. Before.” I said.

They brought him
in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had grown so thin.
He’d always had a pot-belly, and it was gone. The muscles in his hind legs were
weak, flaccid. He came to me and put his head into the hollow of my armpit. He
was trembling violently. I lifted his head and he looked at me with that comic
face I’d always thought made him look like Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man. He
knew. Sharp as hell, right up to the end, hey old friend? He knew, and he was
scared. He trembled all the way down to his spiderweb legs. This bouncing ball
of hair that, when lying on a dark carpet, could be taken for a sheepskin rug,
with no way to tell at which end head and which end tail. So thin. Shaking,
knowing what was going to happen to him. But still a puppy.

I cried, and my
eyes closed as my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my
arms because we hadn’t done much crying at one another. I was ashamed of
myself, not to be taking it as well as he was.

“I
got
to, pup, because you’re
in pain and you can’t eat. I
got
to. But he didn’t want to know that.

The vet came in,
then. He was a nice guy and he asked me if I wanted to go away and just let it
be done.

Then Ahbhu came
up out of there and
looked
at me.

There is a
scene in Kazan’s and Steinbeck’s
Vina
Zapata
where a close friend of Zapata’s, Brando’s,
has been condemned for conspiring with the
federales.
A friend that had been with Zapata since the mountains, since the
revoluci
ó
n
had begun. And they come
to the hut to take him to the firing squad, and Brando starts out, and his
friend stops him with a hand on his arm, and he says to him with great
friendship, “Emiliano, do it yourself.”

Ahbhu looked at
me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with human tongue
he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look,
don’t leave me with strangers.

So I held him as
they laid him down and the vet slipped the lanyard up around his right foreleg
and drew it tight to bulge the vein, and I held his head and he turned it away
from me as the needle went in. It was impossible to tell the moment he passed
over from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered
shut and he was gone.

I wrapped him in
a sheet with the help of the vet and I drove home with Ahbhu on the seat beside
me, just the way we had come home eleven years before. I took him out in the
backyard and began digging his grave. I dug for hours, crying and mumbling to
myself, talking to him in the sheet. It was a very neat, rectangular grave with
smooth sides and all the loose dirt scooped out by hand.

I laid him down
in the hole and he was so tiny in there for a dog who had seemed to be so big
in life, so furry, so funny. And I covered him over and when the hole was packed
full of dirt, I replaced the neat divot of grass I’d scalped off at the start.
And that was all.

But I couldn’t
send him to strangers.

THE END

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1.
Is there any significance to the reversal
of the word
god
being
dog
? If so, what?

2.
Does the writer try to impart human
qualities to a nonhuman creature? Why? Discuss anthropomorphism in the light of
the phrase, “Thou art God.”

3.
Discuss the love the writer shows in this
essay. Compare and contrast it with other forms of love: the love of a man for
a woman, a mother for a child, a son for a mother, a botanist for plants, an
ecologist for the Earth.

14

In his sleep, Nathan Stack talked.

“Why did you pick me? Why me... ?”

15

Like the Earth,
the Mother was in pain.

The great house
was very quiet. The doctor had left, and the relatives had gone into town for
dinner. He sat by the side of her bed and stared down at her. She looked gray
and old and crumpled; her skin was a powdery, ashy hue of moth-dust. He was
crying softly.

He felt her hand
on his knee, and looked up to see her staring at him. “You weren’t supposed to
catch me,” he said.

“I’d be
disappointed if I hadn’t,” she said. Her voice was very thin, very smooth.

“How is it?”

“It hurts. Ben
didn’t dope me too well.”

He bit his lower
lip. The doctor had used massive doses, but the pain was more massive. She gave
little starts as tremors of sudden agony hit her. Impacts. He watched the life
leaking out of her eyes.

“How is your
sister taking it?”

He shrugged. “You
know Charlene. She’s sorry, but it’s all pretty intellectual to her.”

His mother let a
tiny ripple of a smile move her lips. “It’s a terrible thing to say, Nathan,
but your sister isn’t the most likable woman in the world. I’m glad you’re here.”
She paused, thinking, then added, “It’s just possible your father and I missed
something from the gene pool. Charlene isn’t whole.”

“Can I get you
something? A drink of water?”

“No. I’m fine.”

He looked at the
ampoule of narcotic painkiller. The syringe lay mechanical and still on the clean
towel beside it. He felt her eyes on him. She knew what he was thinking. He
looked away.

“I would kill
for a cigarette,” she said.