Dragon Tears

thing coming that he always knew was out there somewhere. Good. Yes. Good. Yes yes yes yes yes.

The people food place with the fat man waiting is not far from the car, so maybe he should bark to make the woman see him, then lead her and the boy to the fat man.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes.

But wait, wait, it could take too long, too long, getting them to follow him. People are so slow to understand sometimes. The fat man might go away. Then they get there, the fat man is gone, they’re standing in the alley, and they don’t know why, they think he’s just a stupid dog, stupid silly dog, humiliated like when the cat is up in the tree looking down at him.

No no no no no. The fat man can’t go away, can’t. Fat man goes away, they won’t be together in a nice warm place or in a car with the wind.

What to do, what to do? Excited. Bark? Don’t bark? Stay, go, yes, no, bark, don’t bark?

Pee. Got to pee. Lift the leg. Ah. Yes. Strong-smelling pee. Steaming on the pavement, steaming. Interesting.

Fat man. Don’t forget the fat man. Waiting in the alley. Go to the fat man first, before he goes inside and is gone forever, get him and bring him back here, yes yes yes yes, because the woman and the boy are not going anywhere.

Good dog. Smart dog.

He trots away from the car. Then runs. To the corner. Around. A little farther. Another corner. The alley behind the people food place.

Panting, excited, he runs up to the door where the fat man gave out scraps. It is closed. The fat man is gone. No more scraps on the ground.

He is surprised. He was so sure. All of them together like in the sleep world.

He scratches at the door. Scratches, scratches.

The fat man doesn’t come. The door stays closed.

He barks. Waits. Barks.

Nothing.

Well. So. Now what?

He is still excited, but not as much as before. Not so excited that he has to pee, but too excited to be still. He paces in front of the door, back and forth across the alley, whining in frustration and confusion, beginning to be a little sad.

Voices echo to him from the far end of the alley, and he knows one of them belongs to the stinky man who smells like everything bad at once, including like the touch of the thing-that-will-kill-you. He can smell the stinky man really well even from a distance. He doesn’t know who the other voices belong to, can’t smell those people so much because the stinky man’s odor covers them.

Maybe one is the fat man, looking for his Fella.

Could be.

Wagging his tail, he hurries to the end of the alley, but when he gets there he finds no fat man, so he stops wagging. Only a man and a woman he’s never seen before, standing near a car in front of the people food place with the stinky man, all of them talking.

You really cops? says the stinky man.

What’d you do to the car? says the woman.

Nothing. I didn’t do anything to the car.

There’s any crap in this car.; you’re a dead man.

No, listen, for God’s sake.

Forced detox, you scumbag.

How could I get in the car, with it locked?

So you tried, huh?

I just wanted to nose around, see were you really cops.

I’ll show you are we really cops or not, you hairball.

Hey, let go of me!

Jesus, you stink!

Let me go, let me go!

Come on, let him go. All right, easy now, says the man who isn’t so stinky.

Sniffing, sniffing, he smells something on this new man that he smells on the stinky man, too, and it surprises him. The touch of the thing-that-will-kill you. This man has been around the bad thing not long ago.

You smell like a walking toxic waste dump, says the woman.

She also has on her the smell of the thing-that-will-kill-you. All. three of them. Stinky man, man, and woman. Interesting.

He moves closer, sniffing.

Listen, please, I’ve got to talk to a cop, says the stinky man.

So talk, says the woman.

My name’s Sammy Shamroe. I got a crime to report.

Let me guess — somebody stole your new Mercedes.

I need help!

So do we, pal.

All three of them not only have the touch of the bad thing on them, but they smell of fear, the same fear he has smelled on the woman and the boy who call him Woofer. They are afraid of the bad thing, all of them.

Someone’s going to kill me, says the stinky man.

Yeah, it’s gonna be me if you don’t get out of my face.

Easy. Easy now.

The stinky man says, And he’s not human, either. I call him the ratman.

Maybe these people should meet the woman and the boy in the car. All of them afraid separately. Together, maybe not afraid. Together, all of them, they might live in a warm place, play all the time, feed him every day, all of them go places in a car — except the stinky man would have to run behind unless he stopped being stinky enough to make you sneeze.

I call him the ratman ‘cause he’s made out of rats, he falls apart and he’s just a bunch of rats running everywhichway.

But how? How to get them together with the woman and the boy? How to make them understand, people being so slow sometimes?

9

When the dog came sniffing around their feet, Harry didn’t know if it was with the bum, Sammy, or if it was just a stray on its own. Depending on how obstreperous the vagrant became, if they had to use force with him, the dog might take sides. It didn’t look dangerous, but you never could tell.

As for Sammy, he appeared to be more of a threat than the dog. He was wasted from life on the street and from whatever had put him there, worse than skinny, spindly, Salvation Army giveaway clothes hanging so loosely on him that you expected to hear bones rattling together when he moved, but that didn’t mean he was weak. He was twitchy with excess energy. His eyes were so wide open, the lids seemed to have been stretched back and pinned out of the way. His face was tight with tension lines, and his lips repeatedly skinned back from his bad teeth in a feral snarl that might have been meant to be an ingratiating smile but was alarming instead.

“The ratman, see, is what I call him, not what he calls himself. Never heard him call himself anything. Don’t know where the hell he comes from, where he’s hiding his ship, he’s just all of a sudden there, just there, the sadistic bastard, one scary son of a bitch—”

In spite of how weak he appeared to be, Sammy might be like a robotic mechanism receiving too much power, circuits overloading, on the trembling verge of exploding, disintegrating into a shrapnel of gears and springs and burst pneumatic tubes that would kill everyone within a block. He might have a knife, knives, even a gun. Harry