Toughness and cleverness had not been his problems. It was all meaningless if his trials didn’t lead him to a different sort of life. The two walked silently in the murkily-sunlit night. Frank stopped.
“Where are the mosquitoes?” Frank asked.
“What?”
“The mosquitoes. This time of year we should be walking through a shit-ton of mosquitoes. I haven’t gotten bit once.”
It was true. Culann didn’t have a bite on him. The day before they embarked, Culann had learned to be careful talking outside to prevent bugs from flying into his mouth. Now there were none.
“Holy shit,” Frank said. “Look down.”
Culann couldn’t tell at first, because they blended in with the brown dirt road, but there were thousands, maybe millions, of dead mosquitoes lying in the road. The cousins crouched down. Every square inch of the road was covered with miniscule corpses.
“Did they spray for bugs?” Culann asked.
“Up here it doesn’t make any sense to. If you sprayed enough to put a dent in the mosquito population, we’d all be dead.”
“Weird,” Culann said before draining the last of his cup. “I’m empty. Let’s go back.”
“Okay, but stay away from Gus’s daughter. He keeps a knife in his boot, you know. A big one.”
Frank led the way back to the party. McGillicuddy was shooting off bottle rockets. As they approached the tent, a bird dropped from the sky and landed at their feet.
“Did that crazy son of a bitch hit a bird?” Frank asked.
Culann bent down and examined the bird, a gray- and white-striped sparrow. Its feathers weren’t singed and it showed no signs of injury, but it was surely dead.
“I don’t think so,” Culann said. “I guess its time was just up.”
They walked farther and found another dead bird on the walkway. On the path ahead, two dogs were fighting over something, something that shed feathers each time they shook their heads. Beyond them, in the clearing ahead, dozens of dogs ran around with birds in their mouths, shaking them savagely and tossing the carcasses around. By now the other revelers had caught sight of what was happening. They lined the edge of the tent and stared out at the field littered with dead birds.
Theories were of course posited.
“Maybe they got poisoned somehow,” McGillicuddy wondered.
“It’s all those oil wells up here,” his wife replied. “Alaska is being raped by those greedy bastards. Who knows what they’re dumping into the atmosphere? The birds could only take so much. This is probably just the tip of iceberg.”
“It’s not pollution,” Alistair replied, his eyes, unblinking, focused off in the distance. “At least not in the physical sense. This is caused by spiritual pollution. This is the hand of God. He is visiting plague and pestilence upon us to punish us for our wicked ways. If His vengeance is reaching all the way up here, the rest of the world must already be gone.”
A few people tittered at Alistair’s gloomy prediction, but the rest at least entertained the possibility they were facing something beyond worldly explanation.
Whatever it was, people were concerned for their dogs, happily romping through the field of death. The festivities came to an abrupt halt. The dogs and their owners retreated to the safety of their homes. Frank and Culann snatched a keg to take back with them
“Alphonse, come,” Frank shouted at the dog, who was busy chewing on a bird.
Frank called again, but the dog ignored him.
“Goddamnit, Alphonse. Come!”
Alphonse paused for a moment to scratch his ear with his hind leg, but then he resumed gnawing on the bird.
“Come on, Alphonse,” Culann said with a clap of his hands, and the dog suddenly cast aside the bird and trotted over to the cousins.
“What the fuck was that?” Frank asked.
“I guess he likes me now.”
“Yeah, well that makes one of us.”
The last time I’d seen Frank before coming to Alaska had been at his second wedding. He and I drank together at the Holiday Inn bar just outside of the hall where the reception was taking place. We were both drunk and not paying appropriate levels of attention to my date or his new bride. We reminisced about all the good times we’d had as boys, lamented how we’d grown apart and made false promises to spend more time together.
My date was Darlene, a girl I’d been seeing for about three months. She taught at the junior high school in my district, so we were acquainted through work but didn’t actually work together on a daily basis. This cut down on the awkwardness that I might have otherwise experienced after getting so drunk that night that I wet the bed. Darlene barely spoke to me as we drove home the next morning, and never spoke to me again afterwards.
Frank didn’t fare much better. One of the last things I remember about that night was seeing Alison arguing with him and wiping her mascara-stained tears on the white lace sleeve of her wedding dress. They would split up within six months. When my dad told me about their impending divorce, I vowed to call Frank and offer my sympathies, which I never did.
3
Culann awoke to Alphonse’s insistent tongue against his face. He pushed the dog away and forced his eyelids open. Frank was still out cold. Alphonse whined up at him.
Culann got up and pushed open the front door for him, but the dog evidently didn’t need to use the bathroom. Culann certainly did, so he shut the door and went into the tiny WC
for a long leak. He tried to flush the toilet, but nothing came out. After finishing, Culann almost tripped over Alphonse, who pressed against his leg as he returned to the living room.
“Frank, there’s something wrong with your toilet.”
He didn’t answer. Culann went into the kitchen, Alphonse clinging to his heels the whole way. Culann poured himself a bowl of Cheerios. Alphonse sat at his feet, staring up at him. Figuring he was hungry, Culann poured kibble into his dish, but the dog ignored it.
“Frank, do you want any cereal?”
He didn’t respond, so Culann ate the cereal dry with Alphonse lying over the tops of his feet. After finishing, Culann tried the radio again. Not even static came out.
“Hey, Frank, wake up.”
He continued to lie still. Culann reached over and shook his shoulder. No response. Employing an old trick from boyhood slumber parties, he pinched Frank’s nose shut. His face felt cold.
Culann jumped up and wiped his hand on has pants. He charged out of the trailer to look for Worner in the ridiculous hope that the piss-poor paramedic could somehow raise the dead. Alphonse followed closely behind. As they ran the quarter mile to Worner’s place, every dog in Pyrite began to bark. Those dogs that were outside and unchained followed, while the rest shouted encouragement to the others rushing by.
Not bothering to knock, Culann shoved his way into Worner’s shack. Alphonse and three other dogs crowded along with him into the humble living room. Worner lay face down on the floor, not moving. An orange housecat lay on its back beside him like an overturned table, its tiny pink tongue hanging from its mouth. The dogs whined up at Culann. He backed out into the road and dropped to his knees, stunned by the sights of Frank and Worner dead, and the realization that others were likely gone, too. He’d fled civilization to live with these rugged outsiders who died just after they’d accepted him.
Frank was the only person in his life he could rely on, and he’d grown close to Worner and McGillicuddy in
