After a while he scratched on the door, but his wife didn’t let him in. He went around back and tried there. That didn’t work either. He looked in the windows, but couldn’t see her.
He laid down in the yard.
That night it rained, and he slept under the car, awakened just in time to keep his wife from backing over him on her way to work.
That afternoon he waited, but his wife did not return at the usual time. Five o’clock was when he came home from the fire house, and she was always waiting, and he had a feeling it was at least five o’clock, and finally the sun went down and he knew it was late.
Still, no wife.
Finally, he saw headlights and a car pulled into the drive. Shella got out. He ran to meet her. To show he was interested, he hunched her leg.
She kicked him loose. He noticed she was holding a leash. Out of the car came Hal.
“Look who I got. A real dog.”
Spot was dumbfounded.
“I met him today at the fire house, and well, we hit it off.”
“You went by the fire house?”
“Of course.”
“What about me?” Spot asked.
“Well, Spot, you are a little old. Sometimes, things change. New blood is necessary.”
“Me and Hal, we’re going to share the house?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She took Hal inside. Just before they closed the door, Hal slipped a paw behind Shella’s back and shot Spot the finger.
When they were inside, Spot scratched on the door in a half-hearted way. No soap.
Next morning Shella hustled him out of the shrubbery by calling his name. She didn’t have Hal with her.
Great! She had missed him. He bounded out, his tongue dangling like a wet sock. “Come here, Spot.”
He went. That’s what dogs did. When the master called, you went to them. He was still her dog. Yes sirree, Bob.
“Come on, boy.” She hustled him to the car.
As he climbed inside on the back seat and she shut the door, he saw Hal come out of the house stretching. He looked pretty happy. He walked over to the car and slapped Shella on the butt.
“See you later, baby.”
“You bet, you dog you.”
Hal walked down the street to the bus stop. Spot watched him by turning first to the back glass, then rushing over to the side view glass.
Shella got in the car.
“Where are we going?” Spot asked.
“It’s a surprise,” she said.
“Can you roll down the window back here a bit?”
“Sure.”
Spot stuck his head out as they drove along, his ears flapping, his tongue hanging.
They drove down a side street, turned and tooled up an alley.
Spot thought he recognized the place.
Why yes, the vet. They had come from another direction and he hadn’t spotted it right off, but that’s where he was.
He unhooked the little tag that dangled from his collar. Checked the dates of his last shots.
No. Nothing was overdue.
They stopped and Shella smiled. She opened the back door and took hold of the leash. “Come on, Spot.”
Spot climbed out of the car, though carefully. He wasn’t as spry as he once was.
Two men were at the back door. One of them was the doctor. The other an assistant.
“Here’s Spot,” she said.
“He looks pretty good,” said the doctor.
“I know. But… Well, he’s old and has his problems. And I have too many dogs.”
She left him there.
The vet checked him over and called the animal shelter. “There’s nothing really wrong with him,” he told the attendant that came for him. “He’s just old, and well, the woman doesn’t want to care for him. He’d be great with children.”
“You know how it is, Doc,” said the attendant. “Dogs all over the place.”
Later, at the animal shelter he stood on the cold concrete and smelled the other dogs. He barked at the cats he could smell. Fact was, he found himself barking anytime anyone came into the corridor of pens.
Sometimes men and woman and children came and looked at him.
None of them chose him. The device in his tail didn’t work right, so he couldn’t wag as ferociously as he liked. His ears were pretty droopy and his jowls hung way too low.
“He looks like his spots are fading,” said one woman whose little girl had stuck her fingers through the grating so Spot could lick her hand.
“His breath stinks,” she said.
As the days went by, Spot tried to look perky all the time. Hoping for adoption.
But one day, they came for him, wearing white coats and grim faces, brandishing a leash and a muzzle and a hypodermic needle.
The Big Blow
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1900, 4:00 P.M.
Telegraphed Message from Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau, Central Office, to Issac Cline, Galveston, Texas, Weather Bureau:
Tropical storm disturbance moving northward over Cuba.
6:38 P.M.
On an afternoon hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock, John McBride, six-foot one-and-a-half inches, 220 pounds, ham-handed, built like a wild boar and of similar disposition, arrived by ferry from mainland Texas to Galveston Island, a six-gun under his coat and a razor in his shoe.
As the ferry docked, McBride set his suitcase down, removed his bowler, took a crisp, white handkerchief from inside his coat, wiped the bowler’s sweatband with it, used it to mop his forehead, ran it over his thinning black hair, and put the hat back on.
An old Chinese guy in San Francisco told him he was losing his hair because he always wore hats, and McBride decided maybe he was right, but now he wore the hats to hide his baldness. At thirty he felt he was too young to lose his hair. The Chinaman had given him a tonic for his problem at a considerable sum. McBride used it religiously, rubbed it into his scalp. So far, all he could see it had done was shine his bald spot. He ever got back to Frisco, he was gonna look that Chinaman up, maybe knock a few knots in his head.
As McBride picked up his suitcase and stepped off the ferry with the others, he observed the sky. It appeared green as a pooltable cloth. As the sun dipped down to drink from the Gulf, McBride almost expected to see steam rise up from beyond the island. He took in a deep breath of sea air and thought it tasted all right. It made him hungry. That was why he was here. He was hungry. First on the menu was a woman, then a steak, then some rest before the final meal — the thing he had come for. To whip a nigger.
He hired a buggy to take him to a poke house he had been told about by his employers, the fellows who had paid his way from Chicago. According to what they said, there was a redhead there so good and tight she’d make you sing soprano. Way he felt, if she was redheaded, female, and ready, he’d be all right, and to hell with the song.
