The Stand

“A washboard in a music store?”

“Yeah. There was a helluva good washtub, too, but somebody had already poked a hole through it and turned it into a bass.”

She began to laugh. She put the washboard down on the sofa, came to him, and hugged him tight. His hands came up to her breasts and she hugged him tighter still. “The doctor said give him jug band music,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

She pressed her face against his neck. “It seems to make him feel just fine. That’s what the song says, anyway. Can you make me feel fine, Stu?”

Smiling, he picked her up. “Well,” he said, “I guess I could give it a try.”

At quarter past two the next afternoon, Glen Bateman burst straight into the apartment without knocking. Fran was at Lucy Swann’s house, where the two women were trying to get a sourdough sponge started. Stu was reading a Max Brand Western. He looked up and saw Glen, his face pale and shocked, his eyes wide, and tossed the book on the floor.

“Stu,” Glen said. “Oh, man, Stu. I’m glad you’re here.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked Glen sharply. “Is it… did someone find her?”

“No,” Glen said. He sat down abruptly as if his legs had just given out. “It’s not bad news, it’s good news. But it’s very strange.”

“What? What is?”

“It’s Kojak. I took a nap after lunch and when I got up, Kojak was on the porch, fast asleep. He’s beat to shit, Stu, he looks like he’s been through a Mixmaster with a set of blunt blades, but it’s him.”

“You mean the dog? That Kojak?”

“That’s who I mean.”

“Are you sure?”

“Same dog-tag that says Woodsville, N.H. Same red collar. Same dog. He’s really scrawny, and he’s been fighting. Dick Ellis—Dick was overjoyed to have an animal to work on for a change—he says he’s lost one eye for good. Bad scratches on his sides and belly, some of them infected, but Dick took care of them. Gave him a sedative and taped up his belly. Dick said it looked like he’d tangled with a wolf, maybe more than one. No rabies, anyhow. He’s clean.” Glen shook his head slowly, and two tears spilled down his cheeks. “That damn dog came back to me. I wish to Christ I hadn’t left him behind to come on his own, Stu. That makes me feel so friggin bad.”

“It couldn’t have been done, Glen. Not with the motorcycles.”

“Yes, but… he followed me, Stu. That’s the kind of thing you read about in Star Weekly … Faithful Dog Follows Master Two Thousand Miles. How could he do a thing like that? How?”

“Maybe the same way we did. Dogs dream, you know—sure they do. Didn’t you ever see one lying fast asleep on the kitchen floor, paws twitching away? There was an old guy in Arnette, Vic Palfrey, and he used to say dogs had two dreams, the good dream and the bad one. The good one’s when the paws twitch. The bad one’s the growling dream. Wake a dog up in the middle of the bad dream, the growling dream, and he’s apt to bite you, like as not.”

Glen shook his head in a dazed way. “You’re saying he dreamed —”

“I’m not sayin anything funnier than what you were talking last night,” Stu reproached him.

Glen grinned and nodded. “Oh, I can talk that stuff for hours on end. I’m one of the great all-time bullshitters. It’s when something actually happens.”

“Awake at the lectern and asleep at the switch.”

“Fuck you, East Texas. Want to come over and see my dog?”

“You bet.”

Glen’s house was on Spruce Street, about two blocks from the Boulderado Hotel. The climbing ivy on the porch trellis was mostly dead, as were all the lawns and most of the flowers in Boulder—without daily watering from the city mains, the arid climate had triumphed.

On the porch was a small round table holding up a gin and tonic. (“Ain’t that pretty horrible stuff without ice?” Stu asked, and Glen answered, “You don’t notice much one way or the other after the third one.”) Beside the drink was an ashtray with five pipes in it, copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ball Four, and My Gun Is Quick —all of them open to different places. There was also an open bag of Kraft Cheese Kisses.

Kojak was lying on the porch, his tattered snout laid peacefully on his forepaws. The dog was rack-thin and pitifully chewed, but Stu recognized him, even on short acquaintance. He squatted and began to stroke Kojak’s head. Kojak woke up and looked happily at Stu. In the way that dogs have, he seemed to grin.

“Say, that’s a good dog,” Stu said, feeling a ridiculous lump in his throat. Like a deck of cards swiftly dealt with the faces up, he seemed to see every dog he’d had since his mom had given him Old Spike, when Stu was only five years old. A lot of dogs. Maybe not one for every card in the deck, but still a lot of dogs. A dog was a good thing to have, and so far as he knew, Kojak was the only dog in Boulder. He glanced up at Glen and glanced down quickly. He guessed even old bald sociologists who read three books at a whack didn’t like to get caught leaking around the eyes.

“Good dog,” he repeated, and Kojak thumped his tail against the porch boards, presumably agreeing that he was, indeed, a good dog.

“Going inside for a minute,” Glen said thickly. “Got to use the bathroom.”

“Yeah,” Stu said, not looking up. “Hey, good boy, say, ole Kojak, wasn’t you a good boy? Ain’t you a one?”

Kojak’s tail thumped agreeably.

“Can you roll over? Play dead, boy. Roll over.”

Kojak obediently rolled over on his back, rear legs splayed out, front paws in the air. Stu’s face grew concerned as he ran his hand gently over the stiff white concertina of bandage Dick Ellis had put on. Farther up, he could see red and puffy-looking scratches that undoubtedly deepened to gores under the bandages. Something had been at him, all right, and it hadn’t been some other wandering dog. A dog would have gone for the muzzle or the throat. What had happened to Kojak was the work of something lower than a dog. More sneaking. Wolfpack, maybe, but Stu doubted if Kojak could have gotten away from a pack. Whatever, he had been lucky not to be disemboweled.

The screen banged as Glen came back out on the porch.

“Whatever it was got at him didn’t miss his vitals by much,” Stu said.

“The wounds were deep and he lost a lot of blood,” Glen agreed. “I just can’t get over thinking that I was the one who let him in for that.”

“And Dick said wolves.”

“Wolves or maybe coyotes… but he thought it was unlikely coyotes would have done such a job, and I agree.”

Stu patted Kojak on the rump and Kojak rolled back onto his belly. “How is it almost all the dogs are gone and there’s still enough wolves in one place—and east of the Rockies, at that—to set on a good dog like this?”

“I guess we’ll never know,” Glen said. “Any more than we’ll know why the goddamned plague took the horses but not the cows and most of the people but not us. I’m not even going to think about it. I’m just going to lay in a big supply of Gainesburgers and keep him fed.”

“Yeah.” Stu looked at Kojak, whose eyes had slipped closed. “He’s tore up, but his doings are still intact—I saw that when he rolled over. We could do worse than to keep our eye out for a bitch, you know it?”

“Yes, that’s so,” Glen said thoughtfully. “Want a warm gin and tonic, East Texas?”

“Hell, no. I may never have gone any further than one year of vocational-technical school, but I’m no fucking barbarian. Got a beer?”

“Oh, I think I can scare up a can of Coors. Warm, though.”

“Sold.” He started to follow Glen into the house, then paused with the screen door in his hand to look back at the sleeping dog. “You sleep good, ole boy,” he told the dog. “Good to have you here.”

He and Glen went inside.

But Kojak wasn’t asleep.