Dog, page 3
We’d been there for just two weeks when Jennifer disappeared. She’d gone out to get something from the car, which was parked on the gravel driveway by the woods.
Her body was found two days later in those woods. Something had torn it to pieces, removing the belly. I saw the photographs, but much later. They wouldn’t let me see the body.
I couldn’t think for weeks. I couldn’t feel a thing, but I did what I could. I functioned. My nightmares had more than enough feeling to them.
There were police interviews and local media interviews, and finally the world stepped back.
I stayed with her parents for a while. They were devastated and perhaps felt guilty, as parents do.
I needed to walk the woods—in the day and in the night, with a flashlight and a rifle I’d bought—looking for them, for any evidence of them, and, when I found nothing, to let go of this too.
It wasn’t the bowl, I realized in the end.
It was Jennifer.
Death had chosen her—the anthropologist would have told me—and we’d thwarted it for a time. But the dogs knew, he’d say, that she’d been chosen—“Death always tells them”—and would not give up.
Yes, we’d brought the ancient bowl back, and we shouldn’t have, but there was more—something much more important:
The civilization begun by the Chichimec, the Dog People, had stretched from Mexico up as far north as St. Louis and east to Louisiana. Their descendants had been, among other tribes, the Natchez—
—her family’s secret.
They were in her blood.
“The dogs knew,” Rocha would have said.
* * *
I returned to Morelos and have been teaching English here for decades now. But this isn’t really why I’m here. I took hunting lessons long ago and go out with boar hunters into the forests of Sinaloa, Nayarit and Jalisco whenever I can. My Spanish is excellent now. When you have a goal, you can learn a language fast. I don’t romanticize this country any more than I romanticize anything these days, but a part of me does remember how happy Jennifer was, here with the pottery we both loved.
I pretend to hunt for boar, but I am looking for something else. I have not seen the dogs again, either kind, but I will see them when the time comes. I’ll take as many of the ugly things with me as I can, leaving their flesh to rot and their souls to drift for eternity without a taste of my flesh.
I will certainly be tasting theirs.
—the end—
Copyright © 2015 by Bruce McAllister
Art copyright © 2015 by Scott Bakal
Bruce McAllister, Dog
