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Sara Berniker’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Not One of Us, Agony in Black, Thirteen Stories, and Fusing Horizons. Her short story ‘Aqua Velva Smitty’ appeared in the October 2004 issue of Playboy.
This story was published in Albedo One issue 29.
If you are a member of Interaction, please nominate this story for a Hugo Award!
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an Albedo One story
A boy needs a dog, the man said, his voice low and laughing. They just seem to go together, boys and dogs, and you can’t fight a thing like that. See, a dog’s like a stand-in for a father. When a boy’s old man can’t be around and his momma’s coddling him ‘til he thinks his brain might bust, his dog is there to give him comfort. They can run off together and explore fields and forests and rivers. A boy can tell his secrets to his dog and never fear he’ll be betrayed.
Henry lay on his narrow bed staring up at the solar system pasted to the ceiling. Jupiter was peeling away, almost ready to come crashing down. He closed his eyes and thought: Today’s the day.
A boy needs a dog, the man said once more, and was gone.
Henry wanted badly to believe that the voice was a memory, that once-upon-a-time his father had whispered such things, but that was just little-kid fantasy - like when he’d stare at the planets above his bed and pretend to be an astronaut. Henry’s father had never spoken with such conviction; Henry didn’t know any men who talked like that - not his teachers, and not his friends’ dads, either. Mitch and Robbie’s fathers were just like Henry’s - gone, baby, gone.
He thought that, most likely, the whole boy-needs-a-dog speech was something from TV that had gotten lodged in his brain; a memory splinter. It was a TV-father talking to a TV-son; it wasn’t real. All that talk of exploring fields and forests was just TV lies.
Henry’s neighborhood was all-concrete. There was a river, but it ran through the ugliest part of town - a place where smart people didn’t go even with big dogs by their sides. The river was gray, the color of smoke, and it smelled of rotting fish and gasoline. There was an abandoned factory next to it where homeless men sometimes camped out. Henry imagined that the men carried knives inside their boots, drank bourbon straight from the bottle, and fought each other until there was blood on the ground. He had never had the nerve to explore the factory, but had no trouble believing that the homeless men he sometimes saw lounging around in front of A1 Liquor, catcalling women and bumming for quarters, would set up house inside the decrepit building that sprawled a whole city block. Whenever kids went missing, whenever the TV newsmen talked about runaways, Henry knew the truth: the factory had eaten them; the homeless men had drawn their daggers from their boots.
A boy needs a dog, the TV-father whispered.
“I sure do,” Henry said, and rolled out of bed. He could hear his mother banging around in the kitchen, but wasn’t too worried. She wouldn’t come in his room, not today. Saturdays were his reprieve from the rest of the week: no school, no church. Saturdays, his mother was too hungover to do anything but talk. On Saturdays, Viv Morgan’s whistle didn’t blow. Not like the other six mornings of the week when she was a terror, sneaking up to his bed while he still dreamed, the whistle clamped between her teeth. Monday to Friday, and most Sundays, Henry woke to its piercing, high-pitched mosquito scream. It didn’t matter how deeply he buried his head beneath the pillow, his mother always found his ear. She’d blow her whistle, and he’d be ripped from sleep to the stark, miserable reality of his tiny bedroom, the cold, dingy apartment, and his mother’s angry face looming over him, huge like the sun.
Henry sometimes tried to wake himself up so that his mother wouldn’t have to, but it never worked. He slept too deeply and dreamt too hard. The one time he’d used his alarm clock - setting it for six-thirty so that he could be up and dressed before she sprang from her sagging mattress in the back bedroom - the alarm had gone off but Henry hadn’t heard it.
His mother had, though.
She’d pulled him out of bed by his feet, his head thwacking hard against the floor. Dressed in a green nightgown, her nipples standing out like bullets, she’d screamed, "You think I don’t deserve a little rest, Henry? You think I don’t work so hard that I need to sleep? You think this is funny?”
His mother hadn’t spoken to him for a week after that, not with words, anyway. But the whistle had still screamed in his ear at seven o’clock every morning.
Today’s Saturday, Henry reassured himself as he padded out of his bedroom and down the dimly lit hall. Today I’m safe.
* * *
His mother smiled when he shuffled into the kitchen, tilting her head to the right, inviting a kiss. “G’morning, lazybones.”
Henry put his lips to her cheek - a fast buss that barely grazed the skin - and smelled the mingled odors of coffee, beer, and sweat. She’d been out late last night -gone to a club or a party with her girlfriends, something like that. Henry hadn’t paid attention to the details. He’d been too happy about having the apartment all to himself. He loved Friday nights, loved standing at the living room window watching his mother walk away.
And last night had been no different. As soon as she’d turned the corner, Henry had been on the phone. He and Robbie and Mitch had spent the night watching horror movies on Channel 20, eating microwave popcorn straight from the bag, talking shit and gossip, goofing on each other and all the other assholes in their fifth grade class at Lincoln Elementary. For a few hours the apartment had been his, not the hard-to-breathe place it was when his mother was home. When she was around, Henry always worried about making a mess or making too much noise or making a nuisance of himself. To hear his mother talk, he was always making something.
Once upon a time, it had been different. When his dad had lived with them, Henry Senior’s presence had tempered her, easing the strain, helping her not to be so angry.
Wasn’t quite like that, Henry thought, pouring himself a bowl of Cheerios and sitting down at the table. It wasn’t quite that nice, was it?
If he thought real hard, concentrating like he did when he imagined murderous homeless men and distant galaxies, Henry could remember the flat clap of his father’s hand against his mother’s cheek. He could remember -- this memory so frail and faded that it was like trying to read a message penciled on cellophane - his father saying, You bitch. Hey, bitch. Bitch! And with that, came the bitter recollection that for the longest time he’d thought that his mother’s first name was Bitch, just as his was Henry, and his father’s Henry Senior.
Henry watched his mother through slitted eyes, taking care to nod in all the right places so that she would think he was interested.
“...then Marcy told this guy - this big old wop with gold chains like you wouldn’t fucking believe, baby -- she told him to get the hell out of her way before she did something crazy. And then I said...”
Henry kept his face neutral, but inside he scowled. He hated when his mother was like this: high and happy and wild, acting like the big girls who smoked behind the juniper bushes on the playground.
“...so Mulligan’s was having half-price drinks for ladies, and even though Marcy said we ain’t no ladies, we went anyways, and...”
At least she wasn’t screaming. At least she wasn’t blowing her whistle and ripping the covers back so that cold air crawled over him like the fingers of the dead. It could be worse, Henry supposed. She could have been in Angry Mommy mode, telling him for the four-hundredth time why a dog was out of the question.
“They make too much noise and they’re always shitting everywhere,” Viv had said last week while the subway went click-clack through a black tunnel. “I know what would happen, Henry. I know how lazy you are. You always fuck everything up. I know you! You’d get a dog and you’d promise to look after it, but soon enough, I’d be the one doing all the goddamned work...”
Henry hated arguing with her, hated it even more when it happened in public where he wasn’t allowed to cry. All of his counter-arguments (I could get a quiet dog, Ma. I’d clean up after him, I would. I’d get a small dog, so small you’d hardly know he was here.) were useless, because she held the trump card - a dog was just too expensive.
Over the clatter of the subway car, she’d shouted, “How do you ‘spect me to pay for pet food and vet shots and all that, Henry? I’m wading through bills as it is, and if Mr. Caruthers don’t give me a raise, we’ll be out on the street.”
A dog’s too expensive...too expensive...too fucking expensive...
Henry slurped up cereal, listening to his mother babble while trying to judge whether it was too soon to ask her again. Despite the risks and the futility, it was a subject that he couldn’t leave alone.
Today’s the day, he thought, remembering Mitch’s story and deciding not to tell her his plans or ask for permission. He was done with asking, done with talking. His mother never listened, anyway.
I’ll be like Dad. I’ll do what I want.
* * *
It was a ten-minute walk to Vine Street - the long city block that was the scariest part of town - but first Henry had to pick up his buddies, his back-up men, his soldiers.
Robbie’s apartment was a fourth-floor walkup at the end of a long hallway that smelled of rotting garbage from the busted disposal chute next to the fire exit.
Mrs. Rocco opened the door, her hair tied up in a faded pink rag, the vacuum cleaner humming at her elbow. She frowned at Henry, as she always did. “Roberto cannot come to play,” she said carefully, taking care to enunciate each word. Her English wasn’t very good, especially when she was pissed.
“He stay out too late with you last night,” she continued, waggling a finger at him; it would have been funny if her frown lines hadn’t cut so deep. “He don’t ask me. He don’t tell me nothing. You make him be bad.”
Henry caught a glimpse of Robbie’s round, flushed face peeking out from his bedroom doorway. One eye was circled with black like a raccoon. Then the front door slammed and Henry was in the hallway, all alone.
Back out on the street, he thought, Shit! Shit! I shoulda told that old bitch to...
But what could he have said that would have made a difference? Nothing, probably.
Henry jogged around the corner to Mitch’s house - a narrow slice of brick and board whose splintery front porch was littered with cheap, broken toys.
Mitch answered the door, still in his pajamas.
“Let’s go, come on,” Henry said. “Get a move on, Mitchy.” He punched his friend’s arm and grinned. “Time’s a wasting. Did you know I’ve got four bucks? I saved it outta my lunch money - you know, from when we had pizza day last week? - and I was gonna use it to buy one of those model planes they had in the window at Ton-O-Toys, but I think instead we should head over to the pet store so I can buy a leash, maybe a collar, too -”
“Can’t,” Mitch said, nodding towards the tiny living room where two small boys and three small girls sat on the floor in front of a flickering television. “My mom went to the movies with my Aunt Dory. I gotta baby-sit.”
“But she already said you could go!”
Mitch shrugged. “Not much I can do; can’t bring the brats along.”
Henry nodded, smiling to show that it didn’t matter. But inside he was screaming. He hated this injustice, this arbitrary nature of mothers: the way they said yes, said no; the way they built up hope for the sheer pleasure of destroying it.
On the sidewalk, he looked back at the Baxter house and saw five little faces lined up in the front window, Mitch a vague shadow behind them. Henry stuck out his tongue, crossed his eyes, and sketched a wave. It wasn’t their fault, they were just kids. They couldn’t help that their mom was selfish-crazy. None of them could.
Crazy bitch, Henry heard his father shout, followed by the flat slap that was like fish being dumped onto the scale at the grocery store.
“Crazy bitches,” Henry whispered.
He stared at the little wide-eyed kids, hating Mrs. Baxter not just for making Mitch stay home while she sat on her fat ass eating popcorn at the movie theater on Dublin Street, but for having so many kids in the first place - skinny, dirty children who had no father. He’d been friends with Mitch since kindergarten, and had loved Mitch’s dad almost as much as his own. Mr. Baxter had worn leather chaps over his jeans and had driven a chopped-down Harley Davidson; sometimes he’d let them shine the chrome. He’d owned a fat Boxer named Reggie, that he’d taken with him when he’d left.
A dog’s like a stand-in for a father, Henry heard the TV-father whisper in the very back of his mind, in that place where he considered the unthinkable. He walked fast, his eyes roaming the sidewalk up ahead for the possibility of trouble, thinking of the terrible, demanding, oppressive women who ruled the lives of their sons through fear. He thought of Mrs. Rocco: so scared she’d lose control of her only child that she’d punched Robbie in the face to keep him shamed and in his room. Thought of Mrs. Baxter: so frightened of having to raise her children alone that she’d turned her eldest son - who would be twelve in the fall - into a father before his time. Thought of his own mother: who feared that he was turning into his father. That was Viv’s nightmare, that was why she yelled and blew the whistle. That was why he wasn’t allowed to have a dog.
Henry didn’t know what kind of whispered conversations his parents had held behind their closed bedroom door, or whether his father had trusted his mother enough to share secrets, but he did remember the bedtime stories that Henry Senior had once told: stories about his childhood on a farm outside of Rochester, stories about the dogs.
We always had a few good ones around, his dad would say, settling on the bed beside him, his huge frame casting shadows against the wall. Lots of dogs. All mutts, y’know, none of those fancy, stuck-up dogs like the richies own. We had good, loyal dogs.
Always at this point, Henry Senior would close his eyes and whisper their names: Rufus and Ranger and Spotty and Mike and One-Eyed-Pete, this little Terrier-cross that only had three legs.
Was he missing an eye, Daddy? Henry had always asked, keeping the rhythm of their ritual. Was that how come you named him that?
Nope. It was ‘cause he squinted. He was a good dog. They all were. None of them would bite unless you provoked them. They were all good dogs...
Mom hates dogs, Henry thought, walking faster. She hates them ‘cause she hates Dad, and I’m like him, so she hates me, too.
Suddenly defiant, he whispered, “I’m getting a dog today and I’m bringing him home and I’ll be just like Daddy and I don’t care what she says.” He raised his face to the cloudy sky and shouted: “I don’t care!”
“Watch where you’re going, dipshit,” a fat man in a torn raincoat said, brushing by in a whiff of garlic and aftershave.
Henry lowered his head, most of his fire gone. He was on Vine Street now, treading in semi-dangerous territory. He wished that his friends were with him - Mitch especially. It was because of Mitch that he was here at all. If not for Mitch, Henry wouldn’t have known how to get a dog for free. If not for Mitch, Henry wouldn’t have known about the wild dogs who lived in the wasteland behind the old factory.
* * *
Looking up and down the sidewalk to make sure he wasn’t being watched, Henry slipped through the break in the fence that was right where Mitch had claimed it would be. Maybe his story wasn’t bullshit, after all. Last night, Mitch had made it sound like he’d been best friends with the high school boys who smoked on the sidewalk out front of the school while they waited to pick up their little brothers and sisters. The way he’d told it, the big boys had blabbed all of their secrets to him.
I just walked up to them, Mitch had said. It was Randy Chesterfield and Mark and Brian, couple other guys, too, and I said, ‘Hey, how’s it going.’ They were already talking ‘bout the factory when I got there, and they said, ‘Hey, Mitch, we could use your opinion on this.’
On the sofa, Henry had exchanged a glance with Robbie, both of them knowing how unlikely that was. The only thing Randy Chesterfield and his crazy-mean friends would use Mitch for was a punching bag. Mitch had probably been eavesdropping. It was a hobby of his - sneaking around and recording private conversations in a battered red notebook that he carried in his back pocket. He said that someday he’d be a reporter, or a detective, or a spy, and that he was in training.
In training for a beating, maybe.
Henry skirted the main building - a three-story cube with busted-out windows and sooty smokestacks that stood on the roof like long blown-out birthday candles -heading for the concrete strip that lay between the factory and the polluted river. He’d never been back here before, but Mitch had described it well enough.
You just look for the junked-out cars and shit, Mitch had said. You can’t miss it. Randy says he goes there all the time to scavenge for his dad’s auto shop. He’s a fucking liar, though. My uncle told me that all the good stuff was picked clean years ago. Randy prolly went back there to sniff glue or jerk-off...
Henry felt like he was walking on the moon. The street sounds were very distant, and the dirty air felt thick in his throat. His heart staggered in his chest, lurching along like poor old three-legged One-Eyed Pete in his father’s story, as he slowly made his way towards a low, narrow corridor formed by piles of junk. Just beyond it was the river, the color of steel.
...anyways, so Randy makes sure we’re all listening close, and then he says in a kinda scary voice that he was back behind the building when he saw them...
Henry took in the broken machinery, rusted orange from years of rain and snow, and the empty hulls of burnt-out cars. There were a lot of places to hide back here.
...three big dogs, he says to us. Couldn’t tell what breed they were, prolly Heinz-57, right? He says they came out of one of those wrecked cars, just ran right at him, panting and spitting and growling. Then he tells us that he picked up a stick and beat them bloody. Yeah right, is what I say. Bet he shit his pants he was so scared...
Horror movie forgotten, Henry and Robbie and Mitch had spent the rest of the night debating whether or not the wild dogs actually existed. Just because pimply Randy Chesterfield (who had failed tenth grade three years running) said he’d seen something, didn’t make it so.
“Bet that asswipe saw a rat and freaked like a little girl,” Robbie had laughed.
Henry hadn’t even smiled at that. He hated rats, especially the bold ones that didn’t run away when they saw you, only twitched their whiskers and affected indifference. They were scarier to him, somehow, than the possibility of snarling wild dogs.
Randy’s story made sense, the boys had come to agree. After all, stray dogs had to live somewhere, and why not out by the factory where they wouldn’t be bothered by people? Henry guessed he’d find out soon enough what was fact and what was fiction. He’d crossed the breach, he’d left the sidewalk. There was no going back, for he’d sworn to himself this morning that today was the day. His father would never have run from this quiet, scary place. Henry Senior would have gotten what he’d come for.
Stepping into the corridor, Henry imagined the kind of community the dogs might form if left to their own devices. There could be hundreds of dogs here - the result of unchecked breeding, each generation more feral than the last.
I could just take a puppy, he thought. Just one little dog...they wouldn’t miss it.
The wind off the river was strong and foul, but he felt good, brave. There was no reason to believe that there were hundreds of dogs out here, that was just his crazy imagination trying to psyche him out.
The bitch emerged from the doorless Mercury without a sound, her head tilted back, nose sniffing the scent of the intruder. She was the size of a Doberman but built heavier around the chest, her coat oil-slick black. Her teats sagged, heavy with milk, and her long, gray lips smiled down the length of her massive muzzle. She panted softly, watching the boy, and padded out into the low corridor created by the columns of city-junk.
Henry didn’t see her at first. He’d drifted off into thought again, imagining the happy group of dogs who would instinctively sense his love of animals and treat him accordingly. He’d started to puzzle out a name for his new pet (Butch, maybe? Or Ranger, like Daddy’s old dog?), and wasn’t paying attention to the subtle movements all around him. I’ll train him. Not to sit and roll over and beg for treats--no dog of mine will ever have to beg - but to be tough and loyal and protect me from her...
As he stared at the ground, lost in daydreams and far away, the bitch was joined by four other dogs. They varied in size, but all of them were lean and malnourished, with bits of missing fur and ribs you could count. Two more dogs - both huge males sporting shaggy Collie coats over Rottweiler builds - came up from the rear. They watched patiently, waiting to see what the bitch would do next.
She chuffed softly, not to scare but to make her presence known.
Oh, shit, Henry thought, looking up. He shook off his dark imaginings (his mother bent over his bed, the hated whistle in her mouth, the huge beast rising from beneath the bedcovers, lunging for her, driving her to the carpet), and stared at the big black dog that was now less than twenty feet away.
Fifteen feet...ten feet...five...
Her eyes were dark and depthless, and there was a long, ugly scar along her left side - a twisted place where no hair grew. All that Henry could hear was the dog’s panting and his own hitching breath. He existed inside a vacuum, a bubble, a place where there was just he and this beautiful, battle-scarred bitch.
With the dog now close enough to touch, had he dared to extend his arm out into the empty space between them, she stopped and barked twice. More dogs sloped out into the corridor, and Henry heard the scrabbling of toenails on the concrete behind him. He did not turn around, knowing that if the bitch decided he should be attacked, then it would be so. He could only wait, for though the dogs were thin and scarred, Henry could see the muscles tensed beneath their skin, and knew that they would be much faster than he.
Henry was suddenly, terribly, grateful that he had not stopped at the pet store to buy a leash. To bring such an item of control into a place like this was dangerous. These weren’t the kind of dogs that you could tame; he’d been a dumb asshole to ever think he could.
Oh, but how the fantasy pulled at him. Oh, but how he would have loved to see the look on his mother’s face when this big, black bitch rose up to greet her. Henry could almost hear the choked tweet of the whistle as it fell from her lips, could almost see her backpedaling to the bedroom door, then falling. Faintly, as if it were a part of him like his heartbeat and his breathsounds, he could hear his mother’s screams.
A boy needs a dog, Henry, a man said. Not the TV-father, but his own dad - his voice rough and gruff and growly, like how the dogs would sound if they were capable of human speech. Some things mothers just don’t understand. Some things certain bitches won’t get. But you can teach her, Henry. She can learn...
Not letting his gaze drop from those dark eyes like two bottomless wells, Henry knelt on the dirty ground, his arms slack, his posture that of total submission.
The bitch barked once, her call echoing down the corridor.
Henry could feel the heat rolling off of her, wished that she would let him touch her, knew that such a thing was not possible here.
A slave does not touch the Queen, he thought wildly, unsure where such an idea had come from, but accepting it as true.
His mother had never seemed so far away.
From between the desiccated hull of an old Ford and a stack of metal desks came a dirty white dog the size of a small pony. In its mouth, it carried something small and black and squirming. A volley of barks, yips, and howls split the air as the dogs moved on Henry, approaching in an ever-tightening circle.
He closed his eyes and did not flinch when he felt their greasy fur brush against his bare forearms, their hot breath on his neck.
* * *
Hours later, Henry stumbled through the breach in the fence, the black puppy cradled inside his T-shirt. He was a different boy than the one who had fled his mother’s babble this morning, and yet he wasn’t. He was still Henry, but changed.
He hurried down Vine Street towards home, no longer scouting the sidewalk for trouble, no longer worried about the high school boys or the homeless men. He had his dream, and a puppy was so much better than a grown-up dog. A puppy you could train to do whatever you wanted. A puppy you could make all yours. It would have no other loyalties.
He wouldn’t be calling it Butch or Ranger, though. His new puppy was a female, a bitch. Henry thought that he might name her Queenie
(c) 2004 Sara Berniker - Albedo One. All rights reserved
Originally published in Albedo One issue 29
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