Imbecile

The 98. Oldsmobile. 1970, to be exact, was the greatest set of wheels ever to grace the earth. The last 365 horse power V-8 equipped with a smooth-shifting Turbo Hydra-Matic 400 transmission. It was big. Danla said it rode like a boat. Ry thought hovercraft. He seldom if ever felt a pothole. The leather front seat was wide enough for four kids, but he only had the two. Only ever would.

The Olds was fifteen years old. The only thing that ever went wrong with it was the electrical glitch that made the interior and exterior lights turn off all of a sudden. They always came right back on, but try having that happen on a winding reservation road in the middle of the night to make you catch your breath and say a prayer to be alive. It only happened to Danla the one time. She never would drive it again. Ry couldn’t have left her the car if he wanted. Which he didn’t.

Ry was driving light speed, you know when the snow flakes are wet and heavy and the headlights make them look like streaks of stars. The radio was off to concentrate. It was a slow moving light speed. 35 on the straightaways. 25 on the curves. The snow wasn’t sticking and the kids were both riding shotgun. They had plenty of room to spread out, but they didn’t. Mary kept leaning on Chase and Chase kept poking Mary.

“Dad, tell Mary to stop slobbering,” Chase said.

Ry could see Mary was tired. She was bored with her dolls and the buttons on the dash and too short to see out of the windows of a car like the Olds. Chase probably couldn’t tell that Mary wasn’t trying to start something. Ry thought about how Chase was in the wrong, but then nobody was ever really in the wrong because if they knew any better they probably wouldn’t be doing what they were doing.

“You two are almost home,” Ry said. “What are you not going to tell?”

“We’re not going to say we watched a scary movie with you even when we get scared at night,” Mary said.

Chase smiled and said, “Redrum. Redrum.”

The snow almost lets up. A break in the light speed continuum.

Ry sees an Indian on the side of the road. He’s holding two leashes. One leash is to a golden lab. The Indian bends down, grabs the golden’s collar, and pulls the dog off the road. The other leash is to a black lab with a lightning stripe on its neck. The dog’s eyes glow in the headlamp. It turns away from the Indian and the car clips the black dog’s skull.

Ry feels a light thud. He shudders. He turns to the kids. Mary is looking ahead but she can’t see above the dash. Chase is still bent over, whispering into Mary’s ear. Ry remembers that the Oldsmobile is 19 feet long with a wheelbase of 10 and a half feet. It weighs two and a half tons. The dog probably felt less of a thud than he did. The kids must not have felt a thing.

“Tell Chase to stop,” Mary says.

“Stop,” Ry says.

“She started it,” Chase says. “She slobbered on me.”

The turnoff to the lane and into the pines is just around the bend. Ry wonders if the Indian is watching his tail lights. He knows that he has to go back, has to try to make things square. First he needs to unload the kids. They don’t need to see blood. Danla doesn’t need to know that Ry just killed a dog, that the he still can’t do anything right.

Ry winds the Olds over the lane and stops in front of the trailer. He leaves the lights on and the engine running. He throws open the doors and the trunk.

“Remember what we tell.” Ry says, hurrying the kids off the seat.

“That we had to watch the slasher movie because the other VHS had too many boobs,” says Chase.

“Wrong,” Ry says.

Ry pulls a paper sack full of clothes from the trunk and runs it to the porch he built out of scrap redwood when they were first married. He grabs Mary and lifts her over the stairs that he never did trust. Chase looks up at him. He’s ten. He’s big enough to fend on his own.

“You don’t want to see Mom, do you?” Chase says.

“Not particularly,” Ry says.

Mary says, “We’ll tell Mom your room was clean.”

“You,” Ry says, “inherited your Mom’s brain.”

The snow is still falling and Ry kisses Mary on the lips and ruffles Chase’s hair and heads back to the car. He slams down the trunk, closes the passenger door and walks around to the front. A tuft of black hair still sticks to the wet headlamp. The kids stand alone on the porch and wave goodbye.

No shoulder is wide enough for an Oldsmobile 98 and the reservation roads didn’t really have shoulders. Ry stopped the car less than a quarter of a mile from Danla’s. Other cars, if there were going to be any, would have to pull around. He turned off the lights. No point in wearing down the battery or making a scene. Besides, his eyes would adjust. It was one of those nights when the snow seemed to glow on its own without the help of a moon or the stars or any city lights.

What Ry told Chase about not wanting to see Danla wasn’t true. If he knew he wasn’t going to see her he would’ve wore his thick coat, maybe coveralls. As it was, he had on the leather jacket he bought to impress.

He found the place where he hit the dog a few dozen feet down the road. It was still snowing. The snow was still not sticking to the road, but off the road it had started to take hold. There were boot tracks and dog tracks in the mud and in the slush. Ry guessed that some of the slush was pink. All the tracks went around and around. Maybe the Indian had to unwind himself from one of the leashes.

The boot tracks headed back down the road the way they came. Ry started back to the car when he saw another set of tracks that headed into the woods. He stepped off the road and knelt to the snow. Dog tracks. The dog wasn’t trailing a leash. He was smart enough to see that. He asked himself what kind of a man would let his dog walk into the woods to die.

He stood up and called, “Lightning. Here boy.”

Ry listened to nothing but his own breathing. His eyes searched down the road for a sign of the Indian. Not a shadow. He didn’t want to see the Indian anyways, not after learning how the man had let his dog walk off into the woods. The next house, half a mile away, belonged to another mill hand. Somewhere between here and there, Ry figured, the Indian had disappeared in the same way that he appeared in the headlights minutes ago. That’s the way it was in this country.

Ry decided that if the dog was still alive he would find it and carry it to the car. That would count for something. Maybe one of its eyes was missing. The kids would never know that the one-eyed dog with the white stripe was almost killed by their dad.

The tracks weren’t easy to follow. They were filling with snow. They disappeared altogether for stretches under the trees where the ground was bare.

He heard a car on the road and unbent himself. The lights passed the Oldsmobile, went around the bend, and headed down the lane toward Danla’s trailer. The engine sounded like a pickup. Ry gauged his position in the woods against where the Indian must have been standing when the 98 went down the same lane. He was wet from the water that came off the branches.

“Damn,” he said. “Damn.”

He figured there were two possibilities. None of them any good. One: the Indian had driven to Danla’s to settle a score for the dog that was now wandering with one eye in the woods. Two: Danla was just now coming home, the trailer had been locked, and she was finding that Ry had left the kids out in the snow.

He started at a run towards the trailer, winding around the pines and over the underbrush. He knew the barbed wire fence was getting closer. He headed for the clearing where the property line would be obvious. He made good time there. Fast as a 455 Rocket V-8. To hell with the leather jacket. He didn’t care if it tore on the fence. Besides, he was sure it was already torn by the branches.

He didn’t see the dog until after he put himself through the fence the first time. When he stood up, a barb ripped at the back of his hand. He stopped to hold the blood to his mouth, turned, and saw the shape behind him in the clearing. At first he thought the dog was standing, looking straight at him. Angry eyes. Then he went back through the fence. Slowly this time, holding the cold taut wire between his forefingers and thumbs. The dog’s muzzle was pillowed in the wet snow. It’s legs had buckled underneath. Who had he been kidding? Nothing could survive an impact with the Olds. The least he could do now was borrow his old shovel, gather the kids, and give Lightning a proper burial.

He walked along the fence until he came to the lane. A new-model Ford was parked in front of the trailer. As he approached, the only thing he could hear was the wet gravel under his feet.

Then he saw them: a man, a woman, and two kids standing in the slider window, staring off toward the clearing, away from where he stood. Silent. The man was tall, clean-shaven. He had an arm around Danla’s shoulder. He had a hand on Mary’s head. Chase stood off to the side against the curtain, quiet like the rest of them. Both of the kids were dry. At some point the snow must have stopped because everything was still except for the water dripping from the trees.

Danla had let her hair grow out. He had asked her about it the last time he saw her. She said no. Every time he came for the kids she always had her hair pulled back or in a cap and he could never tell if she was wearing it long again the way he liked. Now he could.

He shivered from the cold. He didn’t know how they all knew about the black dog. Why they were staring toward it. What they were thinking. They all stood like that for what seemed like an hour before he saw flashing lights.

The third possibility, the one that he hadn’t figured, was that Danla was now dating a man who had more money and more brains than he ever would. A man that she would never call an imbecile. After the man told Danla the Oldsmobile 98 was parked by itself in the middle of the road, she called the police. Now they were all staring through the slider window wondering why he would hide in the woods like a peeping tom. Through the trees, he watched flashing lights from the reservation patrol car pull up behind the Olds.

None of them, not even the cop, knew about the dog. The only other person besides Ry who knew about the black dog with the legs that buckled was the Indian. By now he would be dressed for war, an eagle feather on his head, and riding an Appaloosa through aspens.¹