“Rebel’s body temperature has been dropping. It seems to have stabilized
now, but half an hour ago I thought he was going to be dead.” Dr. Lezander
showed Dad the readings. “See for yourself.”
“My God.” Dad’s voice was stunned. “It’s that low?”
“Yes. Tom, no animal can live with a body temperature of sixty-six
degrees. It’s just… absolutely impossible!”
I touched Rebel. My dog was no longer warm. His white hair felt hard and
coarse. His head turned, and the single eye found me. His tail began to wag,
with obvious effort. And then the tongue slid from between the teeth in that
awful, flesh-ripped grin and licked my palm. His tongue was as cold as a
tombstone.
But he was alive.
Rebel stayed at Dr. Lezander’s house. Over the following days, Dr.
Lezander stitched his torn muzzle, filled him full of antibiotics, and was
planning on amputating the crushed leg but then it began to wither. The white
hair fell away, exposing dead gray flesh. Intrigued by this new development,
Dr. Lezander postponed the amputation and instead wrapped the withering leg to
monitor its progress. On the fourth day in Dr. Lezander’s care, Rebel had a
coughing fit and vomited up a mass of dead tissue the size of a man’s fist.
Dr. Lezander put it in alcohol in a bottle and showed it to Dad and me. It was
Rebel’s punctured lung.
But he was alive.
I began riding Rocket over to Dr. Lezander’s every day after school to
check on my dog. Each afternoon, the doctor wore a freshly puzzled expression
and had something new to show me: pieces of vomited-up bones that could only
be broken ribs, teeth that had fallen out, the blinded eye that had popped
from its socket like a white pebble. For a while Rebel picked at strained meat
and slurped a few tonguefuls of water, and the newspapers at the bottom of his
cage were clotted and soaked with blood. Then Rebel stopped eating and
drinking, wouldn’t touch food or water no matter how much I urged him. He
curled up in a corner, and stared with his one eye at something behind my
shoulder, but I couldn’t figure out what had his attention. He would sit like
that for an hour or more, as if he’d gone to sleep with his eye open, or he
was lost in a dream. I couldn’t get him to respond even when I snapped my
fingers in front of his muzzle. Then he would come out of it, all of a sudden,
and he would lick my hand with his tombstone tongue and whine a little bit.
Then he might sleep, shivering, or he might slide off into the haze again.
But he was alive.
“Listen to his heart, Cory,” Dr. Lezander told me one afternoon. I did,
using the stethoscope. I heard a slow, labored thud. Rebel’s breathing was
like the sound of a creaking door in an old deserted house. He was neither
warm nor cold; he just was. Then Dr. Lezander took a toy mouse and wound it
up, and he set it loose to twist and turn right in front of Rebel, while I
listened to his heartbeat through the stethoscope. Rebel’s tail wagged
sluggishly. The sound of his heart never changed an iota from its slow, slow
beating. It was like the working of an engine set to run at a steady speed,
day and night, with no increase or decrease in power no matter what the
engine’s job required. It was the sound of a machine beating in the darkness
without purpose or joy or understanding. I loved Rebel, but I hated the hollow
sound of that heartbeat.
Dr. Lezander and I sat on his front porch in the warm October afternoon
light. I drank a glass of Tang and ate a slice of Mrs. Lezander’s apple cake.
Dr. Lezander wore a dark blue cardigan sweater with gold buttons; the mornings
had taken a chilly turn. He sat in a rocking chair, facing the golden hills,
and he said, “This is beyond me. Never in my life have I seen anything like
this. Never. I should write it up and send it to a journal, but I don’t think
anyone would believe me.” He folded his hands together, a tawny spill of
sunlight on his face. “Rebel is dead, Cory.”
I just stared at him, an orange mustache on my upper lip.
“Dead,” he repeated. “I don’t expect you to understand this, when I
don’t. Rebel doesn’t eat. He doesn’t drink. He voids nothing. His body is not
warm enough to sustain his organs. His heartbeat is… a drum, played over and
over in the same tattoo without the least variation. His blood—when I can
squeeze any out—is full of poisons. He is wasting away to nothing, and still
he lives. Can you explain that to me, Cory?”
Yes, I thought. I prayed Death away from him.
But I didn’t say anything.
“Ah, well. Mysteries, mysteries,” he said. “We come from darkness, and to
darkness we must return.” He spoke this almost to himself as he rocked back
and forth in his chair with his fingers interwoven. “True of men, and animals,
too.”
I didn’t like this line of thought and conversation. I didn’t like
thinking about the fact that Rebel was getting skinny and his hair was falling
out and he didn’t eat or drink but he lived on. I didn’t like the empty sound
of his heartbeat, like a clock working in a house where no one lived anymore.
To get my mind off these thoughts, I said, “My dad told me you killed a Nazi.”
“What?” He looked at me, startled.
“You killed a Nazi,” I repeated. “In Holland. My dad said you were close
enough to see his face.”
Dr. Lezander didn’t reply for a moment. I remembered Dad telling me not
to ask the doctor about this subject, because most men who’d been in the war
didn’t like to talk about killing. I had feasted on the exploits of Sgt. Rock,
Sgt. Saunders, and the Gallant Men, and in my visions of heroes war was a
television show adapted from a comic book.
“Yes,” he answered. “I was that close to him.”
“Gosh!” I said. “You must’ve been scared! I mean… I would’ve been.”
“Oh, I was scared, all right. Very scared. He broke into our house. He
had a rifle. I had a pistol. He was a young man. A teenager, actually. One of
those blond, blue-eyed teenaged boys who love a parade. I shot him. He fell.”
Dr. Lezander kept rocking in his chair. “I had never fired a gun before. But
the Nazis were in the streets, and they were breaking into our houses, and
what could I do?”
“Were you a hero?” I asked.
He smiled thinly; there was some pain in it. “No, not a hero. Just a
survivor.” I watched his hands grip and relax on the armrests. His fingers
were short and blunt, like powerful instruments. “We were all terrified of the
Nazis, you know. Blitzkrieg. Brownshirt. Waffen SS. Luftwaffe. Those words
struck us with pure terror. But I met a German a few years after the war was
over. He had been a Nazi. He had been one of the monsters.” Dr. Lezander
lifted his chin and watched a flock of birds winging south across the horizon.
“He was just a man, after all. With bad teeth, body odor, and dandruff. Not a
superman, only one man. I told him I’d been in Holland in 1940, when the Nazis
had invaded us. He said he wasn’t there, but he asked me… for forgiveness.”
“Did you forgive him?”
“I did. Though I had many friends who were crushed under that boot, I
forgave one of the men who wore it. Because he was a soldier, and he was
following orders. That is the steel of the German character, Cory. They follow
orders, even if it means walking into fire. Oh, I could have struck that man
across the face. I could’ve spat on him and cursed him. I could’ve found a way
to hound him until the day he died, but I am not the beast. The past is the
past, and sleeping dogs should be left alone. Yes?”
“Yes sir.”
“And speaking of sleeping dogs, we ought to go have a look at Rebel.” He
stood up, his knees creaking, and I followed him into the house.
The day came when Dr. Lezander said he had done all he could and there
was no use to keep Rebel at his house anymore. He gave Rebel back to us, and
we took him home in the pickup truck.
I loved my dog, though the gray flesh showed through his thin white hair,
his skull was scarred and misshapen, and his withered gray leg was as thin as
a warped stick. Mom couldn’t be around him. Dad brought up the subject of
putting Rebel to sleep, but I wouldn’t hear it. Rebel was my dog, and he was
alive.
He never ate. Never drank a drop. He stayed in his pen, because he could
hardly walk on his withered leg. I could count his ribs, and through his
papery skin you could see their broken edges. When I got home from school in
the afternoons, he would look at me and his tail would wag a few times. I
would pet him—though I have to be honest here and say that the feel of his
flesh made my skin crawl—then he would stare off into space and I would be as
good as alone until he came back, however long that might be. My buddies said
he was sick, that I ought to have him put to sleep. I asked them if they’d
like to be put to sleep when they got sick, and that shut them up.
The season of ghosts came upon us.
It was not just that Halloween loomed close at hand, and that the
cardboard boxes of silky costumes and plastic masks appeared on the shelves at
Woolworth’s along with glittery magic wands, rubber pumpkin heads, witches’
hats, and spiders jiggling on black webs. It was a feeling in the crisp
twilight air; it was a hush across the hills. The ghosts were gathering
themselves, building up their strength to wander the fields of October and
speak to those who would listen. Because of my interest in monsters, my
buddies and even my parents concluded that Halloween was my favorite time of
year. They were right, but for the wrong reasons. They thought I relished the
skeleton in the closet, the bump in the night, the sheet-wrapped spook in the
house on the haunted hill. I did not. What I felt in the hushed October air,
as Halloween came nearer, was not the dime-store variety of hobgoblin, but
titanic and mysterious forces at work. These forces could not be named; not
headless horseman, not howling werewolf or grinning vampire. These forces were
as old as the world and as pure in their good or evil as the elements
themselves. Instead of seeing gremlins under my bed, I saw the armies of the
night sharpening swords and axes for a clash in the swirling mist. I saw in my
imagination the tumult on Bald Mountain in all its wild and frantic frenzy,
and at the crowing of a rooster to announce the dawn all the thousands of
capering demons turning their hideous faces toward the east in sadness and
disgust and marching away to their fetid dens in step with the “Anvil Chorus.”
I saw, as well, the broken-hearted lover pined away to a shade, the lost and
sobbing translucent child, the woman in white who wants only kindness from a
stranger.
It was thus on one of these still, cool nights approaching All Hallow’s
Eve that I went out to see Rebel in his pen and found someone standing there
with him.
Rebel was sitting on his haunches, his scarred head cocked to one side.
He was staring at a figure who stood on the opposite side of the mesh fence.
The figure—a little boy, I could tell it was—seemed to be talking to Rebel. I
could hear the murmur of his voice. As soon as the back door closed behind me,
the little boy jumped, startled, and took off running into the woods like a
scalded cat. “Hey!” I shouted. “Wait!”
He didn’t stop. He ran over the fallen leaves without making any noise at
all. The woods swallowed him up.
The wind blew, and the trees whispered. Rebel circled around and around
in his pen, dragging his withered leg. He licked my hand with his chilly
tongue, his nose as cold as a lump of ice. I sat with him for a while. He
tried to lick my cheek, but I turned my face away because his breath smelled
like something dead. Then Rebel went into one of his fixed stares again, his
muzzle aimed at the woods. His tail wagged a few times, and he whimpered.
I left him staring at nothing and I went inside because it was getting
cold.
Sometime during the night, I woke up in agony because I had refused Rebel
my cheek to lick. It was one of those things that grew and grew, until you
couldn’t stand to live with it inside you. I had rejected my dog, pure and
simple. I had prayed Death away from him, and my selfishness had caused him to
exist in this state of betwixt and between. I had rejected him, when all he’d
wanted to do was lick my cheek. I got up in the dark, put on a sweater, and
went to the back door. I was about to turn the back porch light on when I
heard Rebel give a single bark that made my hand stop short of the switch.
After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his
snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or
statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation. I knew this bark: it spoke
of excited happiness, and I hadn’t heard it since before Rebel had died and
come back to life.
Slowly and carefully, I nudged the back door open. I stood in the dark
and listened through the screen. I heard the wind. I heard the last of
summer’s crickets, a hardy tribe. I heard Rebel bark again, happily.
I heard the voice of a little boy say, “Would you like to be my dog?”
My heart squeezed. Whoever he was, he was trying to be very quiet. “I
sure would like for you to be my dog,” he said. “You sure are a pretty dog.”
I couldn’t see Rebel or the little boy from where I stood. I heard the
clatter of the fence, and I knew Rebel had jumped up and planted his paws in
its mesh just as he used to do when I went out to be with him.
The little boy began to whisper to Rebel. I couldn’t make out what was
being said.
But I knew now who he was, and why he was here.
I opened the door. I tried to be careful, but a hinge chirped. It was no
louder than one of the crickets. As I walked out onto the porch, I saw the
little boy running for the forest and the moonlight shone silver on his curly,
sandy-colored hair.
He was eight years old. He would be eight years old forever.
“Carl!” I shouted. “Carl Bellwood!”
It was the little boy who had lived down the street, and who had come to
play with Rebel because his mother would not let him have a dog of his own. It
