Hank and Dingo and I crouched in a downpour at the edge of the woods near the main gate to the Carpin Quarter Horse Ranch. Thunder crashed and lightning lit up the world for brief spaces.
I had never been so wet. The rain came down in sheets.
The earth beneath our feet churned in the torrent of the runoff and became so much mud.
Hank was bent low with an arm around Dingo’s neck, and even the dog tried to make herself as small as possible, pressing herself back against and underneath him in an attempt to stay out of the rain. The pack on Hank’s back was shedding water at an alarming rate. I only hoped the merchandise inside was still high and dry.
The heart of the storm would be passing over us soon. There was one particular sheet of brilliance, there and gone in a twinkling, so bright that my retinas hurt, and even as I thought of counting forward from the flash to the peal of thunder, it seemed that a giant decided at that moment to clap his hands together behind my head.
“Damn,” Hank shouted, “that was close.”
In the woods to our left I saw a flicker of light. The tree that had just been hit by lightning, not twenty yards away, guttered with flame for a moment, then the flames winked out.
“Yeah!” I yelled back.
A hundred yards ahead through the night and the storm I could make out the dark, solid silhouette of the main house. Still no light.
“Do you think anybody’s home?” Hank asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine. If there are any cars, they’ll be around back.”
Dingo barked, but it was half-hearted. A protest, probably. I was certain the dog thought we were all out of our minds, and I wasn’t so sure that she wouldn’t be right if she did. What the hell were we doing anyway? Then again, I’d been asking myself that question for most of my life.
“The stables must be down the lane,” Hank said. “Back beyond the house. Still wish I had that map Julie drew.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hank, I think we should split up. Like in Rio Bravo. Somebody needs to cover the back door, you know what I mean?”
It didn’t take him long to agree, one quick scan of the lay of the land, which was darkness and quagmire, and he was nodding.
“Okay.”
“I’ll go left,” I told him and pointed. Toward the left there was a stand of brushy woods straining against an ancient barbed wire fence and a narrow path between the house and the woods, a black place in the night that appeared to swallow the lightning and the storm.
I caught Hank’s look in a flash of lightning. Even he thought I was crazy. That was a switch.
“You and Dingo go right,” I said, and pointed.
To the right of the house the bare land rose up into a series of low hills, then fell away toward the rear of the property. Back there, somewhere, was the swelling, clay-red waters of the Red River. Also, back there somewhere were the horse stables, and beyond that, a certain manure pile.
“You be… thorough,” Hank said.
“I’ll be…Yeah.”
With that Hank and Dingo were gone into the storm, vanishing completely in an instant.
With the rain filling my shoes-by God, I’d have to get new ones soon-I set off down the fence line, peering at the ground ahead and pausing between flashes of lightning in order to keep my bearings.
I entered the night.
When I was all of seven years old I went with my folks to visit a neighbor lady.
In the small town where I grew up the street lamps were thin-to-nonexistent the further you got away from downtown, and we lived within a block of the city limits. When the moon waned down to nothing, or hid itself completely, the dark spaces between and behind the homes held little more light than a limestone cave, particularly on cloudy nights.
That night was such a night.
After dinner and tall tales, each equally unremarkable, my mother and father said their goodbyes on the front porch while I fidgeted from foot to foot on the spaced concrete blocks that composed the front walk.
I looked around at the ocean of night around me, the only safe shores of which was the pool of rectangular light spilling around the silhouettes of my folks and Mrs. Beckham.
I heard a sound; an odd sound, like a whimper. It seemed to emanate from the side of the house down near the ground, and being age seven it was up to me to investigate.
Some of us are born curious and have the good fortune to have an inborn sense of fear and awe with which to temper it. I wasn’t so lucky. Curiosity I had, and that in spades, but until that moment in the hot high summer of 1970 in the East Texas night at Mrs. Beckham’s house at the corner of Collard Street and Maple, I had not yet learned of fear and pain from the unknown.
Perhaps ten feet-all of a world-into the darkness, I felt for the whimper in the inky blackness.
I moved forward. Two yards. Five.
I smelled earth, freshly turned-the same scent as from our vegetable garden when it was being tilled-and I smelled iron, and something else. A wet smell. A reek.
The whimper turned abruptly into a growl; a low, gravelly staccato rising in volume and intensity in the stillness of the dark. From a world away I could hear the adult voices around front, indistinguishable as words but with crystal clarity as far as tone-over there, in that other world where my parents and the old neighbor lady stood on the shores of the light, all was well. All was right with the world.
The fear began as a little feathery whisper down in the area of my gonads, grew rapidly into a shout and overcame me in a flash.
I turned and ran.
I took two strides and then I felt stabbing heat-teeth sank into my left buttock even as I distinctly heard a raised voice: “Don’t get too close to that dog, now, ya hear!”
It was not the first nor the last time I had been bitten by a dog, but for me it forever changed the character of the night.
As I stumbled forward into the storm at the Carpin ranch, I thought about dogs. Dogs I have loved and dogs I have loathed. I hoped that Carpin didn’t have any, or on the off-chance that he did, that I’d be able to see them before they saw me. I’ve seen my share of ranch operations, and I never knew one not to have a dog.
I didn’t relish meeting mindless teeth, blind in the dark and the storm.
Hank had Dingo. All I had was a.38.
I put one foot in front of the other as I penetrated the darkness between the house and the fence that held back the brush and the woods.
Intermittent lightning revealed just how narrow the space was, and for the length of that space I’d be catching the full brunt of the runoff from the roof.
There were strange, twisted shapes there in the dark. Revealed in snapshot-like images from the lightning, I saw that someone had taken to collecting old kiddie-train parts. Along the fence there was a string of cars, each about eight feet long and three feet high, some of them rusted through in places and starting to cave in upon themselves from decay. Just across from that oddity along the south side of the house and perfectly revealed for an instant of time in a flash of lightning there was the largest Jack-In-The-Box I’d ever seen, all of seven feet tall. Behind it was a huge plastic gorilla with bared teeth sitting cross-legged. Maybe it was King Kong practicing his Zen meditations.
In a moment I had it figured out. Either someone had been planning a miniature golf course and never got it off the ground, or the same someone had hauled off all the props after the miniature golf course was closed down.
I looked at King Kong’s teeth and Jack’s smile in the next thrum of lightning flashes and shuddered.
The way became even narrower toward the rear corner of the house and I could tell that the space opened up back there. Behind all the trash on my right I could see the interminable blackness underneath the house, which was raised up on pier and beam pilings to about my chest height.
And, all things being both equal and perfect, not ten feet from freedom I heard it above the fever pitch of the storm and the thunder: I heard the growl.
Maybe I’ve read a few too many Dean Koontz novels, but in the first instant I got the idea that the thing was part human-some kind of mad-scientist experiment gone horribly awry. Then the thing stepped out to fill the last three feet between the house and the fence.
It was a big animal. By its silhouette I guessed that it was a mastiff. Julie had never said anything about the dog. If ever I talked to her again, I definitely planned to mention that fact. But, then again, there were a good many things that she failed to mention.
Lightning flashed and the dog took a step toward me.
The chain from its neck grew taut. It was at the chain limit.
I took out the thirty-eight. Aimed it at the dog.
The growl grew louder.
I didn’t want to kill the animal, but I had decided that I was coming through.
I hoped no one was home, or that the shot would be taken for thunder if there was.
The rain runoff from the roof poured down on top of my head, trailed down my arm and spilled off the barrel of the gun I held at hip level.
I began to squeeze the trigger.
“Sasha!” A voice bellowed. “Come on!”
The chain around the dog’s neck jerked back and the growl was cut off. It reminded me of killing a lawn-mower engine.
The dog was gone.
I waited, shivering in the cold. I counted slowly from a hundred down to zero, then stepped around the corner of the house and into the back yard.
I paused, waiting for another lightning flash. One came within a few seconds.
I caught movement across the way. There was an immense horse walker in the center of the backyard space, and beyond it, a hundred yards away, were the stables. The movement was from the direction of the stables. I wasn’t certain, but what I’d seen in that hundredth of a second could have been a dog’s tail disappearing into the gloom of the stables.
It wasn’t completely black. There was a utility pole by the parking lot at the other end of the house and it shed pale, electric blue light downward in a cone. There, in main light, were three vehicles. Two of them were trucks. There was a new pickup over there, either silver or white-it seems it’s always impossible to distinguish between the colors in limited light. But one of the trucks I recognized. It was a light-blue Ford F-150 pickup. Someone had replaced the windshield. Other than that, I would have recognized it anywhere.
“Well well,” I said into the rain. “Old friends.”
And down at the stables someone turned on all the lights.