The Essential Ellison Part 104

He didn't react to the name, but then he couldn't have cared less. But that was his name, from that time on.

No one who ever came into my house was unaffected by him. When he sensed someone with good vibrations, he was right there, lying at their feet. He loved to be scratched, and despite years of admonitions he refused to stop begging for sc.r.a.ps at table, because he had found most of the people who came to dinner at my house were patsies unable to escape his woebegone Jackie-Coogan-as-the-Kid look.

But he was a certain barometer of b.u.ms, as well. On any number of occasions when I found someone I liked, and Ahbhu would have nothing to do with him or her, it always turned out the person was a wrongo. I took to nothing his att.i.tude toward newcomers, and I must admit it influenced my own reactions. I was always wary of someone Ahbhu shunned.

Women with whom I had had unsatisfactory affairs would nonetheless return to the house from time to time-to visit the dog. He had an intimate circle of friends, many of whom had nothing to do with me, and numbering among their company some of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood. One exquisite lady used to send her driver to pick him up for Sunday afternoon romps at the beach.

I never asked him what happened on those occasions. He didn't talk.

Last year he started going downhill, though I didn't realize it because he maintained the manner of a puppy almost to the end. But he began sleeping too much, and he couldn't hold down his food-not even the Hungarian meals prepared for him by the Magyars who lived up the street. And it became apparent to me something was wrong with him when he got scared during the big Los Angeles earthquake last year. Ahbhu wasn't afraid of anything. He attacked the Pacific Ocean and walked tall around vicious cats. But the quake terrified him and he jumped up in my bed and threw his forelegs around my neck. I was very nearly the only victim of the earthquake to die from animal strangulation.

He was in and out of the veterinarian's shop all through the early part of this year, and the idiot always said it was his diet.

Then one Sunday when he was out in the backyard, I found him lying at the foot of the stairs, covered with mud, vomiting so heavily all he could bring up was bile. He was matted with his own refuse and he was trying desperately to dig his nose into the earth for coolness. He was barely breathing. I took him to a different vet.

At first they thought it was just old age...that they could pull him through. But finally they took X-rays and saw the cancer had taken hold in his stomach and liver.

I put off the day as much as I could. Somehow I just couldn't conceive of a world that didn't have him in it. But yesterday I went to the vet's office and signed the euthanasia papers.

"I'd like to spend a little time with him, before," I said.

They brought him in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had grown so thin. He'd always had a pot-belly and it was gone. The muscles in his hind legs were weak, flaccid. He came to me and put his head into the hollow of my armpit. He was trembling violently. I lifted his head and he looked at me with that comic face I'd always thought made him look like Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man. He knew. Sharp as h.e.l.l right up to the end, hey old friend? He knew, and he was scared. He trembled all the way down to his spiderweb legs. This bouncing ball of hair that, when lying on a dark carpet, could be taken for a sheepskin rug, with no way to tell at which end head and which end tail. So thin. Shaking, knowing what was going to happen to him. But still a puppy.

I cried and my eyes closed as my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my arms because we hadn't done much crying at one another. I was ashamed of myself not to be taking it as well as he was.

"I got to, pup, because you're in pain and you can't eat. I got to." But he didn't want to know that.

The vet came in, then. He was a nice guy and he asked me if I wanted to go away and just let it be done.

Then Ahbhu came up out of there and looked at me.

There is a scene in Kazan's Viva Zapata where a close friend of Zapata's, Brando's, has been condemned for conspiring with the federales. A friend that had been with Zapata since the mountains, since the revolucion had begun. And they come to the hut to take him to the firing squad, and Brando starts out, and his friend stops him with a hand on his arm, and he says to him with great friendship, "Emiliano, do it yourself."

Ahbhu looked at me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with human tongue he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look, don't leave me with strangers.

So I held him as they laid him down and the vet slipped the lanyard up around his right foreleg and drew it tight to bulge the vein, and I held his head and he turned it away from me as the needle went in. It was impossible to tell the moment he pa.s.sed over from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered shut and he was gone.

I wrapped him in a sheet with the help of the vet and I drove home with Ahbhu on the seat beside me, just the way we had come home eleven years before. I took him out in the backyard and began digging his grave. I dug for hours, crying and mumbling to myself, talking to him in the sheet. It was a very neat, rectangular grave with smooth sides and all the loose dirt scooped out by hand.

I laid him down in the hole and he was so tiny in there for a dog who had seemed to be so big in life, so furry, so funny. And I covered him over and when the hole was packed full of dirt I replaced the neat divot of gra.s.s I'd scalped off at the start. And that was all.

But I couldn't send him to strangers.

THE END QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.

Is there any significance to the reversal of the word G.o.d being dog? If so, what?

Does the writer try to impart human qualities to a nonhuman creature? Why? Discuss anthropomorphism in the light of the phrase, "Thou art G.o.d."

Discuss the love the writer shows in this essay. Compare and contrast it with other forms of love: the love of a man for a woman, a mother for a child, a son for a mother, a botanist for plants, an ecologist for the Earth.

14.

In his sleep, Nathan Stack talked." Why did you pick me? Why me...?"

15.

Like the Earth, the Mother was in pain.

The great house was very quiet. The doctor had left, and the relatives had gone into town for dinner. He sat by the side of her bed and stared down at her. She looked gray and old and crumpled; her skin was a powdery, ashy hue of moth-dust. He was crying softly.

He felt her hand on his knee, and looked up to see her staring at him. " You weren' t supposed to catch me," he said.

" I' d be disappointed if I hadn' t," she said. Her voice was very thin, very smooth.

" How is it?"

" It hurts. Ben didn' t dope me too well."

He bit his lower lip. The doctor had used ma.s.sive doses, but the pain was more ma.s.sive. She gave little starts as tremors of sudden agony hit her. Impacts. He watched the life leaking out of her eyes.

" How is your sister taking it?"

He shrugged. " You know Charlene. She' s sorry, but it' s all pretty intellectual to her."

His mother let a tiny ripple of a smile move her lips. " It' s a terrible thing to say, Nathan, but your sister isn' t the most likable woman in the world. I' m glad you' re here." She paused, thinking, then added, " It' s just possible your father and I missed something from the gene pool. Charlene isn' t whole."

" Can I get you something? A drink of water?"

" No. I' m fine."

He looked at the ampoule of narcotic painkiller. The syringe lay mechanical and still on the clean towel beside it. He felt her eyes on him. She knew what he was thinking. He looked away.

" I would kill for a cigarette," she said.

He laughed. At sixty-five, both legs gone, what remained of her left side paralyzed, the cancer spreading like deadly jelly toward her heart, she was still the matriarch. " You can' t have a cigarette, so forget it."

" Then why don' t you use that hypo and let me out of here."

" Shut up, Mother."

" Oh, for Christ' s sake, Nathan. It' s hours if I' m lucky. Months if I' m not. We' ve had this conversation before. You know I always win."

" Did I ever tell you you were a b.i.t.c.hy old lady?"

" Many times, but I love you anyhow."

He got up and walked to the wall. He could not walk through it, so he went around the inside of the room.

" You can' t get away from it."

" Mother, Jesus! Please!"

" All right. Let' s talk about the business."

" I couldn' t care less about the business right now."

" Then what should we talk about? The lofty uses to which an old lady can put her last moments?"

" You know, you' re really ghoulish. I think you' re enjoying this in some sick way."

" What other way is there to enjoy it."

" An adventure."

" The biggest. A pity your father never had the chance to savor it."

" I hardly think he' d have savored the feeling of being stamped to death in a hydraulic press."

Then he thought about it, because that little smile was on her lips again. " Okay, he probably would have. The two of you were so unreal, you' d have sat there and discussed it and a.n.a.lyzed the pulp."

" And you' re our son."

He was, and he was. And he could not deny it, nor had he ever. He was hard and gentle and wild just like them, and he remembered the days in the jungle beyond Brasilia, and the hunt in the Cayman Trench, and the other days working in the mills alongside his father, and he knew when his moment came he would savor death as she did.

" Tell me something. I' ve always wanted to know. Did Dad kill Tom Golden?"

" Use the needle and I' ll tell you."

" I' m a Stack. I don' t bribe."

" I'm a Stack, and I know what a killing curiosity you' ve got. Use the needle and I' ll tell you."

He walked widdershins around the room. She watched him, eyes bright as the mill vats.

" You old b.i.t.c.h."

" Shame, Nathan. You know you' re not the son of a b.i.t.c.h. Which is more than your sister can say. Did I ever tell you she wasn' t your father' s child?"

" No, but I knew."

" You' d have liked her father. He was Swedish. Your father liked him."

" Is that why Dad broke both his arms?"

" Probably. But I never heard the Swede complain. One night in bed with me in those days was worth a couple of broken arms. Use the needle."

Finally, while the family was between the entree and the dessert, he filled the syringe and injected her. Her eyes widened as the stuff smacked her heart, and just before she died she rallied all her strength and said, " A deal' s a deal. Your father didn' t kill Tom Golden, I did. You 're a h.e.l.l of a man, Nathan, and you fought us the way we wanted, and we both loved you more than you could know. Except, dammit, you cunning s...o...b.., you do know, don' t you?"

" I know," he said, and she died; and he cried; and that was the extent of the poetry in it.

16.

He knows we are coming.

They were climbing the northern face of the onyx mountain. Snake had coated Nathan Stack' s feet with the thick glue and, though it was hardly a country walk, he was able to keep a foothold and pull himself up. Now they had paused to rest on a spiral ledge, and Snake had spoken for the first time of what waited for them where they were going.

"He?"

Snake did not answer. Stack slumped against the wall of the ledge. At the lower slopes of the mountain they had encountered sluglike creatures that had tried to attach themselves to Stack' s flesh, but when Snake had driven them off they had returned to sucking the rocks. They had not come near the shadow creature. Farther up, Stack could see the lights that flickered at the summit; he had felt fear that crawled up from his stomach. A short time before they had come to this ledge they had stumbled past a cave in the mountain where the bat creatures slept. They had gone mad at the presence of the man and the Snake, and the sounds they had made sent waves of nausea through Stack. Snake had helped him and they had gotten past. Now they had stopped and Snake would not answer Stack' s questions.

We must keep climbing.

" Because he knows we' re here." There was a sarcastic rise in Stack' s voice.Snake started moving. Stack closed his eyes. Snake stopped and came back to him. Stack looked up at the one-eyed shadow. " Not another step."

There is no reason why you should not know.

" Except, friend, I have the feeling you aren' t going to tell me anything."

It is not yet time for you to know.

" Look: just because I haven' t asked, doesn' t mean I don' t want to know. You' ve told me things I shouldn' t be able to handle...all kinds of crazy things...I' m as old as, as...I don' t know how old, but I get the feeling you' ve been trying to tell me I' m Adam...."