Thor. Part 3

Thor stood at the living room window every morning and watched Dad leave, wishing he'd turn around and come back. And every night, he stood and waited for Dad's car.

And Thor always seemed to know just when Dad would return.

Sometimes Dad left for two or more days, and Thor didn't sit at the living room window until the day Dad came home.

Mom had noticed Thor's apparent awareness of Dad's schedule, but decided he was probably just picking up on her own expectations, which was partly right. Thor did notice Mom's lack of antic.i.p.ation when Dad wasn't due home, but there was more to it than that, as Mom realized the night Dad got a flat tire.

The skies were dark with rain clouds as Tom got in his car to go home. He'd had a hard time getting out of the office, and hadn't looked at his watch until he was already in the car. He was a half-hour behind schedule, due home in ten minutes, with a forty-minute drive ahead of him. He knew he should call to let Janet know he'd be late, but the battery in his cell phone was dead and the nearest landline was in his office, six floors up, and he didn't want to go back. He'd told Janet he had a heavy schedule, so he figured she wouldn't worry too much, as long as he wasn't more than a half-hour late.

About halfway home, doing seventy, his left rear tire went out with a pow! that almost startled his bladder loose. The car lurched across two lanes before he managed to wrestle it onto the gravel shoulder and let it drift to a stop. He cursed under his breath and got out to survey the damage.

The left rear wheel was shot, torn to shreds. And then his situation dawned on him: no one was going to stop to help.

There was nothing but forest on either side of the road, not a building in sight, and, he knew, none within walking distance.

He sighed, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, opened the trunk, and bent down to haul out the spare tire and get to work.

By the time he had the lugnuts off the flat, his shirt and pants were ruined, smeared with road grime, grease, and whatever else sticks to tires. He was pulling the flat off the axle when the skies opened up and dumped what felt like Niagara Falls on him. He cursed and jumped into the car and waited for a break in the rain. It was a long wait.

He ended up spending forty minutes changing the tire.

Janet sat at the living room window the entire time, peering through the rain for headlights, trying to keep her fears under control. Thor lay on the floor at her feet, sleeping calmly. She tried to make Thor's disinterest into a good sign, but in reality, she wasn't sure what to make of it.

A minute before Tom pulled into the driveway, Thor suddenly tensed, sprang to his feet, and pressed his nose against the gla.s.s. Janet thought he must have heard the car coming. She squinted out the window, but saw nothing. Thor squirmed and whimpered. She looked again - still nothing. She decided Thor must have heard an animal outside; then she saw headlights through the rain, and Tom's car came crunching up the gravel driveway. Thor gave a little greeting woof and dashed off to the back door to greet his leader.

Janet wondered about the incident for a long time. For days, she watched Thor whenever Tom was due home. At first she thought Thor's hearing was just that much better than hers, but she couldn't convince herself. Thor had perked up a whole minute before the car arrived. A little arithmetic told her that if Tom had been doing thirty miles an hour (a conservative estimate, but considering the rain, he might have been going that slow), he would have been a half mile away when Thor perked up. Even if Thor could hear the car that far away - through a closed window, in pouring rain - could he have distinguished it from all the other cars on the road?

The question gnawed at her until weeks later, when Tom was twenty minutes late. It was just enough for Janet to start worrying, but this time, she went into the living room to watch the dog, rather than the road.

Thor had made himself comfortable in the window chair, but he wasn't looking out; he was waiting. Janet sat a few feet away with her stopwatch in hand. A few minutes went by and Thor sat up. She hit the stopwatch. Thor squirmed, pressed his nose to the window and whined, then sat rigid and alert. His ears were up, but they didn't twitch the way they did when he heard something in the distance.

The stopwatch ticked off twenty seconds, twenty-two, twenty-five. Thor didn't move. Fifty seconds. Thor stiffened slightly, his ears perked up, and he tilted his head to put his left ear a little closer to the gla.s.s. His eyes were locked on the street.

Thor's face lit up. He'd heard the car for the first time. Janet stopped the watch. Fifty-five seconds. A few seconds later, she heard the car.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and a chill ran down her spine. She'd just witnessed something impossible.

Later, Janet told Tom about it, but to her amazement, he wasn't surprised. His family had always had dogs, and he'd seen similar behavior in more than one of them. His childhood dog, Harmon, for example, had always known when he was going to the vet, despite the family's careful avoidance of "the V-word." People casually referred to it as a "dog's sixth sense." When Tom was a teenager, he'd looked for other "psychic powers" in Harmon, but found none. If dogs had any other unexplained abilities, they kept them well hidden.

Eventually Tom accepted the explanation that dogs simply pick up very subtle cues from their masters. No big deal.

Janet was disappointed. She'd never been around dogs before, and thought she'd discovered something truly extraordinary. Thor might become famous, she'd imagined, the Psychic Dog.

But if this ability was so commonplace, why hadn't hard research been done on it?

"Well," Tom suggested one night, "a.s.suming dogs do have some psychic ability, maybe scientists feel it's beneath them to research. Who knows?"

Janet spent some time in the library reading all she could find about dogs, but never found any mention of a canine "sixth sense."

But she did find numerous stories about a mysterious ability of dogs to find their way home from hundreds, sometimes even thousands of miles away. Sometimes to homes they'd never been to before. In one case, a family moved cross-country, leaving the dog behind. Months later, the bedraggled pooch showed up on their new doorstep.

But as amazing as the stories were, they were just that - stories. Anecdotal evidence only. No research to back it up. Why not?

And Thor showed no other unusual insights. Just apparent premonitions of Tom's return (and her own return from shopping, which she wasn't there to see).

In the end, Janet, like Thor, accepted what she couldn't understand.

Things seem normal because they're familiar, not because they make sense.

"Heeeere, Thor!"

"Thor? Here, Thor!"

Mom's voice, not Debbie's. Calling from the kitchen.

Thor sprang to his feet with his ears p.r.i.c.ked up, listening for the next call to double-check her tone of voice.

"Here, Thor!" A little impatience, but that was normal for a second call. Overall positive, a little residual irritation (also normal at this time of day with the kids home). Her irritation probably wasn't directed toward him. Could be a trip. Could be anything.

He poked the front door with his nose, but it was latched, so he trotted around the house to the kitchen door, briefly checking on Debbie on his way.

As he expected, she was playing with her plastic sand bucket and shovel in the little gra.s.sy strip between the driveway and the house, chatting idly with her favorite doll, which sat watching from the sidelines. Her kitten was nowhere to be seen, which was not unusual. She'd brought some sand from the beach, and was busy discovering that wet sand and dirt make better castles than the ones she'd made on the beach with wet sand alone.

He was glad to see that Debbie was on the Pack's side of the split-rail fence that separated the Pack's property from the neighbors'. The bottom rail was high enough for Debbie (or Thor, for that matter) to pa.s.s under easily, which she quite often did. Thor didn't care for that. He understood the meaning of the fence, and he agreed with it in principle. In fact, he reinforced its meaning every day with his urine.

The kitchen door, which opened onto the driveway toward the back of the house, was slightly ajar. Thor nosed it open and went inside, where Mom was talking to Teddy, who was trying to get out of the conversation.

"Look," she told her son sternly, "I don't want an argument. Now I want you to take the dog for a walk."

"Awwww!" Teddy whined. Thor didn't need to weigh the reluctance in Teddy's whine against the determination in Mom's voice. There was no contest. No matter what Teddy said or how long or loud he whined, he was taking Thor for a walk.

Thor was no more thrilled at the prospect than Teddy.

"And keep him on the leash," Mom said.

"Mom!" Teddy whined, stretching the word into several syllables.

Thor felt the same way. Why the leash?

Actually, Thor knew why. Relations between him and Teddy had been deteriorating lately, a situation Thor found extremely distressing. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it.

Teddy was bucking for a higher rank in the Pack. Somewhere along the line, Teddy had noticed that Thor only obeyed him when he felt like it. It had always been that way, but Teddy either hadn't noticed or hadn't minded. Not any more. Suddenly he resented it; suddenly he wanted to outrank Thor. It had to do with his glands, Thor knew, but Teddy was getting ahead of himself, and his behavior was completely inappropriate. His attempt to a.s.sume a higher rank had made him a full-time pain in the a.s.s, constantly a.s.serting himself over Thor just for the sake of doing it.

It pained Thor deeply to be involved in any sort of strife within the Pack, but this situation was especially unpleasant, since he and Teddy had been best friends when they were pups. It had never occurred to Thor to wonder how he had gone through puppyhood, adolescence, and adulthood while Teddy remained a child; it had just happened, and now Thor was an adult and Teddy wasn't, and Thor could not be out-ranked by a prep.u.b.escent boy. Teddy could a.s.sert himself all he wanted, but he'd have to grow up before Thor would accept him as a superior.

Ironically, Thor could smell the first signs of hormonal changes in Teddy's crotch. He knew that Teddy would soon be a man, and as soon as he was, he would outrank Thor.

But in the meantime, Thor couldn't understand why Teddy resented Thor's rank. Thor was outranked by Mom and Dad, and it didn't bother him one bit. He didn't even resent it when they forbade him from having s.e.x with b.i.t.c.hes in heat.

Wolf packs are led by a couple, the Mating Pair, both of whom outrank all other pack members, male or female. The Mating Pair's authority even covers the s.e.x lives of the others, and they often forbid mating between pack members. So Mom and Dad's prohibitions on Thor's s.e.x life were in perfect accordance with Natural Law, and he saw no reason to resent them. On the contrary, Thor drew tremendous rea.s.surance from knowing his Pack had a fixed hierarchy, regardless of his own situation. A pack in which all members were equal would be chaotic. How could such a pack function? What would hold it together? How could it decide where to go, what to do? And how could the members possibly be equal in the first place?

Teddy's foolishness was unfathomable, and Thor was not about to let the child meddle with Natural Law.

Meanwhile, Teddy showed no understanding of the situation. And worse, he seemed to blame Thor for his dissatisfaction.

Sometimes he teased Thor cruelly, without a trace of the love they'd shared for so long. Sometimes Thor took about all he could stand from the kid, though there was little he could do about it. Violence was out of the question. If a pack without hierarchy couldn't function, one in which pack members were free to injure or kill each other wouldn't last a day. Thor's only defense was to walk away from Teddy, something he did more and more lately. Walk away and ignore Teddy's outraged commands to come back.

And so the leash.

When Teddy (and only Teddy) took Thor for a walk, it was on the leash. Neither of them liked it, but neither of them outranked Mom.

But there was another reason for the leash today. The man Dad called Flopsy had not shown up at Dad's office on Monday, and Mom and Dad were worried. Mom had warned Teddy to be on the lookout for the man, and to keep Thor away from him if he showed up. It was possible that he might come back to provoke another incident.

All the way to the end of the block, whenever Thor stopped to renew the Pack's territorial markings, Teddy yanked on the leash and whined, "Come on! Hurry up!" At the end of the block (and thankfully, the end of the Pack's territory), they turned right.

They were going to a mom-and-pop grocery store three blocks away. When they got there, Teddy would loop the leash around a fire hydrant and go inside. But as the store came into view, Thor saw another dog tied to the hydrant. A small dog. Yapping. Thor hated being around small dogs.

He didn't exactly hate the dogs themselves, he hated the fate that had befallen them - that grotesque, unnatural, undoglike smallness. As for the dogs themselves, he felt painfully sorry for them. Their condition was so pitiful that it hurt to be around them.

Deep in his gut, Thor understood that dogs are predators, at the top of the food chain, meant to be strong and brave, not weak and helpless. Small dogs can't protect themselves, let alone their packs. All they can do is what the yapping dog was doing - yap for all he was worth, and hope n.o.body calls his bluff.

Teddy tied the leash to a light pole and went inside. Thor gave the yapping do a wide berth and averted his eyes. He was deeply embarra.s.sed by its behavior and its presence.

It was moments like this when Thor understood that dogs are dogs and humans are humans, despite their feelings toward each other or their living arrangements. He never wondered why he lived among people - it was just the way things were - Mom and Dad and the kids were his Pack.

But they were different.

When he was a pup, Thor thought his dogness was part of growing up - a step on the road to humanness. When he grew up he would be human, like Mom and Dad. But now he had grown up - he was an adult and he knew it - and he was still a dog. The realization didn't come as a shock, because it never arrived. As he grew, he simply forgot the thought that he'd grow up human, and came instead to think of dogs as a different kind of human. A short, hairy, four-legged kind.

But on some level, when confronted with a mutation of breeding like the yapping dog, he knew he wasn't a short, hairy, four-legged person. He was a dog, totally and permanently different from the rest of the Pack. It was (mercifully) a fleeting thought, as were all his conceptual thoughts.

After a while Teddy came out, and they started home by a slightly different route.

About a block from the store, Thor stopped to sniff an unfamiliar t.u.r.d.

"Come on!" Teddy said angrily, s.n.a.t.c.hing hard on the leash. He acted like he and Thor were bitter enemies. The thought hurt Thor far more than the chain cutting into his throat.

Thor had worn a choke-chain collar as far back as he could remember. Dad had taught the kids not to use it to make Thor hurry (the way Teddy was using it now); the only reason Thor wore it was because it would be too easy for him to overpower the kids if he were to forget his manners - say, after seeing a cat hiss at him and run away. If he tried to run with the choker on, the collar would painfully remind him of the leash, and hopefully, of the rules.

Thor knew Teddy's behavior was strictly against the rules, and he wished Teddy would grow up, so he could take his higher rank once and for all. Then maybe they could be friends again.

When they got home, Mom and Debbie were gone and so was the SUV. The house was deserted. Thor understood immediately: He and Teddy had gone for a walk so he wouldn't be around to bug Mom about going with her. What a dirty trick.

"Later, fur-face," Teddy said. He stepped out into the back yard and slammed the kitchen door behind him. Thor raced from window to window, watching Teddy walk away and hoping he might come back. He whimpered slightly as Teddy walked to the end of the block and turned the corner. Then he ran through the house, upstairs and down, in a futile effort to find company.

Even Debbie's kitten was gone.

Deeply depressed, he went upstairs on the off chance that Mom and Dad's bedroom door might not be completely closed. He was in luck - the door popped open with a gentle poke from his nose. Mom and Dad's scents were strong here, so strong it was almost as if they were home. He hopped onto the bed and pulled the sheets back with his teeth to expose the place where their smells were strongest. He curled up on the sheets and drew in deep breaths. The rea.s.suring fragrance melted his tensions, leaving him relaxed and tired. He lay his head on a pillow, among traces of Mom's makeup and Dad's after-shave, and didn't think about the scolding he would get when Mom returned. What he was doing was disobedient, but not Bad. He'd done it before and been punished every time, but whenever he found himself alone in the house, the rea.s.surance of the bed was more important than a scolding or a slap from a rolled-up newspaper.

He fell asleep with his head on Mom's pillow and his body sprawled across the open sheets.

Chapter 4.

Tom slid naked into bed and noticed the sheets had been changed, after the previous sheets had only been on the bed for one night. Janet left the door open and the dog got in the bed again, dammit. He almost said something, but decided there was no point in bringing it up.

"I'm really worried about Ted," Janet said, taking off her bra and panties and hurriedly slipping into a sheer black nightgown. Tom lay propped up on one elbow, watching her.

"I know," he said.

When they first married, Janet's discomfort with nudity had irritated him. He'd always been turned on by the thought that some wives walk around the house naked in front of their husbands, and he always a.s.sumed his wife would at least sleep naked with him. Hey, they were married, right? But Janet insisted on a nightgown at bedtime, and a robe before and after bathing - even though their bedroom had its own private bathroom. It wasn't being seen that bothered her - on the contrary, she enjoyed the hungry look in Tom's eyes when he watched her undress - it was the feel of fabric against her skin that she needed.

Now, three children later, Tom was eternally grateful for her apparent modesty. It had kept a little s.e.xual distance between them, kept a little mystery in their love life. They had their own little bedroom games that revolved around Tom trying to pull off her nightgown, robe, or whatever, and Janet breathlessly but unsuccessfully trying to keep herself covered. In the end, her discomfort with nudity excited him in a way few husbands can be excited after so many years. And he'd always been turned on by black lingerie.

"He shouldn't be alone, Tom," Janet said. "Not now. Not after what he's been through."

"I agree, babe, but we have to respect his wishes. He's a big boy, you know." Saying that made him feel like a s.h.i.t, but it had to be said. It was true.

Janet slid under the covers with her back to Tom, snuggling her bottom into his lap. He put his arm around her and pulled her close, cupping one breast in his hand and gently squeezing the nipple between his fingers.

They'd been together thirteen years, a year longer than Teddy had been alive.

"I think we should go visit Ted," Janet said, "whether he likes it or not." She pushed her f.a.n.n.y farther into Tom's lap, unconsciously using s.e.x to sway her husband. Tom thought it was a cute move.

"I don't know," he said. "You might be right, but I'd still feel better if we at least call him and tell we're coming first. Dropping in unannounced is awfully risky. And treating him like a child is downright . . ." He wanted to say "stupid," but there had to be a better choice of words. "It could make things worse instead of better."

Janet's brother Ted was a photographer, and a good one. Also a lucky one. The world is full of good photographers, but not all of them manage to make a comfortable living at their craft. Ted had made more than a comfortable living. He was what Tom called small-time rich - he never had to work again if he didn't want to, but he couldn't live on the Riviera, either.

Ted was a nature photographer who'd been in the right place at the right time on a number of crucial occasions, and he'd hit it off with the right people. His work had been published in Life, National Geographic, and a host of less well-known magazines specializing in the great outdoors. On rare occasions, his pictures even appeared in Time and Newsweek, two publications not known for nature studies.

To top off his good fortune, he'd met Marjorie. Marjorie spent three years with Ted. Together they climbed mountains, dove through coral reefs, hiked across deserts, hacked through jungles, and otherwise fought their way to that perfect picture. The only problem was that Marjorie was also a photographer, but it was always Ted's perfect picture they went after. Marjorie essentially gave up her career to be with Ted.

Tom liked Ted, but he also wondered about him. He didn't see why Marjorie's career had to be sacrificed for Ted's, especially since they photographed the same kinds of things. Ted was a nice guy, but he always thought of himself first - and second, and third, and last. Tom never told Janet his doubts about his brother-in-law, and it was good that he didn't. Janet was absolutely devoted to her brother.

About a year ago in Nepal, Ted's luck changed. The G.o.ds, no doubt offended that a mere mortal should have such uniform good fortune, stole Marjorie away without a trace.