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distinguished themselves in his nostrils and blended into a rich funk that swirled about the pedestrians who stopped next to them, a secret aromatic history that eddied about him even as the pedestrians muttered among themselves and moved on.
    The hard clean smell of new shoe leather seeped from the air-conditioned stores, overlaying the drift of worn leather and grime that eased from tiny musty pores in the sidewalk. He snuffled at them and sneezed. In a trembling confusion he was aware of all that was carried in the breeze, the strong odor of tobacco and the sharp rake of its smoke, the gasoline and exhaust fumes and the stench of aging rubber, the fetid waves that rolled through it all from garbage bins in the alleys and on the backstreet curbs.
    He lowered his head and shifted his shoulders in the harness like a boxer.
    â€œEasy, Buck,” the man said.
    Sometimes in their room the man paced the floor and seemed to say his words in time with his steps until he became like a lulling clock to Buck as he lay resting beneath the dining table. He dozed to the man’s mumbling and the sifting sound of his fingers as they grazed the pages of his book. At times in their dark room the man sat on the edge of his cot and scratched Buck’s ears and spoke to him. “Panorama, Buck,” he would say. “That’s the most difficult to recall. I can see the details, with my hands, with my nose, my tongue. It brings them back. But the big picture. I feel like I must be replacing it with something phony, like a Disney movie or something.” Buck looked up at the man’s shadowed face in the dark room, at his small eyes in their sallow depressions.
    On the farm where he’d been raised before his training at the school, Buck’s name had been Pete. The children and the old man and the woman had tussled with him, thrown sticks, said, “Pete! Good old Pete.” They called out to him, mumbled the name into his fur. But now the man always said “Buck” in the same tone of voice, soft and gentle. As if the man were speaking to himself. As if Buck were not really there.
    â€œI miss colors, Buck,” the man would say. “It’s getting harder to remember them. The blue planet. I remember that. Pictures from space. From out in the blackness.”
    Looking up from the intersection, Buck saw birdsdart through the sky between buildings as quickly as they slipped past the open window at dawn. He heard their high-pitched cries so clearly that he saw their beady eyes, their barbed tongues flicking between parted beaks. He salivated at the dusky taste of a dove once he’d held in his mouth. And in his most delicate bones he felt the murmur of some incessant activity, the low hum beyond the visible world. His hackles rose and his muscles tingled with electricity.
    There was a metallic whirring, like a big fat June bug stuck on its back, followed by the dull clunk of the switch in the traffic control box. Cars stopped. The lane opened up before them, and for a moment no one moved, as if the empty-eyed vehicles were not to be trusted, restrained only by some fragile miracle of faith. He felt the man carefully regrip the leather harness. He felt the activity of the world spool down into the tight and rifled tunnel of their path.
    â€œForward, Buck,” said the man.
    He leaned into the harness and moved them into the world.

AGNES OF BOB
    A GNES MENKEN, MISSING HER LEFT EYE, AND BOB the bulldog, missing his right, often sat together on their porch, Agnes in her straight-backed rocking chair and Bob in her lap. Together they could see anything coming, Bob to one side and Agnes to the other. They always seemed to be staring straight ahead but really they were looking both ways.
    Whereas Bob’s bad right eye was sewn up, Agnes had a false one that roved. It was obvious to her that people often had trouble telling which eye was the good one, so sometimes she would look at them awhile with the