Last Days of the Dog-Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

of God. She had made her peace with God, though she’d never liked religion. She certainly wasn’t afraid of God, like she had been once without realizing it. She would face God like she would anybody else, with dignity and demanding a little respect in return. She’d never willingly offended God, had only ignored Him a little, like everyone else. But recently she had silently said, If it comes a time when it’s convenient to You, go ahead.
    She thought, Maybe I’ll see Pops, and with two good eyes.
    She fished her glass one out of the little dish of solution on the bedside table, popped it in, and eased her legs off the side of the bed. As soon as her toes touched the cool bare floor, Bob was there, leaping into the air around her like a circus dog.
    â€œGet,” she waved at him, shuffling into the kitchen to make coffee. “Get.”
    The coffee made, she poured a cup, took it out to the porch, and no sooner had her bottom touched the chair than Bob jumped into her lap, circled, and settled in his sphinxlike pose to observe the traffic.
    Carolyn Barr and April Ready walked briskly by, swinging their arms like majorettes. They waved, Agnes nodded. The women, in their sixties, had the legs of thirty-year-olds.
    â€œAmazing, Bob,” Agnes muttered. “I bet I know why their old boys kicked off.”
    She and Pops had had what she’d considered a normal life, in that regard. Toward the end, Pops got to where he wasn’t interested, and she didn’t mind, much. The truth was, they’d never really gotten over the embarrassment. She’d always figured more sex would’ve been a good thing, but she’d never brought it up with Pops. It seemed frivolous. They’d never talked about sex, never even used the word. She’d always worked, just like him. Forty years! Forty years at the power company for her. He’d kept books at the steam feed works, never retired. A chain-smoker with Coke-bottle-thick glasses, he came home smoking, seemed like steam from the works leaking out of his thick windows onto the world. When he had his attack, he fell into a pile of foundry sand and suffocated.
    The day Pops had died, the widow Louella Marshall (a Baptist) had come by. Her husband, Herbert, had been dead for ten years, and since then she hadn’t so much as had coffee with a man. She’d married her church, is what she said. Agnes couldn’t stand her because she seemed so smug, and Agnes couldn’t believeshe wasn’t a phony, a religious bully who was scared to death of dying herself, afraid she was going to hell for having secretly wished her bullying husband would die and leave her alone. Agnes wasn’t afraid of going to hell, but when Louella sat in her armchair and made like to comfort her by saying God had taken Pops to be with Him in heaven, she had gotten so angry she took her coffee cup and saucer into the kitchen and dashed them in the sink. She didn’t pretend to have dropped them.
    After that, for a while, she frequently had a dream in which she was swimming out in the middle of the ocean, strong as one of those nuts that used to swim across the English Channel. But then there was a roaring sound, and she’d look up and see it was the edge of the world, and a beast would rise up with the body of a dragon and the face of Pops, which then changed into the dog face of Bob, and she awoke in her bedroom where the blue night-light made the damp air seem like water and the breeze through the window sounded like ocean swells and it took her some minutes to calm down and hear Bob down at the foot of her bed, grunting and thrashing in some dream of his own.
    She had realized then that she was afraid of dying, and afraid of what had happened to Pops. But she could not be like Louella and believe that this was God’s will, that he had singled out Pops like an assassin. She decided that she would face the possibility of her own death with