Shape of the Final Dog and Other Stories (9781101600665) Read Online Free PDF Page B

him, You don’t go around dropping somebody out of his job without having a legitimate reason for it. He says that I never had the job in the first place. I remind him it was all sewed up the night before on our phone conversation, but Doc can’t remember it. Drop Chicken Man, I tell him. Me and the Wild Man will take his place. But it turns out Chicken Man has a contract. I tell him I’m getting a lawyer on it, and he hangs up on me.
    I can hardly believe it, but I do. That’s the kind of crap that happens down here. I even bought a big chocolate cake so after our opening me, Mot, and Sister could celebrate.
    When we get back home, I join Sister in helping her finish off her nightly bottle. Seeing the cake was a sad thing. Me and Sis sat there drinking the gin, not talking much, just watching Mot. Watched him stick his finger into the icing, testing the taste, then watched him eat the whole damn thing. I knew what was gonna happen, so did she, and we were right. He threw up. This time we cleaned it up together.
    I was fired up on all kinds of dirty tricks I wanted to play on Jack. I didn’t blame Doc so much as the LaHands. I knew they had him over a barrel. And when Sis heard enough about my ideas of getting even with those needleheads, she went off to bed. But I couldn’t stop, and there’s Mot sitting there, staring at me like he knew what I was thinking. I’d taken my thinking about as far as it would go by sunup. Then I knew what I had to do, and it had nothing to do with setting fire to Skyland. What I really needed to do was what I’d been dreaming about doing for a long time before all this ever happened. So I take myself a shower, wake up Mot, and drive us out to the lake to go fishing.
    But an excursion that starts out simple can pull you right out of what you expect into a fate you never dreamed of.



T he shoppers and the merchants were gone. The silence of leftover noise, of leftover smells, was strong. Everything closed. Almost dark. It was Sunday.
    The horse’s head above the horse-meat shop. The machine that made it cannot be imagined by the man looking at it. But nothing is a waste, he thinks, for him who will touch the bottom of no matter into what he falls, and he thought of the Arab girl. Saw himself as a restless tired bird, her as an island.
    Later in his cool sheets waiting for the noise of morning, he imagines her sitting alone somewhere eating, and vaguely all the other functions of her body, running sure as the cycles of the moon, like a rock or a cat. The little hairs of her body stood out like stars in the dark of his love, and he made a note of it.
    A page full. And after hesitating to throw it away, he threw it away, then bit into the skin of his wrist so hard the impression of his teeth remained for a day.
    If he knew her, there would be nothing he couldn’t tell her, nothing he wouldn’t show. He was sure she was noble. He liked her hands. Here all alone from Algiers, he liked to think. Proud. Expecting nothing. Actually she was from Jerez de la Frontera. She was Spanish. She’d been in Paris almost a year. Worked at the confectioner’s washing dishes and silverware up the narrow steps on the second floor where they had a small counter and tables.
    From her window above the street she watched him standing in front of the horse butcher’s, looking up at the plastic horse head. Her stomach was empty. Her fingers went to the scar on her abdomen. She rubbed her belly through the cotton shirt. Two years before she had awakened with a pain like fire and it didn’t go away. At work that morning, finally she could no longer walk, and was taken in a cab to the hospital and operated on.
    They found teeth in her belly. She didn’t want to see them. The doctor said they were little vestigial teeth. She tried not to show her fear so he wouldn’t tease her. He would have if he thought she was better-looking, and told her that it was not