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‘Maybe you ought to hold off for awhile,’ Robinson said. ‘You might …’
Timlin waited politely, eyebrows raised.
‘Fuck, I don’t know,’ Robinson said. And then, surprising himself, he shouted, ‘What did they do? What did those motherfuckers do?’
‘You know perfectly well what they did,’ Timlin said. ‘And now we live with the consequences. I know you love that dog, Peter. It’s displaced love – what the psychiatrists call hysterical conversion – but we take what we can get, and if we’ve got half a brain, we’re grateful. So don’t hesitate. Stick him in the neck, and stick him hard. Grab his collar in case he flinches.’
Robinson put his beer down. He didn’t want it anymore. ‘He was in pretty bad shape when I left. Maybe he’s dead already.’
But Gandalf wasn’t.
He looked up when Robinson came into the bedroom and thumped his tail twice on his bloody pad of blankets. Robinson sat down next to him. He stroked Gandalf’s head and thought about the dooms of love, which were really so simple when you peered directly into them. Gandalf put his head on Robinson’s knee and looked up at him. Robinson took the hypo out of his shirt pocket and removed the protective cap from the needle.
‘You’re a good guy,’ he said, and took hold of Gandalf’s collar, as Timlin had instructed.
While he was nerving himself to go through with it, he heard a gunshot. The sound was faint at this distance, but with the lake so still, there was no mistaking it for anything else. It rolled across the hot summer air, diminished, tried to echo, failed. Gandalf cocked his ears, and an idea came to Robinson, as comforting as it was absurd. Maybe Timlin was wrong about the nothing. It was possible. In a world where you could look up and see an eternal hallway of stars, he reckoned anything was. Maybe –
Maybe.
Gandalf was still looking at him as he slid the needle home. For a moment the dog’s eyes remained bright and aware, and in the endless moment before the brightness left, Robinson would have taken it back if he could.
He sat there on the floor for a long time, hoping that last loon might sound off one more time, but it didn’t. After awhile, he went out to the lean-to, found a spade, and dug a hole in his wife’s flower garden. There was no need to go deep; no animal was going to come along and dig Gandalf up.
When he woke up the next morning, Robinson’s mouth tasted coppery. When he lifted his head, his cheek peeled away from the pillow. Both his nose and his gums had bled in the night.
It was another beautiful day, and although it was still summer, the first color had begun to steal into the trees. Robinson wheeled his Fat Bob out of the lean-to and replaced the dead battery, working slowly and carefully in the deep silence.
When he finished, he turned the switch. The green neutral light came on, but stuttered a little. He shut the switch off, tightened the co
Robinson wasn’t surprised to find himself thinking of his first and only trip to attend the a
Robinson gu
He squeezed the clutch and toed the gearshift down into first. He rolled up the driveway, banked right, and toed up this time, into second and then third. The road was dirt, and rutted in places, but the bike took the ruts easily, floating Robinson up and down on the seat. His nose was spouting again; the blood streamed up his cheeks and flew off behind him in fat droplets. He took the first curve and then the second, banking harder now, hitting fourth gear as he came onto a brief straight stretch. The Fat Bob was eager to go. It had been in that goddam lean-to too long, gathering dust. On Robinson’s right, he could see Lake Pocomtuc from the corner of his eye, still as a mirror, the sun beating a yellow-gold track across the blue. Robinson let out a yell and shook one fist at the sky – at the universe – before returning it to the handgrip. Ahead was the buttonhook, with the MIND YOUR DRIVING! sign that marked Dead Man’s Curve.
Robinson aimed for the sign and twisted the throttle all the way. He just had time to hit fifth gear.
For Kurt Sutter and Richard Chizmar