Night Dogs

anderson 65 Kent Anderson Night Dogs It was a hot night, and humid. There was no moon. The air was heavy as it always is in that dream when the thing you fear most comes out of the dark and you can never run fast enough to escape it. "Night dog," Jan said. The dog was tearing at a flap of fur and dead meat, trying to peel if off the asphalt. Potter tapped the brakes, and cut the lights of the police car. The dim light from the instrument panel went black just as Potter smiled. "I'm guessin' left," Potter said, "I'll start leadin' him at that last phone pole before the factory." "Gotcha, Cap'n," Jan said, smiling into the darkness, "I got the overheads. The P.A. squeal is on 10." The best way to get a night dog was to guess which way he'd run to get out of the street, and accelerate that way before the dog moved. You'd have a 50-50 chance that way if you were fast enough. For some reason the dogs rarely changed directions once they'd committed themselves. By turning on the overhead lights and the P.A. feedback squeal as you accelerated , you could cost the dog an instant's hesitation. The blue and white Nova glided down the street. "Night dogs" was the name they'd given the scores of wild dogs that lived in the district. Most of them were thin — they had a lot of Doberman blood — but they averaged 50 or 60 pounds. A smaller dog couldn't compete for the half-eaten cheeseburgers, scattered french fries, the sweet red wine puddled in gutters, moldy fruit, fish guts, and garbage can table scraps. When food got scarce they ate their own shit and each other. They were rarely seen during the day, waiting for nightfall in the firegutted houses and boarded up cellars that were not already taken by winos, or by kids shooting heiron. The night dog houses were used like giant garbage dumpsters by people in the neighborhood. There was no other garbage service. Before they were filled up they were usually set afire. Firemen hated them. Night dogs carried a strong scent of fear and piss and garbage in their fur. You could smell them in the dark when you couldn't see them. Pot- 66 the minnesota review ter and Jan would have let them go about their wretched lives, but many of them were "crazy." It might have been because of inbreeding, the food they ate, or the pressures of simple survival. It didn't really matter. Twice in the past month they had taken dog bite victims to Emanuel Hospital emergency room. They had both been little girls. The two-year-old has a gash that started at the top of her forehead, peeling wider and deeper as it ran down the side of her face, opening into the pearly blue bone, and finally splitting her cheek like a plum. You could see through the smooth black skin, the torn muscle, white baby fat and clotting blood, you could see her teeth. She had shrieked and rocked all the way to the hospital while Jan tried to hold her still and cradle her bloody head. It had been late afternoon, and the emergency room wasn't crowded yet. There were only a few people lying on tables between the cotton screens, waiting for an intern whose 24-hour shift had started at 8:00 a.m., hearing but not seeing the people on the other side of the screens. In a few hours the gurneys would be rumbling down the halls on their little rubber wheels, IV bottles swinging above them like lanterns on the chrome mast, ferrying shooting victims to operating rooms. The big double doors would be banging open, ambulance attendants carrying bloody drunk drivers who had gone through the windshields of their $400.00 Buicks. The uncomfortable but easy-to-clean orange plastic chairs in the waiting room would be filled with black women, eyes swollen shut, bloody split lips, their teeth pink when they cried. Cutting victims would be holding...