Unfinished Tales: J.A.B.S.

 

J.A.B.S.    

Freshman year was being the hardest time Bazzell Butzehauser could ever remember in his life, and that was saying something. Not only had he been exposed to an even larger group of peers to make fun of his name, but he had more or less lost his best friend Steve Jones when his father, an Air Force man, had to move again. Letters, no matter how frequent, just weren’t the same.

     His sister Mina, a junior and already an editor on the school paper and something of a star on the volleyball team, was no help. She had worked hard to overcome the family’s reputation for oddity and was not about to be dragged back by associating with Bazzell’s rather eccentric individuality.

     Bazzell brooded. Bazzell read; he always carried a pile of library books from class to class. He rarely laughed with the easy braying laughter of his classmates; he smiled ironically at things that others took quite seriously. It was known that he didn’t smoke or drink while everybody else was experimenting, because of religion of all things, and had never gone on a single date in his life. It was never imagined that he might not have found anybody that he cared to get together with. Everybody had to be pursuing SOMEONE, even if it was only the freckle-faced ‘Catfish’ McAllen.

Bazzell had seen things. Bazzell knew things that very few people in his life were aware of, and even those people didn’t really have an explanation for them, just hoped they’d go away if they were ignored. He had tried, but he couldn’t ignore them, and he couldn’t see the world as a totally explicable, well-lit place anymore.

He seemed to himself to be surrounded by chance oracles and baffling clues. Passing by his sister’s room, he heard the radio singing “Life is just a fantasy” and it stopped him in mid-step and clutched at his heart; the rest of the song was just babble to him. Going between the house and the garage at night he looked up and saw clouds racing across the face of the moon, and that too would stop him with its inexplicable significance. Most of the time the world seemed a bland and placid sea, seething with pointless activity, but these things would arise like shark fins breaching the surface, hinting at ominous depths.

Just when he most needed most support, he was most alone. His grampa had died, and his gramma followed six months later, after putting their farm up for sale and moving into an old folks’ home. Mr. Butzehauser was working harder than ever at his trucking job in the depressed economy, and the few hours that he was home he was drained, almost somnolent. To help supplement their income his mother spent much of her spare time going door to door trying to sell Swish, a bright green miracle cleaner in a plastic bottle. It was not proving to be the bonanza the pyramid-scheming pioneer organization claimed, and it made her touchy and distracted. Bazzell felt he couldn’t disturb them with his vague moods while they struggled with such concrete problems. To help along, he took a job at the local Mr. Cheezi’s, where the little he made was almost eaten up by the money he was putting aside for a second-hand clunker of his own, college, and the gas he felt he had to pay his parents for rides to work.

There were two things that comforted him. The first was Sheba, Opa’s old watchdog, who had come to stay with them when the farm went up for sale. There was something comforting about the speckled pointer, not quite purebred and starting to get fat with age. She had transferred her loyalty without hesitation to Bazzell, and he felt that she was somehow his special legacy left from his grandparents. While not doing anything so irrational as holding conversations with her, at his worst moments he could just sit on the back porch and she would sit with him, drooling jowls on his knees and eyes turned up at him, and her wise silence soothed his soul.

The second thing he had found by pure chance.

He had been walking to a nearby Dairy Queen for a snack while he waited until Mina was done with her after-school activities and they could drive home. He had time to grab a shake, do his homework in a booth, and walk back before spending a half hour squirming on a concrete bench outside the school buildings. But that day he had not quite finished his drink before the store was suddenly invaded by a stream of rowdy seniors, crowding up to the counter and loudly yelling out orders. Bazzell looked around at the available seating, made a quiet calculation, and got up and left before he was asked to move.

He lingered uncomfortably for a while under the parking canopy, hoping to finish his thick strawberry goop and toss the cup before heading out, his bulging notebook binder clutched incongruously in one hand. He looked around at the neighborhood.

Behind the line of shops and restaurants that fronted Nolde Street, one of Walnut Springs’ larger thoroughfares, there were rows of bland generic buildings, basically tin and tar-paper sheds that were used for the little businesses that popped up and shriveled away with some regularity. The most numerous and permanent were the storage facilities; private barber shops, laundromats, and florists washed helplessly around them. But there was one tiny building that caught his eye, right behind the Dairy Queen.

There was a cardboard sign in the window. In large black letters it proclaimed: BOOKS.

There were no bookshops in Walnut Springs. The closest chain stores were thirty miles away, or you could thumb through whatever movie tie-in or mass-produced genre fiction that was to be found on the squeaky metal revolving racks in the Pic-n-Saves.

Bazzell loved books. Almost in a trance, he sucked up the last of the shake, tossed the nearly empty cup through the flapping mouth the metal bin at the Dairy Queen door, and moved across the crunching tarmac towards the building. He thrust his hand unconsciously into his pants pocket and jingled the change there. Maybe a couple of dollars left. Hardly enough for even a paperback. Oh, well. Maybe they had a volume of Charles Schulz’ Peanuts there that he didn’t have; it had been a while since he’d bothered with his childhood favorite.

As he paused to look both ways before crossing the sleepy side-road, Bazzell could see the smaller words on the sign and read the full inscription: Yesterday’s Books - Bought and Sold – Half Priced. As he walked cautiously over the road, he looked askance at the drab little building. The parking in front was empty, weeds sprouting in the rough gravel, and a gnarled hackberry tree growing wild at the side was the only shade. Nothing could be seen beyond the gray obscurity of the screened front door. The only inducement to enter was that one siren word: books. He opened the door, and stepped in. It hissed shut behind him.

If the outside was plain, the inside was a cave of wonders. It probably wouldn’t appear so to most other people, with its concrete floor and battered, sagging shelves, but Bazzell wasn’t most other people. Even the sluggishly warm Texas air, barely stirred by one struggling box-fan gasping through the tiny windows seemed enchanted to the teen, because its baking breath carried the intoxicating, the mysterious, the alluring scent of volume upon volume stacked wall along wall and on two towering rows of shelves down the middle of the tiny structure, so that there seemed barely room for anyone to walk through the crowded space without danger of an avalanche.

“Well, hello there.”

Behind a battered counter that looked like it came with the building sat a square elderly man with a white beard. That was unusual enough in a town and a time when most men were clean-shaven, but he was clearly someone out of the normal for Walnut Springs. With his thick black specs and the aromatic pipe threaded in his fingers, he was almost the stereotype of an intellectual. The well-read hardcover book held carelessly in his other hand completed the impression. Only his casual stance and the shabby recliner he was seated in argued against his dignity.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” Bazzell answered. He eyes wandered the stacks of the crowded little room. “I’m just gonna look around a little.”

The old man settled back.

“Okay. Things are pretty much by genre, and the paperbacks are all half the price on the cover. Hardbacks are marked inside.” He smiled and went back to his book. “Good hunting.”

Bazzell began to wander the stacks. He passed the section for pink romance novels, and one for the brown backs of westerns, and the mysteries in black and red. There was a children’s corner filled with careless, well-pawed books spilling out without rhyme or reason. There was a section devoted to “serious” novels, mostly off-white or newspaper-yellow. But the books he fell into the moment he saw them were the science-fiction fantasy.

There was no single color code here, although there was an unusual preponderance of purple, which he later decided must be designed to echo the prose within.

He loved stories of magic, whether in movies or books, but they had always been placed scatter-shot in their medium. Here, in one concentrated wall, the dreams of decades were gathered. And some were serious works, whole novels written by serious intelligent writers, not thin, frothy confections made for the amusement of sweet-toothed children. Bazzell knew, instinctively, that there were deep truths to be found hidden here, modern myths to feed the spirit in a way that ‘realistic’ fiction couldn’t.

He knew, from his own experience, that such a view of the world was far too limited.

There had been that animated scarecrow when he was twelve. There had been the summer of the vampire that had passed his window every night, looking in with burning eyes and gleaming teeth, before moving on with a little nod that had promised more to come. And those were only the big things he remembered: if his father could be trusted (and Bazzell knew he could) there had been even stranger things when he was just in the cradle.

Fantasy, for him, was more real than ‘reality’.

He zoned out for a while as he explored the books. They were stacked on their sides, title out, and he would have to carefully pull them out to look at the front. Eventually he found himself being drawn to several illustrated with peculiarly illustrated covers, obviously by the same artist, strangely jewel-like and rather stylized in their perspective. He noticed too that they were all published by the same company, and all had originally cost ninety-five cents.

At half-price he could afford four of them. Bazzell began to carefully consider which to choose.

He was still trying to make a final decision when he looked down at his watch and saw the time. In another five minutes his sister would be out of class and waiting for him.

He grabbed to top four books off the pile he had been making, looked longingly at the others, and hurried to the front. The old man jumped a little, put his pipe down, and leaned forward over the counter to examine his choices.

“Good books, good books,” he mumbled as he shuffled the stack to check the prices. “Very good.” He sat back in his chair and took up his pipe again. “Two dollars even. Would you like a bag?” He gestured at an uneven stack of carefully folded old paper bags from the local grocery store.

Bazzell grudged every second it took the old man to shove the paperbacks into a banana-smelling sack, but he did say “Thank you” before he was out of the door with a bang. He lolloped along the heat-baked streets, vaguely aware that he must look ridiculously awkward, until he finally turned into the mostly abandoned school parking lot and saw Mina steaming away in the front seat of her second-hand clunker, windows rolled down in a vain effort to catch a breeze.

“Where’ve you been?” she barked. “I’ve been waiting ten minutes in this furnace.” Her straight brown hair was slick and limp, her face as red with anger as with the heat. Bazzell hurriedly slipped around and got into the front seat as quick as he could.

“I’m sorry,” he babbled, yanking on the seatbelt. “I got out of Dairy Queen and I saw this store ...”

“You’re lucky I didn’t just drive off and leave ya.” Mina ground on the ignition. She was never very gentle with her car. She started to pull out, squinting behind her, barely throwing her brother a glance. “What kind of a store?”

“A bookstore, a used bookstore, right here in Walnut Springs!” He pulled out his purchases as proof. “Look! Four books for two bucks!”

“Humph!” Mina sounded grumpy, but Bazzell could tell she was intrigued and mollified. If there was one thing the Butzehauser siblings shared, it was an interest in reading. “Where was this?”

“Over by Dairy Queen, I told you, just across the street.”

Mina had to drive that way anyway, and as they passed it, he pointed out where it was tucked away off the main road. Mina was less than impressed with its bare-bones appearance.

“I’ll have to check it out one of these days,” she said as she drove on. She glanced over at the gaudy covers of Bazzell’s selections splayed out on the seat between them. “See what they got besides that hippie trash.”

“Hey!” There were few insults more deadly than ‘hippie’ in the family.

Back at home Bazzell grabbed a snack and a glass of tea and ducked into his room to do a little browsing before it was time to go to work. He shared the room with his little brother, but luckily he was out in the backyard, playing around while their weary dad worked on the garden in the fugitive hours before supper, after which he would fall exhausted into bed. Bazzell spread his new books out and tried to decide which to read first.

He looked at their titles; they were almost as baroque as the covers. The Last Unicorn. The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Lud-in-the-Mist. The Man Who Was Thursday. They lacked the usual teasing summations on the back. Instead he leafed through them, book after book, sampling again the rich prose that had drawn him in the first place, sipping them like wine to decide which would go best with his present mood.

As he turned the pages, he became aware of his mother talking on the phone in the hall. There was something in the tone of her voice that pulled him out of his literary drifting and made him focus blankly on what she was saying.

“I don’t know, Maggie,” she said. “It seemed like such a good idea, at least the way Sylvie sold it to me. I guess I just don’t have what it takes.”

A pause.

“I know, and now I’m into it for two hundred bucks; if I can’t sell that I’ve got to eat the cost, and I just don’t know that we can take it right now. I know. I know. I know.”

A longer pause.

“I don’t know. Maybe the people around here just don’t care about keeping clean. Well, no, that’s not entirely fair. I know I haven’t been selling it right. Well, I couldn’t. It seemed fine at first, then I got to feeling it wasn’t quite the miracle cleaner Sylvie sold me. I should have known; she charms everybody. After I figured out for myself it was no better than a few cents worth of bleach in a squirt bottle, I just couldn’t sell it with any conviction.

“No, Maggie, that’s nice, but I can’t let you do that. I just won’t buy any other cleaners till it’s used up; it might be a while. Even then I’m still stuck with a thirty-dollar fake leather samples case. Lord knows what I’ll do with that.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll see if I can get a job at that new restaurant down in Riverside. You hadn’t heard? Some folks have opened up an old house down there, turned it into a kind of a local hang-out. Yeah, the economy. Well, I haven’t eaten there myself, but I heard the food is good and cheap, and that that Debbie Schmidt works there. If they’ll take Debbie Schmidt, they must be aching for a good worker. They certainly didn’t hire her for her looks.

“I don’t know. I could find some time to work, I guess. The kids are getting big enough to take care of themselves. Maybe weekends …”

Bazzell let himself drift away and forced himself to try to focus again, to escape into his books. These were hard times, he knew, and there was little more he could do to help the family that he wasn’t already doing. The best he could do was to hunker down and endure it, while somehow keeping his spirits up.

After a few minutes he gave up and went to shower before donning his brown-and-orange Mr. Cheezi uniform and getting a ride to work.

 

Mr. Cheezi’s was in the one tiny strip mall that had managed to form in the little town. It had been built in what had once been a swampy field, and the parking lot was half a puddle after any rain and echoed with frogs from the drainage ditch next to the highway. On these hot late spring nights, the sidewalks outside would be inundated with swarms of crickets, seeking the eternally buzzing neon signs and the glaring green lights that lined the long portico that linked the rectangular row of shops together.

It was part of Bazzell’s job, whenever there was a lull in business, to go out with a broom and sweep the stinking heaps of crickets, alive and dead, away from the front door so the customers wouldn’t be offended and so that that live bugs didn’t follow them inside. It was part of the grunt work; none of the cooks and certainly no cashier would be asked to do it. Bazzell didn’t mind. Just to get out of the crowded, smoky rooms or the steaming dishwashing sink and out into the night was break enough.

But he had used to like crickets. Their bright little black eyes, their clumsy jumping, the company of their calm chirping at night. He had never squashed one if he could help it. Now he swept their bodies away in piles, the living and the dead together.

It’s just like people, he reflected gloomily. Great individually but get them swarming around a bright light that will do them absolutely no good whatsoever, and they start to stink.

His spirits lifted slightly as the night drew to a close and the restaurant began to empty. Only the most raucous patrons remained, drinking beer and watching the free big screen TV that had only lately been installed, although there was not much on now but the late-night news with its tales of woe at home and abroad. Bazzell did enjoy cleaning up though, undoing the chaos that the unconcerned and all-too-often uncaring customers had wrought in the course of the evening, and as things got quieter his thoughts grew calmer.

Finally, when all was finished for the night, it was the rule of Mr. Springs, the owner, to let the crew eat whatever pizza that had not been sold and share a pitcher of soda. Bazzell was getting a bit of a tummy under this policy, but he didn’t seem to have the willpower to abstain. Going to bed on a stomach full of dough and sugar water was not the best thing for him, but it mollified his brain and settled him down for the night ahead. After Armando, one of his co-workers who lived near his neighborhood, gave him a ride home, he dropped into his bed without even showering and was off in a dead sleep until next morning.

Bazzell got up about ten the next morning. As he stumbled in his pajamas to the kitchen, he passed Kevin, who was still absorbed in Saturday morning cartoons and didn’t even look up as he passed. As he grabbed the comics off the newspaper pile, he glanced out the window and saw the old Buick was gone, and he vaguely remembered his mom saying something about taking Mina to something or other. He looked out the backyard window as he got the milk out of the fridge. His dad was sitting almost motionless in his old green lawn chair under the ash tree, looking out at his garden as the oscillating sprinkler shot twelve-foot arcs of water back and forth over half the plot.

He had a bowl of Frankenberry and two slices of toast, then retreated back to the bedroom. Laying on his stomach on the twin bed with the box fan in the open window on the highest speed (there was no way they could afford air conditioning), he picked up one his books almost at random from the top of the pile and started reading.

It was The Man Who Was Thursday. After first he thought he had made the wrong choice, as it started in a garden party with a debate between two poets, one the usual romantic rebel and the other a proponent of law and order. The rebel’s sister was obviously set up as the other’s love interest.

But all that was left behind soon enough as it was revealed that the rebel was a real anarchist, who in a fit of anger at being called a poser confesses that he is a serious member of a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of order. On pledge of complete confidentiality, the rebel takes him to a secret meeting. Before they enter, the other poet elicits a similar vow of secrecy, and then reveals that he himself also has another identity, as an agent of a government office to seek out the anarchists hiding in high society. They are at a strange stalemate.

The agent poet manages to insinuate himself into the position that the rebel had been going to assume and is sent on a mission to the high council of anarchists. They are all code-named for the days of the week, with the supreme and supremely dangerous leader called Sunday. The agent himself becomes the man who was Thursday. And it was here, just before the poet Gabriel Syme was about to be introduced to the Council, that a strange yellowed little pamphlet came fluttering out of the book and settled like a butterfly between Bazzell’s elbows on the bed.

It nearly blew away in the fan’s breeze, but he pinned it down with a quick slap of his palm. At first, he thought it was one of those tip-in ads that you still found in some paperbacks: advertisements for book clubs or cigarettes that, if you tried to remove them, usually destroyed the binding. Then its flimsy paper made him think that it was a stray religious tract that had probably been used for a bookmark. But when he started to read it out of curiosity, his eyes went wide, and kept getting wider.

The front page was mostly a picture of a fancy heraldic shield. Over the top were the words: “Are You a Youth Interested in the Unusual or the Unknown? Do You want to help your Country?” and underneath, “Then the Department of Extranatural Affairs might be for YOU!”

“What the heck –” he muttered and turned the page. Amid crude graphics depicting UFOs and cartoony ghosts the words shouted on.

“The Department of Extranatural Affairs is a Government agency with a proud History. Now we are asking for Junior Members to begin training in this Vital Defense Organization, to start learning the systems and procedures to help ward off dangerous incursions into our Known Reality.

“Send off and Register today, and you will receive not only the First of many course, but also a Certificate of Junior Agency and an Official Badge, acknowledging you as an Endorsed Trainee of this Government Program.

“If you are reading this now, YOU could be a member of this astounding experiment! Protect yourself, your family, and your country from the Strange and MYSTERIOUS! Learn proven methods of defense from the Extranatural taught by EXPERTS in the field! Please send $1 to cover Postage and a self-addressed stamped envelope to receive the first pamphlet, certificate and badge, and within six weeks YOU can be hunting down ghosts, monsters, and the UNKNOWN!”

Bazzell looked at the address. It was in Washington, but it had to be a joke, some kind of bunkum, like Mom’s Swish! scam. He started to scrunch it up, but then stopped, reconsidering. It was still a kind of interesting doodad, something that maybe even his friend Steve might like hearing about in his letters. He could imagine them having a few yuks over it. He smoothed the cheap paper out and stuck it in between some pages in the back. After all, he could always use it as a bookmark until he was done.

He plunged back into the adventures of Gabriel Syme as he voyaged ever deeper into an enigmatic labyrinth of mirrors and double-agents.

 

He emerged briefly at lunchtime when called for a meal of cold sandwiches and potato chips, then vanished again into his book until Mina appeared to tell him to hurry up and get ready for work again. He went through the evening on autopilot; there was part of his brain that was still wandering cold London streets or dashing across green shires in an old-fashioned motor car, trying to stop a planned assassination. He looked at every customer and co-worker, and saw, not the mindless braying jack-asses that he had grown accustomed to, but a host of covert enemies or potential allies; not a seething mass of humanity, but a bunch of individuals, headed for either Heaven or Hell, but all rushing alike to the grave and pausing a moment in this inn (so he fleetingly romanticized the store) to try to catch a passing drop of honey on their tongues.

And while he worked to scrape the sticky strands of quasi-artificial cheese from aluminum plates, or endured the horrible keel arising from washed ashtrays, the actions of the novel seemed to twine engagingly with the words of the strange pamphlet he had found within. A secret government department … protecting the world … A phrase rose up that he had learned when his English class was studying Kipling: The Sons of Martha. The practical men of society who did all the hidden work so the careless members could flit along in their daily lives without worrying about the dirty work that undergirded so much of the work-a-day world.

Maybe the pamphlet was a joke. But Bazzell knew that the sort of world that it joked about was real, was in fact deadly serious. He had seen such things. He could even do some of the things it mentioned, if he ever dared let himself go.

Just the thought of it made him tremble. As if in sympathy, the whole restaurant rumbled in response, silverware rattling on the tables and drinks sloshing in the cups and jugs. The customers looked up in surprise, wondering if thunder or maybe a low flying jet had passed overhead. There was a pause as if to see if anything would follow, but then things went back to normal and meals and conversation continued. Bazzell shook his head to clear it and went out to bus tables.

But in that moment, he had made up his mind. Maybe it had been meant as a joke, a hoax, an elaborate con of some kind. But he was going to act as if it were true, because it was true, truer possibly than they could imagine. He would be a secret extranatural agent, whether such a Department existed or not. He took a deep breath, straightened his back, and started in to clear up the garbage left behind on the long rows of tables.

 

For the rest of the weekend Bazzell didn’t seem any different to those around him; perhaps just a little more withdrawn than usual. The truth is his outer life was on automatic. Inside he was seething with his thoughts, as perhaps only an adolescent can seethe. He was trying to put his new resolve into an order of some kind, and it was not simple.

There was a slew of books available on the subject. Ghosts, UFOs, and monsters had become de riguer in the last decade of cover-ups and conspiracies, perhaps as a distraction from more frightening realities, perhaps as a substitute for the diminishing tide of religion. He found them mostly useless. The more “scientific” they tried to be, the farther away they seemed to him to be from the secret heart of these phenomena. Fantasy fiction, so-called, seemed far closer to the truth.

Thursday was payday, and after they had cashed his check, an interested Mina drove him over to the bookstore this time. While they split up and his older sister was audibly scorning the romance section and digging around for Hemingway and Faulkner like nuggets of gold hidden in the abandoned best-sellers of the last decade, Bazzell made a beeline for what he was already considering ‘his’ area. He loaded up on Lovecraft, Dunsany, and the more fantastic-looking works of Bradbury (among others), and soon had a pile of a dozen or so for about ten dollars. He fidgeted around restlessly as Mina made her methodical way through the shelves, eventually coming to the counter with a hardback and two softcovers that cost almost as much as all of Bazzell’s selections combined. He could hardly wait; as they loaded back into the clunker his nose was already stuck into a book called Gormenghast.

As they pulled into the driveway at home, he was ready to vanish into the bedroom to read, to pile his new acquisitions on his dresser with his other books and exult gloating over his growing hoard, but Mrs. Butzehauser met them at the car even before they could get out, her hair tumbling around her distracted face as she grabbed the window frame and bent down in.

“Sheba’s gone.” There was a tremor in her voice. “I came home a few minutes ago and the gate was open. I ran around the block, but I didn’t see her. Mina, you drive around the neighborhood. I’m taking the Buick to check by the highway. Bazz, you stay here in case she comes back, and watch Kevin.”

Something clutched in his chest, and almost before he could unfreeze and think of what had happened, Mina and his mother were gone, leaving him abandoned and stunned on the front porch. As he slowly put his books down on the concrete stoop and sank down to sit staring blankly at the street in front of him, this new sudden disaster began to sit down quietly next to him and gradually take up company in his brain.

Sheba was one of the last living connections to his grandparents. Although he had already accepted the sneaking thought that she, too, wouldn’t be around forever, the idea that she could be suddenly, perhaps violently torn away from them, was more than he could bear. The image of her run-over body (her most likely fate; he had seen the like all too often) competed with the thought of her dying starving and alone in a rainy ditch far away, perhaps dimly wondering where her loving family were.

Bazzell could barely keep his squirming butt on the porch, but he had been given his orders. His legs longed to be running down the street, perhaps seeing a clue or hearing a sound that Mina, trapped inside her noisy car, would never notice. Instead his eyes strained up and down the Loop, head turning restlessly left and right, cursing every sound from the wind in the trees to the distant roar of the highway that might mask Sheba’s lonely bark.

“What’s going on?”

Bazzell jumped. He had been so intent on his watch he hadn’t noticed Kevin coming noiselessly out the front door to stand behind him. His little brother stood behind him, smudgy ice cream sandwich in one hand and wearing his corduroy jacket despite the heat. His bright blue eyes were wide with curiosity.

“I’m watching for Sheba,” he said shortly. “You know she’s missing, right?”

“Yeah, Mom said. She’s gonna look for her, though.” He took a bite of his sandwich, deepening the dark smudge around his mouth, and smacked his lips.

“Geez.” Bazzell turned away. “How can you wear that coat in this weather? It makes me hot just to look at you.”

“I like it. Mom says it’s okay.”

Kevin was going to be thirteen that summer. Some folks said he was slow. The Schmidts next door called him a ree-tard. But it wasn’t that, Bazzell knew. Kevin was all right. He just didn’t put the same emphasis on things the way most people did, and it was off-putting. Mom said her brother was the same way, and he had gone on to be an engineer in Austin.  Mom let him do things his way, and right now if that soiled, darkening yellow coat was his security blanket, so be it. He would grow out of it in his own time.

Mina had picked up what she considered the dropped ball, however, and nagged him enough for two parents’ worth. Kevin just laughed or looked at her solemnly and went on doing what he was doing. Bazzell hardly ever interfered; he was halfway between them emotionally as well as by birth. But the heat and worry over Sheba increased his irritability and his tone was brusque.

“Look, could you wait here and keep an eye out for Sheba while I put my stuff away? And don’t YOU go wandering off!”

“Sure, Bazzo,” Kevin grinned. “Maybe she’ll come back for some ice cream!” He waved the melty mess in its tattered wrapper enticingly.

Bazzell sighed inwardly and jumped to his feet, grabbing his books and school binder, and scrambling inside. He raced to his room and dumped them on the bed then hurried to the kitchen for a quick gulp of water. As he passed the front door, he could hear Kevin singing tunelessly, “He-e-ere, Sheba! Here, girl! Come get some nice cream!”

As fast as Bazzell tried to be, by the time he came back out his heart sank to see that his little brother was no longer on the porch.

After a split-second of panic, he saw Kevin was squatting down half-way across the yard, and for another instant of wild joy he thought his brother was petting and talking happily to a returned Sheba. Then he saw it was much too small to be the old pointer, and then that it was one of the dirty old mutts that roamed the neighborhood in a loose sort of pack and that Kevin was patting its filthy head and it was licking his hands with slobber flying everywhere.

The dog winced away as Bazzell came pounding up to them, but seemed unwilling to leave Kevin, glancing up at the younger boy with twitching eyebrows as if appealing to his protection. Bazzell raised his hand to threaten it but stopped as Kevin looked up grinning.

“Look, Bazz!” He said. “It ain’t Sheba, but it’s another dog!”

Bazzell put his hand down.

“Yes, Kevin,” he said wearily. “But we’re looking for Sheba. Let’s let this dog get along.” He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You get inside now and wash your hands. You don’t know where he’s been. He might have rabies.”

“Naw, he’s okay,” said Kevin. “He’s just hungry is all.” He got up and wiped his fingers on his coat. He turned dutifully to head inside but stopped as an idea struck him. “Hey, maybe he knows Sheba! Maybe he can help us find her! Dogs track things, right?”

“That’s huntin’ dogs, bloodhounds and like that,” Bazzell explained. “Not mangy street mutts like this. Now go in and wash up. With soap.”

“Aw, he’s all right.” The boy went on in, banging the door thoughtlessly behind him. Bazzell waved the dog away, not with any real conviction, and walked slowly back to the porch. When he turned to sit down, however, he saw the stray had followed him. It sat down as soon as Bazzell looked and him and sat staring expectantly.

“Go on,” he waved again, more forcefully. “I don’t have anything for you.” The dog didn’t budge. Bazzell sat down heavily and stared back at the stray.

He probably could have driven it off easily, but right now in the face of Sheba’s dilemma the thought of even mild anger at another dog seemed unthinkable. They sat and examined each other.

The animal was indescribably dingy, patched all over in overgrown hair that was black and brown but mostly a dusty gray that would probably have been white if it had ever had a bath. It might have been some sort of beagle terrier mix, he decided, a mongrel anyway, with who knows what all in there. Despite that, or maybe because of it, there was a sort of wary intelligence in its stance as it sat there, considering him right back.

That Kevin, he thought gloomily. Thinks things will work like an old movie. Go on, Lassie, find Timmie, find Timmie. If only …

He stopped short. Some old words had suddenly snuck into his mind and peeped around the corner of his brain. 

“You, you have this thing too … the power leaks into things around you … sheep are the dumbest beasts on the earth, but Opa's will do what he tells them … you have to be careful.”

He heard them in his father’s voice, spoken on the scariest night of his life. You have this thing too. You have to be careful. He knew only too well that that was true.

Ever since that night he had been careful. The power was wild; it fed on your emotions if you let it and you couldn’t always be certain of the outcome. If he even thought it was creeping up on him, he went through a careful, calming ritual he had devised until his feelings were diverted into more wholesome channels. He had never even considered – well, never except for the occasional sneaking temptation in his darkest moments – never considered using the power of his own free will.

But now? Now he had never felt as desperate as this since that Halloween night.

On an impulse he suddenly turned and headed for the gated back yard. The dog watched him curiously as he went but didn’t move from where it sat. Bazzell ducked into the garage and emerged with the bit of old blanket Sheba slept in in one hand and one of her dog biscuits in the other.

This is stupid, he thought. You don’t even know if this is something you can do consciously, or if it’s one of those things you only manage if you don’t think about it too much. Well, maybe not, but you never know unless you try. And he wasn’t going to let Sheba go for lack of trying.

He sat down carefully on the porch so as not to spook him. Although the mutt had been looking around attentive to every stray noise or movement, it hadn’t budged from its spot three feet away. Probably hoping for Kevin to give it some more ice cream, he thought. He held the blanket out slowly, cautiously, the biscuit tucked away in one hand.

“Here, boy,” he said, “Come here, boy, come get a good sniff. Come on boy, come on … Snoopy. Yeah, you’re a Snoopy, aren’t you? Snoopy’s smart, isn’t he? Snoopy would know what to do. Come on, boy, I know there’s some beagle in you there. Come get a sniff.”

The dog stretched out its and gave the blanket a quick nervous sniff, then snuffled it up and down, a careful eye still on Bazzell’s face.

“That’s right, get a good whiff. That’s Sheba. SHEBA.” His gaze was fixed on the dog’s eyes as well. Bazzell thought hard about the old pointer and imagined shoving that image into the dog’s brain. Then he imagined the little mongrel leading Sheba home and getting rewarded; lots of food and petting went into that picture. “Go find her.” The dog cocked a quizzical eye as if trying to figure what the boy was up to, then sat back unconcernedly and scratched its ear with one overgrown back paw.

Bazzell blushed. He suddenly felt very stupid.

“Aw,” he scoffed, presenting the biscuit angrily with a quick thrust. The dog ducked back, then again slowly stretched out its neck and sniffed. When it didn’t take the treat immediately Bazzell threw it down in front of him and sat up quickly and tromped off to put the blanket away, startling the stray and making it cringe back a few steps. At least he had tried. By the time he got back the dog had nabbed the biscuit and was halfway down the road already, no doubt going somewhere where it could devour its windfall in peace.

Snoopy, he thought wryly, sitting down and taking up his worrisome vigil again. Why, he wasn’t even a Spike.

 

Bazzell sat for the next half hour looking restlessly up and down the street, alternately berating himself for trying to stir up the power for something so stupid, then for failing to do so, then consoling himself that at least he had tried, that he could tell himself he had tried everything, anyway. Then Mom had driven up, having failed to find Sheba, and then Mina a few minutes later.

“I talked to Old Man Johnson. He was sitting out on his lawn,” was all she could report. “He hasn’t seen her, but he’ll keep his eyes open, he said.”

“I don’t know what else we can do until your father gets home,” Mrs. Butzehauser said tiredly. “I’ve got to get supper started. I guess we can always pray that she’ll just find her way back.” She started to head in.

“Can I go for a walk around the block?” Bazzell piped up. “Maybe I’ll find her or see a clue or somebody I meet can tell me something. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

His mother looked at him wanly for a moment.

“Yeah, okay, just around the block,” she said after a pause. “And be back before dark. I know you’re worried about her, but don’t let us have to go looking for you, too.”

“Okay, Mom.”

She went in and Mina followed her. His sister stopped next to him before she went in.

“You’re not going to find anything, you know. I was pretty thorough,” she said gruffly. She patted him on the shoulder. “Good luck, Bazz.”

He took a minute to grab one of his walking sticks and then was off down the street. Although it was getting late in the afternoon it was still hotter than hell and he could feel the tarmac grilling his feet right through his shoes. Still, it seemed less unbearable than waiting around. Every few minutes he had to wipe the sweat out of his eyes to clear his vision.

Even so, his vision wasn’t the main sense he was using. Mostly he was straining his ears, listening not only for barks or howls in the still summer air but also for any stir or commotion that might bear investigation and lead him to Sheba. He kept his own calls down to a minimum; he was afraid of missing something while he was yelling. But also he was embarrassed about advertising his own distress; an almost painful awareness that there were assholes around who would glory in his family’s troubles. Only his keen sense of Sheba’s peril let him make himself such a spectacle.

He went all around the Loop and then headed down the main street of the neighborhood toward the road. Along here he felt less self-conscious and allowed himself to be louder; he needed to be, because the closer he got to the main intersection the noisier it became.

He reached the highway and stopped. This was the limit his parents had set for him long ago. Here was the little neighborhood store at the turnoff where he had rambled when younger to buy soda, little bags of chips, and penny candy. He hadn’t been out this way on foot for a while. Right now, the thought of getting a cold root beer before heading back was almost irresistible.

It felt like a betrayal of Sheba to spend any time on such an indulgence, but he ducked in as fast as he could, leaving his walking stick outside the door. The tiny establishment, half bar and grill, half convenience store, was almost empty at this time of day. The owner, a tanned and weathered man with graying hair greased up in the fashion of twenty years ago, looked up from his portable TV behind the counter. He nodded with the judgmental cordiality of a shopkeeper who greets a former customer who perhaps has not been as faithful as once he was.

“Hey, kid, long time no see.”

Bazzell headed sheepishly to the refrigerator.

“Hello, Mr. Romero. Yeah, school’s been keeping me pretty busy.” He opened the lid of the faded red and white coffin cooler. There were only about a dozen or so sodas swimming in the ice melt inside. He reached in and fished out a root beer and took it to the counter. As he counted out the money, he plucked up his courage.

“How’s things been?”

“Eh, not so good now that there’s that dive down in River Hollow.” He gestured vaguely to the neighborhood over the highway. “Takes a lot of my old customers. Used to be people came in here on weekends, drink some beer, shoot some pool, but it was a nice place, I could keep people in line. Over there. Eh.” He flapped his bar towel in disgust as he wiped up the water-ring from Bazzell’s can off the counter. “Wild bunch. And those goons encourage it.”

“Ah,” Bazzell said. He paused. “Say, you haven’t heard anybody mention a dog loose around here, have you? An old female spotted pointer, kind of liver-colored? My grampa’s old dog has gone missing, somehow.”

“Nah. Most people in here nowadays come off the road. You’re the first local boy in all afternoon.” Bazzell nodded his head and started heading for the exit. “Say, tell your dad to come around for a hamburger again someday and we can shoot the shit like in the old days.”

“I will, Mr. Romero. Thanks for the soda.”

“Come again.”

Bazzell heard the shop bell ring behind him with relief. He grabbed up his walking stick and headed over to the little tin-roofed carport over to the side of the shop to get into the shade, popped the top of his soda and threw the ring down with the multitude of others mingled with the gravel there. He stood there sipping his soda before heading home, when suddenly he felt something touch the back of his pants leg.

He jerked away, almost spilling his soda, raising the stick reflexively. He turned with a crunch of gravel and looked behind him wildly.

It was the little patchy mongrel again. The dog hadn’t flinched away from Bazzell’s jump, but sat looking quizzically, expectantly up into the boy’s face.

Bazzell laughed shakily.

“Dang, Snoopy, you scared me. You do get around, don’t you?”

The dog whined a little and scratched the ground with one paw.

“Sorry, dog, I don’t have any snacks. And I don’t think you’d care for root beer.” He took another sip. The dog watched him closely, never blinking or taking its eyes off him. “Hey, man, them’s the breaks.”  He turned to go.

The dog whined, even louder, ducking its head, but never moving.

“Sorry.” Bazzell took another step, and suddenly the mutt was dashing around his feet, growling, yapping, and taking little nips at his heels. Bazzell stopped and the dog stopped abruptly, looking up at him intensely. Bazzell raised his stick.

“Look, I don’t want to hurt you,” he said sternly. “Go on, now, let me be. Get.”

The dog turned, trotted about five paces toward the highway, then stopped, sat, and gazed at him again. When Bazzell started to cautiously move away, it leapt to its feet and barked again, wagging its tail.

“What the heck’s wrong with you, Snoopy …” Bazzell began, then stopped abruptly as he suddenly remembered.

“Snoopy,” he said slowly. “Do you want me to follow you? Did you … did you find Sheba?”

The dog did nothing, just sat there staring at him keenly.

“Ah, jeez,” Bazzell said. He looked around to see if there was anyone around to see him. Except for the occasional car passing down the four-lane highway, the area was as deserted as any place on a hot, dry, Texas afternoon.

“Okay, Snoopy,” he said reluctantly, cheeks flushing red and with what felt like a sudden flow of blood through his head. “Take me to Sheba, boy. Go find her.”

The stray promptly turned and started to head off over the highway.

Bazzell hesitated. This was the usual boundary of his territory on this side of the neighborhood. Across the road the land sloped down into Riverside, a swampy area full of run-down summer houses, once decent and rather informal, but now a place that had to be visited by the police with alarming frequency. He remembered having to pass through it back when he rode the bus and being uneasy as they went through the densely wooded area until they had broken out again into the normal light of day.

Snoopy stopped right in the middle of the road and looked back at him.

Just at that moment Bazzell became aware of a string of cars coming down from the right, barreling along at top speed.

“Hey!” he called. “Hey, Snoopy! Get back here! Get out of the way.”

The dog just looked at him, and then sat down, scratching itself unconcernedly.

“Oh, crap!” Bazzell yelped. He dropped his soda and sprinted out into the road. He scooped up the smelly beast in one hand and made it to the other side of the highway, stumbling into the ditch as the first car dopplered past them, blaring its horn and never slowing down for even a second. The other cars whizzed past one after the other, and it wasn’t until after they had all passed, and it was quiet again, that Bazzell dared to stand up and let the dog back down onto its feet.

“Are you nuts?” he asked rhetorically. “You could have been run over!”

The dog twitched its eyebrows and cocked its head. Bazzell suddenly wondered which one of them was the crazy one.

He looked around, thinking. Maybe it was an irrational idea to follow a dog as if it would lead him to Sheba because he had asked it to. But here he was, already out of bounds, and it was just as likely that the pointer had wandered over here as anywhere. It couldn’t hurt to take a look around, at least while the sun was still up.

“Okay, Snoop,” he muttered. “Here we are.” He gestured ahead, feeling foolish. “Go on, lead the way.”

The dog looked at him blankly, not moving.

“Ah,” Bazzell scoffed, and headed for the street that wound into the shady neighborhood. The dog stood up and started trotting at his side.

The first block or two was still fairly decent, as if the people who lived there knew that they could be seen from the road and meant to keep up appearances. But the deeper Bazzell walked in and the denser and more overgrown the trees became, the more ramshackle the houses grew. Many had derelict vehicles in the yard, wading in weeds, up on blocks or resting on deflated, peeling tires. Down in Riverside the local aesthetic seemed to tend toward turning rusty garbage into some kind of decoration, and then alternating with just plain garbage like round cages of chicken wire filled with years’ worth of corroded beer cans like a sort of bilious boast.

As he went deeper, the dog at his heels, Bazzell got more nervous. He wondered about the effectives of his stick as a weapon, just in case trouble arose, and thought it was only about better than nothing. Still, he knew that the road looped around and out again, and that if he just forged ahead, he’d come out eventually. In the meantime, he kept his eyes and ears open for any hint of Sheba’s presence.

He was so intent on keeping himself aware of his situation that it was a few steps before he became conscious that he was no longer hearing the click of Snoopy’s uncut toenails at his side. He stopped and looked back.

The dog had squatted down in front of an overgrown driveway. Bazzell could see that the lot it led into extended all the way to the river, with a building that sat back near the water. At first, he thought it was just another house, but when he looked a little closer, he saw that it had been fitted out into some kind of diner. He realized that this must be place his mother had been talking about on the phone. He wrinkled his nose at the idea of her working in such a dive, though from the looks of the place she would probably elevate the tone pretty easily.

To his dismay, Snoopy got up and started walking down the driveway.

He hesitated a moment, then followed him, if lagging carefully behind. In for a dime, in for a dollar, he thought wryly. After all, it was a public place and not a private home. If he was cautious, he should be all right … at least legally. He dragged his feet a little, ready to flee at the first time of trouble, but going stubbornly forward.

As he closed in on the building, dismaying details started coming clear. On the starter strip near the ground there were cracks and even gaping holes that hinted at rats and racoons. The roof, though whole, sagged alarmingly, with branches from nearby branches grazing along the tiles. As he turned to the front of the house at the end of the driveway, he saw a clutch of handmade signs that put him inevitably in mind of Jethro’s handiwork on The Beverly Hillbillies, if not quite so neatly done. The front porch was nailed up with little pairs of deer horns, some with patches of skin still clinging to the skullcap, old license plates, horseshoes, and a scabrous tin beer sign that looked like it had been picked out of a garbage dump. Hanging from the eaves the main hand-lettered sign declared that this was Billy’s Place.

A lesser sign by the door declared “LUNCH 11-1, SuPPeR 7-10. CHILI – Corn Bread, HOT DOG – BurGer, CHIPS – Pickkles. Sunday – BBQ, Pot. Salad.”

Bazzell pulled out his pocket watch, a cheap ten-dollar job he had bought at a department store in San Antonio. It ticked like a time bomb when it was out of his pocket. It wasn’t quite 6:30 yet. He hesitated. Well, maybe there was somebody setting up he could talk to. He clumped up the hollow wooden steps that bent under his feet. Snoopy vanished into the scraggly shrubbery that fringed the porch. As the boy went up, he could smell the sour smell of vomit and beer steaming out of the bushes.

Great, he thought. This is probably just where Snoopy comes for a scrounged-up meal.

Still. Here he was. Maybe, just maybe, somebody had seen Sheba. He went up boldly to the entrance and tried the handle. The generic sign in the door’s window said “Sorry, We’re Closed”, but the knob turned easily, and with just a little hesitation he walked right in.

From inside it was even easier to tell that the place had once been an ordinary house, rather roughly transformed into an eatery. There was a patched seam right down the middle of the dining area where the walls separating the living and the dining room had been, painted over in a not-too-successful effort to make it blend together. A counter that divided the passage into the kitchen looked like it had been cobbled together out of wooden crates and covered with a plywood plank, leaving a plain gap for the waitstaff to go in and out. There was nothing on the counter but a jar of pickled eggs, a tray of motley salt and pepper shakers that looked like they had been lifted from every other restaurant in town, and three of four crusty bottles of ketchup. The light slanted into the room through dingy Venetian blinds.

The tables seemed to have been scraped together from any old place, including a few card tables, and covered with cheap plastic checkered tablecloths. Battered Samsonite folding chairs vied with ancient rickety wooden specimens that might have been salvaged out of some old shut-down fraternal order. As Bazzell’s eyes adjusted to the dim light after the blazing sun, he saw that there was a girl doing her best to pummel this unpromising set-up into some sort of order. Cautiously, he approached her through the shadowy room, floor creaking wearily under his feet.

“Excuse me, Miss, I wonder if you could …” he began, then stopped as she straightened up, turning to look at him with mingled annoyance and professional courtesy. He saw her clearly for the first time as she came into the ambience of the dirty shaded overhead light and presented in that shabby second-hand setting, he could see that she was unexpectedly, almost shockingly beautiful.

The first words that came into his head when he could think again were “skin white as snow, hair black as ebony, lips red as blood,” and the old rubric for the first time made sense to him. Her cheeks were a little flushed from her efforts, or perhaps from his tongue-tied scrutiny, but otherwise the description was perfect. She was dressed in a clean but faded blue-and-white checked dress, over which the dingy bar apron clung like a pall of smog.

“Yes?” She looked at him inquiringly, eyebrows raised, obviously eager to get on with her chores. “Can I help you? We’re not open for another thirty minutes, you know.”

“Uh … I was wondering if I could have a drink of water,” he stammered. “I was out walking and it’s so hot …”

“Oh, Lord, of course,” she said. “I know how that can be. Wait here just a sec.” She put down her cleaning rag and smiled at him in concern. “Go on, have a seat.”

In a daze, Bazzell plunked down into one of the shaky chairs, not because he was feeling tired, but because she had told him to. He watched her as she walked away. She was a tad chunkier than the current willowy ideal, which he had always thought he preferred, going with the cultural flow as it were. Now he realized how appealing a difference of opinion could be. In the quiet he could hear her running the kitchen tap behind the counter. Sheba had run right out of his head, and in the time before the girl could come back, Bazzell wondered what he would say to her.

She returned, a jelly jar glass full of tap water held carefully in both hands.

“Here you go, sweetie,” she said, maternal concern in her voice. “Now drink it slow, and you just sit there for a bit.”

“Thanks,” Bazzell managed. He smiled weakly and took a slow sip of water. It was slightly brown and smelled strongly of iron and chlorine, but under her encouraging eyes he felt he would probably have gulped down far worse. She smiled at him and went back to fixing tables. There wasn’t much she could do for them, but whatever straightening and care could do, she was doing. After a bit she started humming.

When he couldn’t force down any more water, Bazzell managed to marshal his thought enough to clear his throat and start a question.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I don’t mean to interrupt you working, but did you happen to see a dog around here, an old brown-spotted pointer? She was my grampa’s dog before he died, and she’s gone missing, and I was looking to see if she might have wandered into the neighborhood …”

“Oh, no, darling, I sure haven’t,” she paused, cleaning rag in hand, and lifted her head to turn large sympathetic eyes on him. “That’s so sad. I’ll sure look out for her, and I’ll tell Uncle Billy; he owns the restaurant. He’s always on the lookout for rescuing stray dogs. You live around here?”

“Across the highway, in fact, over on the Loop. My name’s Bazzell Butzehauser.”

She smiled.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen you at school. The one everybody calls Dr. Spock.” She reached out her hand. “Stella Schmidt.”

He took her hand, started to shake, then paused.

“Schmidt? You mean, like … Joey Schmidt?”

“He’s my cousin. Well, of course, you would know him, his family lives on the Loop, too. Our side’s more out of town.”

“And you go to Gothenburg High? I don’t think I’ve seen you …”

“Well, I’m pretty sure we move in different career tracks. I’m not up there in the brainy grades. I don’t suppose there’s any reason you’d notice little old me running around. I’ve seen you, though. You look like you’re a million miles away, thinking about something else. I always say to myself, now there’s a boy on his way somewhere.”

She looked down and smiled.

“You can let go my hand now.”

Bazzell started and dropped her hand.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “I guess you can miss a lot if you’re not paying attention.”

“Yeah.” She reached down into her apron and pulled out an order pad with the stub of a pencil folded into its pages. “Do you want to write down your phone number? In case I see your dog, so I can call you?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, that would be great.” He took the pad and started to write. For a moment it seemed the blunt lead could hardly form a recognizable digit, but then he got control of his fingers and very carefully wrote out the numbers and initialed it B.B. just to be sure. He started to shyly hand the pad back when both of their heads snapped up at a sudden sound from outside the front door.

Someone was yelling angrily, punctuated by sharp barks that could only have been Snoopy. Bazzell scrambled to his feet and headed for the door, followed by Stella, who hastily tore the page from the pad and pocketed it as she ran.   

A battered old yellow pick-up with a camper had pulled up into the gravel parking lot. An energetic, rangy man in a greasy Budweiser cap, not quite six-foot-tall, had apparently just got out and was dancing energetically about, wrinkled brown grocery bag clutched in one hand, kicking viciously away with sharp-toed, well-worn cowboy boots. Darting at his legs, nipping, growling, angrily yapping, the little mongrel was keeping just out of range of the man’s thrusting feet.

“Got-damn, got-damn, you little shit! I’ll bash your got-damn head in! You’re dead meat, you little asshole, I get my got-damn hands on you!”

“Hey! Hey!” Bazzell came running down the steps, not sure if he was yelling at the man or the dog. He just wanted to defuse the situation. “Hey, hold on there!”

The man cut venomous eyes at the boy, but never let his attention stray off the snapping dog.

“This mutt yours? There’s laws in this county, you know. I got every right to shoot him, he attacks me, or I could got-damn sue you!”

“Here! Down, boy! Down!”  To Bazzell’s surprise, the dog actually seemed to listen to his words, and stood still, legs spread and back bristling. His muzzle was drawn open to show snaggled teeth bared in an ominous growl.

“I said, is this mutt yours?” the man insisted. The boy looked into the man’s crazy pale blue eyes and read violence there. Defiantly, Bazzell reached down and snatched the little dog up. It flinched as he grabbed it but settled down in his arms when it realized what was going on. It never stopped watching the man, though, and its growl, though low, was threatening.

“Yeh, he’s mine,” he said defiantly. “Sorry about that, mister.”

“Well, keep him off or tie him up, boy.” The man re-adjusted his greasy cap irritably and tightened his grip on the brown sack. “I can’t have fleabags like him hanging around my rest-runt and annoying my customers.”

Bazzell looked down at the bag and for a second was taken aback. It was dripping blood. He pointed.

“I guess that’s what did it,” he said. “He must have smelled that.”

The man glanced down.

“Oh, got damn. I gotta get this in the fridge asap,” he snapped. “You! You get on out of here and take that road-kill with you!” He looked up at the porch. “Stella! Stop gawking and get back in! We open in five minutes, got-damn it!”

“Yes, Uncle Billy,” she said obediently, and turned to go back in, not without a quick inquisitive glance at Bazzell. It seemed to him she wanted to say something more but couldn’t under the angry man’s glare. Bazzell took up his walking stick and settled the dog more securely under his arm. Head held high and not hurrying, he walked back to the road and turned his steps back to the Loop.

“Well, Snoopy,” he murmured. “I guess I’m stuck with you. What was that all about?”

The spotted dog looked up at him under worried twitching eyebrows, whined a little, and adjusted itself more comfortably in his hold.

 

By the time Bazzell got home supper was almost over, but he didn’t go in right away. Instead, as he had planned on the walk back, he took Snoopy straight to the garage and, much to the dog’s protestation, hauled out Sheba’s flea soap and gave him a thorough bath in the utility sink there. After several epic struggles of lathering and rinsing, the dog came out surprisingly white, and smelling, if not exactly fragrant, at least antiseptic. Bazzell dried him off and then went over to Sheba’s corner, filled her bowls with food and water, and let the little mongrel have his fill as he sat close to him on an unfolded lawn chair. Bazzell heard the back door of the house open, and the next minute Mina and Kevin came scuffling eagerly in, only to be brought up short by the sight of the unfamiliar dog.

“What the heck?” said Mina angrily. “We thought you might have found Sheba!”

Bazzell bent down and scratched Snoopy on the rump. He didn’t pause a second as he crunched hungrily on, but his back leg twitched.

 “No, I found this little dog.”

Mina’s brows clenched.

“You’re not trying to replace Sheba already?”

“No, I’m still looking.” He looked up at Mina. “But if someone had found her, like I found Snoopy here, hungry and dirty and homeless, I hope they’d have the kindness to take care of her. So …” He shrugged.

“Oh, Lord love a duck,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what Mom’ll say. Don’t we have enough troubles already? What if he has rabies?”

“He doesn’t have rabies …” Bazzell began, when suddenly Kevin, who had been edging carefully closer, suddenly cried out “Snoopy!” and started vigorously petting the little dog’s head. The mongrel flinched under the assault but didn’t growl; instead it just looked up imploringly into Bazzell’s face with big brown eyes.

“Easy there, Kevin,” Bazzell said. “Easy now. You got to give him time to get used to you.”

Kevin moderated his strokes into almost exaggerated gentleness and the dog lowered his head back into the food bowl and went on grinding away at the dry food.

“Snoopy’s a good dog,” he said softly, running his fingers over the newly clean hair. “A good dog. Maybe he can help us find Sheba.”

“Oh, puh-lease.” Mina rolled her eyes, but Bazzell looked at him in surprise. It was almost as if his brother knew what he had done, how this whole thing had started.

“Maybe he can,” he said. “I sure hope so.”

 

Mom was not best pleased with the thought of another dog so quickly on the heels of the old pointer’s disappearance, but Pop said if Bazzell paid for his shots he could stay. They went down to the pound the next day to see if possibly someone had found Sheba and turned her in (they hadn’t), dropped off a description in case she turned up, and got the protesting Snoopy a quick series of vaccinations. The little dog looked at him resentfully all the way home, but by the time he was put in the fenced back yard and fed again he seemed reconciled to it.

Kevin was delighted with the new pet and started playing an interminable game of fetch with Snoopy, a game the little dog indulged in with infinite patience, it seemed. Mina, on the other hand, looked only disgusted when she had to even just see him.

It had never seemed to Bazzell that she had ever really cared for Sheba, that affection for pets was just a girly kind of weakness that she had to reject. But Sheba had been a family pet, and Mina wasn’t about anything if she wasn’t about family loyalty; after all, it reflected on her. If they had to have a dog, it was good to have a pure-bred sitter. A reclaimed road-apple like Snoopy was just a sign of white-trash relaxed standards that she shuddered away from.

Even so, it looked to Bazzell, when he thought about, something more than grim loyalty in the way she hopped into her car every few hours and went cruising down the highway, looking for the lost dog. And he remembered secretive, almost reflexive pats on a warm furry head made when his sister thought no one was looking. She was even more attentive than ever to the road when she drove him to Mr. Cheezie’s that afternoon.

Once he was bound down into routine, he found that his mind was flying free. He wondered if he had done enough that day, if he hadn’t been distracted by one damn thing after another. He wondered where Sheba was, if she was even still alive, if they would ever know what had happened to her. In the meantime, he did the only thing he could do: clean up, make new things, and reduce the chaos around him back into some kind of order. At the end of the night as he rode home he came to a decision for the next day. When he fell into bed past midnight, he could hardly get to sleep even though he was exhausted. Eventually, he slept.

Bazzell was up at the crack of dawn that Sunday, before even Mom was awake. He got dressed and slipped out the back door with scarcely a noise. Snoopy was lying awake on the concrete porch, as if expecting him.

“Morning, Snoop,” Bazzell whispered. “Let’s go for a walk, hey?”

It was as quiet as only an early morning Sunday could be. Even the tap of Bazzell’s walking stick sounded unnaturally loud as they started down the street, so after a few steps he just shouldered it and tried to step even more silently along in his sneakers. The slightest crunch of gravel, the rhythmic click of Snoopy’s toenails as he trotted at his side, echoed in the stillness. Bazzell headed out at first to the north and the underpass crossing the road to the elementary school, but after he had circled around it and headed back towards the Loop he found himself drawn back inevitably southward, over the highway and back into Riverside.

He wondered, as he descended from the highway into the wooded neighborhood, if the quiet ominous miasma hanging over the area was only in his mind. To his imagination it had the uneasy stillness of a graveyard after a wild night of who knew what occult orgies. A hazy golden fog rising off the river bottom, already dissipating under the brutal morning sun, added to the unearthly atmosphere. 

Notes

JABS stands for "Junior Agent, Bureau of Shadows". This story was written as a sequel to draw Bazzell ('hero' of the Brother Silas tale) into the the Bureau of Shadows continuity and to adapt one of my strange dreams. Eventually Haff was going to be revealed as an agent himself, “Haff” is retired, Stephen Haff from “The Power of Fantasy”. "At the end Bazz wonders if it was all just a coincidence as nothing really supernatural happened; the thing with the dog might have been a coincidence. Haff talks to him about a phenomenon he calls The Haunting, a fugitive, persistent sense That Something Beyond The Known Material Universe Is Happening. Even people not in the DEA get it. Some people think it can be rationally explained, others don’t. Lean on it, count on it, and it seems to vanish; treat it dismissively and the more it seems to tease you with clues and hints. So what do you do? Be alert, not dismissive, but not submissive either, if you get my meaning. Live you normal life, but don’t fall asleep."

I have a whole rack of notes on how it was going to end, including the original dream. So why didn't I finish it? I was working on it in the middle of 2019. Perhaps it just got unwieldy; perhaps I was overwhelmed with writing an 'action-packed' conclusion. I could buckle down and finish it. I could.