Vic and Blood Read online

  Let him go! An educated nose like mine came high these days. There were solos just crying for a good dog. And I worked cheap. It didn't take that much to feed me; not as much as an Akita or a Doberman. There were even roverpaks that needed a good lead dog. Even if I started at the bottom of the pile, with my talent I'd be lead dog in no time.

  It wouldn't be easy. A new dog always had to eat some shit for a while before his excellence was recognized. But I could do it. Maybe a year. Maybe two. In a roverpak. Eating shit.

  I decided to follow him, to tell him he was on his own. To tell him I could make it just very well thank you without a stupid boy like him running the show.

  I trotted out of the alley and kept to the shadows. Even if he was going to be stupid about survival, I still had my wits about me. The trouble on the barge hadn't been all my fault. He'd let them call me an eggsucker. He knew I didn't like that. And besides, the clown with the pump gun had given him trouble earlier. I knew he'd blown him away halfway because of that, not just on my account.

  I was maybe a block behind him, and there he was, just staggering half-drunk down the center of the avenue.

  What a schmuck!

  Then I saw the glowing green haze that meant there was a screamer in a crater in the middle of the road. Vic was too juiced to even see it. But then, humans can't see the greenish-blue radiation haze as well as we noble creatures can. Go ahead you dip, I thought, just walk down the street and in another ten steps your going to be hugging a screamer. Go on, walk away from me; you're not five minutes without me and already about to get burned. You toad.

  Bumble, bumble, bumble, he just went careening toward the crater, and the green haze got brighter, which meant the screamer was aware my valiant ex-master was on the way. So long, turkey, I thought. That's it for you, screwloose!

  And then I thought of eating shit at the bottom of a roverpak for a year or two, and the next thing I knew I was running full out toward him, howling my brave little heart out. “Albert, you nincompoop! Look out! Screamer crater right in front of you! Look out dummy! Jump it, dodge it, get away from there you simple shit!”

  But he was too drunk to know what he was doing. And there, right on schedule, coming up like something from an old Japanese horror flick ... there was the king awful ugliest screamer I've ever seen, oozing green slime and his parts falling off like some medieval drawing of a rotting flagellant or a leper, nothing but bitten fingernails all the way back to the knuckles, and eyelashes as long as spider legs, and big whirling eyes without eyelids, his mouth open and yelling with the pain of his burns, groping and clutching trying to climb out of the pit.

  And stupid Vic just sashaying up to him as if he were a chorus girl looking for a good time.

  “Look out, you asshole!” I screamed mind to mind, and sailed past him on the rise, just looming up in that screamer's face and baring my fangs and barking like crazy...

  And the poor devil fell back into the pit and I didn't have to touch him, which would have been the end of me, and I fell into the pit and didn't even stop to look around, just came up running and scrabbled down the street in terror just the way that poor devil screamer had screamed, which is rotten syntax, but I was terrified!

  The next time I stopped for breath. I was two miles up the road and way back there somewhere good old Vic was running so hard his knees were hitting him in the chin. I stopped and fell down and lay on my side in the gutter and just breathed in and out as best I could and prayed for a better life.

  Vic came running up, went fifty yards past me, realized the heap in the gutter had been me, and came back. He fell down on the curb and panted for ten minutes.

  When the lights stopped flashing and my chest stopped hurting and I stopped sounding like an asthmatic, I flipped over, got my legs under me, and sat down properly.

  He was staring at me.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

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  * * *

  FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

  “I look upon those who assure me they had a ‘happy childhood’ as either pathological liars, or pariahs.”

  “The most taxing problem faced by those of us of the intellectual elite is that, unfortunately, telepathy takes two minds.”

  “I could eat.”

  “There's some of those canned cherries left.”

  “That would be all right.”

  He pulled a can of cherries out of the rucksack, and the can opener. “Green, wasn't he?” I said, offhandedly.

  “Oh, he was okay.”

  “You looked as if you didn't know whether to shit or wind your watch.”

  “Eggsucker,” he said. He was grinning.

  So we just sat there and ate the canned cherries.

  “Name the Presidents after Roosevelt,” I said. “Franklin, not Teddy.”

  And he did. But he forgot Ford again. There's only so much you can do with a human. But it's a living.

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  * * *

  A BOY AND HIS DOG

  I

  I WAS OUT WITH BLOOD, my dog. It was his week for annoying me; he kept calling me Albert. He thought that was pretty damned funny. Payson Terhune: ha ha.

  I'd caught a couple of water rats for him, the big green and ocher ones, and someone's manicured poodle, lost off a leash in one of the downunders.

  He'd eaten pretty good, but he was cranky. “Come on, son of a bitch,” I demanded, “find me a piece of ass.”

  Blood just chuckled, deep in his dog-throat. “You're funny when you get horny,” he said.

  Maybe funny enough to kick him upside his asshole sphincter, that refugee from a dingoheap.

  “Find! I ain't kidding!”

  “For shame, Albert. After all I've taught you. Not ‘I ain't kidding.’ I'm not kidding.”

  He knew I'd reached the edge of my patience. Sullenly, he started casting. He sat down on the crumbled remains of the curb, and his eyelids flickered and closed, and his hairy body tensed. After a while he settled down on his front paws, and scraped them forward till he was lying flat, his shaggy head on the outstretched paws. The tenseness left him and he began trembling, almost the way he trembled just preparatory to scratching a flea. It went on that way for almost a quarter of an hour, and finally he rolled over and lay on his back, his naked belly toward the night sky, his front paws folded mantislike, his hind legs extended and open. “I'm sorry,” he said. “There's nothing.”

  I could have gotten mad and booted him; but I knew he had tried. I wasn't happy about it, I really wanted to get laid, but what could I do? “Okay,” I said, with resignation, “forget it.”

  He kicked himself onto his side and quickly got up.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Not much we can do, is there?” I was more than a little sarcastic. He sat down again, at my feet, insolently humble.

  I leaned against the melted stub of a lamppost, and thought about girls. It was painful. “We can always go to a show,” I said. Blood looked around the street, at the pools of shadow lying in the weed-overgrown craters, and didn't say anything. The whelp was waiting for me to say okay, let's go. He liked movies as much as I did.

  “Okay, let's go.”

  He got up and followed me, his tongue hanging, panting with happiness. Go ahead and laugh, you eggsucker. No popcorn for you!

  Our Gang was a roverpak that had never been able to cut it simply foraging, so they'd opted for comfort and gone a smart way to getting it. They were movie-oriented kids, and they'd taken over the turf where the Metropole Theater was located. No one tried to bust their turf, because we all needed the movies, and as long as Our Gang had access to films, and did a better job of keeping the films going, they provided a service, even for solos like me and Blood. Especially for solos like us.

  They made me check my .45 and the Browning .22 long at the door. There was a little alcove right beside the ticket booth. I bought my tickets first; it cost me a can of Osc
ar Mayer Philadelphia Scrapple for me, and a tin of sardines for Blood. Then the Our Gang guards with the bren guns motioned me over to the alcove and I checked my heat. I saw water leaking from a broken pipe in the ceiling and I told the checker, a kid with big leathery warts all over his face and lips, to move my weapons where it was dry. He ignored me. “Hey you! Motherfuckin’ toad, move my stuff over the other side ... it goes to rust fast ... an’ it picks up any spots, man, I'll break your bones!”

  He started to give me jaw about it, looked at the guards with the brens, knew if they tossed me out I'd lose my price of admission whether I went in or not, but they weren't looking for any action, probably understrength, and gave him the nod to let it pass, to do what I said. So the toad moved my Browning to the other end of the gun rack, and pegged my .45 under it.

  Blood and me went into the theater.

  “I want popcorn.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Come on, Albert. Buy me popcorn.”

  “I'm tapped out. You can live without popcorn.”

  “You're just being a shit.”

  I shrugged: sue me.

  We went in. The place was jammed. I was glad the guards hadn't tried to take anything but guns. My spike and knife felt reassuring, lying-up in their oiled sheaths at the back of my neck. Blood found two together, and we moved into the row, stepping on feet. Someone cursed and I ignored him. A Doberman growled. Blood's fur stirred, but he let it pass. There was always some hardcase on the muscle, even on neutral ground like the Metropole.

  (I heard once about a get-it-on they'd had at the old Loew's Granada, on the South Side. Wound up with ten or twelve rovers and their mutts dead, the theater burned down and a couple of good Cagney films lost in the fire. After that was when the roverpaks had got up the agreement that movie houses were sanctuaries. It was better now, but there was always somebody too messed in the mind to come soft.)

  It was a triple feature. Raw Deal with Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, Raymond Burr and Marsha Hunt was the oldest of the three. It'd been made in 1948, eighty-six years ago; god only knows how the damn thing'd hung together all that time; it slipped sprockets and they had to stop the movie all the time to re-thread it. But it was a good movie. About this solo who'd been japped by his roverpak and was out to get revenge. Gangsters, mobs, a lot of punching and fighting. Real good.

  The middle flick was a thing made during the Third War, in ‘92, twenty-seven years before I was even born, thing called Smell of a Chink. It was mostly gut-spilling and some nice hand-to-hand. Beautiful scene of skirmisher greyhounds equipped with napalm throwers, jellyburning a Chink town. Blood dug it, even though we'd seen this flick before. He had some kind of phony shuck going that these were ancestors of his, and he knew and I knew he was making it up.

  “Wanna burn a baby, hero?” I whispered to him. He got the barb and just shifted in his seat, didn't say a thing, kept looking pleased as the dogs worked their way through the town. I was bored stiff.

  I was waiting for the main feature.

  Finally it came on. It was a beauty, a beaver flick made in the late 1970s. It was called Big Black Leather Splits. Started right out very good. These two blondes in black leather corsets and boots laced all the way up to their crotches, with whips and masks, got this skinny guy down and one of the chicks sat on his face while the other one went down on him. It got really hairy after that.

  All around me there were solos playing with themselves. I was about to jog it a little myself when Blood leaned across and said, real soft, the way he does when he's onto something unusually smelly, “There's a chick in here.”

  “You're nuts,” I said.

  “I tell you I smell her. She's in here, man.”

  Without being conspicuous, I looked around. Almost every seat in the theater was taken with solos or their dogs. If a chick had slipped in there'd have been a riot. She'd have been ripped to pieces before any single guy could have gotten into her. “Where?” I asked, softly. All around me, the solos were beating-off, moaning as the blondes took off their masks and one of them worked the skinny guy with a big wooden ram strapped around her hips.

  “Give me a minute,” Blood said. He was really concentrating. His body was tense as a wire. His eyes were closed, his muzzle quivering. I let him work.

  It was possible. Just maybe possible. I knew that they made really dumb flicks in the downunders, the kind of crap they'd made back in the 1930s and ‘40s, real clean stuff with even married people sleeping in twin beds. Myrna Loy and George Brent kind of flicks. And I knew that, once in a while, a chick from one of the really strict middle-class downunders would cumup, to see what a hairy flick was like. I'd heard about it, but it'd never happened in any theater I'd ever been in.

  And the chances of it happening in the Metropole, particularly, were slim. There was a lot of twisty trade came to the Metropole. Now, understand, I'm not specially prejudiced against guys corning one another ... hell, I can understand it. There just aren't enough chicks anywhere. But I can't cut the jockey-and-boxer scene because it gets some weak little boxer hanging on you, getting jealous, you have to hunt for him and all he thinks he has to do is bare his ass to get all the work done for him. It's as bad as having a chick dragging along behind. Made for a lot of bad blood and fights in the bigger roverpaks, too. So I just never swung that way. Well, not never, but not for a long time.

  So with all the twisties in the Metropole, I didn't think a chick would chance it. Be a toss-up who'd tear her apart first: the boxers or the straights.

  And if she was here, why couldn't any of the other dogs smell her...?

  “Third row in front of us,” Blood said. “Aisle seat. Dressed like a solo.”

  “How's come you can whiff her and no other dog's caught her?”

  “You forget who I am, Albert.”

  “I didn't forget, I just don't believe it.”

  Actually, bottom-line, I guess I did believe it. When you'd been as dumb as I'd been and a dog like Blood'd taught me so much, a guy came to believe everything he said. You don't argue with your teacher.

  Not when he'd taught you how to read and write and add and subtract and everything else they used to know that meant you were smart (but doesn't mean much of anything now, except it's good to know it, I guess).

  (The reading's a pretty good thing. It comes in handy when you can find some canned goods someplace, like in a bombed-out supermarket; makes it easier to pick out stuff you like when the pictures are gone off the labels. Couple of times the reading stopped me from taking canned beets. Shit, I hate beets!)

  So I guess I did believe why he could maybe whiff a chick in there, and no other mutt could. He'd told me all about that a million times. It was his favorite story. History he called it. Christ, I'm not that dumb! I knew what history was. That was all the stuff that happened before now.

  But I liked hearing history straight from Blood, instead of him making me read one of those crummy books he was always dragging in. And that particular history was all about him, so he laid it on me over and over, till I knew it by heart ... no, the word was rote. Not wrote, like writing, that was something else. I knew it by rote, means you got it word-for-word.

  And when a mutt teaches you everything you know, and he tells you something rote, I guess finally you do believe it. Except I'd never let that leg-lifter know it.

  II

  What he'd told me rote was:

  Over sixty-five years ago, in Los Angeles, before the Third War even got going completely, there was a man named Buesing who lived in Cerritos. He raised dogs as watchmen and sentries and attackers. Dobermans, Danes, schnauzers and Japanese akitas. He had one four-year-old German shepherd bitch named Ginger. She worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's narcotics division. She could smell out marijuana. No matter how well it was hidden. They ran a test on her: there were 25,000 boxes in an auto parts warehouse. Five of them had been planted with marijuana sealed in cellophane, wrapped in tin foil and heavy brown paper, and final
ly hidden in three separate sealed cartons. Within seven minutes Ginger found all five packages. At the same time that Ginger was working, ninety-two miles farther north, in Santa Barbara, cetologists had drawn and amplified dolphin spinal fluid and injected it into Chacma baboons and dogs. Altering surgery and grafting had been done. The first successful product of this cetacean experimentation had been a two-year-old male Puli named Ahbhu, who had communicated sense-impressions telepathically. Cross-breeding and continued experimentation had produced the first skirmisher dogs, just in time for the Third War. Telepathic over short distances, easily trained, able to track gasoline or troops or poison gas or radiation when linked with their human controllers, they had become the shock commandos of a new kind of war. The selective traits had bred true. Dobermans, greyhounds, akitas, pulis and schnauzers had become steadily more telepathic.

  Ginger and Ahbhu had been Blood's ancestors.

  He had told me so, a thousand times. Had told me the story just that way, in just those words, a thousand times, as it had been told to him. I'd never believed him till now.

  Maybe the little bastard was special.

  I checked out the solo scrunched down in the aisle seat three rows ahead of me. I couldn't tell a damned thing. The solo had his (her?) cap pulled way down, fleece jacket pulled way up.

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I can be. It's a girl.”

  “If it is, she's playing with herself just like a guy.”

  Blood snickered. “Surprise,” he said sarcastically.

  The mystery solo sat through Raw Deal again. It made sense, if that was a girl. Most of the solos and all of the members of roverpaks left after the beaver flick. The theater didn't fill up much more, it gave the streets time to empty, he/she could make his/her way back to wherever he/she had come from. I sat through Raw Deal again myself. Blood went to sleep.