TWENTY-ONE
We parked and went into the office, a very small office but full of interesting smells. I’d forgotten all about Mexican air and what’s in it. This is a big subject that I promise to get to later, but for now let’s just say Mexico’s a great place if you’re interested in smells.
A woman with gray hair in a long ponytail sat in a lumpy old chair, watching TV and smoking a thin cigar. Bernie said something in that way he did when we were down in Mexico. The woman said, “Three hundred pesos for a single, or twenty U.S.”
Bernie took out his wallet. “Your English is great.”
“Should be,” said the woman. “It’s my first language.”
“Yeah?” said Bernie.
“Graduated from New Trier High back in the day. Plus a year at Central Illinois.”
“Hey,” said Bernie.
“Now I’m back down here.”
“Oh?”
“Papers,” said the woman.
“Ah,” said Bernie.
Human speech could be very easy sometimes—yeah, hey, oh, ah. Bernie was a master. As for what they were talking about, that was anybody’s guess. I didn’t dwell on it; in fact, the whole thing vanished from my mind right away, because all of a sudden a mouse popped out of nowhere, ran right by me—smelling strongly of butter, by the way—and disappeared into a tiny hole in the wall. I looked up. Bernie and the woman seemed to have missed it all.
“Room number seven,” she was saying, and Bernie took a key off a wall peg.
“Get many Americans staying here?” he said.
“Some,” said the woman. “Especially around festival time. Plus birdwatchers and hunters passing through.”
“Hunting what?” Bernie said.
“Whitetail, mostly,” said the woman. “Some turkey.” She nodded toward a table in the corner. “There’s brochures if you want.”
I was hoping Bernie would go pick one up—turkeys are another interest of mine—but he didn’t. Instead he said, “Had any Americans recently?”
“One or two.”
“Gentleman named Darren Quigley, by any chance?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” the woman said.
“An acquaintance of ours,” Bernie said. “We’re trying to catch up with him, maybe get in some sightseeing.” He took something from his pocket. “Here’s a picture of him.” We had a picture of Darren? One thing about this job: there were lots of surprises.
The woman glanced at the picture. “Never seen him,” she said.
“Too bad,” Bernie said. “We should have organized this better. Kind of a reunion thing, actually—three old buddies.” Three old buddies? I was lost. “The third buddy should have passed this way as well—big fellow.”
The woman shook her head.
“Wears a bandanna,” Bernie said. “Name of Jocko Cochrane.”
She stopped shaking her head in mid-shake, then shook it once or twice more. Her gaze fell on me. “It’s fifty pesos extra for the dog.”
“You didn’t mention that,” Bernie said.
“I forgot.”
Bernie paid some more money and said good night. We went outside, headed toward our room. I realized my tail was down, kind of just dragging along after me, and raised it back up. Fifty pesos extra for me? What was that all about?
Bernie switched on the bedside light, a dim brownish light that left the corners of the room in shadow, even though it was a pretty small room. He tried the overhead light; it didn’t work. I sniffed around. There’d been a man and a woman in here, but not recently, and they’d had a burger or two. Other than that, nothing of note. Then I spotted a strange picture on the wall, a picture of a bull and a dude dressed up in a glittery costume. The dude held a sword and seemed to be about to stab the bull with it. Could that be? I tried to look away but couldn’t, at least not for long. Has that ever happened to you? Meanwhile, Bernie was unpacking, pouring water in my bowl, brushing his teeth. Those little teeth humans had—they brushed them every day for some reason. Mine are big but only get brushed when Janie’s Pet Grooming Service—We Pick Up and Deliver comes to visit. So: the smaller the teeth, the more you need to brush them? Was that it?
“Let’s catch some zzz’s, big guy.” Bernie turned down covers, got in the bed, reached for the switch, but the light went out before he touched it; at the same time the AC stopped humming. “Uh-oh,” Bernie said. He rose, crashed into a chair sitting in plain sight, and went to the window.
I squeezed in beside him. Bernie parted the curtains. The whole village was dark, dark and silent; although actually it was a silvery kind of darkness because of the moon, and not quite silent, either: I could hear a car, far off, but coming closer.
“Either a power failure or they switched off the generator,” Bernie said. He opened the window and a nice little breeze flowed in. Bernie gazed at the village, not a light showing. His voice grew quiet. “That’s how nights were in olden times,” he said. I waited for more, so maybe I could get the point, but no more came. Bernie climbed in bed. I lay down beside it, stretched my legs way out, then pulled them back in, got comfortable. Dreamland rolled over me right away, like a tall, dark wave.
Things are different in dreamland. For example, I was flying. Not flapping my wings or anything—I don’t believe I had wings in the dream—but just soaring high up over the desert. Way down below something was moving. I drew closer. Hey! It was Peanut! I took a nice deep sniff, trying for a whiff of that powerful Peanut smell, and I picked up a powerful smell, all right, but kind of confusing.
I opened my eyes, saw the bed beside me, remembered where we were. I rose and looked at Bernie. He was sleeping, one arm outside the covers, chest rising and falling. I watched that arm for a while, and might have kept that up for some time, but then a gust of wind blew through the open window, carrying a powerful smell, the powerful smell from my dream. The dream itself was gone, but did I care? No. I was already at the window, sticking my nose out into the night. That smell, the very most powerful smell in the nation within the nation: need I mention it’s the smell that females of my kind sometimes get when they . . . have wants—let’s leave it at that.
The next thing I knew I was outside. I’m a pretty good leaper—in fact, the very best leaper in my K-9 class, which actually led to all that trouble on the very last day, meaning the day I would have gotten my certificate—but with such a low window even a bad leaper, Iggy, for example, could have done it. Well, maybe not Iggy.
Ah. So nice to be outside on a soft and beautiful night, all silvery dark, the moon now in a different part of the sky and lower, nothing stirring, and that special scent a snap to follow. Was this the way things were in olden times? I began to see why Bernie went on and on about them, whatever olden times actually were.
The scent led me away from the motel, across the hard-packed dirt street, still warm from the day, and into an alley with a bar on one side—easy to tell from that barroom smell, which I must have described already, probably more than once—and a crumbling wall on the other. The alley ended at a cross street, also dirt, with deep ruts here and there like black holes. Bernie talked about black holes a lot. They were dangerous, capable of swallowing up everything, so I was careful to avoid them. I made my way down the street, low ramshackle dwellings on both sides, the scent growing stronger. A moment or two later, just beyond a rusted-out car up on blocks in someone’s front yard, I glimpsed a bushy tail, pure white in the moonlight and raised up high.
I trotted on over, not fast; no need to scare anybody. And there she was! Nice and big, although not nearly my size, of course; mostly black and white, with some other colors, too; a longish snout and small, watchful eyes: I liked her! She gave me a look with those small, watchful eyes and then turned and trotted away. But not fast—we were in tune on that not-fast thing. I trotted after her, gave her a sniff. Ah, yes. After that, it got not so easy to keep events straight in my mind. But did she give me a sniff back? Pretty sure that happened. Did we circle around a bit? Probably. And there’s no doubt that I bumped up against her and she kind of pushed back a bit. Then we were in the shadow of the rusted-out car, a very private space. My eyes were on the moon, but I wasn’t really seeing it.
All of a sudden a woman called out from the nearest ramshackle house: “Lola! Dónde estás? Lola?”
Lola? A cool name, but the interruption was inconvenient. A flashlight went on, and the beam began sweeping the yard.
“Lola! What the hell?” The beam passed over us, came back, and stayed, circling us in bright light. “Dios mío! Ven aquí!” Very inconvenient, because we were occupied. And then just like that—in the way the very best things can sneak up on you—we weren’t! Lola scooted away and took off toward the house, glancing back once. Those small, watchful eyes: I’d never seen anything quite like them. The next moment something got thrown at me, missing by a mile, whatever that was. “Mal perro-vete!” Meaning what? Not sure, but I caught the tone and ambled off. I felt tip-top, just about the highest tip-top I can feel. It was great to be south of the border down Mexico way.
I headed back to the motel, taking my time. Funny, the way I’d been so tired before I’d lain down beside Bernie’s bed, and now, long before morning, I was full of pep and all set for another day, and not only that but working up a bit of an appetite. No trouble finding my way back in a new place, a simple matter of following my own scent, a scent—if I haven’t gone into this before and I should have on account of the importance of knowing your own scent in the nation within—made up of a faint, almost undetectable, smell of old leather, plus salt and pepper, mink coats, and just a soupçon of tomato; and to be honest, a healthy dash of something male and funky, especially tonight for some reason. And so, not really paying much attention to my surroundings, my mind on other things, such as the likelihood of coming upon a tidbit or two in this dark little village with everyone but me fast asleep, I was just dimly aware that I might not be the only one up and about. The faint sound of soft, quick footsteps; a shadow darting around a corner: hey! What was going on? I snapped out of it, hurried toward that same corner.
Not a shadow, I saw, but a man, and a big one. He ran across the main street toward the motel, carrying something that picked up a few moonlit sparkles. At the same time, the big man’s scent drifted to me, a nasty, stale smell I remembered. Those bad guys I get close enough to sink my teeth into tend to have smells that stay with me. I charged across the street just as the big guy threw the shiny thing through a window in the motel: our window.
From inside came a flash, bright as day, and then a huge boom that blew out all the window glass and a chunk of the wall. The big guy turned and I got a real good look at him—bandanna, sideburns, twisted nose: Jocko. He saw me and took off toward a pickup parked down the street. I wanted to go after him, wanted that real bad. Instead I leaped through the hole in the wall.
The room was on fire—the bed, the walls, everything—with sheets of flame bursting up to the ceiling and tearing right through. And so much smoke, hurting my eyes, filling my nose in a horrible way. Where was Bernie? I couldn’t see him, couldn’t smell him, could only smell smoke. I barked and barked again.
“Chet?”
And there he was, almost lost in the smoke, crawling on the floor, but in the wrong direction, toward one of the burning walls. I ran over—the air so hot now, crackling all around—and pushed at Bernie, turning him around. He got a hand on me, staggered to his feet. Then came another boom and the whole outside wall vanished and burning stuff started pelting down on us like a fiery rain. We dove through the space where the wall had stood, rolled into the street, got up, and ran, me and Bernie together.
KA-BOOM!
We turned to watch. The motel went up in flames. They rose to the sky and from their very tips hurled red fragments of curtains and bedding and furniture even higher. Maybe it was kind of beautiful in a way.