CAMBRIDGE, NEW YORK — JULY 1980
Carl woke on his back in the half dark.
The last two mornings there had been a pup or two on his chest when he woke, or up against his neck. This morning there was nothing. He moved his legs, then his arms. Nothing, until his left arm and his left leg hit the wall.
He sat up, quicker than he usually did, and looked around. It was still too dark to see much. He swung his legs out and put his feet on the floor, and something crunched under one of them. A chip. Two. He crossed that foot up over his knee, picked the pieces off the bottom of it, and ate them.
The lamp hung on the wall by the bunk, next to the window. He took it down, reached up over the window frame for a wooden match, struck it on the wall, and lit the lamp.
The pups were scattered across the floor, asleep, most of them on their backs. Around them was the mess. Penny was awake. She was in her spot in the middle of the rug, lids lower than usual, looking back at him.
He held the lamp up to see the whole room.
They had gotten into the sack. The varmint supplies had been in it, on the floor by the door. The sack was open, the can of Charles Chips was on its side with its lid off, and the floor was crumbs and wrappings. They had eaten a lot. It had taken them most of the night, and he had slept through it.
He got up and went to the door, stepping around the worst of it.
“Let’s go, munchers.”
Penny was up and at the door with him. The rest took a minute or two to gather themselves and came to the door slowly, heads down.
He scolded them there, in general terms. Then he opened the lower half of the door and led the whole string of them out for the morning routine.
Once he saw them settle down in a patch of sun, he went back in and left the door open. He cleaned up the crumbs and the wrappings first, then the bigger stuff. The sack was where the pups had left it. He went through what remained, item by item, setting the survivors on the counter. The counter did not take long. Most of everything not in a jar or can was gone. There had been two or three treatments’ worth left in that sack. What was on the counter wouldn’t make one.
While he worked he went to the door every so often and checked on the pups. By the time he was done they were all asleep but Penny. Her eyelids were starting to droop.
He made himself a plate. Some greens the pups had mostly left alone, with pickle juice over them for dressing, and a few crunchy things off the floor, croutons more or less, that the pups had been too full to finish. He opened a can of beans and franks and set the can on the plate. Then he put everything else in the food box and put the box up on the top bunk. He pulled the three-legged stool out onto the stoop, near the door. He went back in for the water jug and topped off the pups’ water, and came out with the plate and the jug and sat down on the stool.
He ate and watched the pups, one at a time. They were asleep, but dreaming — a leg going here and there, and small sounds that went with whatever they were dreaming about. Then he got to Penny.
She was looking right at him. Her eyelids closed slowly, popped open, and started closing again. His own started doing the same. He leaned back against the siding.
He woke to a can scraping. Slim had his nose deep in it and was pushing it along the stoop against the siding. JJ was on the stoop too, trying to get in on it. Penny sat in the middle of the stoop. Birdie and Emmy were still asleep in the sun.
His plate was empty except for the end of a pickle and some pickle juice and bean sauce. Most of the sauce had spilled out at some point onto his pants crotch. He looked at Slim and JJ and set the plate down as he got up. A crunch, then munching.
He looked at Penny.
“You got me, babe. But two out of three, okay? I’ll get you next time.”
He stepped down to Birdie and Emmy and scooped them up, and waved the rest of them into the cabin. As he set Birdie and Emmy down he saw the scrap board tacked over the hole in the open corner.
“Oh yeah. Need to get to that.” He looked at the pups. “You guys hang in here, okay?” He picked up the spade and put it in his pocket, went out, and shut the lower half of the door behind him.
He looked under the cabin. It sat up off the ground, but not enough. He tried anyway, shoulders in under the skirting, and backed out with dust in his hair. He pulled the spade out of his pocket and looked at the gap. The spade had been handy. It wasn’t handy enough for this. He needed a shovel.
He looked at the sky, and at the lay of the land, and made his best guess at the direction of the monastery, and set out. He went in deep cover. He walked the tree lines instead of the open, and twice he stood very still. It took some time. He located the tool shed, infiltrated it, and inspected the arsenal at leisure — the shovels in particular, of which there were several kinds, and he handled each one — and picked a proper pointed one, and headed for the door.
He stopped. Turned around, went back, and took a mattock and a hoe as well.
—
The mission ran a couple of hours, all told, and when he got back the pups were up.
There had been accidents.
Whoever built the cabin had set the window and the door to catch the prevailing wind for a cross draft. With the window and the upper half of the door open, it was working. The smell reached him as he came out of the trees into the clearing, and it got stronger the closer he got to the cabin. He leaned the shovel and the mattock and the hoe against the cabin by the stoop, swung the lower half open under the upper, and stepped in.
Usually he got mobbed at the door. It had gotten to be a routine: Birdie and Emmy on the shoelaces, by now a tug-of-war with Carl over one lace; Slim sniffing and licking a hanging hand, or wherever Carl had let some food drop on his clothes; JJ jumping on him and everybody else; Penny watching. Not this time. He herded the pups out into the clearing, and went back in and got to work.
Most of it had been down a while. Some pieces were small, pebble and marble size, and some were bigger. The small ones were fairly dry. He worked the floor with the coal shovel from the stove and a scrap of shingle, and partway across the room he slowed, and picked one up off the boards. Dried. Dense. Holding its shape. He looked it over. He turned it. He brought it up under his nose and held it there.
He set it in the ash pan. He finished the floor, and the ones that held their shape went into the pan with it. He set the pan on the counter.
He looked out the door. Penny was on the stoop, and the other four were playing, not hard. He went back in, pried the scrap board off the corner, knelt, and looked at the hole, and at the fresh dirt at the mouth of it. He had nothing to put down the hole.
He looked at the pan on the counter.
He went over the pieces in it, and went over them again, with his eyes and his nose. He held a particularly hard one a foot above the counter, dropped it, and listened. Then he sorted the pieces into little groups on the counter, the way a man sorts change, and slid one group of three off by itself. He picked up two of them and looked around, and stopped. Then he took off his hat, dropped the two in, and put the hat back on. The third he set deep in the mouth of the hole.
He went outside and got the pointed shovel and the mattock, and dug an opening under the floor framing big enough to fit through. He made it a little bigger. Then he lay down on his back and pulled himself in, head first, halfway under the cabin.
It was dark under there, but not all the way. Light came in through the opening he’d dug and the gaps in the skirting, and through thin seams between the floorboards, where the boards had swelled and shrunk over the years.
There wasn’t much room for a man his size. He put his arms out and felt along the dirt with his fingers. He found a hole, and another, and a few more.
He reached up under his hat for one of the pieces. Just then something tugged on his left boot. Then on his right boot. Then something small came up his left leg, and something else up his right, and there was more tugging, at the crotch of his jeans.
“Knuckleheads. I’m going to get you knuckleheads.”
He got the two pieces out from under his hat, dropped them into the nearest holes, and shimmied his way back out. A wrestling match followed, and Carl did the play-by-play.
“Tag team. Four on one, and one in the corner. Nobody’s checking the tags, and the ref’s not looking.”
Slim had a bootlace. JJ was on his chest. He got an arm around Slim and rolled, and Slim came up on top anyway.
“Reversal. He had him and he lost him. Look at the size of that one.”
Birdie and Emmy went in under his arms. Penny stayed out of it, off at the edge, watching.
“Double-team. That’s a double-team, and it’s going to go unpunished. He’s trying to get to his feet. He is not going to get to his feet.”
He got to one knee. JJ hit him in the chest and he went over on his back in the dirt, and the four of them were on him.
“And that’ll do it. That’ll do it. Exhausted and pinned. It’s all over for the man from Missouri. Back to you, Gordon.”
Everybody came out of it covered in dirt to one degree or another, Carl the most.
He gathered up the tools and the pups. He leaned the tools against the cabin by the door, and they all filed in. He brought the stool in after them. Carl stripped down to his underwear and socks, got the box down off the top bunk, and made do with what he had for dinner, for the pups and for himself. He set it up outside. After dinner they all went for a long, slow walk around the edge of the clearing, and he let them explore a little way into the brush along the treeline. Emmy ran the mound a few times, up and over and around in loops, and couldn’t get any takers. Then they went back inside.
It had been a busy day, and it showed. The pups clocked out one at a time, Penny last.
Carl sat down on the stool with his elbows on his knees and watched the hole in the corner until the room was almost dark.
