Free Dog by Bruce McAllister Page A

because he was so dark. “He has Chichimec blood— indigena blood—from his great grandfather’s side, I am told,” she explained. “Otherwise he would not be so dark. His father is blonde.” The boy was dark, sure, but cute and animated and got along better with the family’s two boxers and its two American guests than his brothers and sisters—in their blonde aloofness—did. The mother’s distress over her fifth child made life in the house awkward, especially when the boy was present and listening to her apologies for him. But the apologies didn’t seem to bother him. She did love him, and he must have known this.
    â€œ Do you know the Chichimeca? ” she asked, in Spanish.
    â€œNo,” we answered.
    â€œThey were the ‘dog people,’” she said, then dropped the subject and moved on to the Saturday market, what fun it was, and where we could find the nearest store for school supplies.
    *   *   *
    We would walk the five blocks through the colonia and the city streets beyond the gates to the institute, and return the same way at day’s end. Our teachers were young and liberal too, with one exception—a middle-aged anthropologist who seemed to have no politics and who didn’t join in the laughter and occasional silliness of his younger colleagues.
    The day Jennifer was house-bound with a bad cold, I returned from the institute by myself and saw a dog, a mid-sized mongrel by some bushes on the wide sidewalk just ahead of me. It was sleeping. I assumed it would move as I approached or simply let me walk by. Any dog would, wouldn’t it? It was a sidewalk. Public.
    As I neared it, the animal leaped to its feet snarling and jumped at me.
    I was wearing a backpack with my books and supplies in it, and the dog’s jaws, clacking wetly, got the backpack. The dog hung from the pack by its jaws and thrashed. I could barely stay on my feet and nearly toppled backward. My nerves were firing like lightning, in the panic only adrenaline can make, and I was hitting at the animal behind me but never quite connecting.
    Suddenly the weight on my back disappeared. I was able to straighten up, and, when I turned, the dog was trotting away, looking back once and only once. It was an ugly dog—short-haired, long-legged, a belly bigger than any starving dog should have, and a wrinkled face like a Shar Pei, those battle dogs. Was it pregnant? Ill?
    My backpack was in shreds. I kept thinking, looping in a spasm of thought: Jesus! What if it had bitten me? How do you catch a dog like that for quarantine? How do you get rabies shots? Do you stay with the family or somewhere else?
    I had no idea how things worked down here, I realized, despite Tony’s advice about the world. Just the day before, I’d learned you could be put in jail here for witnessing—just witnessing—a car accident.
    Tony had been right. Don’t be stupid. Find out what you need to know about a country.… so you don’t die like an idiot.
    I’d been stupid.
    A few people had stopped on the street, but were moving again. Nothing to see here. Dogs are dogs.
    For a week I dreamed of the animal, how it had hung on like it wanted to kill me, needed to kill me, was so hungry that nothing in the universe could satisfy its hunger. In the dreams it came at my face. The wrinkles got bigger. It was wearing a mask—a human mask—and then the mask was a mirror, and it was my face. As its jaws snapped at me, blood and pieces of flesh cascaded from them— my blood and flesh. It was more than any dog could possibly eat, so it gave back to me what it could not eat. I ate my own flesh and woke so nauseated I thought I would vomit.
    What do you do with a dream like that?
    I’d moan, and Jennifer would have to wake me. But I kept the dreams to myself. I’d already told her about the dog attack—so she’d be cautious on the streets if we