Free No Man's Dog by Jon A. Jackson Page A

exposed.
    He considered the situation calmly as he drove from his unfinished house, where he had left Helen sprawled and spent on their bed. It was no more than a half mile to Frank’s house, down a dusty two-track road. Joe drove slowly. He had ample time to weigh his thoughts on this fateful act. He had been more shocked than he realized by the implications of Caspar’s warning. His life was changing again. He didn’t feel angry, just resolved.
    He had a feeling that he’d not be coming back this way afterward. He’d very likely never see Helen again. It wouldn’t even be wise for him to visit Montana again, which made him sad. At present, he wasn’t sure where he would go; he didn’t have time for these thoughts but he was sure it would be somewhere nice.
    He wasn’t angry. Joe avoided anger. It was a waste of time. Very early in life he had given a great deal of thought to the problem of anger. His analysis was that typically anger arose as a result of an injury. Anger made it difficult to act. It clouded one’s mind, blinded one to further danger. If one needed to retaliate, or otherwise compensate for the injury, especially quickly, anger was something one couldn’t afford. If the injury was not sufficient to require action, then one ought to shrug off the injury. He’d practiced this, over the years, and he’d become proficient at it.
    Yet he’d ponder anger in idle moments. It seemed to him that most people indulged their anger, nourished it. Apparently, they did this because they were afraid to act. They didn’t want to disturb things. They were content to live with their anger, he felt. Presumably, they eventually forgot about the source of it, although he supposed there was always some bitter residue stuffed away in the back of the mind, likely to surface at odd moments.
    That was probably the case with most anger-inducing situations. There were also, of course, those situations where one simply couldn’t react, daren’t react, because the source of the injury was too powerful. In that case, one was forced to swallow one’s anger, which became a corrosive acid in one’s stomach. Perhaps, in some uncharted future, one could react, savagely no doubt, but it would likely be too late.
    Joe didn’t want any of that. When an occasion for anger arose, he felt he should recognize it, decide as quickly as possible if it was an actionable offense, and, if it wasn’t, wave it away. That didn’t mean he would forget that an injury had been done to him, although he supposed he had forgotten most if not all of the minor injuries done. But if it didn’t require a response, then admit as much to himself, promptly, and let that be enough.
    Case in point: it was bad enough that Fedima had successfully convinced Frank to get rid of the two watchdogs Bruno and Sylvie. Joe had conceded that these dogs, having demonstrated that they would attack human beings, must have seemed to Fedima too great a threat to the life of her child, Paulie, to ignore. When Joe looked at it from her point of view, he felt that her fears were, if far-fetched, simply too intense to be overcome. So he’d shrugged off Frank’s decision to send the dogs away.
    But the cows were too much. Farming might be in Fedima’s blood, but that blood could be let. It was ridiculous. Frank was not a farmer, or a rancher. He raised marijuana. That might be considered gardening, but it wasn’t farming, and definitely not ranching. Beyond that, they had plenty of money. They didn’t need to do anything but fish and hunt and dawdle in the hot springs. Most important, Joe and Helen depended on Frank to provide a kind of buffer between them and the rest of the world, which couldn’t otherwise reach Joe’s place without going through Frank’s. It was asecurity issue. Joe was very keen on security. Now, with Caspar’s revelations, he didn’t have that anymore.
    And he hated cows—miserable, slab-sided, shit-smeared, stupid beasts that wandered