The Last of the Winnebagos

Aberfan raised his head off my lap and looked at me. His gums were gray, and he was panting, but I couldn’t see any more blood. He tried to lick my hand. “You’ll make it, Aberfan,” I said. “You made it before, remember?”

“But you didn’t get out of the car and go check, to make sure it was dead?” Hunter said.

“No.”

“And you don’t have any idea who hit the jackal?” he said, and made it sound like the accusation it was.

“No.”

He glanced back at the uniform, who had moved around the car to the other side. “Whew,” Hunter said, shaking his Hawaiian collar, “it’s like an oven out here. Mind if I come in?” which meant the uniform needed more privacy. Well, then, by all means, give him more privacy. The sooner he sprayed print-fix on the bumper and tires and peeled off the incriminating traces of jackal blood that weren’t there and stuck them in the evidence bags he was carrying in the pockets of that uniform, the sooner they’d leave. I opened the screen door wider.

“Oh, this is great,” Hunter said, still trying to generate a breeze with his collar. “These old adobe houses stay so cool.” He glanced around the room at the developer and the enlarger, the couch, the dry-mounted photographs on the wall. “You don’t have any idea who might nave hit the jackal?”

“I figure it was a tanker,” I said. “What else would be on Van Buren that time of morning?”

I was almost sure it had been a car or a small truck. A tanker would have left the jackal a spot on the pavement. But a tanker would get a license suspension and two weeks of having to run water into Santa Fe instead of Phoenix, and probably not that. Rumor at the paper had it the Society was in the water board’s pocket. If it was a car, on the other hand, the Society would take away the car and stick its driver with a prison sentence. “They’re all trying to beat the cameras,” I said. “The tanker probably didn’t even know it’d hit it.”

“What?” he said.

“I said, it had to be a tanker. There isn’t anything else on Van Buren during rush hour.”

I expected him to say, “Except for you,” but he didn’t. He wasn’t even listening. “Is this your dog?” he said.

He was looking at the photograph of Perdita. “No,” I said. “That was my grandmother’s dog.”

“What is it?”

A nasty little beast. And when it died of the newnarvo, my grandmother had cried like a baby. “A chihuahua.” He looked around at the other walls. “Did you take all these pictures of dogs?” His whole manner had changed, taking on a politeness that made me realize just how insolent he had intended to be before. The one on the road wasn’t the only jackal around.

“Some of them,” I said. He was looking at the photograph next to it. “I didn’t take that one.”

“I know what this one is,” he said, pointing at it. “It’s a boxer, right?”

“An English bulldog,” I said.

“Oh, right. Weren’t those the ones that were exterminated? For being vicious?”

“No,” I said.

He moved on to the picture over the developer, like a tourist in a museum. “I bet you didn’t take this one either,” he said, pointing at the high shoes, the old-fashioned hat on the stout old woman holding the dogs in her arms.

“That’s a photograph of Beatrix Potter, the English children’s author,” I said. “She wrote Peter Rabbit.”

He wasn’t interested. “What kind of dogs are those?”

“Pekingese.”

“It’s a great picture of them.” It is, in fact, a terrible picture of them. One of them has wrenched his face away from the camera, and the other sits grimly in her owner’s hand, waiting for its chance. Obviously neither of them liked having its picture taken, though you can’t tell that from their expressions. They reveal nothing in their little flat-nosed faces, in their black little eyes.

Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, comes through beautifully, in spite of the attempt to smile for the camera and the fact that she must have had to hold onto the Pekes for dear life, or maybe because of that. The fierce, humorous love she felt for her fierce, humorous little dogs is all there in her face. She must never, in spite of Peter Rabbit and its attendant fame, have developed a public face. Everything she felt was right there, unprotected, unshuttered. Like Katie.

“Are any of these your dog?” Hunter asked. He was standing looking at the picture of Misha that hung above the couch.

“No,” I said.

“How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” he asked, and I wondered how he knew I had had a dog and what else he knew.

“He didn’t like having his picture taken.”

He folded up the readout, stuck it in his pocket, and turned around to look at the photo of Perdita again. “He looks like he was a real nice little dog,” he said.

The uniform was waiting on the front step, obviously finished with whatever he had done to the car.