The Last of the Winnebagos

She was just out of range of the eisenstadt, her face in the shadow of the narrow aisle.

“There was a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said. I kept my voice low so she would lean forward into the light to try and hear me. “It’d been hit by a car, and it was lying funny, at an angle. It looked like a dog. I wanted to talk to somebody who remembered Aberfan, somebody who knew him.”

“I didn’t know him,” she said. “I only killed him, remember? That’s why you did this, isn’t it, because I killed Aberfan?”

She didn’t look at the eisenstadt, hadn’t even glanced at it when I set it on the table, but I wondered suddenly if she knew what I was up to. She was still carefully out of range. And what if I said to her, “That’s right. That’s why I did this, because you killed him, and I didn’t have any pictures of him. You owe me. If I can’t have a picture of Aberfan, you at least owe me a picture of you remembering him.”

Only she didn’t remember him, didn’t know anything about him except what she had seen on the way to the vet’s, Aberfan lying on my lap and looking up at me, already dying. I had had no business coming here, dredging all this up again. No business.

“At first I thought you were going to have me arrested,” Katie said, “and then after all the dogs died, I thought you were going to kill me.”

The screen door banged. “Forgot my cars,” the little girl said and scooped them into the tail of her T-shirt. Katie tousled her hair as she went past, and then folded her arms again.

“ ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I was going to tell you when you came to kill me,” she said. “ ‘It was snowy. He ran right in front of me. I didn’t even see him.’ I looked up everything I could find about newparvo. Preparing for the defense. How it mutated from parvovirus and from cat distemper before that and then kept on mutating, so they couldn’t come up with a vaccine. How even before the third wave they were below the minimum survival population. How it was the fault of the people who owned the last survivors because they wouldn’t risk their dogs to breed them. How the scientists didn’t come up with a vaccine until only the jackals were left. ‘You’re wrong,’ I was going to tell you. ‘It was the puppy mill owners’ fault that all the dogs died. If they hadn’t kept their dogs in such unsanitary conditions, it never would have gotten out of control in the first place.’ I had my defense all ready. But you’d moved away.”

Jana banged in again, carrying the empty whale glass. She had a red smear across the whole lower half of her face. “I need some more,” she said, making “some more” into one word. She held the glass in both hands while Katie opened the refrigerator and poured her another glassful.

“Wait a minute, honey,” she said. “You’ve got Kool-Aid all over you,” and bent to wipe Jana’s face with a paper towel.

Katie hadn’t said a word in her defense while we waited at the vet’s, not, “It was snowy,” or, “He ran right out in front of me,” or, “I didn’t even see him.” She had sat silently beside me, twisting her mittens in her lap, until the vet came out and told me Aberfan was dead, and then she had said, “I didn’t know there were any left in Colorado. I thought they were all dead.”

And I had turned to her, to a sixteen-year-old not even old enough to know how to shut her face, and said, “Now they all are. Thanks to you.”

“That kind of talk isn’t necessary,” the vet had said warningly.

I had wrenched away from the hand he tried to put on my shoulder. “How does it feel to have killed one of the last dogs in the world?” I had shouted at her. “How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?”

The screen door banged again. Katie was looking at me, still holding the reddened paper towel.

“You moved away,” she said, “and I thought maybe that meant you’d forgiven me, but it didn’t, did it?” She came over to the table and wiped at the red circle the glass had left. “Why did you do it? To punish me? Or did you think that’s what I’d been doing the last fifteen years, roaring around the roads murdering animals?”

“What?” I said.

“The Society’s already been here.”

“The Society?” I said, not understanding.

“Yes,” she said, still looking at the red-stained towel. “They said you had reported a dead animal on Van Buren. They wanted to know where I was this morning between eight and nine A.M.”

I nearly ran down a roadworker on the way back into Phoenix. He leaped for the still-wet cement barrier, dropping the shovel he’d been leaning on all day, and I ran right over it.

The Society had already been there. They had left my house and gone straight to hers. Only that wasn’t possible, because I hadn’t even called Katie then. I hadn’t even seen the picture of Mrs. Ambler yet. Which meant they had gone to see Ramirez after they left me, and the last thing Ramirez and the paper needed was trouble with the Society.