The Last of the Winnebagos

“No kidding. The very last one.” No kidding. She was being kept in isolation at the Society’s research facility in St. Louis when I saw her. I had talked them into letting me shoot her, but it had to be from outside the quarantine area. The picture had an unfocused look that came from shooting it through a wire mesh—reinforced window in the door, but I wouldn’t have done any better if they’d let me inside. Misha was past having any expression to photograph. She hadn’t eaten in a week at that point. She lay with her head on her paws, staring at the door, the whole time I was there.

“You wouldn’t consider selling this picture to the Society, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

He nodded understandingly. “I guess people were pretty upset when she died.”

Pretty upset. They had turned on anyone who had anything to do with it—the puppy mill owners, the scientists who hadn’t come up with a vaccine, Misha’s vet— and a lot of others who hadn’t. And they had handed over their civil rights to a bunch of jackals who were able to grab them because everybody felt so guilty. Pretty upset.

“What’s this one?” Segura asked. He had already moved on to the picture next to it. “It’s General Patton’s bull terrier Willie.” They fed and cleaned up after Misha with those robot arms they used to use in the nuclear plants. Her owner, a tired-looking woman, was allowed to watch her through the wire-mesh window but had to stay off to the side because Misha flung herself barking against the door whenever she saw her.

“You should make them let you in,” I had told her. “It’s cruel to keep her locked up like that. You should make them let you take her back home.”

“And let her get the newparvo?” she said. There was nobody left for Misha to get the newparvo from, but I didn’t say that. I set the right readings on the camera, trying not to lean into Misha’s line of vision. “You know what killed them, don’t you?” she said. “The ozone layer. All those holes. The radiation got in and caused it.”

It was the communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren’t guilty at all.

“This one here looks kind of like a jackal,” Segura said. He was looking at a picture I had taken of a German shepherd after Aberfan died. “Dogs were a lot like jackals, weren’t they?”

“No,” I said, and sat down on the shelf in front of the developer’s screen, across from Hunter. “I already told you everything I know about the jackal. I saw it lying in the road, and I called you.”

“You said when you saw the jackal it was in the far right lane,” Hunter said.

“That’s right.”

“And you were in the far left lane?”

“I was in the far left lane.”

They were going to take me over my story, point by point, and when I couldn’t remember what I’d said before, they were going to say, “Are you sure that’s what you saw, Mr. McCombe? Are you sure you didn’t see the jackal get hit? Katherine Powell hit it, didn’t she?” “You told us this morning you stopped, but the jackal was already dead. Is that right?” Hunter asked.

“No,” I said.

Segura looked up. Hunter touched his hand casually to his pocket and then brought it back to his knee, turning on the taper.

“I didn’t stop for about a mile. Then I backed up and looked at it, but it was dead. There was blood coming out of its mouth.”

Hunter didn’t say anything. He kept his hands on his knees and waited—an old journalist’s trick, if you wait long enough, they’ll say something they didn’t intend to, just to fill the silence.

’The jackal’s body was at a peculiar angle,” I said, right on cue. “The way it was lying, it didn’t look like a jackal. I thought it was a dog.” I waited till the silence got uncomfortable again. “It brought back a lot of terrible memories,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking. I just wanted to get away from it. After a few minutes I realized I should have called the Society, and I stopped at the 7-Eleven.”

I waited again, till Segura began to shoot uncomfortable glances at Hunter, and then started in again. “I thought I’d be okay, that I could go ahead and work, but after I got to my first shoot, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, so I came home.” Candor. Openness. If the Amblers can do it, so can you. “I guess I was still in shock or something. I didn’t even call my boss and have her get somebody to cover the governor’s conference. All I could think about was—” I stopped and rubbed my hand across my face. “I needed to talk to somebody. I had the paper look up an old friend of mine, Katherine Powell.” I stopped, I hoped this time for good. I had admitted lying to them and confessed to two crimes: leaving the scene of the accident and using press access to get a lifeline for personal use, and maybe that would be enough to satisfy them. I didn’t want to say anything about going out to see Katie. They would know she would have told me about their visit and decide this confession was an attempt to get her off, and maybe they’d been watching the house and knew it anyway, and this was all wasted effort.