Last Night - James Salter [12]
Walking slowly, aware of how brazen she was, she went toward the house. Her urge was to look in the windows, no more than that. Still, despite the silence, the complete stillness, that was forbidden.
She walked farther. Suddenly someone rose from the side porch. She was unable to utter a sound or move.
It was a dog, a huge dog higher than her waist, coming toward her, yellow-eyed. She had always been afraid of dogs, the Alsatian that had unexpectedly turned on her college roommate and torn off a piece of her scalp. The size of this one, its lowered head and slow, deliberate stride.
Do not show fear, she knew that. Carefully she moved the bicycle so that it was between them. The dog stopped a few feet away, its eyes directly on her, the sun along its back. She did not know what to expect, a sudden short rush.
— Good boy, she said. It was all she could think of. Good boy.
Moving cautiously, she began wheeling the bicycle toward the road, turning her head away slightly so as to appear unworried. Her legs felt naked, the bare calves. They would be ripped open as if by a scythe. The dog was following her, its shoulders moving smoothly, like a kind of machine. Somehow finding the courage, she tried to ride. The front wheel wavered. The dog, high as the handlebars, came nearer.
— No, she cried. No!
After a moment or two, obediently, he slowed or veered off. He was gone.
She rode as if freed, as if flying through blocks of sunlight and high, solemn tunnels of trees. And then she saw him again. He was following—not exactly following, since he was some distance ahead. He seemed to float along in the fields, which were burning in the midday sun, on fire. She turned onto her own road. There he came. He fell in behind her. She could hear the clatter of his nails like falling stones. She looked back. He was trotting awkwardly, like a big man running in the rain. A line of spittle trailed from his jaw. When she reached her house he had disappeared.
THAT NIGHT in a cotton robe she was preparing for bed, cleaning her face, the bathroom door ajar. She brushed her hair with many rapid strokes.
— Tired? her husband asked as she emerged.
It was his way of introducing the subject.
— No, she said.
So there they were in the summer night with the far-off sound of the sea. Among the things her husband admired that Ardis possessed was extraordinary skin, luminous and smooth, a skin so pure that to touch it would make one tremble.
— Wait, she whispered, —not so fast.
Afterward he lay back without a word, already falling into deepest sleep, much too soon. She touched his shoulder. She heard something outside the window.
— Did you hear that?
— No, what? he said drowsily.
She waited. There was nothing. It had seemed faint, like a sigh.
The next morning she said,
— Oh! There, just beneath the trees, the dog lay. She could see his ears—they were small ears dashed with white.
— What is it? her husband asked.
— Nothing, she said. A dog. It followed me yesterday.
— From where? he said, coming to see.
— Down the road. I think it might be that man’s. Brennan’s.
— Brennan?
— I passed his house, she said, and afterward it was following me.
— What were you doing at Brennan’s?
— Nothing. I was passing. He’s not even there.
— What do you mean, he’s not there?
— I don’t know. Somebody said that.
He went to the door and opened it. The dog—it was a deerhound—had been lying with its forelegs stretched out in front like a sphinx, its haunches round and high. Awkwardly it rose and after a moment moved, reluctantly it seemed, wandering slowly across the fields, never looking back.
In the evening they went to a party on Mecox Road. Far out toward Montauk, winds were sweeping the coast. The waves exploded in clouds of spray. Ardis was talking to a woman not much older than herself, whose husband had just died of a brain tumor at the age of forty. He had diagnosed it himself, the woman said. He’d been sitting in a theater when