Fiction from The Literary Review

Devil Dogs

Terese Svoboda

Hounds all night. Hound dogs. Each dog is a devil, someone you know. It's in the voice: I want, I want, and no fooling. That's what you say from under the covers, way under. You have been forewarned, you say.
          What about aft?
          It’s just dogs, dear, you say. That’s how dogs do it.
          We straddle and twist, we enter and triumph.
          What do they want with their hounding? The rain to stop? Two girls clad in small suits to bend over? A man in a porkpie hat, and the hat rolling off right up to the dogs’ slavering lips, right up to where they’re bawling under the branches? These hounds with their hounding come no closer all night, not one step further.
          You howl along until dawn, about three minutes off. Then it is up for a walk along the perimeter of the view we paid for, green and trees forever, howling as if you will raise your leg, as if you own it.
          After you slam the door on their howls, after you kiss that sound from my ears, after that, we hear the shot.
          Hunt is what we both agreed on, so little sinister we joke we’d be It if that’s what it takes to get the hounds to stop hounding, silent then louder and louder after that shot.
          But I thought you don’t shoot with hounds, I say, you just tree.
          Of course you shoot, you say. How else to get rid of that devilish fox?
          So the fox is the devil, not the dogs?
          If it’s someone you know, you say.
          The hounds wheel, a noise that is stereo and louder. We hear them over ourselves. You say, shaking your shaggy self away, Did you know dogs never go hoarse?
          They tire, I say. Listen now.
          I dress.
          Hmmm. The baying's lost steam but not interest, you say, raising my blousefront for a quick kiss.
          Then a man crosses the window. I don't know what dead looks like exactly but the man that he carries looks it.
          We are up in the hall, we're at the door.
          A bad accident, says the man. Could I use your phone?
          He drapes the man on the couch. The man on the couch moves his eyes but can't speak because the hole in him lies near his box. Blood takes care of the floor. I bring down sheets and twist them to him but he relaxes more, though the relaxing is sudden. The black and brown hounds, at least a few of them, come in and mill like they don't know what to do, like us.
          He calls, hangs up and goes to the window to wait. Are the hounds his? He wears nice shoes, not the hound kind. His red coat is lighter than the color of the floor.
          Tucking the sheet under the man at the couch leg, I see his eyes go out. That's how I knew they were on. I make some sounds in my throat, and you come over to where I stand and press the sheet to the hole.
          Who was he? you ask.
          He turns from the window where he is watching for help or maybe just has turned away. With the sun so strong his face looks as black as his head. No-account, he says.
          You sock him upside the head from a reflex some people have that goes wild when trouble presents itself, nothing I could have known about you, having had, in our short time together, no trouble presented.
          He doesn't pass out the way they do so well in the movies. He looks at you like you cannot understand a thing of what the world is about, let alone this man on the bed in front of us. And then he angles himself up and goes out.
          The dogs leave too, for which I am glad since one or two keep putting their paws in the blood, sticking their twitching noses too close and making their noises, their yapping.
          When the troopers show, we have to say we didn't run after him. He had all those dogs, who could miss him, and on foot like that? The troopers, three of them, triplets in the look-alike relatedness they have down here where hounds prowl, rail against us. Now we have to go in there and find him, they say.
          We are not moved.
          They look hard at the view that we've paid for to stay awake all night in front of. Then two of them sling the man over their shoulders in this hammock they make from the sheets, and then they pack him in their vehicle.
          The last one left outside the vehicle tips his head toward the trees and a portable speaker to his lips. Come on out, he says behind his portable speaker, with the pro forma voice of Excuse me and Please.
          A rotten limb falls, with its sound of a shot. The trooper doesn't start, he stands there with patience. When the man does come out, it is only a few minutes later and he is dragging the fallenlimb with him he is that upset. They don't cuff him—he throws his arms around the trooper and cries and so does the trooper, calling out his name or the name of the dead man. The dogs wag silent around them.
          This is something that happens, the trooper says to us. Then they all leave, the man in the front seat, not back with the dead and the others.

          This is no weekend murder place, demur the owners from their other-end-of-the-state office.
          Fresh sheets are coming, they promise.
          That's okay. Already we have our clothes in our bags, I say. Already the dogs are hounding us again, dog after dog after dog. They won't go but we will. We are waiting for a car to come.
          You're looking at the trees after I hang up. The fox or the hounds—which loves the tree more?
          I put my arms around you. It's not about love, I say. Each fox is dead and the dogs chase him up a tree until he knows that.
          The dogs can't help it, you say.
          You tuck your fingers in where you shouldn't. I forget the fist you made so fast, and all the rest that should draw the knowing of two people up tight, I forget and kiss you and kiss you until there’s only that kiss in the middle of a forest, a place I have to find later on my own, much later, without dogs.