Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

Usually it was the life of Riley, but somehow it wasn’t enough in this place. We’d get about half-oiled and work up a promising argument about what was wrong with the world. Then, just when we’d got life looking its screwball funniest with our arguments one or the other of us would look out the window and see Joey Pond in his wheelchair, waiting for a one-eyed dog named Charlie to come trotting home across the palmetto flats. He was always there, day or night, until his mother came home from work and rolled him inside.

It wasn’t right or natural for a kid to wait like that for anything and it worried me. I even offered once to buy the kid another mutt but Ethel Pond told me quick to mind my own business. Doc explained that the kid didn’t want another mutt because he had what Doc called a psychological block.

“Charlie was more than just a dog to him,” Doc said. “He was a sort of symbol because he offered the kid two things that no one else in the world could—security and independence. With Charlie keeping him company he felt secure, and he was independent of the kids who could run and play because he had Charlie to play with. If he took another dog now he’d be giving up more than Charlie. He’d be giving up everything that Charlie had meant to him, then there wouldn’t be any point in living.”

I could see it when Doc put it that way. The dog had spent more time with Joey than Ethel had, and the kid felt as safe with him as he’d have been with a platoon of Marines. And Charlie, being a one-man dog, had depended on Joey for the affection he wouldn’t take from anybody else. The dog needed Joey and Joey needed him. Together, they’d been a natural.

At first I thought it was funny that Joey never complained or cried when Charlie didn’t come home, but Doc explained that it was all a part of this psychological block business. If Joey cried he’d be admitting that Charlie was lost. So he waited and watched, secure in his belief that Charlie would return.

The Ponds got used to Doc and me being around, but they never got what you’d call intimate. Joey would laugh at some of the droll things Doc said, but his eyes always went back to the palmetto flats and the highway, looking for Charlie. And he never let anything interfere with his routine.

That routine started every morning when old man Cloehessey, the postman, pedaled his bicycle out from Twin Palms to leave a handful of mail for the trailer-court tenants. Cloehessey would always make it a point to ride back by way of the Pond trailer and Joey would stop him and ask if he’s seen anything of a one-eyed dog on his route that day.

Old Cloehessey would lean on his bike and take off his sun helmet and mop his bald scalp, scowling while he pretended to think.

Then he’d say, “Not today, Joey,” or, “Thought so yesterday, but this fellow had two eyes on him. ‘Twasn’t Charlie.”

Then he’d pedal away, shaking his head. Later on the handyman would come around to swap sanitary tanks under the trailers and Joey would ask him the same question. Once a month the power company sent out a man to read the electric meters and he was part of Joey’s routine too.

It was hard on Ethel. Sometimes the kid would dream at night that Charlie had come home and was scratching at the trailer ramp to be let in, and he’d wake Ethel and beg her to go out and see. When that happened Doc and I could hear Ethel talking to him, low and steady, until all hours of the morning, and when he finally went back to sleep we’d hear her open the cupboard and take out the gin bottle.

But there came a night that was more than Ethel could take, a night that changed Joey’s routine and a lot more with it. It left a mark you’ve seen yourself—everybody has that’s got eyes to see—though you never knew what made it. Nobody ever knew that but Joey and Ethel Pond and Doc and me.

Doc and I were turning in around midnight that night when the kid sang out next door. We heard Ethel get up and go to him, and we got up too and opened a beer because we knew neither of us would sleep any more till she got Joey quiet again. But this night was different. Ethel hadn’t talked to the kid long when he yelled, “Charlie! Charlie!” and after that we heard both of them bawling.

A little later Ethel came out into the moonlight and shut the trailer door behind her. She looked rumpled and beaten, her hair straggling damply on her shoulders and her eyes puffed and red from crying. The gin she’d had hadn’t helped any either.

She stood for a while without moving, then she looked up at the sky and said something I’m not likely to forget.

“Why couldn’t You give the kid a break?” she said, not railing or anything but loud enough for us to hear. “You, up there—what’s another lousy one-eyed mutt to You?”

Doc and I looked at each other in the half-dark of our own trailer. “She’s done it, Roy,” Doc said.

I knew what he meant and wished I didn’t. Ethel had finally told the kid that Charlie wasn’t coming back, not ever.

That’s why I was worried about Joey when I came home the next evening and found him watching the sky instead of the palmetto flats. It meant he’d given up waiting for Charlie. And the quiet way the kid spoke of moving the stars around worried me more, because it sounded outright crazy.

Not that you could blame him for going off his head. It was tough enough to be pinned to a wheelchair without being able to wiggle so much as a toe. But to lose his dog in the bargain….

I was on my third beer when Doc Shull rolled in with a big package under his arm. Doc was stone sober, which surprised me, and he was hot and tired from a shopping trip to Tampa, which surprised me more. It was when he ripped the paper off his package, though, that I thought he’d lost his mind.

“Books for Joey,” Doc said. “Ethel and I agreed this morning that the boy needs another interest to occupy his time now, and since he can’t go to school I’m going to teach him here.”

He went on to explain that Ethel hadn’t had the heart the night before, desperate as she was, to tell the kid the whole truth. She’d told him instead, quoting an imaginary customer at the Sea Shell Diner, that a tourist car with Michigan license plates had picked Charlie up on the highway and taken him away. It was a good enough story. Joey still didn’t know that Charlie was dead, but his waiting was over because no dog could be expected to find his way home from Michigan.

“We’ve got to give the boy another interest,” Doc said, putting away the books and puncturing another beer can. “Joey has a remarkable talent for concentration—most handicapped children have—that could be the end of him if it isn’t diverted into safe channels.”

I thought the kid had cracked up already and said so.

“Moving stars?” Doc said when I told him. “Good Lord, Roy—”

Ethel Pond knocked just then, interrupting him. She came in and had a beer with us and talked to Doc about his plan for educating Joey at home. But she couldn’t tell us anything more about the kid’s new fixation than we already knew. When she asked him why he stared up at the sky like that he’d say only that he wants something to remember Charlie by.

It was about nine o’clock, when Ethel went home to cook supper. Doc and I knocked off our cribbage game and went outside with our folding chairs to get some air. It was then that the first star moved.

It moved all of a sudden, the way any shooting star does, and shot across the sky in a curving, blue-white streak of fire. I didn’t pay much attention, but Doc nearly choked on his beer.

“Roy,” he said, “that was Sirius! It moved!”

I didn’t see anything serious about it and said so. You can see a dozen or so stars zip across the sky on any clear night if you’re in the mood to look up.