F. Paul Wilson: The Touch

He pulled on a dark sweater, slipped the naked blade through a loop in his overalls, and reached for the doorknob. Phemus was there in a flash, his nose to the door crack, growling.

Ba knelt down beside the animal.

"You'd die for her, too, wouldn't you, dog?" he said in his village dialect.

He remembered the day the Missus had found Phemus as if it were yesterday. He had been driving her back from the city and had taken a local route to avoid a tie-up on the Long Island Expressway. Suddenly the Missus had called to him to stop. As he pulled into the curb he saw why: A group of four boys in their early teens was chasing a limping, emaciated dog down the sidewalk, pelting it with rocks as it fled before them. Suddenly it stumbled and they were upon it, shouting as they surrounded it and kicked it repeatedly.

Before Ba knew it, the Missus was out of the car and running toward the group. She reached them just as one of the boys raised a heavy stone high over his head, ready to smash it down on the weak, exhausted creature. The Missus charged in and hurled him aside with a violent shove. The boy lost his balance and fell, but immediately leaped up at her, his fists raised, rage in his face. But Ba was approaching then. He looked at the boy and wished him death for even so much as considering the idea of striking the Missus. The boy must have read something of that wish in Ba's face, for he spun and ran. His friends quickly followed on his heels.

The Missus hovered over the panting dog and gently stroked the ridges of his heaving ribs. She picked him up and turned toward the car. Ba offered to take the dog for her but she told him to drive directly to the vet's.

In his mind's eye he could still see her in the rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat with the dog on her lap, unmindful of the blood that oozed onto her expensive dress and the velvet upholstery. The dog had the strength to lick her hand once and she had smiled.

On the way to the veterinary clinic, she had told him of people who moved away and simply abandoned their pets, leaving a faithful animal sitting at the back door of an empty house, waiting for days to be let in. Finally, when hunger and thirst got to be too much, the creature would take to th streets, ill-equipped to fend for itself after a lifetime as a house pet.

At the vet's they learned that the dog had a broken rear leg, three broken ribs, and a left eye that had been punctured by a stick.

Better to kill a dog and eat it rather than treat it so , Ba had thought.

The dog's bones healed, but the eye was permanently damaged. The Missus named him Polyphemus—a name Ba did not understand—and he had been a member of the household for five years.

"Not tonight," Ba told the dog as it tried to follow him out the door. "You've too gentle a heart. It might betray you."

He closed the door on Phemus' whines and barks and made his way down to the garage and out the side door to the grounds.

A half-moon was rising over the water. Ba kept to the shadows of the ground-brushing willows along the rim of the property until he could duck across a small area of lawn to the foundation plantings around the house. Quickly and quietly, he made his way through the shrubbery.

He found them on the west side. They already had one of the casement windows pried open and one of the pair was supporting the other as he climbed in.

Ba spoke from behind a rhododendron.

"The Missus does not want you here. Leave!"

The one up at the window dropped down and faced the spot where Ba was hiding. Ba recognized him then as the one he had frightened away the other night.

"It's the gook again!" the shorter one said. Two knives suddenly gleamed in the moonlight.

"Get him!"

___3.___

Sylvia Nash

"Ba?"

Where is he ? Sylvia wondered as she scanned the backyard from her work area off the hothouse that served as her arboretum. He almost invariably started off each day watering the trees in the hothouse. But the trays under the pots were dry and he was nowhere in sight.

Strains from Vivaldi, left on the stereo since last night, filled the air. Sylvia put down the chopsticks she had been using to loosen the soil around the ezo spruce bonsai before her and brushed her hands. The ishi-zuki was ready for transplanting and she needed someone to help her. The tree's new Fukuroshiki pot was layered with stone and soil and waiting for the tree. All that was missing was Ba.

Normally she would de-pot and transplant a tree by herself, laying it on its side, pruning the longer, heavier roots, then replacing it in its pot after freshening the soil. But the ishi-zuki was special. She had spent too many years working, watching, and waiting while she trained the roots of this little tree to grow over and around the rock upon which it sat to jeopardize it by trying to transplant it without assistance. If the stone fell free of the roots, she'd never forgive herself.

"Gladys?" she called. "Have you seen Ba?"

"Not this morning, ma'am," the maid answered from the kitchen.

"Come on, Mess," she said to the cat curled up in the sun by the door. "Let's go find Ba."

The cat raised its head and looked at her for a moment through slit eyes, then went back to dozing. Mess didn't like to move much. She had grown fat and lazy since the day Sylvia found her as a kitten and brought her home. Someone had bundled her and her four siblings into a trash can bag and dumped them in the middle of the road in front of Toad Hall. Mess, the only survivor after the bag had been run over by a number of cars, had truly been a mess when Sylvia had freed her—shaking, terrified, splattered with the blood of her brothers and sisters. To this day she would not go near the road.

Sylvia picked up her cup of coffee and walked out into the back. The forsythia were in full bloom, splashing buttercup yellow here and there around the awakening yard. Beyond the greening lawn was a narrow strip of sand; beyond that was the Long Island Sound, lapping high at the dock. Far on the other side lay Connecticut's south shore. A breeze blew the briny smell of the water across the yard and sighed through the willows that ringed the property. That sound—the wind in the willows—and the sight of this old, three-storied house looking like it had been transplanted whole from a Georgia riverbank had left her no choice but to buy the place and name it Toad Hall.

As she neared Jeffy's fenced-in play area, she saw two mallards standing before him, quacking softly. He used to feed the ducks, laughing like a little madman as they chased the bits of stale bread he threw to them. This pair probably thought he was the same old Jeffy. But he wasn't. He ignored them.

The ducks flew off at her approach. She thought she saw Jeffy's lips moving and she rushed over to him. But she heard nothing. He was still squatting in the grass, still rocking back and forth endlessly, totally absorbed in the bright yellow of the dandelion he had found in the grass.

"How's it going, Jeffy?"

The child continued to stare into the flower as if he had found the secrets of the universe there.

Sylvia pulled a box of Nerds from her smock pocket and squatted beside him. She had found Nerds the most suitable for her purposes because they released their flavor instantaneously and were not filling. She pinched one of the tiny candies at the tip of her thumb and forefinger and held it ready.

"Jeffy!" she said, pronouncing his name in a crisp, sharp tone. " Jeffy !"

His head turned a degree or two in her direction. At the first increment of motion, her hand darted out with an accuracy born of years of experience and pressed the Nerd between his lips. As he bit into it, she called his name again in an attempt to get him to turn a few more degrees her way.