Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

There were among the men a number of theories to account for this or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to account for Joe. Joe was a favorite with all the men, liked even by those who liked no one else, of which, as the winter night dragged on, there came to be more than a few. His sleight-of-hand and magic tricks were endlessly renewable sources of entertainment, particularly to the simpler-minded at Kelvinator Station. He was reliable, adept, resourceful, and industrious, but his accented and oddly skewed language softened the edges of his evident competence, the latter a quality that, in the other talented men of Kelvinator, could take on an aggressive, antagonistic sharpness. Furthermore, it was known, though Joe had said little about it, that he had, in some ways, a more personal stake than any of them in the outcome of the war. He was in many ways the man of mystery among them. Those who had known him since training days at Greenland Station spread the word that he never read his mail, that in his footlocker was a stack of unopened letters three inches thick. To men for whom correspondence was a kind of addiction, this made him the object of considerable awe.

Some said that Joe's weakness at Lupe Velez was due to his incomplete grasp of English, though the obvious rebuttal here was that several of the native speakers were considerably worse off in this regard than Joe. Others blamed the remote, dreamy aspect of his personality, as obvious to them as it had been to any of his friends in New York, even here in a place against which, it might be imagined, any lesser remoteness ought to have sunk into low relief. Then there were those who claimed that he just preferred the company of dogs. There was something to all of these explanations, though the last was the sole one that Joe would admit to.

He was generally fond of the dogs, but the one he had true feelings for was Oyster. Oyster was a gray-brown mongrel with the thick coat of an Eskimo dog, large ears inclined to undistinguished flopping, and a stout, baffled expression that suggested, said the dog men, a recent influence of Saint Bernard in his bloodlines. Earlier mistreatment with the lash during his first career in Alaska had blinded his left eye, leaving it the milky blue-white pearl that gave him his name. The very first time that Joe had been condemned to Dog-town for the night by a loss at Lupe Velez, he had noticed Oyster, way down in his niche at the very end of the sparkling tunnel, seeming to beckon to him, sitting up and laying his ears back in a pitiful way. The dogs were all desperately lonely for human companionship (they seemed to despise one another). But Joe had chosen to lie alone that night in a small bare patch at the door to a storeroom, away from the perpetual growling and muttering of the dogs.

Then, in mid-March, a food cache that they had neglected to get into the storehouse had been lost in the first great blizzard of the winter. Joe pitched in to help find it. He went on skis, for only the third time in his life, and soon was separated from the others in the party out searching for the lost ton of food. A sudden wind blew up, suspending him in an impenetrable gauze of snow dust. Blind and frantic, he had skied into a haycock and fallen, with a sound of chimes and splintering rafters, through the ice. It was Oyster, driven by ancestral Bernardine impulses, who had found him. After that, Joe and Oyster had become semiregular bedmates, according to the vagaries of Lupe Velez. Even when he slept in his bunk, Joe visited Oyster every day, bringing him hunks of bacon and ham and the dried apricots to which the dog was partial. Apart from the two dog men, Casper and Houk, who viewed the dogs as a coach viewed his linemen, as Diaghilev his corps, as Satan his devils, Joe was the only denizen of Kelvinator Station who did not find the animals merely an ill-smelling, loud, and perpetual source of annoyance.

It was only because he had lost so often at Lupe Velez and had, as a consequence, slept with the dog so many times, that Joe became aware, even deep in his own poisoned sleep, of an alteration in the usual pattern of Oyster's breathing.

The change, an absence of the dog's usual low, steady, grumbling wheeze, disturbed him. He stirred and woke just enough to become aware of an unfamiliar buzzing sound, faint and steady, in the dog tunnel. It droned on comfortingly for some time, and in his groggy state, Joe very nearly fell back into a slumber that undoubtedly would have been final. He sat up, slowly, on one arm. He could not seem to focus his thoughts, as if a gauzy curtain of snow dust hung and floated across the inside of his skull. He could not see very well, either, and he blinked and rubbed his eyes. After a moment it occurred to him that the sudden motion of his sitting up ought to have awakened at least his bedmate, who was always finely attuned to the least of Joe's movements; and yet Oyster slept on, silent, the rise and fall of his grizzled flank shallow and slow. That was when Joe realized that the buzz he had been contentedly listening to in the warmth of his sleeping bag for who knew how long was the chilly hum of the electric lights that were strung at intervals along the tunnels. It was a sound he had never heard, not once, in all his nights in Dog-town, because the ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs drowned it out. But now Dog-town was completely silent.

He reached out and slapped Oyster, gently, on the back of his head, then poked a finger into the soft flesh where his left foreleg met his body. The dog stirred, and Joe thought he might have whimpered softly, but he did not raise his head. His limbs were slack. Joe, feeling very wobbly, crawled out of the crate and went on his hands and knees across the tunnel to check on Forrestal, Casper's pure-breed malamute, who had succeeded lost Stengel as Dog Ring. He saw now why rubbing his eyes had done no good: the tunnel was full of fog, curling and billowing down from the Main Stem. Forrestal did not respond at all when Joe patted him, or poked him, or shook him hard, once. Joe lowered his ear to the animal's chest. There was no discernible heartbeat.

Quickly, now, Joe unhooked Oyster's collar from the chain whose other end was bolted into the wooden crate, picked up the dog, and carried him down the tunnel toward the Main Stem. He felt as if he was going to vomit, but he didn't know whether this was because there was something the matter with him, something that was going to kill him, too, or merely because to get to the end of the tunnel he had to walk past seventeen dogs lying dead in their carved-out niches. He was not thinking very clearly at all.

The Dog-town tunnel ran at right angles to the central tunnel of Kelvinator Station, and directly across from its mouth was the door of the Waldorf. The original plans had called for Dog-town to lie at some distance from the men's quarters, but they had run out of time here, too, and so been forced to shelter the dogs right at their doorstep, as it were, in a tunnel that had originally been dug for food storage. This door was supposed to be kept closed, to prevent the precious warmth of the stove fom escaping the sleeping quarters, but as he approached it, struggling along with eighty-five pounds of dying dog in his arms, Joe saw that it stood open a few inches, prevented from closing by one of his own socks, which he must have dropped on his way out to Dog-town. He had been folding his clothes on his bunk that evening, as he later reconstructed, and the sock must have clung to his bedroll. A warm, flatulent breath of beer and unwashed woolen underwear came sighing into the tunnel from the Waldorf, melting the ice, filling the tunnel with ghostly clouds of condensation. Joe nudged the door open with his foot and stepped into the room. The air seemed unnaturally stuffy and far too warm, and as he stood there, listening for the usual congested snuffling of the men, his dizziness increased. The weight of the dog in his arms grew intolerable. Oyster fell from his arms and hit the plank floor with a thud. The sound made Joe gag. He stumbled to his left, wildly veering to avoid touching any of the bunks he walked between or the men lying in them, toward the light switch. No one protested or rolled away from the blaze of light.