Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

One dog moved its mouth clumsily just as the wind howled. I thought I heard the dog say, “Good enough.”

Terrified, I found myself on the verge of laughter.

“Good enough?” I said. “For what?”

Beyond the still forms of the dogs looking down at us, I saw clouds being blown across the sky. Pastrami, who had been keeping still inside my jacket, yapped, as though remembering that he was a dog.

It was a pain having to go down the mountain, but my friend was adamant about keeping stocked on certain things. I made up my mind to go to town for the first time in a week. When I got to the garage, Pastrami was waiting beside the car door, looking fully recovered and eager to come along.

“No, stay home,” I said. After what I’d seen last time, I thought it better to leave him behind. I drove down the mountain roads carefully, and saw that Christmas decorations were up all around town. It must be that time of year already. As I looked around, mulling over my long string of holiday-season social failures, I noticed that something was a little off.

It was people’s expressions—they seemed haggard, somehow. Some were constantly glancing behind themselves in fear. An elderly person sitting on a bench had the puffy face of someone who’d been up crying all night. There were few cars on the road, and every house had its curtains drawn. Was I imagining it? Even the overly cheerful Christmas decorations gave the impression that the town was desperately trying to avert its eyes from something upsetting.

The shop assistant in the fruit-and-vegetable section wasn’t around. Normally, I’d have been relieved, but this time it bothered me, so I asked the woman restocking the frozen foods what had happened. “Yes, that boy—he quit.” Quit? All of a sudden? The woman gave me a long look. I thought I detected wariness and irritation in her eyes and quickly walked away. For some reason, the dog food had been moved, even though the cat food was still in the same place. I thought about asking where they’d put it, but I didn’t feel like engaging that woman again.

The older man at the gas station with whom I always exchanged a few words wasn’t there, either.

“Is he not working today?” I asked the young attendant in the Santa hat as he handed me my change. I’d gotten him to put a plastic container of diesel in the trunk for me.

“Mm-hm.” He nodded ambiguously. There it was again. Each time I mentioned someone who wasn’t there, I could sense irritation rise in the townspeople’s eyes.

I was absorbed in a poster for a Christmas party—FORGET ALL YOUR TROUBLES!—when I felt the young man staring at me. “He said I could ask him if I ever needed anything. I was counting on it,” I said, almost to myself.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” said the young man, batting away the pompom on his Santa hat.

“Do you mean that? I might take you up on it.” I hoped my eagerness to get back up the mountain wasn’t showing on my face.

“Sure.” He trotted inside to the cash register to bring me a pale pink flyer. “The charges for the services are all on here, if you’d like to take it with you.”

I thanked him and rolled up the window, but one more thing was weighing on my mind. I rolled the window back down and asked offhandedly, “Do you deal with dogs?”

“Dogs?” he said. There was a pause, and he pointed at the bottom of the flyer. “You can see about dogs at the bottom there.”

I stopped for a red light outside the police station. I was contemplating the sign in large print on the noticeboard—FOR THE GOOD OF THE TOWN, THEY’VE GOT TO BE PUT DOWN—when a huge truck behind me blasted its horn.

After that, I spent most of my waking hours at my desk, because I really had to knuckle down to my work. It required bottomless reserves of concentration. Several jobs were already complete and framed, and lined up along the attic wall, but even when I looked at those, I didn’t understand in the slightest what made people want to pay so much for them. But there was no need for me to understand. The thing that mattered was that having this work let me avoid dealing with people. The thing was, the more progress I made, the more time I spent dreading when I would have to leave this place.

I was having a leisurely soak in the bath for the first time in a while, feeling good about the amount of work I’d gotten done, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a phone call in a few days. When I looked at the calendar in the kitchen, I saw it was four days past Tuesday, when he always rang. I checked the time, which was only eight at night, and decided to ring him myself. No answer. No matter how many times I tried, I didn’t even get through to the answering machine. Had something happened? He was conscientious, not like me. When he’d had appendicitis, he’d left me a message letting me know he’d be in surgery and wouldn’t be answering his phone for eight hours—that was the kind of person he was. It could be that the phone had actually rung, many times, and I’d been too engrossed in the work to notice. I checked the calendar again, and was taken aback. It was December 31!

I decided to do something about the draft from the living-room window before the arrival of the new year. I got some putty and pressed it into the window frame. Then I noticed the pale pink flyer on the floor beneath the coat rack. I sat down on the sofa with the dogs and looked through the list of services available, just in case. The prices seemed a little high, but I could see myself calling them in an emergency. There was no entry for “Retrieval of animals in wells,” although there was one for “Recovery of dead birds in chimneys.” Farther down, the item “Dog walking” had been heavily crossed out. I recalled the exchange with the young man at the gas station. The last item on the list was even more mysterious.

“Extermination of dogs.”

Perhaps they meant feral dogs, I thought as I stroked the heads of the white dogs. But surely that sort of thing would normally be left to the public health department. I suddenly remembered the strange snow tools, like big sharp forks, that I’d seen propped beside the winter tires at the gas station. What could they have been for? The dog I was petting pricked up its ears, barked menacingly, and leapt onto the flyer, ripping it to shreds. “Stop it!” I said, but then the other dogs caught the scent of the paper and, crouching down ready to pounce, started howling and growling as if they’d gone mad. Yap yap, yap yap yap!

I calmed them down, got up from the sofa, and thought about ringing him again. But for some reason, I already knew he wouldn’t answer, and instead I dialed the number for my parents’ place, for the first time in a long time. No one picked up, despite it being New Year’s Eve. Just to make sure, I tried the police. No response. The fire department. No response. I dialed every number I could think of, but all I heard was the phone ringing, over and over.

I got my jacket from the coat rack, and with car keys in hand headed to the garage. The dogs followed and tried to get in the car. I told them I was just going down to have a look around the town, but this didn’t satisfy them.

You want to come too?

Yap yap!

But I can’t take all of you!

Yap yap yap! The dogs went on barking as if they were broken.

It took an hour to walk down to the foot of the mountain, white dogs in tow. When I got there the town was deserted.

There were still Christmas decorations everywhere. I heard pet dogs crying from inside their houses, so I pried open the doors and let them loose, but the white dogs didn’t respond to them in the slightest. The newly freed dogs ran off in a flash, as if to get away from the white dogs as quickly as they could.