Last Days of the Dog-Men by Brad Watson Page A

closed both eyes to sleep as the molten sun boiled up, cyclopic, from the water.

A BLESSING
    T HAT AFTERNOON HER HUSBAND DROVE THEM OUT the old Birmingham highway in the wagon, a 1985 Ford LTD Country Squire he’d bought on a lark in these, the latter days of what she called her great gestation. It was a big, safe car. He drove slowly as always, taking it easy, never straining the wagon’s enormous transmission. The car sailed over humps in the road like a yacht over swells in the ocean, and plowed into low-lying dips with a grave and leveling balanced distribution of load.
    They sat on the broad front seat as small as children, as if their feet weren’t actually touching the floor. The car’s long, broad interior even made her feel small, with her swollen middle and engorged, stretch-marked, leaky sacs—once girlish breasts she could cupin her palms. Sitting there, she felt like a penitent, pregnant twelve-year-old on an outing with her dad.
    After a few miles her husband turned on the wagon’s left blinker, looked in the rearview mirror, checked once over his left shoulder, and turned, releasing a convoy of impatient vehicles gathered behind him. In her visor’s vanity mirror she caught flashes of the angry faces of drivers who watched the Ford mosey off down the little blacktop road.
    It was getting toward late afternoon, the sun dropping in the sky and yellowing in the haze. On the left appeared a lush, rolling pasture where two piebald horses grazed in the shade of a grove and flicked their tails at horseflies.
    â€œOh, look,” she said. “Pintos. Let’s stop, just for a minute.” She’d ridden horses as a girl, and hoped she would again someday, with their child. Her husband eased the wagon onto the shoulder and came around to help her get out. He held her by the arm while she steadied her legs and rolled her weight from the ball of one swollen foot to another, over to the barbed-wire fence. The wire was rusty. They didn’t touch it or try to cross it into the pasture. He whistled a couple of times for the ponies, who looked up from grazing to gaze at them briefly. The smaller one toggled its ears in their direction, and then both bent back down to the sweet-looking grass.
    â€œI wish we had an apple or something,” she said.
    â€œWe’d better get on,” he said. “We’ll be late.”
    She lingered a moment. “It’s a good omen,” she said, “seeing the ponies.”
    Omens weren’t as important to him as to her, she knew, but he was not unaffected by them. Once, after a breakup, she saw an early star right next to the moon, which was full and distinct as a white communion wafer she might reach up, take, and place upon her tongue. She hadn’t taken communion since she was a girl. It had been a very good sign.
    He helped her back to the car, and they drove on down the road to a T intersection, where he turned right onto a bumpy lane pocked with potholes and ragged on the edges, as if it had been ripped from the middle of a better road and patched with surplus asphalt. The car jolted and rattled over a washed-out stretch. He slowed even more and looked over at her. She put both hands on her middle as if to steady it.
    â€œI’m okay,” she said, patting herself. “Good shocks.”
    They descended into a wooded ravine and crossed a small bridge over a creek. The water rushed beneath them over what looked like slate and plunged into a lower cut off to their left, disappearing into the thick, intertwined foliage of the woods. She wondered at what sort of wildlife crept in there, what strange small animals. Manimals, she’d called animals when she was a toddler. She’d had a sonogram a couple of months back, and was awed and a little frightened by the baby’s alien image on the screen, its wide dark eye sockets and oddly reptilian attitude in the womb. In some ways it was like the grainy, negative