Train by Pete Dexter

out into the empty lobby and caught the bus home to Darktown. Some Mexican boys got on a few blocks later, loud and full of liquor, and they looked at Train awhile, but he had the nine iron with him, and they decided he wasn’t what they was looking for after all.
     
     
The lights were out at the house and he let himself in the back door, so the dog would hear him coming. He was half deaf now, and sometimes you came in the front way and surprised him, it scared him so bad, he pissed on the floor. The dog’s nerves was already shot from being run over when Train found him, but he got worse with age, and worse again when Mayflower moved in. Sometimes now he flinched at a shadow passing over his head.
     
     
Train slipped through the screen door, closing it quietly behind him, and then turned on the kitchen light. The dog was lying in the far corner, squinting. Train leaned his nine iron against the table and opened the refrigerator, got himself some ice tea and a piece of chicken.
     
     
The dog stayed where it was. Train pulled the skin off the chicken and held it under the table, but the dog didn’t move. “Lucky?” he said, and the animal dragged his tail once or twice across the floor, but he still didn’t come. Train stood up and took the chicken skin to him. The dog picked it delicately from his fingers— Train feeling only his breath— chewed once or twice on it, and then dropped it on the floor. Train knelt down next to him and smoothed the animal’s head.
     
     
“You got to go outside?” he said. It was the dog’s habit to eat a little of whatever Train had and then take his whistle in the yard. He didn’t eat much these days; he was old and tired. “Come on, then,” Train said, and tugged gently at his collar. The animal whined a little, and Train moved behind him, got his hands underneath, and lifted him up. He held him there a moment, feeling the heart pounding against his ribs, until he was sure the dog had his feet under him, and then let him go. He walked to the back door, unlocked it and opened it up, and called him again.
     
     
The dog moved a few steps toward the open door and then stopped, seemed like he forgot how to walk. Train went back and picked him up and carried him outside. “What’s wrong with you tonight?” he said.
     
     
The animal yipped when Train set him down in the yard, and Train checked his hands for blood. It wasn’t like him to complain. Train had found the dog in the road, run over and left for dead, and carried him home, squeezing him to keep him from falling out of his arms, and the dog never made any noise at all. That was eleven years ago, and his mother said when she saw him coming up the road that day, the dog looked as big as he did. Strangely, when he remembered it, he saw it through her eyes too.
     
     
It was a small yard, enclosed in a wood-plank fence eight feet high, and there was grass back there, a curiosity in Darktown. Train had brought the seed home from the course a little at a time in his pants pocket. The dog stood still a moment, almost like he was lost, and then sniffed the ground, found a spot he liked and squatted to take his whistle. Train had never seen the dog squat before— even after he been run over— and it troubled him, the way small things were changing. The things he was losing a little at a time. He heard his mother behind him then, coming into the kitchen.
     
     
She had brushed her hair and was wrapped up in a Japanese robe Mayflower said he got in the war in Korea. Risked his life overseas and then gave her the souvenir. There was a sleep line across her face, but except for that, she was perfect. Her skin was tender, like a girl’s, and her features looked good, even when she didn’t fix herself up with lipstick and rouge.
     
     
“I heard you talking, baby,” she said. She spoke softly, not wanting to wake Mayflower up. “Thought maybe you’d brought somebody home.” Seemed like one way or another she was