gaze took in the car, your ears had picked up the roaring of its engine. Then the car itself entered your field of vision. It was an expensive car: a Jaguar. The first sports car on the island. The driver, and owner, was a thirty-seven-year-old man who had made it big in the United Arab Emirates. He had paid for the car in US dollars and brought it ashore the day before, and now he was driving it in as flamboyant a manner as possible, showing off. Right now, he was pushing seventy miles per hour. Driving like a nut. You saw what was coming. Those three dogs were about to be run over. The father and his children. Three dogs, just like you.
Suddenly you were up and running.
Your premonition was confirmed by a noise. A shift in the sound of the engine. A sudden slamming of the brakes.
Something was moving you. CH…you were thinking. CH…CHILDREN!
The father was hit. So was one of the puppies. The two dogs were thrown together six feet into the air. The third dog was dangling by his neck from your mouth. You were on the far side of the road; you had run, and you had made it. You had…you had saved the puppy. You had been taught how to survive on a battlefield. You had almost been sent to the front lines in Southeast Asia, to fight the Vietcong. You had been awarded two medals for your outstanding service as a military dog: a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. The puppy you saved was smaller than his dad, but at six months old he was heavy enough. But you had saved him. An instant later, he would have been dead meat.
You shuddered. Somewhere inside, Goodnight, you were barking your pride.
There on the far side of the road, you set the puppy on the ground.
He was less a puppy, really, than a young dog. He was an odd-looking thing. His coat was brown, but he had six thin black stripes on one side and a black spot on his haunch. He looked a bit like a guitar. He was paralyzed with fear by the sudden catastrophe. But then he started walking. Gingerly, unsteadily. His father’s body, and his brother’s, lay sprawled on the asphalt. The Jaguar was long gone, of course. The driver didn’t hang around to pay his respects to the two dogs he had killed. He didn’t come to apologize to the child he had orphaned. Soon enough the dogs’ owner and his bodyguard would track him down and beat him half to death. But that was still several hours off. The time for that hadn’t yet arrived.
Right now, it was just the young dog who looked like a guitar peering down at two dead bodies. Tragedy. Trickling blood. It had happened so suddenly, this…death. The shock of it. The guitar dog had been through this once before. Only this time around, the number of dead had increased—doubled. This time it wasn’t just one dog stretched out on the ground, it was one plus one. It was two.
He backed away.
He sensed that he was losing them. He was scared. Terrified. He was being pushed back to his earliest memory, his first experience of fear.
He stepped back off the road. Onto the ground.
And there you were. You, Goodnight, were waiting. As the guitar dog backed away step by step from the bodies, he pushed slowly up against your warm body. Your fur was short, and under it was your skin. It was warm. Soft. The young dog was afraid of things that were cold and hard. And there you were.
He collapsed into you. Bam, just like that. He cuddled desperately against you. He needed to feel safe…truly safe. He nuzzled for your teats. He had responded in the same way to his mother’s body, but this time the infantile impulse was even stronger. You had teats. Five pairs of them, ten in all. They had never produced milk. But as he moved from the first to the second, the third, the fourth…each teat he tried exuded warmth. Living warmth.
So he pressed desperately against you and kept sucking.
And you understood.
I’M A MOTHER.
You felt it.
I’M SUCKLING HIM. HE IS MY CHILD.
Destiny was doing its work, and you were confused, you were reconstructing your memory. You had given birth to this child with the guitar-like stripes—he was yours. That was how you remembered it now. And so you told him: GO ON, SUCK. You gazed