The Dog (27 page)

“Underneath,” she said. Their friends took his body and lifted it while Meifang spread the blanket on the cold road beneath him. They laid him down on it, and she brought up the sides of the blanket to cover his arms. Po draped the second blanket over his son's body.

The farmers lifted him up and carried him slowly toward the crowd, which again parted to let them through. The bus driver who'd stopped first had cranked up his engine and turned on the lights so they could see where to go. They processed toward the Tongs' vehicle and laid the body in the back. Meifang climbed in beside him and sat down on a wheel well, her hand on his chest. Po climbed up into the seat and started the engine. They had one motorcycle-style light attached to the front, but it was enough. Po knew the road with his eyes closed, and he released the brake and executed a tight loop in the switchback, then pointed up the road toward their house. The banging of the two-stroke echoed over the valley.

A PSB climbed up into the Russian troop transport's cab and another couple of officers wrestled the bicycle out from beneath its front axle. They tossed the mangled frame into the scrub on the side of the road and climbed in on the other side. Gears grinding, it headed down the mountain to the station, followed by the PSB sedan.

The crowd dispersed to their buses and trucks. The first bus, already warmed up, roared off, followed by the scrap metal and the concrete trucks. The third truck and the minivan pulled away as the last passenger boarded the second bus, where the track-suited driver was priming the engine, praying the thing would start. When he turned the key and pressed the starter, the engine chugged, caught, then chugged some more. He could hear the belts rasping, the fan blades cutting the cold air around the block. The lights dimmed and flickered with each revolution of the crankshaft. He took his finger off the starter. The bus was quiet except for the creaking of the passengers' seats as they settled in the cold. It was dark outside, dark inside. The only lights were far down in the valley, pinpricks in a black sheet. He tried again. The engine chugged, then caught, and roared as he gave it the gas. He let it run for a while, warming its bones, revving the engine every so often, before depressing the clutch and pushing the gearshift. It knocked back, shuddering in his hand, but he waited for a gap and pushed it forward again. The bus fell into gear and he released the clutch, gassing it up, giving it what it wanted, letting it strain against the brake before lifting his foot, the bus then groaning forward, toward the bend in the road, its tires breaking loose the frost that had settled in their treads. He cranked the wheel around the switchback's arc, over the dark stain on the pavement, meaning to look down to make sure he didn't guide the tires directly through it, spreading the poor man's blood all over the road, but he looked too late and couldn't be sure that he hadn't. He checked his watch, raising the luminous dial right up to his nose. Behind schedule, and three more stops before he'd be able to sleep. He could make it up on the backside of the mountain. Once they'd crested the pass, he could really open it up and let it run.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Sean McDonald for his gentle ministrations; to Courtney Hodell for spotting this book when it was only a speck on the horizon and for guiding it into port; to Anna Stein; to Antoine Wilson, Brigid Hughes, Ben Howe, and Lysley Tenorio; to Hawlin Wu; and to my family: Jennie, Eleanor, and Anna.

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack Livings's stories have appeared in
The Paris Review
,
A Public Space
,
StoryQuarterly
,
Tin House
,
New Delta Review
, and
The Best American Short Stories
, and have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. Livings is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He lives with his family in New York.

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2014 by Jack Livings
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014

Portions of this book have previously appeared, in slightly different form, in
The Best American Short Stories 2006
,
The Paris Review
,
A Public Space
,
The Pushcart Prize XXXIII
, and
The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII
.

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected]

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Livings, Jack, 1974–

         [Short stories. Selections]

         The Dog / Jack Livings. — First edition.

             pages cm

         ISBN 978-0-374-17853-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71001-9 (ebook)

         1.  China—Fiction.   I.  Title.

     PS3612.I949 A6 2014

     813'.6—dc23

2013048087

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