Firebirds Soaring (21 page)

She didn’t know if she’d be “let go” or if she’d resign first. Either way, the end was near. Appie checked her bank account online and found she had a good start on a nest egg, given that she almost never bought anything. And her available credit was through the roof. She’d heard there was a sizable opt-out community on Orcas Island. Maybe there was one in North Dakota, too. The world, her future, felt limitless, like a flat endless prairie stretching out the horizon, vast as the sea. She wondered if there were fresh lilies down at Pike Place Market. She’d always liked lilies. Appie logged off her workstation and walked out the door to go find out.

DOLLY THE DOG-SOLDIER

Y
ou do a job, you want to know why, and how it turns out. Here are the things that happened to Dolly. 1. The Colonel picked her out from all the ones in the litter. She remembers it only slightly. It was a long time ago. She remembers that then, all of them used to run together like wolves and tumble together at noon and night like puppies. When the Colonel came to the arfenedge with his wolven eyes and his sweet talk to the Sisters, soon the litter went to live at his halfway house out in the country.

Halfway to hell, Dolly thought later. Not much later. How she learned the word
hell
was this: a teacher came to separate the litter out into ones-at-a-time. She knew he was a teacher because he said so.

“I am Wayne, and I’m here to try to teach you little savages a thing or two. That means you call me Teacher, or sir, or Mr. Wayne if you think I’m feeling friendly, and you listen to what I say, and you learn something.”

“You look like an Airedale to me,” said Tezzy, who liked this new tool of words and liked to bite, too.

“Dammit to hell,” said Mr. Wayne. “You wash out of this programme and you’re back on the sidewalk, and probably with some scars to show for it! It’s in your interest to listen to me now, and not be a mutt.”

“Sir, we were in the arfidge,” said Terry. He was Tezzy’s littermate, from a mom who’d liked her needle too much when he was about six, people years, and he’d dragged Tezzy out of the path of cars ever since. He’d troubled to learn to talk before then. “Wun’t they take us back?”

“Let me tell you all something,” said Mr. Wayne wearily. At least, he looked weary to Dolly as he sat down and gestured the litter—Dolly guessed she better start calling them a pack now—to come ’round him and shush up. “This Colonel we work for doesn’t let anybody go. I came here seven years ago for a three-month contract. Am I teaching in the countryside? No. I’m here in an armed camp surrounded by a pack of little street wolves, trying to turn you into something the Colonel can use.”

Dolly huffed politely, her nose turned away. He’d said they were a pack! It was official, then. She thought she detected a bit of street dog on him, under the fine clothing and the good grammar. And indeed, at her sneeze, he looked at her and said, “Unless you have a summer cold, I’ll assume you want to speak.”

Dolly could hardly get her tongue out of the way of the flood of words. “What is
dammit
and what is
hell
? What is
contract
and what is
assume
? How will use and how much will hurt? ”

So maybe it wasn’t the Colonel who picked her out later for special training. Maybe the Colonel just noticed somehow from his God-eyes, what Dolly soon learned to call surveillance, just how Mr. Wayne’s eyes focussed on her dully at the start of her speaking, then sharpened and looked back, like he finally had something to listen to properly. The other littermates—pack kids now—were laughing and making fun like usual, but Dolly was modelled on a different breed from them.

“Shut up,” said Mr. Wayne to them, and then to Dolly, “Hell is a place of punishment.
Dammit
means people are stuck there like they were in prison. It’s from the word
damned
, which means ‘condemned’ or ‘sentenced.’”

Tezzy started to speak, and Mr. Wayne turned to her. “Shut up and learn something. You need a real bone to chew on, and you’ll get one. You’ll get the world according to Colonel Quartermaine. That ought to be enough.”

He went on to all of them, but Dolly knew he really continued to speak to her. “And the use is unclear, but I think it goes without saying that it will hurt. Sometimes.

“As for contracts, a contract is a deal between people. This pack and I had better make one now: I contract to tell you the truth as best I know it, and you contract to pull up your socks and learn something, so you can take some kind of control of your own lives. Knowledge is power.”

“What is ‘power’?” said Dolly.

8. Soon after her capture, Dolly had some surgery. It was painful and took a long time to recover from, but when she had, she looked very different from how she once did. The only visible sign was a scar at her lip, which she learned to say was from a violent incident in her childhood.

 

2. Okay, so she didn’t actually
see
the Colonel for months. It all mushes together in memory, until recently when she has tried to sort it out. Long before then they realised Mr. Wayne really was a nice man, just trying to stay toughened up like them. Much later Mr. Wayne turned into just Wayne, but that was for Dolly and is in another part of the story.

Also, that was long after the dormitory, and the staff up there who punished them all if any of them were caught talking in the dark with each other, a pack’s best time; punished them for creeping into each other’s beds in little heaps—like the puppies they so wished they still could be; punished them for putting their front paws under the covers; punished them if they said “paws” or “pack” or “dog” or “pup” even though the angry shouted commands and reprimands sounded a lot like barking and growling to the resentful pack; punished them if they barked back.

It was lonely in the dorm, but with the help of Mr. Wayne, everybody remembered that they all, even a street pack’s lowest member, knew you can eventually make a dog do what you want, even if all you do is hit it, because that’s Nature. All Nurture does is add to the power of the command, because the pup is so eager for the puppy love it can’t get from the litter anymore that it grovels and cringes toward any hand, hoping this one will be the one to deliver the pat of approval. Mr. Wayne tried pretty early to teach them to give their own pats to themselves.

They were pretty young then. Even at the time, Dolly remembers, she thought,
What’s the approval of a young pup like me worth?
And she knew the others had trouble with it too, from the way the skin creased above their eyes when they were trying. The way their paws—hands, that is—would come up involuntarily toward their heads, like when you pat a real dog on its belly and its back foot thumps; they were trying to deliver their own
positive reinforcement
, but their hands seldom got all the way to their faces or hair.

Finally, Mr. Wayne said, “Do it like this,” and he put his own hand over the centre of his chest. “Protect your heart. The ancients thought the liver was the seat of the soul, but we assign soul and love to the heart. Put your little paws over your little hearts.”

And with protection, they may survive to become big hearts
, Dolly thought, but she put her little left hand over her breastbone, trying to get it exactly as far from each nipple, and hoped for survival. By now, Tezzy had started believing in being a Good Dog, so Dolly had no one with whom to talk revolution—except, perhaps, Mr. Wayne, but she thought that would take a bit of planning, and the learning of some special words she didn’t know yet.

That was before the day the Colonel came to their room. The Colonel was tall and bulgy, not because of his pants with their balloon sides (called jodhpurs, she later learned), but around the belt and the lower buttons on his shirt. He had sparse hair in a pitiful comb-over, and broken blood vessels in his cheeks, and the stale smell of old booze coming out of his skin like the street rubbies the litter sometimes had shaken down for their pocket-pools of spare change. Despite all these, he was surrounded by an aura that educated Dolly and the others instantly about
power
and brought to all their hearts the terrifying knowledge that they would never get away back to their dens on Rynam Avenue, so in fear and shock as he walked in, his military boots shining and his outfit out of some old cheap movie like they’d sneaked into the Dreamland Theatre to see, they all stood, shrinking back, and placed their paws protectively over their hearts, and he thought they were saluting him.

He stood and looked at them, and they looked at him sideways, trying to take his measure, pressing their self-esteem against their chests hidden under tiny paws, shrinking everywhere else into their trademark cringe. They all tried to keep from trembling.

“Well done, Wayne, old boy,” said the Colonel.

Mr. Wayne’s fair skin flushed, but he said, “Sir. They’re a good bunch. A good group, sir. They do as they’re taught.”

Dolly was the only one, she found out later, who understood the hidden meaning in that, as the pack stood there with hands frozen to their sternums, mesmerised by this tall, delusional figure—ah, but Dolly didn’t know that word then: she just looked at his antique outfit and listened to the strain in the upper registers of his voice, like dogs know how to do, and she resisted the impulse to whine at his terrifying foolishness.

She wasn’t going to like any of this from here on in, she thought, and it was going to hurt a lot.

 

10. Dolly had a hard time adjusting to her new life. But she decided, finally, that it was going to be better than the old, if she had to use her last breath making it so.
Going to be happy if I die trying? Well, something like that.

 

3. Dolly was wrong about the possibility of pain—at first. They spent most of their time with Mr. Wayne, and when they were with the Colonel, at first, they did a lot of things that Dolly liked.

She liked the gymnasium with its barres and hanging rings and stripey wood floors, but better still she liked running and jumping through the forest around their house, and most of all, she loved what the Colonel called “the burn” as the pack worked hard to develop strength, agility, and endurance.

The sessions with the Colonel grew both harder and more difficult. Harder was no problem to Dolly. She had been born to that wiry readiness and resilience that the Colonel prized. What was more difficult was keeping her hand over her heart as she learned why the Colonel wanted them.

They were a Noble Experiment, he told them, in the Reclamation of Humanity from the Depths to which Decadence had Driven the Race. They were one pack, which he called a cohort. There was a cohort from Rio, where they were all jaguars and could tear out your throat with a swipe of their claws, and one from Thessaloniki, who were Rom and could sell you their own shit, so appealing and appalling they were with their ragtag filthiness and their sad greeting-card eyes.

The Colonel had a lot of money. He paid for everything. Gradually most of the pack came to love him. Why was Dolly different? Because she had loved Mr. Wayne first, and then herself at his instruction? She curled up in her bed at night with her paws over her nose and before she went to sleep she reminded herself that she was alive, that a dog might be a man’s best friend but the man did not own him—even if he thought he did—and that, though the Colonel said “I can read you little shits like a book,” inside a dog it was too dark to read.