Monsters
How close we were to the darkness under the boardwalk then was about four feet, I’d guess, and Matey wasn’t even straining at the leash to go into it, chase down some bad guy, but we went anyway, just on a silent agreement that this was going to stand in for everything else we hadn’t done. This was going to be our big adventure.
Underneath, once our eyes adjusted, it was another world — trash and smoke and cast-off clothes and seaweed the tide brought in. Because the sun couldn’t get to it to dry it up, it festered and stank. And there were eyes watching us too, we could tell. Too many posts to tell what was bodies, what wasn’t. Just that some of the posts were blowing out pale lines of smoke. It was like walking through a dream, I suppose, the kind where you don’t realize you can’t breathe until you’re suddenly suffocating. Matey could feel it too, I think. He didn’t growl or pull against Elaine, but there was a new tenseness about him. It had to do with his ears and his tail.
Without him, we probably would have made a show of pretending to be looking for something we couldn’t find, then scampered back to the safety of the beach.
Nobody approached us, though, or said anything to us.
My guess is that the people under there had a certain respect for the line Matey still cut. He just looked like a police dog.
Ten minutes later, breathing again, we were on the boardwalk. It was exactly forty-four minutes past the time Elaine was supposed to have been home, and there was a band taking the stage somewhere behind us, so the crowd was streaming past like water. We kept our arms close, and I went first so we could keep Matey between us, which, this is how parents are supposed to act, I’m pretty sure. They’re supposed to take the knees and elbows the world has to offer, keep their kid safe, out of the way.
In our case, though, we trusted Matey, sure, but didn’t want him taking a piece out of somebody either.
And I’m probably making these people rushing past us sound like a mob. It was nothing that big, was starting to thin out after a few seconds, even, so we could see clear concrete ahead, and past that the road that led to Elaine’s and however we were going to say goodbye.
Maybe Matey could feel that, too, how we weren’t exactly pushing to get to that awkwardness.
Either way, some of his training bubbled up, right at the end of the crowd.
For the first time since we’d been walking him, he exploded, real jaw-snapping, slobbering, maniac killer dog kind of stuff. Not at us either, but at somebody in the crowd. Had they touched his ear wrong? Were they carrying drugs, a bomb?
I held onto his leash with Elaine, and still, he was edging us forward.
Who he was barking at was this one guy wearing leather pants instead of the bright shorts everybody else had on.
The guy stood still, let the crowd melt ahead of him, and looked from Matey up to Elaine and me.
He was smiling.
“Yours?” he said, taking a step forward, to Matey.
I started to yell to him not to, that couldn’t he see the dog hated him, but I didn’t even say anything. This close to Elaine, I could smell the chlorine on her, from when we’d swam earlier in the hotel pool, when we had the whole ocean if we wanted.
“Nice doggy,” the guy said like a joke, taking another step forward, and there wasn’t even anything that strange about his voice or, from what I could tell, his smell, or anything, but Matey was about to choke himself on the leash.
“He’s a police dog,” Elaine managed to get out.
The guy nodded, said that explained it then, yeah? It was a joke to him, all of this.
“Please,” I said, losing ground, “we’ve got to— ” but the guy was stepping forward again, like he wanted to see what Matey was made of.
Instead of walking away to his concert, he squatted down so that Matey’s teeth were maybe two feet from his face, then looked over him to us.
“Yours?” he said, and we shook our heads no just as Matey bunched his haunches and surged forward for the kill.
Though he didn’t make it to the guy’s throat, he did catch him in the meat just under the thumb.
The guy ripped his hand away slower than I thought made any sense. As if it were made of paper, and he didn’t want to pull too fast, as that might rip it even more.
“No worries,” he said, his voice a new kind of even, his eyes photographing Matey practically, and — we talked about this on the way home — for the ten or maybe twelve seconds more we were there on the sidewalk with him, the guy’s hand where Matey’s tooth had opened it, it was just white flesh on the inside. No blood. Like the time I’d cracked my shin on the curb next door and then sat there for maybe five minutes staring at the white I knew had to be cartilage. What I was afraid of, and never told anybody, was that I was dead, and only just figuring it out. That I would only be alive if I bled.
It kept me looking behind us all the way to Elaine’s turn-off, and then made me walk past it with her too, to deposit Matey one last time. Tomorrow the Wilkersons were supposed to be back, and the town was going to just go on without us, without even remembering us, probably.
At least that’s what we thought.
Back at the split in the road which went uphill to my new granddad’s house, anyway, after having held hands for the width of exactly three consecutive houses, which even this late in the summer felt impulsive, like falling off some tall thing, Elaine leaned down and kissed me and then turned before I could kiss back, danced off to her house.