Cap Leech lifted the tin can, sniffed, fixed the cotton stopper. Those eye whites, dull bits of glass pressed against the skin, hovered over the floor. Without raising them he began to laugh, “Open your hand.” Slowly, in the fat of the Sheriff’s upturned palm, he drew a circle with his broken fingertip. “Disease,” he said, “thriving. Catch a fly in your fist and you could infect the town.” Quickly, with the iced cotton, he swabbed the hand, let it go. “Clean. For awhile.”
“Wade,” the Sheriff drew back and called, “come here, Wade!”
In a stoop Wade pulled the pointer through the doorway. It brought with it the smell of rain, the smell of paws, forelegs and chest soaked in storm and caked with the mud of a downpour; it twisted its head, drops beating against its eyes, and shook, would have spattered the walls, between Wade’s knees. All day it shied and staggered under the sun. But by nightfall it was able to force moisture, to yelp at the shell-like roll of a cloudburst in its ears, to walk as if leaving puddles across the floor, to smell as if the rain had actually come down and driven it bleating and thin into a rivulet filling ditch.
Wade walked stiff-legged, raised his head to smile, and pulled, lifted the dog by its throat. All four of the animal’s legs were rigid, hind legs clamped straight up and down, front paws crossed over its bleeding snout. He dropped the dog in the middle of the room, released the matted fur. His hands were wet, the bottoms of his trousers damp.
“Sheriff, this dog is scratched.”
“Scratched?”
“Yes, sir. She’s cut up.”
“Got ahold of her, did they?”
“Yes, sir. They must have claws.”
The first motorcycle the Sheriff saw appeared at dusk, bounded around a corner of the granary and sped without lights down one gutter of the sanded street. He had raised a hand against it, started at the whirr of wheels spoked with dirt and a few oily flower stems, and had begun to run clumsily, freshly shaved and scented, as it jumped the wooden walk, leapt, a small thunderbird, and flashed through a plate glass window.