The Rake Magazine

I WAS 38 YEARS OLD and washing dishes in a strip bar, forced to wear a ridiculous chef's hat because the place clung to its delusions and had the audacity to serve food. The all-you-can-eat chili special was a big draw with the oil boys from the refinery across the highway. I'd punch out at 11:00 and get the hell out of there. I still had enough pride to go someplace else to drink, so every night I'd head over to the Toot-Toot Tavern up the road. There was a decent moon over the highway and the usual prevailing stench of petroleum. I guess I felt pretty good, but this was no bright beer commercial; I was too old, had a bigger thirst than that, and wasn't dressed for the part. I had a pocketful of cash, and my life at the time didn't boil down to much more than that: I'd have a pocketful of cash and then I wouldn't. I still had this vague notion that anything could happen, it was just that anything now meant something entirely different than it once had. Maybe it was now a truer notion, with a greater allowance for the machinations of what I like to call the black lottery. Some guys hit the Powerball jackpot; others get hit by a grease truck or get kicked in the teeth in the parking lot of a bar. Odds were odds. Still, that night I liked my chances. I had this interesting thing developing with a woman at the Toot-Toot; a bashful, slow-motion, almost old-fashioned sort of courtship that had been going on for almost three weeks, and was completely out of place in a grimy, groping dive like the Toot-Toot, where the jukebox was so loud and the selections so horrific you almost wished you could drink yourself deaf.

It was the strangest damn thing because I had seen this woman around for well over a year, and all that time there was nothing there. Nothing. Her name was Julene and she was a day bartender at a place further down the highway called The Bends, and she apparently lived with her mother in a trailer somewhere out in the scrub. I'd been introduced to her by a guy named Slim Chung, who was the caretaker at the place I was staying, and who divided his drinking between the Toot-Toot and The Bends. Slim Chung had a temp job at the airport in something called "In-Flight Services," a gig that allowed him to carry home a blue gym bag full of those little bottles of airline liquor every day. He carried that bag everywhere he went.

Anyway, you know how certain types of women will pull every single hair from their eyebrows and draw a more perfect line along the ridge of bone above their sockets? That was Julene, and I'd never given her a second look until one night a few weeks back when I found myself seated across a table from her, studying those odd brown lines above her eyes. She smelled just like angel food cake. We made small talk for a while, and I noticed she could force down Old Heaven Hill bourbon without retching or tearing up. I was impressed. I told her I wasn't a guy who was threatened by a woman who could drink me under the table, which was the honest-to-God truth. She asked me if I was one of those men who made a habit of barging in and out of women's lives. I think I just blushed and shook my head; I certainly didn't tell her that on the two occasions in my life that I had actually fallen in love, I hadn't even realized it until I found myself in the middle of the night drunk and crying in a phone booth. No, I didn't tell Julene that, not then anyway, but at some point in the conversation I did start to look at her a little harder, a little more closely.

She was one of those women who would strike you as beautiful one minute, and a moment later you would change your mind. There is nothing particularly cruel or calculating in that assessment. I know I'm not a matinee idol, and cheap whiskey has taught me lessons in practical relativity that no physics professor could ever hope to impart. I suppose the truth was that we had both seen better days, but in the world of the Toot-Toot, that notion could be almost presumptuous. When you're 25 years old, you want to look into some woman's eyes in a bar and feel like she's thinking you're the most charming person in the world, but when you get to be 38, it's somehow good enough if you sense the the presence or the approximation of the same thought that's running through your own mind: You'll do.

That night at the Toot-Toot, I thought I saw that most modest of appraisals in a woman's eyes for the first time in many years. And every 15 minutes or so Slim Chung came around and freshened our drinks from his stash in the blue gym bag, so everyone got very drunk.

IN THOSE DAYS we all lived in the industrial bush out beyond the airport, and we drank all the time. Every big city eventually runs out of steam and coughs up a mess just like that, a place where infrastructure gives way to indifference, and the tangle of streets and highways and interchanges finally gives way to one dark road, leaving town. Follow that road from the airport and you'll enter a territory of the ugliest outcast industries: places of necessary isolation; waste; intense pollution, steam, and heat; nuts-and-bolts capitalism; blank, flat barracks where hinges, springs, filters, mud flaps, and ball bearings are manufactured. These were badlands; dark scrub, fringe, margin, the outskirts of Oz, the airspace invaded every 30 seconds by the skull-vacuuming scream of jets.

I had a room in the Jet Stream, an old cottage motel dating from the '50s or '60s. The Jet Stream was a dejected and defeated enterprise. Perhaps the original owners thought they would attract airport business; pilots, stewardesses, and businessmen in town for a few days, but the Jet Stream was in precisely the wrong location to attract airport customers. The airport, big as a city itself, sat directly between the motel and the city with its access freeways and enticements. When I first discovered the Jet Stream, it was already in lamentable condition. The parking lot and faded sign were terminally dark. The various cottages were badly in need of repairs and a coat of paint. Slim Chung never lifted a finger around the place. A peeling sign along the old state highway advertised "Low weekly and monthly rates." There was a modest and functional neon sign in the window of the office that was activated nightly: Office. Vacancy.

South along the two-lane highway, there were no occupied dwellings between the Jet Stream and a huge, terrifying oil refinery about a mile down the road. That place was a visual spectacle: garishly futuristic, with its towering smokestacks belching flames into the night sky; seemingly random nests of wire and steel; looming towers, catwalks, and trestles; and concrete orbs sprawling and towering over acre upon acre of a tightly penned, brightly lit, steam-bound nightmare. Strung out along the opposite side of the highway from the refinery were a half-dozen bars and truck-stop cafeterias that were frequented day and night by refinery workers.

THE TOOT-TOOT was a squat box in the middle of a scrub lot about a half-mile south of the refinery, surrounded by a dirt parking lot that even on the best days was as challenging as a motocross track. The place was always packed with serious drinkers, and I had been forced to come to terms with the fact that I had joined their ranks. I was becoming a career drinker, so great was my weakness for sedation and liquored transcendence. I'd learned just how far I could go without a lot of sick carryover and soul-searching and ugly shit like that; train wreck narrowly averted: I liked to keep it right there. But just about everybody in the Toot-Toot had had a gun in their mouth at one time or another--metaphorically, certainly, but also literally--and more frequently than most of them were comfortable admitting.

When I came through the front door I saw Julene at a table in the back, her feet propped on a chair directly across from her. I made my way across the crowded bar and joined her. "Hey," she said, and kicked the chair out from under the table with her feet. "I saved you a place." We sat there and made our usual nice, quiet conversation until closing time. We both had plenty to drink, and while we were standing around in the parking lot out back she took my car keys from me and said, "Why don't we go back to your place?" I wasn't terribly surprised... but, yes, I suppose I was.

I wasn't the slickest fielding shortstop in the American League, but she clearly knew what she was doing. There were sparks, I guess, but they were the sort of fat tadpole sparks you'd see drifting lazily from a dying campfire and then collapsing back into darkness. This was nice enough. I certainly wasn't complaining.

Afterward we took a little sampler of Slim Chung's airline liquor and sat outside my room. We'd found a little bit of the only sort of magic you could hope to coax from the kind of lives we were leading. I think we both knew full well that one day pretty soon we'd have to face some ugly music, and we surely did, each in our own way. But that morning we were content to simply sit there quietly sipping from our little bottles and staring at the refinery flames in the distance, listening to the sound of a train moving somewhere out in the darkness, easing by with that soothing restless rhythm, the perfect somnolent sound of motion, of something heavy being carried away.

It's strange to me that nobody seems to expect anything in the way of an explanation these days. Nothing in the world surprises anyone anymore, unless, you know, someone decides to go all Jerry Bruckheimer with their rage.

I guess I'm not a person who can live without explanations or surprise.

Does the ticking of that clock bother you?

I'm waiting like everyone else. In the morning I'll get in my car and drive and blast music and try to get my heart to open, and I'll go through it all and it will smart a little bit and it will be bittersweet and it won't be like it once was, because so many essential hearts are now absent, but it will be something I nonetheless look forward to because I can't help myself.

For a few hours, and maybe even longer, I might even be able to forget about the saddle on my back, and perhaps no one will notice that I'm now so stooped that I can't even see who or what is riding me. It's more likely, of course, that they will notice --how could they not?-- but won't say anything out of kindness and courtesy.

The truth is they all probably know a whole lot more than I do, and can see me more clearly than I could ever hope to see myself. All I know anymore is that whatever's in the saddle is reckless, heedless, and something of a mess maker. He's steered me into all sorts of places I don't belong, and left behind quite a trail of wreckage. Oh, shit yes, my rider and me, we've broken all sorts of stuff that'll never be fixed.

Still, I'll do what I always do and try to feel whole while doing it. I'll go to a little family market that has been downtown for more than a century, and I will buy oysters and cream, just as I did when I tagged along with my father as a child.

And I'll go at midnight and sit with my mother and what is left of my family and we will listen once again to the stories about that long, long ago night when a wondrous bright star appeared to shepherds tending their flocks in the fields and an angel spoke to them of great tidings and three wise men were drawn to a manger in a town in the Middle East where an outlaw was born. And whether you believe those stories or not, you cannot deny that they are stories that contain all the essential wonder and magic and mysteries and hope of most good stories, then just as now. And you cannot deny that they are stories that forever changed the world, for the better and for the worse, in what sometimes seems like equal measure.

I know that I'll lift up my voice and sing, because it's what I've always done; it's tradition, ritual, a habit yoked to memory, and it feels good. And I'll see all sorts of people who were part of the tribe that raised and educated me and kicked my ass out into the world. And in the early hours of Christmas morning, I will walk with my dog through the quiet, snowy streets that as a child I raced through on my stingray bike in the settling dusk of a thousand summer nights. With any luck snow will be falling, or there will be a clear, deep sky crammed with stars, and up and down every street I will remember dozens of voices and faces and the sound of laugher in dark backyards and the smell of my father's cologne and all those Christmas mornings so long ago now, when I laid awake almost breathless with anticipation in the darkness of my bedroom, listening for sleighbells and waiting for the first light of morning.

Let's suppose you --the hypothetical, perhaps wholly imagined You-- stumble in here to Yo Ivanhoe on an occasional, one-time, or even purely accidental basis (one of those Google mishaps, say), completely unaware that this little futility closet is in fact a mere, very minor adjunct to a giant media empire (Rake Media Worldwide), which produces a print magazine in whose employ I --Brad Zellar-- presently find myself, however tenuously.

Rake Media Worldwide also operates a website, where Yo Ivanhoe enjoys sidebar status as a barely-tolerated exercise in pathetic self indulgence. You --the hypothetical, perhaps wholly imagined You-- may not know any of this. And so you may not know that if you go to the Rake website and poke around a bit you can find (and watch) a video of me --Brad Zellar-- reading, from the relative comfort of my modest home, a traditional Christmas story, complete with a live infant, a dog, a roaring fire, and an inebriate. I would post the thing right here but I don't have the slightest idea how to do any such thing, so I will provide you with a link that will take you there.

In doing this --a rare act of loathsome self promotion-- I am motivated solely by the spirit of the season and a sort of pathological generosity. I hope that you will thank me for it, even as I feel the need to apologize for wasting your time.

A lot of folks around town thought there was something special about Richard Kunkel. Big things were expected of that poor fellow. Certainly no one believed that such a fine, bright boy as Richard Kunkel would stick around a tiny little jerkwater village like ours for the rest of his life. Many assumed Kunkel would follow his fathe into the Armed Forces, and would rise quickly through the ranks. Others thought certain that with that fine voice of his he would become a supper club singer. He was always getting up to sing at parties and special occasions around town, and he knew all the songs from the famous Broadway shows. As for myself, well, I thought perhaps Richard Kunkel would carve out a place for himself in the political arena. I always pictured him smiling and blowing kisses from the back of a train, waving goodbye to that little town of ours forever.

But, no sir, it turns out that our Richard Kunkel didn't have the ambition God gave a field mouse, and he never went anywhere. As he grew older it was always one odd job around town after another. The fellow couldn't seem to hold a position to save his soul, and it was the death of his poor mother. After a time rumors began to circulate that Richard had a fondness for liquor and played cards with the priests for money. He never married, but he never did stop being the same friendly, outgoing Richard Kunkel the town had known as a boy. He never amounted to a hill of beans, either, which saddened all of us. You like to see your bright young people go out into the world to make something of themselves.

Then one year Richard Kunkel did an unusual and entirely unexpected thing, a rather scandalous thing in our little scheme of things. Richard recruited some children from the church youth group and mounted a Christmas pageant from a play he had apparently written himself, based on some of the questionable stories regarding St. Nicholas of Myra. In actuality the play had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas and focused almost entirely on the legend of St. Nicholas' resuscitation of three boys --Timothy, Mark, and John-- who had allegedly been slaughtered, pickled, and sold as meat during a fourth century famine. This peculiar incident was described by Richard Kunkel --and most clumsily enacted by his rankly amateur players-- in obsessive and grotesque detail, complete with much shrieking, writhing, and the liberal spilling of false blood.

This inappropriate production was staged as a prelude to a chili dinner in the church basement, and needless to say whatever point Richard was trying to make was entirely lost on the horrified spectators, most of whom were elderly folks from the local senior citizen center who had come expecting some celebration of the spirit of the season.

Richard --playing a filthy and half-dressed pawnbroker (St. Nicholas being the patron saint of pawn brokers, or so Kunkel explained in the program notes)-- narrated the play with a disturbing and incoherent zeal. There was much speculation that Richard was, in fact, intoxicated, speculation which was perhaps fueled by the fact that his character was swilling messily from a large bottle of whiskey throughout the production. A prop, Richard later claimed, but there were few believers.

People need to recognize the effect one untoward incident can have on a man's reputation in a small town. I'm not saying it's always fair and square, but after Richard Kunkel's little lark at the church dinner people's attitudes towards him changed. He'd been a bit of a disappointment to that point, but this was something else entirely. Richard Kunkel went from a boy of failed promise to the sort of mystery nobody really wanted around. It's sad, but that's the way of the world.

He finally left town a year or so later, and the word around here is that he's working at a Fleet Farm up in Rochester these days.

It was an old, quiet horse, the color of gray corduroy, or child's clay, those elephant slabs wrapped in wax paper that Reston remembered from classrooms in his childhood. Six months earlier the horse had been delivered to the pasture out back of Reston's trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from the truck. She didn't kick or fuss, but simply refused to budge. Reston had paid 100 dollars for the horse to save it from being put down. He had inherited his ex-girlfriend's pathological weakness for downtrodden animals of all kinds, and he had a dog that was crazy about horses.

One of the delivery fellows had kept referring to the horse as ‘daft,' which Reston thought was an unusual word choice for a young man who couldn't have been more than 20 years of age. He didn't think the horse was daft, at any rate, just depressed. She tended to stand, with her head down, in one place for long stretches of time, but there were signs that she was coming around. She and the dog seemed to get along just fine, and it gave Reston real pleasure to see them trot around the pasture together.

Reston had never in his life spent Christmas alone, and he wasn't quite sure what to do with himself. The day before Christmas eve he drove into the nearest decent-sized city, a college town of maybe 70,000 people, just under a half hour's drive from his trailer. The city was crowded with last minute shoppers from the small towns that were clustered in the long valleys throughout the mountains. He stopped at some chain steak place for lunch, and later splurged on a bunch of new CDs, as well as nearly fifty bucks worth of treats for his dog. Heavy snow was falling as he made his way back out of town, and by the time he pulled into the half-mile gravel road that led to his trailer, visibility had been reduced to next to nothing; Reston couldn't even see the gray horse in her pasture. The snow was really swirling in the valley, and the Christmas lights of Reston's nearest neighbor a half-mile across the way had disappeared as well. He couldn't find the trailer in his headlights until he was within maybe fifteen or twenty feet.

He sat out in his truck for perhaps a half hour, maybe longer, listening to Christmas carols on the radio and drinking beer. Somehow he seemed to be pulling in a radio station from the Midwest; he noticed that when they gave the time there was an hour difference from the clock on the truck's dashboard. By the time Reston vacated the truck in the driveway he was well along the way to drunk and had already switched over from beer to whiskey. He stumbled through the blowing snow to the door of the trailer. His dog, a herding mongrel so strained as to look exotic, was waiting for him in a state of pitched agitation, and Reston opened the door and watched the dog disappear into the whiteout beyond the trailer.

That night he drank enough to feel genuinely sorry for himself, and almost managed to talk himself into flying out to spend Christmas with his sister's family in Colorado.

The next morning, Reston woke up on the couch, as hung over as he'd been in years. The trailer was completely drifted in, and the wind was still tossing snow around and obscuring the range down the valley to the north. Every light in the place was still on. The only radio station he could pick up in the valley was wheedling with Christmas carols, the signal drifting in and out --some choir somewhere, with a big echo effect that suggested a live feed from a cathedral. Reston was determined to force down some Alka-Seltzer and go back to bed, but he realized with a start that his dog was still someplace out in the storm. It was rare that the dog would spend the night outside in any weather, and Reston was alarmed and appalled that he had left him out in the storm all night.

He went to the door and called out into the blowing snow. There was no response, and he still could not even make out the gray horse in the pasture less than 100 yards away. Reston pulled on a pair of boots, parka, mittens, and a hat with earflaps, and ventured out into the drifts that had developed all around the trailer. His truck was almost completely buried. He tried to call out into the snow for the dog, but his voice was swallowed in the swirling wind. Wading knee- and sometimes hip-deep through the drifts, Reston made his way around the side of the trailer and managed somehow to locate one of the fence posts from the horse pasture. He couldn't see much, or far, but there was no sign of either the dog or the horse. The wind was blowing so hard that when he turned back his footsteps were already almost completely blown over. Reston tried again to call the dog's name, but realized it was pointless and returned to the trailer.

He crawled back into bed, bundled himself in blankets, and tried to nap. His head was throbbing, and as Reston lay there he kept imagining that he heard the dog barking somewhere out in the storm. He got up twice and went to the door, but there was no sign of the dog and no sound other than the howling of the wind. At some point Reston managed to find his way back into sleep while listening to Christmas carols on the radio. It seemed to be a loop of the same program --the same choir-- he'd heard the night before; every single song was reduced to a melancholy, echo-chamber lament. It sounded like a death row choir, complete with all the mournful sonic effects you might expect from an institution constructed entirely of concrete and steel. It was breaking Reston's heart and blowing all sorts of painful memories around in his head. Even as he slept fitfully he was aware of his heart pinging in his chest like sonar in an abandoned submarine.

It was Christmas Eve.

Reston had traveled so far from the man he'd once been that the people he had allowed himself to be close to, as well as those to whom he was conjoined by blood, had become mostly uncomfortable strangers to him. Or at least that was the way he had come to think of the situation. There was now too much time and too much silence and distance between himself and what for lack of a more strictly truthful term he thought of as his loved ones. He had no axe to grind, no extravagant grievance or baggage, and it now seemed sad and even a bit shameful to think that his mother did not even know where he was now living or how to get in touch with him. He hadn't spoken with her in over ten months. When Reston's girlfriend had grown tired of the west and had moved back to Boston --it had been nearly two years-- he'd given up the apartment in Bozeman and taken the trailer in the valley. He was supposed to be finishing a set of illustrations for a children's book --the sort of clunky and typically lazy and manipulative story that people were always writing for kids-- and he hadn't made any progress in weeks.

In the years since his girlfriend's departure, Reston had almost gotten used to the loneliness and its odd, romanticized solace and pleasures. His girlfriend had been in possession of a more polished set of social instincts. She'd been an English professor at a local college, and liked to host small gatherings, enjoyed going out for dinner and shopping. Left to his own devices, Reston seldom did anything that might be considered social. He had made few real friends in the years he'd been living in the west, and still hadn't even bothered to have the trailer wired for a telephone. The dog was a perfect companion; it was all the things people who were nuts about dogs claimed dogs to be: a good listener, an enforcer of reasonable routine and satisfying daily order. It was also absolutely companionable: patient, even-tempered, and eager to please. That Man's Best Friend business really was not overstating, not in this instance. This dog was an ideal, Reston believed, a study in refined, dignified behavior that seldom strayed into true stoicism. It could muster real, contagious enthusiasm in a heartbeat, yet also seemed to have mastered serenity.

Reston was projecting, of course; he could see that. The dog was exactly what he needed and wanted it to be. It was unconscionable that he'd allowed himself to get so drunk that he'd left the dog outside in a raging blizzard all night. The poor animal could have trudged miles in search of shelter by this time. The odd thing about the whole affair was that Reston had seldom even gone into town without taking the dog along, and he virtually never simply let him roam freely, as he had the night before. He'd been made careless by melancholy and liquor, by the crippling, almost narcotic nostalgia of the holidays, and he knew that he would chew himself up forever with grief if anything had happened to the dog. In the two preceding years the only real highlights of the holiday season had been the long walks they'd taken together on Christmas Eve.

As he lay there hung over and drifting miserably along the blurriest edges of sleep, Reston imagined being hounded to the end of his days by a canine ghost. By mid-afternoon, as he forced himself to listen to an old Jackie Gleason Christmas album --the ultimate expression of the Christmas carol as suicide note-- he believed he felt as wretched as he ever had, and found himself actually attempting to squeeze out tears for the first time in years.

He finally bundled himself up again and ventured out in what was left of the afternoon light to look for the dog. The storm was lifting. A bank of dark clouds was rolling steadily down the valley. The odd and alarming new development was that not only was Reston's dog missing, but there was no sign of the gray horse anywhere in the pasture. The sky had cleared to the point that the entirety of the fenced pasture was once again visible, and the horse was nowhere to be seen. Reston waddled along the drifts that were built up along the fence line and inspected the gate. It was not only firmly latched, but drifted completely shut. He walked the length of the road leading to his trailer, all the way out to where it intersected the main gravel road that led to the state highway. He saw no evidence of any traffic whatsoever, no animal or vehicle tracks other than those from his own truck the previous evening, and even those were mostly blown over.

Reston managed to get the truck started and backed out to the turnaround. The four-wheel drive got him through the drifted snow to the gravel county road, which was in pretty good shape. From there to the blacktop state highway, a distance of just under two miles, he saw no signs of either the dog or the horse. Once he hit the stop sign at the highway he decided to make another trip into town. He had no idea what he expected to accomplish there on Christmas Eve; it was almost four o'clock and already growing murky. The highway had been plowed and road conditions were fine. There were still carols looping on the radio station, and Reston made up his mind to attend Christmas Eve services at some church in town. He hadn't been in a church in many years, but he had fond memories of holiday services from his childhood, and felt very much like a man who needed somehow to be forgiven. If God was ever going to grab him, he figured, this was probably a good opportunity. He'd certainly never felt so susceptible.

In town Reston found a phone book and tried to call the local animal shelter, but got the answering machine and a deadpan voice wishing him a merry Christmas and encouraging him to neuter his pets. He walked around downtown checking telephone poles and bulletin boards where he thought he might find notices of lost and found animals, but turned up nothing that fit the description of his dog. In the empty Greyhound station he picked up a copy of the local newspaper and found an advertisement for Christmas Eve services at area churches. There was a six o'clock service at a big Lutheran church right in town, so Reston left his truck on the street and went off in search of the place.

The church was packed with families, and there were dozens of scrubbed and squirming children. Reston had a tough time staying awake through some of the readings and much of the sermon, but afterwards, walking back to his truck, he felt somehow better for having gone. His heart felt lighter and heavier at the same time, a strangely emotional state that he had always associated with the holidays.

Before driving back to the trailer Reston stopped off at a 24-hour place for breakfast. Sitting in the church it had occurred to him that he hadn't had a bite to eat all day. The restaurant was located in the middle of a strip mall parking lot, and the lot was packed. Reston ended up parking several hundred yards from the restaurant, and as he walked from the truck he was greeted warmly by at least a half dozen strangers. He remembered his late father coming in from a last-minute errand on Christmas eve long ago; the old man was rosy-cheeked, half in the bag, and happy as a clam. He was a man who loved special occasions, and as he came in with his arms loaded with shopping bags he had bellowed, "The whole damn town is lousy with Christmas spirit!" Reston tried to remember how many years now his father had been dead. He'd been killed in a car accident on the Fourth of July, the car he was driving having collided with a train while he and a couple buddies were returning --drunk as skunks-- from an early morning round of golf. It had to have been at least fifteen years.

All the way out to the trailer Reston tried to put back together the years, to line up memories and freeze them back there when there had still seemed to be so much time, time passing and carrying him past dark off-ramps, dimly-lit intersections, and all the forks in the road where he had chosen --or, unconsciously, not chosen-- the direction that had led him to the road along which he was driving alone now on Christmas eve, as lost and uncertain of his ultimate destination as he had ever felt in his life. Reston couldn't even say for certain what he was, or what he might have been but wasn't, or even what he might one day be. He'd basically let each day shove him wherever it wanted, and when it stopped shoving he stayed put. He missed the old man, a guy who'd been a shover, a dictator in the best and most intoxicating way; he'd always gone his own way and dragged others along who were helpless to resist him, right to the end. After his death, Reston's mother had admitted that she'd been little more than one more of his tag-alongs. "He told me he was going to marry me," she said, "and I believed him."

Back at the trailer Reston stood out in the middle of the drifted-in driveway and called out to the dog. The storm had blown over, and there was a bright quarter moon. There was no sign of the dog. Reston craned his neck and watched a jet make its way right through Orion's belt in the east. He was so tired. It was already close to ten o'clock, and he went back into the trailer, mixed himself a glass of eggnog, and cued up the Jackie Gleason record on the stereo. He fell asleep on the couch and was awakened by what he thought were bells. Reston sat up in the dark of the trailer and listened. All was silent, and then he heard voices. He pulled on his boots and stepped outside the trailer. It was a gorgeous night, and though Reston knew that voices could carry a great distance on cold nights in that place, these voices had sounded like they were right outside his windows. He could see the Christmas lights twinkling from his neighbor's yard across the valley, and could hear laughter from what sounded like a party. The trees at the farthest edge of his fence line seemed to be nested with glowing corposants. Reston walked around the trailer and there, a hundred yards away in the pasture, was his dog, sitting attentively before the gray horse.

The horse's big head was hanging directly above the dog's, steam streaming from its nostrils. The horse and the dog were right in the middle of the pasture. It was an absolutely clear night, and it sounded like the voices were coming from the pasture. Reston approached the fence and swore he heard the dog emit what sounded like a hoarse, incredulous chuckle. The stars were stretched out above the valley, precise, detailed constellations embroidered across the clear, dusty clutter of the Milky Way. Reston heard a pop and was astonished to see modest fireworks of some sort bloom above the valley in the direction of his neighbor's house, and he was inexplicably moved to see the dog and the horse raise their heads at once to marvel at the display.

Reston let out a whoop that snapped out into the cold air and was quickly swallowed up. And just then the dog looked in Reston's direction, threw its head back, and stretched out its front legs and executed a sort of bow of acknowledgement. Reston watched the dog roll over on its back and begin to writhe happily in the snow, kicking up a cloud that briefly enveloped both dog and horse. Reston stood still for what felt like a long time. He closed his eyes briefly and when he opened them again the whirling snow in the pasture was dissipating in a slow shower of fine particles that shivered almost like sparks in the moonlight.