Little Sister Death by William Gay Page A

striding through the sedge, a movement too swift for the eye to follow, twin drops of scarlet beading on her calf. He slowly took up the aluminum antenna pole, smashed the end of it onto the snake’s head, its four-foot length instantaneously constricting into a writhing mass of flesh, convulsing in silent agony.
    He raised the pole. The snake’s mouth was open, the jaws unhinged, the fangs delicate hypodermics like sharp-curved fish bones. He lowered it deliberately, smeared the snake’s head across the stone. He leant, watching the snake for movement, the pole poised, pale pinkish stains on the white rock. The snake was very still.
    He felt watched. He turned. Some faint noise, perhaps a whisper of wind in the dry cornstalks. A black dog watched him stoically from the edge of the cornfield. An enormous dog, high-shouldered and lean, standing cold and still as ice. He felt lost in the raw beast. The oversized, erect ears looked like a photograph he’d seen of jackals or wild African hunting dogs, the muzzle long and snoutlike, slightly open. He could see quite clearly the row of teeth and the red-looking tongue bisected dark by a shadow. Get, he told it uncertainly. Get the fuck away from here. Nothing. He looked about for a stone or a stick and saw horrified out of the tail of his eye the dog vanish. It seemed to step abruptly sidewise and become for an instant the right half of a black dog, Binder whirling to see it vanish completely, not as if it were fading out but simply stepping behind something. But there was nothing to step behind. Through the gone half of the dog he could see the motionless corn blades, the rampant growth of morning glories, the crowlike convolutions of the parched earth contrasted against the corporeal and inarguably real-looking shorthaired half of the dog. In an instant, an eyesblink, it was gone too.
    He came closer. He studied the spot intently, leant for a moment openmouthed and foolish, halfcomic in profound scrutiny of the fissured clay.
    He went on up the slope with the antenna and hurriedly set it up, hooking the leadwire to it abstractedly and occasionally glancing back over his shoulder at the cornfield. He lashed the pole to a fencepost with a length of wire, angled the antenna toward where he guessed Nashville was.
    The cornfield seemed darker toward its center. Light entered at the rows’ end, ran like liquid down the middles, getting shallower and shallower. There seemed at the convergence of the rows some mass of shadows light could not defray. He clipped the wire with the sidecutters and pocketed them and started toward the cornfield. He stopped at the spot the dog had been. He stepped into the field a few feet, the cornblades whispering against his jeans. Then he turned and went back to the house.
    The TV was couched in the corner by the window, its screen flickering the particolored images of a game show, and Binder watched it, feeling a curious sense of triumph as if the television and he had been locked in combat, as if it had been some recalcitrant beast he had had to force to do his bidding.
    Lunch was soup and deviled eggs and tuna fish sandwiches. Binder set across from Corrie and drank iced coffee. His head ached and he wasn’t hungry. He felt slightly nauseated and soreness seemed to be creeping up on him like polluted water seeping from his bones.
    He sat the glass down. I saw a dog out there in the cornfield, he told her.
    A dog, she said, and he realized suddenly the enormity of the gap between what he had seen and what she had said. There seemed a vast gulf of windy space between the words and the still, dark beast watching him so calmly. He remembered that he hadn’t seen the feet and that it had dull yellow eyes.
    Probably homeless, she said musingly. A stray somebody dropped here? We ought to put out something for it to eat.
    His hand faltered halfway to his mouth with the glass of coffee. For a moment he thought he might say something, then he thought better