Boys Life

every one. You can hardly see the cracks.” She showed me, but she’d done a good job of repairing them. “I miss Holland,” she said. “So much.”
    “Are you ever goin’ back?”
    “Someday, maybe. Frans and I talk about it. We’ve even gotten the travel brochures. Still… what happened to us… the Nazis and all that terrible…” She frowned and returned the robin to its place between an oriole and a hummingbird. “Well, some broken things are not so easily mended,” she said.
    I heard a dog barking. It was Rebel’s bark, hoarse but strong. The sound was coming up from the basement through an air vent. Then I heard Dr. Lezander call, “Tom! Cory! Will both of you come down here, please?”
    We found Dr. Lezander taking Rebel’s temperature again, by the bottom route. Rebel was still listless and sleepy, but he showed no signs of dying. Dr. Lezander had applied a white ointment to Rebel’s wounded muzzle and had him connected now to two needles and bottles of dripping clear liquid. “I wanted you to see this animal’s temperature,” he said. “I’ve taken it four times in the last hour.” He picked up his notebook and wrote down the thermometer’s reading. “This is unheard of! Absolutely unheard of!”
    “What is it?” Dad asked.
    “Rebel’s body temperature has been dropping. It seems to have stabilized now, but half an hour ago I thought he was going to be dead.” Dr. Lezander showed Dad the readings. “See for yourself.”
    “My God.” Dad’s voice was stunned. “It’s that low?”
    “Yes. Tom, no animal can live with a body temperature of sixty-six degrees. It’s just… absolutely impossible!”
    I touched Rebel. My dog was no longer warm. His white hair felt hard and coarse. His head turned, and the single eye found me. His tail began to wag, with obvious effort. And then the tongue slid from between the teeth in that awful, flesh-ripped grin and licked my palm. His tongue was as cold as a tombstone.
    But he was alive.
    Rebel stayed at Dr. Lezander’s house. Over the following days, Dr. Lezander stitched his torn muzzle, filled him full of antibiotics, and was planning on amputating the crushed leg but then it began to wither. The white hair fell away, exposing dead gray flesh. Intrigued by this new development, Dr. Lezander postponed the amputation and instead wrapped the withering leg to monitor its progress. On the fourth day in Dr. Lezander’s care, Rebel had a coughing fit and vomited up a mass of dead tissue the size of a man’s fist. Dr. Lezander put it in alcohol in a bottle and showed it to Dad and me. It was Rebel’s punctured lung.
    But he was alive.
    I began riding Rocket over to Dr. Lezander’s every day after school to check on my dog. Each afternoon, the doctor wore a freshly puzzled expression and had something new to show me: pieces of vomited-up bones that could only be broken ribs, teeth that had fallen out, the blinded eye that had popped from its socket like a white pebble. For a while Rebel picked at strained meat and slurped a few tonguefuls of water, and the newspapers at the bottom of his cage were clotted and soaked with blood. Then Rebel stopped eating and drinking, wouldn’t touch food or water no matter how much I urged him. He curled up in a corner, and stared with his one eye at something behind my shoulder, but I couldn’t figure out what had his attention. He would sit like that for an hour or more, as if he’d gone to sleep with his eye open, or he was lost in a dream. I couldn’t get him to respond even when I snapped my fingers in front of his muzzle. Then he would come out of it, all of a sudden, and he would lick my hand with his tombstone tongue and whine a little bit. Then he might sleep, shivering, or he might slide off into the haze again.
    But he was alive.
    “Listen to his heart, Cory,” Dr. Lezander told me one afternoon. I did, using the stethoscope. I heard a slow, labored thud. Rebel’s breathing was like the sound of a creaking door in an old deserted house. He was neither warm nor cold; he just was. Then Dr. Lezander took a toy mouse and wound it up, and he set it loose to twist and turn right in front of Rebel, while I listened to his heartbeat through the stethoscope. Rebel’s tail wagged sluggishly. The sound of his heart never changed an iota from its slow, slow beating. It was like the working of an engine set to run at a steady speed, day and night, with no increase or decrease in power no matter what