Boys Life

water, each supporting one handle and Mom holding the light. They tilted the wheelbarrow up as high as they could, and Mr. Thornberry lifted his head up, the veins standing out in his scrawny neck. I heard my mother grunt with the effort. But the wheelbarrow was moving, and they pushed it through the water that was swirling around the open doorway and across the flooded porch. At the foot of the two cinderblock steps, the water came up to Mr. Thornberry’s neck and splashed into his face. They moved away, the current at their backs helping them push the wheelbarrow. I had never thought of my mother as being physically strong before. I guess you never know what a person can do until that person has to do it.
    “Cory?” Gavin said after a minute or so.
    “Yeah, Gavin?”
    “I cain’t swim,” he said.
    He was pressed up against my side. He was starting to shiver now that he didn’t have to be so brave for his grandpap. “That’s okay,” I told him. “You won’t have to.”
    I hoped.
    We waited. Surely they’d be back soon. The water was lapping up over our soggy shoes. I asked Gavin if he knew any songs, and he said he knew “On Top of Old Smoky,” which he began to sing in a high, quavering yet not unpleasant voice.
    His singing-more of a yodel, actually-attracted something that suddenly came paddling through the doorway, and I caught my breath at the noise and swung the light onto it.
    It was a brown dog, matted with mud. Its eyes gleamed wildly in the light, its breathing harsh as it swam across the room toward us, through the flotsam of papers and other trash. “Come on, boy!” I said. Whether it was a boy or girl was incidental; the dog looked like it needed a perch. “Come on!” I gave Gavin the lamp, and the dog whimpered and yelped as a slow wave slipped through the door and lifted the animal up and down again. Water smacked the walls.
    “Come on, boy!” I leaned down to get the struggling dog. I grasped its front paws. It looked up into my face, its pink tongue hanging out in the dank yellow light, as a born-again Christian might appeal to the Savior.
    I was lifting the dog out by its paws, and I felt it shudder.
    Something went crunch.
    As fast as that.
    And then its head and shoulders were coming out of the dark water and suddenly there was no more of the dog beyond the middle of its back, no hindquarters, no tail, no hind legs, nothing but a gaping hole that started spilling a torrent of black blood and steaming guts.
    The dog made a little whining sound. That’s all. But its paws twitched and its eyes were on me, and the agony I saw in them will last in my mind forever.
    I cried out-and what I said I will never know-and dropped the mess that had once been a dog. It splashed in, went under, came back up, and the paws were still trying to paddle. I heard Gavin shout something; wannawaterMars? it sounded like. And then the water thrashed around the half of a carcass, the entrails streaming behind it like a hideous tail, and I saw the skin of something break the surface.
    It was covered with diamond-shaped scales the colors of autumn leaves: pale brown, shimmering purple, deep gold, and tawny russet. All the shades of the river were there, too, from swirls of muddy ocher to moonlight pink. I saw a forest of mussels leeched to its flesh, gray canyons of scars and fishhooks scarlet with rust. I saw a body as thick as an ancient oak twist slowly around in the water, taking its own sweet time. I was transfixed by the spectacle, even as Gavin wailed with terror. I knew what I was looking at, and though my heart pounded and I could hardly draw a breath, I thought it was as beautiful as anything in God’s creation.
    Then I recalled the jagged fang driven like a blade into the chunk of wood at Mr. Sculley’s. Beautiful or not, Old Moses had just torn a dog in half.
    He was still hungry. This happened so fast, my mind hardly had time to see it: a pair of jaws opened, fangs glistened, and an old boot was in there impaled on one of them along with a flopping silver fish. The jaws sucked the remaining half of the dog’s carcass in with a snarling rush of water and then closed delicately, as one might savor a lemonhead candy at the Lyric theater. I caught a quick glimpse of a narrow, pale green cat’s-eye the size of a baseball, shielded with a gelatinous film. Then Gavin fell back off the table into the water, and the lamp he was holding hissed out.
    I didn’t think about being brave. I didn’t