Drop City

abandoned it. The railroad tracks ran within a hundred feet of the back end of the place and the boxcars sat there humped up to the horizon like dominoes. Sess didn't even want to get out of the car, but she prodded him, and a moment later they were standing there in the lot, gravel crunching under their feet, and she was thinking this was about as far from the Thirtymile as you could get and still be in the state of Alaska. An ammoniac smell hit them then, carried on a light breeze with a handful of mosquitoes in it. There was a feeble anguished sound of yipping and whining, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. “What can we lose?” she said, trying to mollify him as he gave her a glum look over the roof of the ridiculous car.
    Inside, the smell was concentrated, and she thought of the only big-city zoo she'd ever been to, in San Francisco, where the ratty animals lay festering in concrete troughs and the multiplied stink of them--a stink so intense it made her panicky--was the only lasting impression she had of the place, of the whole city, in fact. The floor was concrete, the light inadequate. A blocky woman with pouffed-up hair and teardrop glasses grinned at them from behind a plywood counter with a Formica top. “You here for an adoption?” she asked over the racket of the dogs, which had gone up a notch since they'd stepped in the door. “Or just thinking about it maybe?”
    Then they were walking down a cement corridor between rows of mesh cages, dogs of every size and description leaping at the wire, yodeling, yapping, whining, their paws like windmills, their eyes alive with eagerness and hope. The woman stooped to one or another of them, cooing, and they poked their shining noses through the mesh to worship her fingers and the back of her hand. There was a terrific scrabbling of nails as the dogs fought for purchase on the wet concrete. One of them, a beagle mix with flapping ears and deep, liquid eyes, clambered up on the backs of three others to stick its snout through the gap where the cage door had pulled back from its hinges, and Pamela slid her hand in against the wall to feel the dog's appreciation, its pink tongue extracting every molecule of flavor from her skin. She wanted to adopt them all.
    “Now, Buster,” the woman was saying, pressing her hand to the mesh where a white-faced retriever crouched over its bad hips, “Buster's the sweetest thing you'd ever want to see. He'd make a perfect house dog. And he loves kids. You two have kids?”
    Sess was right there with her, but he didn't seem to hear her. He was focused on a dog in the back of the cage, a lean big-headed thing with paws like griddles that couldn't have been more than eight or ten months old. “That one,” he said, “can I see that one?”
    The woman looked dubious. “You mean Peaches? That's Peaches,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Pamela. “He's not a house dog, but if you live in the country and you've got some space, well, I guess he'd be fine. He's shy, that's all.”
    “That's because he's got wolf in him,” Sess said, and his mood had lifted--she could hear it in his voice. “You see the angularity of those back legs, Pamela? And the snout? The pointy snout means he's got longer vertebrae so his chest muscles fan out and he can really cover ground. That's a fast dog there. And he'll pull too.” And then he was in the cage, three or four dogs swarming at his hands, tails whacking. The wolf dog shrank back in the corner and Sess went down into a crouch, squatting over his knees and extending his right hand. “Peaches,” he said, his voice burnished and low, “what kind of a name is that for a dog? Come here, boy, come on.” It took a minute, Pamela and the woman watching from outside the cage, and then the dog came to him, five feet across the cement floor, in the submissive posture of a wolf, creeping on its elbows and dragging its belly. Sess smoothed back its ears, ran a hand over its snout. “I'll take this one,” he said.
    At the grocery he wouldn't let her get more than they could carry on their backs, and he didn't offer any explanations and he didn't bother coming in with her to push the stainless steel cart up and down the aisles of plenty like every other husband and wife in creation. He stayed out in the dirt lot with the dog--at the very end of it where it trailed off into knee-high weed--and though he'd brought a homemade leather leash and collar along,