The dogs are poised and trembling.
As taut as drawn springs, they await only the hair-trigger release that will send them hurtling across the courtyard in attack. As yet, there is no barking. Only the spotted one speaks in his low growl, and the others wait and listen to the leader of the pack, their ears twitching to the modulated notes that rise and fall like the earlier chanting of the muezzin. As the sunlight fades, there are eight pairs of glittering eyes in that courtyard, fastened on these intruders who look different and sound different (she shouldn’t have spoken to Paul) and smell different from any human being they have ever known. She does not want to do anything to inspire the attack she is certain will come anyway, no sudden move, no shrill warning, especially no aroma of fear, which she is positive is seeping from every pore to pollute the air as surely as had the Greek’s farts. The leader of the pack is still growling. Perhaps he is as frightened as she is. Perhaps the growl is only his macho-dog act, perhaps he is only strutting his stuff for the seven mutts behind him, all of them watching with those glittering little eyes and those twitching ears, waiting. Cautiously, she places her hand on Paul’s arm. Watching the dogs, they begin backing out of the courtyard — and just then, the leader springs.
He seems propelled by the force of his own growl. He is airborne an instant after he begins his charge, his fangs bared as he lunges unerringly for the jugular. Lissie brings up her right arm and his jaws clamp on it, his fangs biting into naked flesh. She remembers something about hitting for the nose, and instinctively clenches her left hand and smashes the fist at the dog’s nose, remembering an instant later that it’s a shark you’re supposed to hit on the nose, a fucking shark, and wincing in pain as the weight of the animal knocks her flat on her back to the ground. His teeth are still clamped onto her forearm. The pain is excruciating. She smells the dog stink on him, and the putrid aroma of the garbage now scattered on the courtyard floor from the open can she knocked over when she fell. She does not know where Paul is, she prays with every religious remnant in her body that he hasn’t deserted her. She will pray in Islamic if that will help; just let him be there, just let him not have turned and deserted her.
The dog is gnawing on her arm as if it is the sundown meal he’d been searching for here in the courtyard. The other dogs are yapping in random frenzy, and she realizes as her eyes frantically graze the courtyard walls that Paul has fled through the gate, Paul has left her behind, Paul has run again. It is then that the truly terrifying thought comes to her: are these dogs starving? It is one thing to be bitten by an angry or a frightened animal; it is another to be eaten by a hungry one. Someone bursts into the courtyard from the kitchen door at the rear of the building. He is wearing baggy pants and a turban and an apron, and there is an ancient musket in his hands. There is another man behind him, waving a cleaver. The gun goes off. There is another shot, and the dogs begin barking now in unison against these new intruders, these shouting saviors, these nice Afghans who make such pretty rugs, these dear lovely people. She thinks But where the hell are you, Paul — and then faints from loss of blood, or hunger, or fear, or exhaustion, or everything.
August 14, 1970
Dear Mom and Dad,
Well, here I am in the city of Kabul where Paul and I have spent a day resting because we were attacked by wild dogs in the village of Shahnur just two days ago. The doctor says it will be all right for us to move on to India tomorrow, which is what we plan to do first thing in the morning. I’m very tired, and my right arm hurts like hell, so if you don’t mind, I’ll make this postcard brief.
All my love,
12
He called his attorney. His attorney said there was no need for alarm but that it might be wise to call the State Department in Washington to see if they might be able to help him in locating Lissie. The man he spoke to there was named Mr. Brothers. Mr. Brothers told him there was virtually nothing the State Department could do. Unless they knew his daughter’s address, there was no way their various consuls in Asia could even begin making inquiries. He suggested that Jamie contact him again the moment he knew where his daughter could be reached. Jamie thanked him, and then hung up. He had called the State Department because he’d wanted help in locating his daughter; he had just been told to call back after he’d located his daughter.
He was a stranger to the part of the world in which his daughter was traveling. He telephoned the India Government Tourist Office and asked for a map to supplement the one in his 1967 Rand McNally Atlas, and then bought a half-dozen more maps in the Doubleday near Fifty-seventh. Some of them proved worthless while others were so detailed and sophisticated that they listed currency rates, time changes, temperatures and rainfalls at various times of the year, and even unlighted tollgates one might expect to encounter at night. The roadmaps gave him a sense of security. The countries through which she had passed, the country in which she was now traveling (presumably) seemed more civilized than he’d imagined them to be; there were primary roads and secondary roads and even little back roads, just as there were in Connecticut.
Like an armchair general planning a fall campaign, Jamie spread his roadmaps on the long table in the barn and tried to second-guess Lissie’s route.
Had she entered India at Lahore, which seemed likely, and then continued on to Delhi and eastward to Calcutta? Or had she gone up to Nepal instead? It was supposed to be beautiful there in Nepal, maybe they went right out of Delhi into Nepal, looks like maybe, what can this be, maybe nine hundred miles to Katmandu, that’s where they may have headed, supposed to be terrific there in Katmandu, temples and everything, monks, whatever, would have taken them maybe, well, how many miles a day would they be averaging, oh, figure thirty miles an hour, maybe a bit more, but say thirty and play it safe. So figure two hundred, two hundred and fifty miles a day, no more than that, they’d have been in Katmandu — well, let’s say they spent at least a few days in Delhi, let’s say they left Delhi on the twenty-first, they’d be in Katmandu by, where’s the calendar, well, I don’t need a calendar, just divide nine hundred by two-fifty, that’s close to four days, they’d have been in Katmandu by the twenty-fourth of August.
He made this calculation on Sunday, August 30, sixteen days after Lissie had written her last letter home. At a dinner party that night, he learned that both Reynolds McGruder here in Rutledge, and Matthew Bridges in nearby Talmadge, had a month ago received telegrams from the Defense Department stating that their respective sons had been killed in action. Apparently both young men (their lieutenants’ letters to each family read like carbon copies of each other) had been engaged in dropping supplies to a beleaguered South Vietnamese rifle company when the Vietcong opened fire and blasted the hovering helicopter out of the sky. It seemed as though Charlie hadn’t heard that the Americans might be pulling out. Or perhaps Charlie had simply decided that dropping ammunition and food could be considered aiding and abetting the enemy. Either way, Roger Bridges (who would have been twenty-one this month) and David McGruder (whose twentieth birthday would have come in December) would never again or respectively play drums and lead guitar in the group they had formed two years ago.