Chapter 7 The Fire of God
The Fire of God
i
o lord, receive me in my penitence
Chester was fairly sure he would be dead by sundown, tomorrow afternoon at the latest. He was not disturbed by this; on the contrary, the prospect came as a great relief.
His damnation was entering its third season, having endured the winter when he feared he might die, and the spring when he came to realize that the true horror was that he would not die soon enough.
Now summer was upon him. The Starving Rocks, as he had come to call this desert, was nearing the end of its long meal.
i offer thanks for my time here
Chester pried one eye open, looked down the length of his body, shuddered a bit, and closed it again.
When he last saw snow fall, it was through a window in House, the den of his mistress, with chewtoy between his paws and a fire warming his butt.
There had been a half-eaten bowl of food-rocks gathering dust in the food room.
He had had occasion to reflect on that detail many times.
Back in those days he mostly disdained the food-rocks, taking his meals instead from the paw and dish of the two-legs he considered to be his life mate.
Even now, with his starvation nearly finished, those foods still had the power to call a trickle of drool from the side of his mouth—fat roasts, dripping with grease and still warm from their time in the hot-box, or salty bacon, or perhaps just the wet, homey comfort of gravy-from-the-metal-rock-thing.
The fact that he would be willing to trade his tail and paws for even a single one of the food-rocks he had once disdained was only a taste of the rich ironies he had happened on while treading the long path of his death.
Chester had eaten nothing at all for two months.
In the month before that he had done better.
Two days after his damnation began, he caught a mouse and gobbled it down whole.
A week later he came across the half-eaten corpse of some desert beast and fell on it with a will, thinking then, in what he now recognized as his boundless naivete, that he had been hungry.
Not so. Had he been hungry, he would not have walked away with morsels of meat still clinging to the bone.
Had he been truly hungry he would have eaten the bones themselves and licked the dirt underneath besides. Hell, he had discovered, is hunger.
for without it i would have died blind to my sin
Perhaps a half month after that, he came upon a small pack of men wandering among the Starving Rocks.
He followed their trail for a time. One of them, a kind-smelling female that reminded him of his two-legs, had given him a handful of some crunchy thing.
The flavor was not particularly pleasant, but as he had come to discover, flavor is not a big concern after the third day or so.
Later that afternoon she had given him another.
That night he slept just beyond their circle of firelight.
He had dreamed that she would accept him into her pack, as his two-legs once had.
He dreamed that he would once again have chewtoy between his paws and a fire warming his butt.
But the next morning when he came to beg for breakfast the woman wasn’t around.
When the male she had been with saw Chester he beckoned.
“C’mon, buddy. Closer. Closer still.” Chester could smell the meat.
He crawled forward, wanting to hope. His stomach rumbled.
His tail twitched. The man threw boiling fat in his face.
Hell is also burning.
The pain had been beyond description, beyond imagination.
His face and muzzle seemed on fire, or swarmed by a thousand stinging bees.
For many days he had been able to do little but scream.
Somewhere in this time the fur on the left half of his face slid off and lay before him in the sand.
Chester sniffed at it for a moment, thinking of how the meals of his two-legs smelled when she took them from the hot-box, steaming and succulent, then gobbled it down, hating himself but unable to stop.
That moment was the beginning of his understanding, the awakening of his faith, the first breath of his prayer.
i have forsaken the craft of my fathers
In time the burns healed enough for him to function.
He tried to hunt, of course—his mother had told him stories of the days when all dogs hunted for their meals, and he knew such things were possible—but despite that first lucky mouse he never caught the knack of it.
Few creatures lived among the rocks. Those that did tended to be small and quick.
Back when he still had the energy, he tried to chase them, but at the last second they always bolted into some damn hole.
The only thing in this desert more plentiful than rocks was prairie dog holes.
He never caught one of the little bastards, not even once. In time the prairie dogs realized this. They began to make a game of it, darting over him in his sleep and calling out taunts from within their burrows. They took to calling him the Furry Cactus because he was so slow.
Every few days he heard the voices of men. Sometimes women. Sometimes both. He stayed far away.
He first saw the outline of his ribs toward the end of summer.
He grew desperate, and of course, desperation is the mother of craft.
That night he lay still on a warm rock, breathing slow and regular, but careful not to truly sleep.
When the prairie dogs started their game he surprised one of them, dashing after a fat one named Sliderpaw.
The chase was short but very close, ending with Sliderpaw diving into a nearby hole perhaps a paw-length ahead of Chester’s snapping jaws.
Inside the burrow, the prairie dogs shared a good laugh at Sliderpaw’s expense, for of course they all thought Chester was a joke.
Chester could hear them quite clearly. They sat just inside the hole, laughing about how if Sliderpaw hadn’t farted at the exact right moment he would sleep now in the belly of the Furry Cactus.
There was little point in bantering with them.
He had concluded that around the same time he realized it was futile to try to dig them out of their holes.
But his frustration was such that he could not stop himself from snapping, “The Furry Cactus will sleep now. If any would like to try another go, please do. I think I’m getting the hang of this fine game. ”
That shut them up for a moment, but as he wandered off, he heard them call after him, “There he goes, the King of the Skeletons.”
“Aye,” agreed Sliderpaw. “The cacti have lost a fine leader.” The prairie dogs’ cackling laughter echoed from every bolt-hole within a day’s walking distance. From then on Chester was called the King of the Skeletons by all. Hell, he had discovered, is also laughter.
i have bound myself to an unsane pack
When he was little, Chester loved his two-legs so much that he felt his heart would burst from it.
He lived in her den for as long as he could remember.
In the evenings, when it snowed, they would lay by the fire and nibble little morsels together—first a bite for her, then a bite for him.
Sometimes she would rub his belly. Sometimes she would whisper soft words in his ear in a language he could not understand.
It was a gentle time. Back then he thought all times were gentle.
i offer up my suffering and my life as penance
Chester loved his two-legs, but sometimes he angered her without meaning to.
Many days she would go away and leave him to his own company.
That terrified him—why didn’t she take him with her?
Were they not a pack? Was he not worthy?
Left alone in massive House, he would seek out things that smelled of her, and sleep on them, or chew them, or take them to a special place and leave them there.
When he was hungry he ate from the bins of used food.
When he was bored he chewed stuff. Toward the end he began to form an uneasy association with the piles of chew scraps and her rages.
He made them less for a while after that, then stopped entirely.
But no matter how she beat him, he never understood what wrong could come of relieving himself, not when she left him to lie alone in the dark for so long.
subjugate me to thy will, o lord
Finally a day came when she took him along with her.
He jumped into Car, grinning and wagging.
The two of them ran down the road faster than even the fastest dog might run.
Chester hung his head out the side. The wind rushing up his nose made him nearly insane with the ecstasy of smells.
When they stopped, they were in what he would come to call the Starving Rocks.
that i may at last join your pack
His two-legs called him out of Car and patted him a little.
Chester wagged his tail and showed her his belly for the last time.
She rubbed on it for a few breaths. She said soft things.
He noticed that small waters leaked from her eyes.
He thought that strange, but attached little import to it. Men often do strange things.
When Car swallowed her and ran away, he followed, thinking that this was some new game.
But Car was fast, so fast. Chester cried out to her, saying, “Please don’t leave me,” saying, “I’m sorry,” saying, “I swear I’ll be good.
” But she didn’t stop, no matter how he begged.
When he gave up the chase and found himself alone in the forest of rocks and sand, when he saw that the sun was setting and felt the first bite of the night chill, when his stomach made its first tiny stirrings of hunger, he thought it was a mistake.
Perhaps she had just forgotten? For days, he held tight to the hope, the certainty, that she would be back.
He understood nothing.
and be with you, lord, either in this world or the next