How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet Read Free Book Online Page A

as quickly as he could, safely out of traffic. He stood there gazing down, his chest clutching. But then he saw its flank moving. It breathed. It was still alive. It could have bitten him. Did coyotes bite people? They were always shrinking away; they slunk along the roadside and veered off into brush as the headlights swept over them. He looked into its face, the muzzle sharp at the nose like a fox but somehow humble-mouthed like a dog; the light eyes, which were open and seemed to see him.
    “Oh,” he said, and knelt down. It would not bite. It was dying. And if it did, he thought, that meant it was planning to live.
    It made a sound from its throat—a growl, maybe. If he had a gun he could shoot it. Because Jesus: the legs! Nothing should have to bear that.
    “Good boy. Quiet there, boy,” he said uncertainly. It probably did not want him near; he should back off. Better to die alone if you were an animal like this one, a loner that avoided any contact with humans. He looked past the flank to the underbelly; nothing there. The poor thing was a bitch. “Steady, girl,” he said. “It’s OK.”
    He stood creakily and stepped back, but somehow he could not leave. He went to sit in his car. He waited, listening to a country music station.
    But he was restless and anxious and soon he got out again to see if she was dead yet. He had an idea he should move her, once she was gone; he should carry her into the brush, where she could go to ground.
    He willed himself not to look at her legs, to try to ignore what was back there bleeding, the cracked bone tapering into nothing. He looked only at her face and her side to see if she was still breathing. But despite the fact that he was not looking, as he sat beside her, he imagined the shock from the ruined legs coursing though her body, what must be the blind surge of the pain as the end closed in. A loud end—the rush of cars still distant punctuated by the searing noise and glare of those approaching, bearing down viciously and then fading again. She was dying in the smells of asphalt, exhaust, and gasoline, no doubt also the smell of her own blood, and him, and other smells he could not know himself.
    The fullness, the terrible sympathy!
    Had he felt this before, he wondered? Maybe when he was a boy? Animals died by the road and you saw that all the time, everyone did. You saw them lying there, so obvious in their deadness, sad lumps of dirty meat; you saw their limp furry masses thrown up like flowers along the yellow stripes, the tumbly asphalt edges. You saw the red insides all exposed. You thought: that is the difference between them and me. My insides are firmly contained.
    And were I to lie on the side of the road dying, it would be nothing like that. No one would drive around me : the cars would stop, tens upon hundreds of them; there would be lines of stopped traffic for miles as they removed my body, flashing their red and blue lights of crisis and competence.
    Presently he realized her flank had ceased to rise and fall. He was relieved but oddly disoriented. Where was the ambulance? No: he was all that she had. All her lights, all her rescue workers.
    It was just a coyote. No one would fault him for leaving. And yet he felt confused.
    “Good girl,” he whispered.

    •

    Back in Los Angeles he traded in the S-Class, chose a modest 190 to replace it and drove off the lot quickly. Irrational, but he had to get rid of it.
    We all kill sooner or later, he said to himself, fine. Was she maybe half-blind? Maybe when they got old they went blind and could not hunt anymore, as birds died by starving. Maybe she had been feeble and exhausted and thought, trotting onto the blacktop for the last time: welcome, friend. All the times she must have seen the cars fly by, in their hundreds and hundreds of thousands.
    But no. A coyote might want relief from suffering, but to plan for her own end seemed human.
    Still a particular moment recurred within him, the sense of a rising