Chapter 9: The 4 Agnews

By Allen Frost


She still had connections. Don Benny paid her to walk his dogs everyday. She made a living that way. Later in the morning, she took his three greyhounds for a walk to the park. The straining end of the leash kept them from running away. Her dog Agnew tried to keep pace with them, but Don Benny’s dogs were all retired racers. Frances was still tired from the full moon effects. “Agnews!” she called, getting louder, “Agnews! Agnews! Stop!”
Finally, all three of them halted instantly. The greyhounds turned their puppet like heads to stare big black watery eyes at her.
“What’s got into you Agnews?”
Her old Agnew panted to her side rustily.
“The park’s not going anywhere…” She took a breath. “Just take it easy.”
They started again and before long they were running again. Frances held the shrouds of the dog sail. The park appeared like a green island beyond the meridian.
Once they passed over the cement curb onto the cobblestones into the leafy shade of it, the three Agnews caught her by surprise with a quick rip that took the leash out of her hand. They bolted gone across the lawn. She couldn’t hope to match their speed in her long skirt and this daylight. A hundred yards away she saw a rhododendron lash as they whipped into its cover.
“Ohhh Agnew…” she sat down on a bench. Agnew lay in the slatted shade underneath. Agnew was a gift from Don Benny—when he found out she was still alive, and heard her heroic rescue of Agnew from the candy store blaze, he gave her the dog. That was kind of him, but more than he could bear; he bought three more dogs to replace his old friend. She rubbed her sore calves. “They’re probably after a rabbit. I’m not going running after them right away.” She slipped off her shoes and socks. The grass felt good and instantly she remembered last night. Fast pieces of it flew at her like jagged glass, someplace she had been before, fragments of a dream, parts of a whole she couldn’t piece together…Why did it always have to disappear when she woke up?
She stood up and splashed into the cut grass. “Come on Agnew, I guess we better go now.”
There was a man running a kite with his daughter. They got it going into the air in blue swoops back and forth. Frances looked away at her shoes in her hand. It still hurt to think about her father. Don Benny got out of that same burning room but not him…Don Benny told her all he left behind in there was fire and smoke.
“Agnews!” she called. The sky replied with the roaring pass of a Flying Wing on patrol. If they weren’t always looking for war, maybe they wouldn’t find one, she thought. She squinted her eyes at its silver knife shape glinting sun. It was quickly gone, leaving a charcoal trail in the cloudless sky. “Agnews!” she repeated.
The Agnews weren’t in the undergrowth. The brush and flowers turned back into field on the other side. “Agnew, can you track them?” Frances asked her companion. She pointed her finger beyond. “Where’d they go, boy?”
Agnew crept gingerly through the last of the shrubs. He was camouflaged by a cover of burs, torn leaves and brambles. He’d been through a lot in the past year, seven years for a dog, and the baleful look he gave Frances told her that in spades. She scratched him, “I know…”
A gust of wind came rushing across the new field like an ocean wave and with it came a faint cry of, “Help!”
“What’s that?” She heard the yell again.
Even Agnew creaked to his four feet.
More breeze poured off the crown of maple trees towards them. Milkweed pollen loosed gauze made her sneeze. It was a long minute running over the field to the tall stand of arbor. “Look!” Frances yelled back to Agnew.
The Agnews were bunched at a trunk, staring up into the leaves at the thing they had treed. The leash wrapped around them so tightly it bunched them together making the Agnews resemble one dog with three heads. They snapped and wheezed at whatever was up there in the leaves.
“Help!” the voice piped down. “Get it away from me Frances. Please!”
She thought she knew that wretched voice, but he was well hidden.
“What it that thing!? Did you bring it from Mars?”
“Is that you, Tiny?”
“Yes it’s me. Listen Frances, I’m sorry I took a shot at your dad. We got a code, you know. Nobody deserts!”
“My father? What are you talking about?”
The three Agnews were joined by her leafy Agnew who huffed his paws up against the trunk and snapped at the little foot positioned on a limb.
“Aiieee!” Tiny shrieked. “Call your monsters back!”
She almost told him they were only dogs, but she paused instead. “First tell me what you know.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll talk. What choice do I have? I’ll give with it…It took me a long time to find him. I had to know if he was still alive. I put the pieces together. A guy like that knows too much. I’m sorry to say this Frances, but it’s the business we’re in. He turned the cops on to us when he found a new supply. The doc traded us for a connection straight from the source then he thought he’d drop out of sight. Savvy?”
“No.”
“I finally found him and I plugged him. But I didn’t plan on him being from outer space. A Martian stool pigeon.”
She wanted to say something about that, but she didn’t dare. What was her father’s plan?
“Not til I saw that green blood spilled out of him did I know…” His shift in the tree caused the leaves to rustle and branches clack. The dogs shifted below. “When I saw that green blood I panicked. I didn’t know what I was up against. Now I do. I know you Martians have got rockets and monsters and advanced technology and robot armies. Look, can’t we make a truce, you can forget it all and get back in your rocket and go back to Mars? I don’t want to start an interplanetary war.”
Frances stood and listened without saying a word.
His voice floated a sigh down from the tree, “I don’t know if I killed him or not. I doubt it. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. There…That’s it…If you want to shoot me with a raygun and feed me to your monsters, go ahead. But I promise, if you let me go, I promise he’s off the hit list. We don’t know him from now on.”
Frances paused again while she thought about the possibility. Her father bleeding green? That couldn’t be? He must be okay, somewhere in the city. The dogs whined again. She crept closer and took the leash. “Alright Tiny. It’s a deal. I’ll take the monsters back. Give me a minute or two to get away, then you can come down.”
“Thanks Frances…”
She tugged the Agnews, “Let’s go,” and they all followed along in the deep swerving weeds, retracing the path they had sawed getting there.