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Page 28.
Scene 9. Language of Dogs
 "Jack—you'll be late for supper." A woman's voice echoed from downstairs through the quietly sunny, two-story Temecula ranch home. The house nestled amid pine trees, high up amid alpine meadows and stony crags.
"I'll be down there in a minute," Jack Gray called back from his upstairs back bedroom, where at the moment he puttered over a bookshelf while getting dressed. He'd been taking a little breather—a moment alone, in the safety and familiarity of the house to which he’d been born. It was his true home. He wanted to decompress. He wanted to let his thoughts and emotions float together for a relaxed and well-deserved handshake.
He'd spent the morning on the high acres of the ranch, cutting and stacking fallen oak wood. He'd transport it for chopping, a year or more drying in the mountain wind, and eventual burning in the fireplace at the main house. A powder-blue, mid-afternoon California sky presided over vast vistas of inland mountains and deserts as he chopped away, sweaty and naked from the waist up.
Nobody, aside from Johannes Rector at Compass News Corp, and Claire Lightfield at Sigma 2020, knew the existence of this place, or of Jack's family life here. Ironically, he was most paranoid about safety from assassins here than anywhere else in the world. It wasn't for his own sake so much as for his sister, her husband, and the four children who were growing up here. The smaller boys were Janet and Mark's children, while the teenage girls were Jack's daughters.
How he got here from Los Angeles, a two hour drive northwest and worlds away, was an enigma to everyone but Jack, and purposely so. Once he appeared here, he was no longer Jack Gray or Pathfinder, but Jack Dorsey…hence the D Ranch; or Dandelion Ranch. Gray had been Catherine’s maiden name. He wore it as a pennant, hoping to gain the attention of whoever had scored the hit, years ago. Until he exacted justice for her, he would not retire from the business. If he died doing it, so be it.
Jack's personal domain at the ranch was an airy, upstairs corner suite including bedroom, bath, and study. The boys were down the hall, at the back of the second story, where all three single guys shared a common shower. The two girls had their bedrooms on the second floor, but on the front side—high up, overlooking the hills across the valley in the direction of San Diego. His sister Janet Dorsey-Barger and her husband Mark Barger had an apartment downstairs.
Jack's windows on two sides overlooked a Federally protected Indian reservation behind the family ranch.
Hearing dogs, Jack froze. Somewhere on the ranch a big working dog started barking. The sound came from downhill in front, where the state road passed, a winding blacktop. Other dogs joined in. Their husky hammer-blows cut across the tranquil air amid floating butterflies, skittering squirrels, and a circling hawk pair.
Standing frozen, Jack listened intently to the language of the dogs. As if he were one of their pack, he listened for any sign of danger, of an intruder, of anything at all amiss on the isolated 200 acre ranch. No dog ever raised its voice without a reason, even if it was just the joy of being alive or seeing a bird or thinking about supper. Jack, an expert on survival, had a theory that the way dogs became domesticated was not by wolves coming near human campfires and liking the food thrown to them. Rather, some form of wolf or primitive dog allowed men to hunt with them. As long as the symbiotic humans did not upset the alpha chain, and contributed to the pack somehow, they were permitted to run along at the rear of the pack with the gimps. Gradually, the human pack members achieved higher pack status, though still far below the top alpha and beta wolves. Humans made poor dogs, Jack reflected, but humans were fiendishly clever at being parasitic, as with buffalo and reindeer herds. When these gamma humans returned to their Old Stone Age clans, carrying meat, the eta and zeta dogs under them came along as if belonging to a new pack—in which humans became the alphas, and the etas and zetas were higher up as well. That was Jack's opinion about how, in Paleolithic times, the domesticated dog was born.
Jack listened intently to his dogs talking.
For a moment, something cold and terrifying crossed his eyes. His soothing equanimity vanished instantly, replaced by the survival instincts of his working life. In that instant, cause and effect blended—terrified stimulus, terrifying response. He started to reach for the fully loaded, matte black 9mm Sig-Sauer stashed safely in a locked drawer at his knee. For an instant, he saw himself with the gun in hand—running, dodging, rolling, shooting, killing on the mountain meadows to avoid being killed, and more importantly, to save his family-pack.
A feeling like battery acid spilled through his guts, so powerful it ached in the major bones where the body pivots for fighting or running. He was no stranger to the feeling. Utterly unpleasant to the point of pain, the sudden jolt of racing high voltage had saved his life more than once. But it came with a price. The adrenaline-fried emotion passed in an instant, leaving Jack shaken. He had to stand for two or three minutes—face lowered, ashen, bracing himself with both hands against the dresser. He waited for the poison voltage to evaporate from his jangled nerves. The bad movie passed in a flash, like a breakneck express train fading into night and fog.
This was sweet, balmy, blue-skied California daylight. The dogs were merely excited and pleasured. He relaxed. Three of the shepherds were former military dogs who had seen combat service. They now bounded in pensioneered glory, like retired career soldiers, bossing the ranch and everyone that crossed its borders.
"Jack?" came his sister's voice again from downstairs. She sounded worried.
"I'm just getting dressed," he called out pleasantly when his voice no longer shook. "I'll be down in a minute."
"Be sure you look nice. Mark will be here, and someone else." Janet Barger, Jack's younger sister, ran the ranch, which she co-owned with Jack. Mark was her husband, Jack's brother-in-law, a decent guy. There was a pre-nup. The ranch had been in the family for over a century, and stayed there, intact no matter who or what. Jack did not worry about leaving his two daughters at the house—or Mark would have left years ago. With Janet and Mark, nothing to worry about.
Someone else?
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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