With a roar Jimmy heaved himself forward.

A blast of a car horn--he'd darted into traffic.

Tires screeched. His life unreeled before his eyes, but unlike the film noire he always imagined it to be, it appeared as a cartoon. The last frame of a squashed cartoon character was so pitiful that he cried out, headlights becoming white hot just before the film snapped.

When he opened his eyes there was a crowd of faces around him. They were all looking at him--at Jimmy Diamond! The Dog was there too, but as though a fever had broken, the sight of it didn't even upset him. He was too weak to be upset--weak but sound, his mind replaying the cartoon that had flashed by before the car struck. Breathing regularly, he realized that it didn't have to mean what he'd feared and a giddiness made him begin to talk out of his head.

"You're gonna be okay, buddy," one of the faces said and Jimmy became aware that the grip around his chest was from the binds of a stretcher. Men in white coats lifted him into the back of an ambulance and a deep sense of peace settled into his body--from the hospital, Jimmy knew, they would call his sister back in East St. Louis. She would come, and when he was ready, take him home.

While police pushed back a crowd of gaping tourists, the Dog managed to get through and shove its mug in Jimmy's face. Something had gone wrong with its laugh, though: it was choked with emotion. "Jimmy, I'll make it up to you," it whispered hoarsely. "I swear I will."

 

Seeing the Dog so serious brought back a distant rehearsal session. During it, Jimmy had been trying to work on their delivery when the Dog turned philosophical over how lucky humans were, living lives where everything was more than it seemed: roses could be made to smell sweeter just by giving them the right name, beautiful anchormodels delivered dead-serious news that was also fun and exciting, humans everywhere busily transforming deodorant, license plates, breakfast cereals, even themselves into more than they were. And instead of getting all tangled up in the slack, the more ways a thing could be, the less like a leash-law life became for them. "But with us?" Once, after wolfing down the entire contents of a kid's Easter basket, the Dog lamented, it had to have a vet pull synthetic grass and other indigestible Easter stuff out of its ass.