Freddie walked slowly, leaning back, allowing Smick the dog to do most of the work of moving them both forward along the sidewalk. Smick lunged at the end of the leash, desperate to cover the last twenty feet of sidewalk and make it into the park, as he had been well trained to do his business nowhere else. As soon as they passed the last section of chain link fence and turned in at the gate the dog stepped off the cement path and lifted his leg to pee against the first tree.
This first tree had soothed the built-up anguish of so many dogs, on so many days, that Freddie knew it was not the sort of tree you sit against on lazy sunny days, chewing a blade of grass, your girlfriend's head resting in your lap. No, this was so clearly a toilet tree that Freddie unconsciously held his breath while he stood near it, waiting for Smick to be finished.
Not that anybody leaned against trees or chewed grass stems in this park anymore. This park where Freddie had first dug in the sand and slid down slides under the watchful eye of his mother who sat smoking on a nearby bench, talking to other smoking, watchful young mothers; this park where Freddie and his lifelong best friend Benny had graduated to unsupervised playtime, standing on the swings and climbing the backstop and venturing into forbidden territory through holes in the fence, onto railway land where interesting garbage could sometimes be found; this park where he and Bennie had drank their first beers and smoked their first joints, had gone to the dogs, as they say these days. The park had gone to the dogs.
Smick stopped peeing, but Freddie saw the way he stopped; he saw that Smick had cut it off, saving some pee to sprinkle on other trees. The urgency of peeing was over for now, but the pleasure of peeing; the social doggie aspect of peeing would continue, unless Freddie were to spoil Smick's sport by pulling on the leash and turning him round to walk quickly back to the apartment, the way he sometimes did on cold winter days. But Freddie let Smick pull him a few feet further into the park. He would let the dog visit some other trees, here in the well-lit part of the park closest to the street, but he would not be pulled deeper into the park than that. He would not be pulled to the dark, overgrown back half of the grounds where the old goalposts were, and he would never venture again to that rundown chain link fence, and the railway land was off limits forever, not due to his mother's rules but because Freddie feared the place and the way the place had changed, for good. The park would never be the same to him again, since it had really, truly gone to the dogs.
When Freddie and Benny were eleven years old, their mothers had joined a citizen's group and had brought their children to a protest at City Hall. After all, children are a powerful tool, attractive to the media, and useful for putting pressure on politicians. So Freddie and Benny had stood holding between them a sign that said "No More Feral Dogs" while news cameras whirred and their mothers and other members of the citizen's group stood behind them, acting like a crowd, and they had watched themselves do this later on the evening news. But the politicians had done nothing and the wild dogs had stayed on the railway land, occasionally crossing into the park itself, in a pack, but generally staying out of sight.
And when Freddie and Benny were twelve they had been among a group of boys who found the remains of an old man who had gone missing in his pyjamas one morning. Two weeks later, after an unsuccessful search, not much was left of the old man when the boys found him. Shreds of his pyjamas were strewn around the bones, and he was not entirely eaten. It looked more like he had been picked at like a leftover turkey, but picked at by many mouths, and for many days. At first there was an uproar, but as the city spokesman said, there was no proof that the dogs had killed him; maybe they had encountered his body after he died, and half-starved as they were it was only natural that they would eat him.
So the dogs remained. But it kept happening, once in a while, until a year later they found the corpses of three prostitutes back there behind the chain link fence in the space of only a week, and by this time it had been generally accepted that underworld figures were using the area as a convenient place to dispose of bodies.
And then, by the time Freddie and Benny turned fifteen, others were doing it too. Unclaimed bodies from the morgue were brought to the railway land and left there. A couple of unwanted babies were dumped there. People were bringing their aged relatives there. And now it was too late to call the police, because there were no more police, and nobody could blame the city government because they no longer existed either. The morgue was shut down and the dogs were the new morgue, because bodies had to be eliminated somehow.
There was a rumour going around Freddie's school the year he was sixteen, that some boys from the school had ambushed a mentally handicapped woman, had stripped her and used broken bottles to make her bleed, that they had driven her beyond the chain link fence by throwing rocks at her, and that they had climbed the sides of the backstop and watched as she was torn apart by the dogs. Freddie never found out if it was true, but he knew of the woman they were talking about, and she had indeed gone missing, never to be heard from again.
And a few weeks ago now, Freddie and Benny and some others had been standing back there near the fence, smoking and talking, when they had suddenly become aware that they were not alone, that many dogs of all sizes stood all around them, had arrived so quietly that nobody noticed, and as soon as they made a move to run to the street the dogs rushed them, expertly splitting them up. Freddie had been bitten once in the back of his thigh by a scruffy yellow retriever, but he'd made it to the backstop and climbed to the top, out of reach of the dogs, and most of the other youths were up on the backstop too. But Benny was still down there, at the pitchers' mound, staggering under the weight as twenty dogs tugged at his clothes and his skin. He made animal sounds as they tired him out and, bleeding from a number of wounds, he didn't have the strength to fight his way that last few feet to the backstop. It was not a clean kill, with Benny still standing even as his abdomen tore open and his entrails spilled out, and Freddie saw that some of the dogs had already begun to eat before Benny finally slumped to the ground.
Smick peed on the old see-saw, and Freddie watched the area all around, but nothing moved. He thought about how a good hunter could pick off these dogs one by one, with a bit of patience, and it would not get rid of them all, but it might reinstill their respect for humans. But there was nowhere to buy a gun anymore, and those who had guns hoarded their ammunition, and this was just one more indication of the depths to which society had sunk.
Freddie knew he didn't want to come around here anymore. He leaned down and unhooked Smick's leash from his collar. The dog jogged away, into the bushes, and Freddie walked quickly back to the street, then walked more slowly along the sidewalk, headed for home.