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Ice gave her a few moments, then got back to pushing forward. “Hey, we need to move, Indy. Listen, we’re going to stand right here up against this fence. I’m going to boost you up to the top. See if you can grab the top and hoist yourself over. Hang down on the other side, then drop feet-first and wait for me there.”
Indy didn’t even turn in his direction. Ice gently touched her elbow, but she whipped her arm away again, gasping like she’d been shocked, had definitely forgotten who Ice was, maybe even forgotten who she was.
Ice sat back down on his ass, sighed heavily, then glanced at the grinning dog. “Got any ideas, Pooch?”
Pooch sat up now, cocked his head and stared at Ice, its furry face furrowing in a quizzical frown. “Sure,” it seemed to say. “Follow me.”
Ice stared as Pooch stood up, its tail wagging in a way that wasn’t just random friendliness. There was an intentionality to the wag, and when Pooch licked Indy’s face and then backed up two steps and let out an urgentyip, Ice sighed again and shook his head because obviously the drug was making him imagine a talking dog asking them to follow his wagging tail.
Pooch went down on his front paws, let out another impatient bark, then pranced about like Ice imagined a unicorn might do in this rainbow-colored hallucination that he was obviously in right now.
But then Indy sat up suddenly, staring at the dog like maybe she was in that same hallucination, deep in the same delusion.
“All right then,” Ice said with a shrug. “Guess we’re following you, Pooch.”
He watched with a vague mixture of disbelief and amusement as Pooch hurried along the length of the fence, Indy crawling after him on all fours. Ice scratched his stubble, then shrugged again and hopped on the crazy train, following the two four-legged beasts, taking up the rear, glancing cautiously around to make sure nobody was watching this insanity, checking his position relative to the stuck cameras to make sure this crawling party of three kept within the extended blind spot.
“End of the line for us soon, Pooch,” Ice said as they approached the second jammed camera. “We can’t—”
Ice stopped mid-sentence.
Pooch was gone.
Had he imagined the whole thing?
Hallucinated the dog?
Nope, there was Pooch again, wagging his tail, grinning like a goon, head cocked to the left like he was wondering why the silly humans were on the wrong side of the fence.
“Wait, how are you on the other side?” Ice cocked his own fuzzy head when he realized that Pooch and he were now separated by the fence. “What the hell kind of hallucination is this?”
And then Ice understood.
He understood when he saw Indy’s butt stick up in the air, then slowly disappear into the ground as she wriggled and wormed her way along the sunken path of paw-dug dirt that tunneled beneath the fence.
“No way,” Ice muttered, scrambling forward and grabbing the bottom of the fence-mesh, pulling it up with all his strength to make sure Indy didn’t get snagged on the bottom. She made it through all the way, grinning like a child at play, totally lost in her own physicality, like this dog was some guiding angel sent down to lead them across the chasm between heaven and hell. “No fucking way.”
Grinning in disbelief, Ice examined the sunken tunnel-space beneath the fence. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, but then again he’d been focused on the cameras. It was fairly low profile, hidden from view by a mound of scrubgrass. It looked well worn, like it had been carved out by the front paws of dozens of dogs over months, if not years.
Ice shook his head to get the amazement out of it. He glanced at Pooch, just to make sure the dog was real. Then he reminded himself that LSD was known to make ordinary events seem symbolic and magical. There were a million stray dogs in this city. This wasn’t symbolic or magical. Just dumb luck. Get your ass moving, he told himself.
And move his ass he did. It was a tight squeeze, but Ice managed to wriggle and squirm his big body beneath the fence to the other side. He sat up, dusted himself off, shaking off the last bits of incredulity until suddenly he was grinning just like Pooch and Indy, Ice’s own big pink tongue hanging out like he was one of them, one of the pack, four-legged and furry.
Then suddenly Ice heard voices.
Not in his head, best he could tell.
Immediately he snapped back into urgent focus, ready to clamp his palm over Indy’s mouth in case she got spooked.
But Indy stayed silent. Her face was animated, her eyes no longer glassy and vacant. But she wasn’t back all the way yet, and that made Ice’s gut tighten with the same anxious worry that although her staying quiet was useful right now, it was still a really bad sign, that maybe she wouldn’t come back all the way even when she sobered up, that maybe he’d fucked up real bad by putting her in a duct-tape strait-jacket and tying her to a car seat while making some dumb joke about how they would laugh about this later.
Nobody was fucking laughing now.
Except the owners of those voices, Ice thought when he heard chuckles mixed in with coos and clucks and other strange sounds of affection. He frowned, then suddenly understood when Pooch ran towards the voices, tail wagging with furious recognition.
Several more stray dogs appeared out of seemingly nowhere, all of them headed towards the voices, which had stopped at the far side of the baggage-cart lot, safely out of view. Moments later Ice heard the clatter of metal food-bowls being lined up on the tarmac, followed by slurping and crunching as the dogs devoured what appeared to be their regularly scheduled breakfast.
So it wasn’t magic at all, Ice told himself again. Just dumb luck that we got here just when Pooch and his buddies would have crawled through that hole for breakfast anyway.