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he had over 40 dogs. The earlier ones he just let loose, they were too sane. The rest, when the vet found them, were grotesque things—who hardly moved except to eat or fornicate. They lay, the dogs, when they found his body, listless as sandbagspropped against the 14 foot fence Livingstone had built. Their eyes bulged like marbles; some were blind, their eyes had split. Livingstone had found that the less he fed them the more they fornicated, if only to keep their mind off the hunger. These originally beautiful dogs were gawky and terrifying to that New Orleans vet when he found them. He couldnt even recognise that they had been spaniels or were intended to be. They didnt snarl, just hissed through the teeth—gaps left in them for they were falling out. Livingstone had often given them just alcohol to drink.
    His mother continued to give him money for his business, which still of course hadnt turned a penny. He had never sold a dog and lived alone. He came into town on Thursdays for food and on Thursday evenings when I was stationed in New Orleans he sang with me. We usually drank a lot after the bouts of singing. And again, even when drunk he never showed any sign of madness or quirkiness. As if he left all his madness, all his perverse logic, behind that fence on his farm and was washed pure by the time he came to town every Thursday. Many he had known when younger said how much more stable he had become, and that now they probably would accept him in the army. He told me he had a small farm he ran, never mentioning dogs. Then usually about three in the morning or around then he went back home to the house next to those 40 mad dogs, clinically and scientifically breeding the worst with the worst, those heaps of bone and hair and sexual organs and bulging eyes and minds which were chaotic half out of hunger out of liquor out of their minds being pressed out of shape by new freakish bones that grew into their skulls. These spaniels, if you could call them that now, were mostly brown.
    When they found Livingstone there was almost nothing left of him. Even his watch had been eaten by one of the dogs who coughed it up in the presence of the vet. There were the bones of course, and his left wrist—the hand that held the whip when he was in the pen—was left untouched in the middle of the area. But there was not much else. The dust all over the yard was reddish and his clothes, not much left of those, scattered round.
    The dogs too were blood hungry. Though this scene was discovered, they reckoned, two days after the event occurred, some of the dogs had been similarly eaten. The vet went into the house, got Livingstone’s shot gun, the same one that had spread bullets into his mother’s leg, couldnt find any bullets, went into town, bought bullets, didnt say a word in town except got the sheriff with him and rode back. And they shot all the dogs left, refusing to go into the pen, but poking the gun through the planks in the fence and blowing off the thirty heads that remained alive whenever they came into range or into the arc that the gun could turn to reach them. Then they went in, dug a pit with a couple of Livingstone’s shovels, and buried everything. Forty dogs and their disintegrated owner.
    The clock inside whirred for a half second and then clunked 1 o clock. Sallie got up and walked down the steps of the porch. Henry could deal with the steps now, went down with her and they walked into the edge of the dark empty desert. John rocked on in his chair. I was watching Sallie. She bent down, put her hands under Henry’s ears and scratched his neck where she knew he liked it. She bent down further to his ear, the left one, the one away from us, and said, very quietly, I dont think John heard it it was so quiet, Aint that a nasty story Henry, aint it? Aint it nasty.

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    Up with the curtain
down with your pants
William Bonney
is going to dance

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    H’lo folks—’d liketa sing my song about the lady Miss AD you all