Garp slapped his hands together so sharply that the boy jumped. "He was killed like that!" Garp cried. "Smack! He was dead. Nobody could fix him. He'd have had a better chance if the dog had gotten him."

"A car hit him?" Walt asked.

"A truck," Garp said, "ran right over his head. His brains came out his old ear holes, where his ears used to be."

"Squashed him?" Walt asked.

"Flat," said Garp, and he held up his hand, palm level, in front of Walt's serious little face. Jesus, Helen thought, it was Walt's story after all. Don't run into the street without looking!

"The end," said Garp.

"Good night," Walt said.

"Good night," Garp said to him. Helen heard them kiss.

"Why didn't the dog have a name?" Walt asked.

"I don't know," Garp said. "Don't run into the street without looking."

When Walt fell asleep, Helen and Garp made love. Helen had a sudden insight regarding Garp's story.

"That dog could never move that truck," she said. "Not an inch."

"Right," Garp said. Helen felt sure he had actually been there.

"So how'd you move it?" she asked him.

"I couldn't move it either," Garp said. "It wouldn't budge. So I cut a link out of the dog's chain, at night when he was patrolling the cafe, and I matched the link at a hardware store. The next night I added some links--about six inches."

"And the cat never ran into the street?" Helen asked.

"No, that was for Walt," Garp admitted.

"Of course," Helen said.

"The chain was plenty long enough," Garp said. "The cat didn't get away."

"The dog killed the cat?" Helen asked.

"He bit him in half," Garp said.

"In a city in Germany?" Helen said.

"No, Austria," Garp said. "It was Vienna. I never lived in Germany."

"But how could the dog have been in the war?" Helen asked. "He'd have been twenty years old by the time you got there."

"The dog wasn't in the war," Garp said. "He was just a dog. His owner had been in the war--the man who owned the cafe. That's why he knew how to train the dog. He trained him to kill anybody who walked in the cafe when it was dark outside. When it was light outside, anybody could walk in; when it was dark, even the master couldn't get in."

"That's nice!" Helen said. "Suppose there was a fire? There seems to me to be a number of drawbacks to that method."

"It's a war method, apparently," Garp said.

"Well," Helen said, "it makes a better story than the dog's being in the war."

"You think so, really?" Garp asked her. It seemed to her that he was alert for the first time during their conversation. "That's interesting," he said, "because I just this minute made it up."

"About the owner's being in the war?" Helen asked.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net