That night was such a night.

After dinner and tall tales, each equally unremarkable, my mother and father said their goodbyes on the front porch while I fidgeted from foot to foot on the spaced concrete blocks that composed the front walk.

I looked around at the ocean of night around me, the only safe shores of which was the pool of rectangular light spilling around the silhouettes of my folks and Mrs. Beckham.

I heard a sound; an odd sound, like a whimper. It seemed to emanate from the side of the house down near the ground, and being age seven it was up to me to investigate.

Some of us are born curious and have the good fortune to have an inborn sense of fear and awe with which to temper it. I wasn’t so lucky. Curiosity I had, and that in spades, but until that moment in the hot high summer of 1970 in the East Texas night at Mrs. Beckham’s house at the corner of Collard Street and Maple, I had not yet learned of fear and pain from the unknown.

Perhaps ten feet-all of a world-into the darkness, I felt for the whimper in the inky blackness.

I moved forward. Two yards. Five.

I smelled earth, freshly turned-the same scent as from our vegetable garden when it was being tilled-and I smelled iron, and something else. A wet smell. A reek.

The whimper turned abruptly into a growl; a low, gravelly staccato rising in volume and intensity in the stillness of the dark. From a world away I could hear the adult voices around front, indistinguishable as words but with crystal clarity as far as tone-over there, in that other world where my parents and the old neighbor lady stood on the shores of the light, all was well. All was right with the world.

The fear began as a little feathery whisper down in the area of my gonads, grew rapidly into a shout and overcame me in a flash.

I turned and ran.

I took two strides and then I felt stabbing heat-teeth sank into my left buttock even as I distinctly heard a raised voice: “Don’t get too close to that dog, now, ya hear!”

It was not the first nor the last time I had been bitten by a dog, but for me it forever changed the character of the night.

As I stumbled forward into the storm at the Carpin ranch, I thought about dogs. Dogs I have loved and dogs I have loathed. I hoped that Carpin didn’t have any, or on the off-chance that he did, that I’d be able to see them before they saw me. I’ve seen my share of ranch operations, and I never knew one not to have a dog.

I didn’t relish meeting mindless teeth, blind in the dark and the storm.

Hank had Dingo. All I had was a.38.

I put one foot in front of the other as I penetrated the darkness between the house and the fence that held back the brush and the woods.

Intermittent lightning revealed just how narrow the space was, and for the length of that space I’d be catching the full brunt of the runoff from the roof.

There were strange, twisted shapes there in the dark. Revealed in snapshot-like images from the lightning, I saw that someone had taken to collecting old kiddie-train parts. Along the fence there was a string of cars, each about eight feet long and three feet high, some of them rusted through in places and starting to cave in upon themselves from decay. Just across from that oddity along the south side of the house and perfectly revealed for an instant of time in a flash of lightning there was the largest Jack-In-The-Box I’d ever seen, all of seven feet tall. Behind it was a huge plastic gorilla with bared teeth sitting cross-legged. Maybe it was King Kong practicing his Zen meditations.

In a moment I had it figured out. Either someone had been planning a miniature golf course and never got it off the ground, or the same someone had hauled off all the props after the miniature golf course was closed down.

I looked at King Kong’s teeth and Jack’s smile in the next thrum of lightning flashes and shuddered.

The way became even narrower toward the rear corner of the house and I could tell that the space opened up back there. Behind all the trash on my right I could see the interminable blackness underneath the house, which was raised up on pier and beam pilings to about my chest height.

And, all things being both equal and perfect, not ten feet from freedom I heard it above the fever pitch of the storm and the thunder: I heard the growl.

Maybe I’ve read a few too many Dean Koontz novels, but in the first instant I got the idea that the thing was part human-some kind of mad-scientist experiment gone horribly awry. Then the thing stepped out to fill the last three feet between the house and the fence.

It was a big animal. By its silhouette I guessed that it was a mastiff. Julie had never said anything about the dog. If ever I talked to her again, I definitely planned to mention that fact. But, then again, there were a good many things that she failed to mention.

Lightning flashed and the dog took a step toward me.

The chain from its neck grew taut. It was at the chain limit.

I took out the thirty-eight. Aimed it at the dog.

The growl grew louder.

I didn’t want to kill the animal, but I had decided that I was coming through.

I hoped no one was home, or that the shot would be taken for thunder if there was.

The rain runoff from the roof poured down on top of my head, trailed down my arm and spilled off the barrel of the gun I held at hip level.

I began to squeeze the trigger.

“Sasha!” A voice bellowed. “Come on!”

The chain around the dog’s neck jerked back and the growl was cut off. It reminded me of killing a lawn-mower engine.

The dog was gone.

I waited, shivering in the cold. I counted slowly from a hundred down to zero, then stepped around the corner of the house and into the back yard.

I paused, waiting for another lightning flash. One came within a few seconds.

I caught movement across the way. There was an immense horse walker in the center of the backyard space, and beyond it, a hundred yards away, were the stables. The movement was from the direction of the stables. I wasn’t certain, but what I’d seen in that hundredth of a second could have been a dog’s tail disappearing into the gloom of the stables.

It wasn’t completely black. There was a utility pole by the parking lot at the other end of the house and it shed pale, electric blue light downward in a cone. There, in main light, were three vehicles. Two of them were trucks. There was a new pickup over there, either silver or white-it seems it’s always impossible to distinguish between the colors in limited light. But one of the trucks I recognized. It was a light-blue Ford F-150 pickup. Someone had replaced the windshield. Other than that, I would have recognized it anywhere.

“Well well,” I said into the rain. “Old friends.”

And down at the stables someone turned on all the lights.

I would find out much later what Hank was up to during his and Dingo’s trek through the rain.

At the bottom of the last hill he traversed he found the south bank of the Red River. A hundred yards down, around the curve of the bank he found a floating dock and a motor boat, which was where he parted with the first of the presents he carried on his back.

Up the bank, perpendicular to the river, he came upon the darkened exterior of the northern end of the horse stables. After a quick search he found what he was looking for and left another present.

I wouldn’t know anything about his little Santa Claus-run for another fifteen minutes.

Time enough for Hank to start the countdown to World War III.

When the man and the dog were gone I stepped up onto the porch. There was little light inside, but I caught an amber glow from the central part of the house.