I ran down to the viaduct, crossed underneath it, and came back to the point of the collision and began searching for the dog. I found Buffmeir’s right forearm and hand severed almost bloodlessly. Then at the bottom of a sloping grass hill, I spotted Oyster. He was unmarked, but dead just the same. I lifted his head to my lap and talked to him, but his body was limp. I thought that maybe if I could get him back to the store, somebody there could do something to revive him. As I said, he seemed unmarked. I tried to lift him but he weighed more than eighty pounds. I tried pulling him up the grassy slope by his rear feet, but I kept slipping and falling down. I dragged him for a ways across the gravel, but that was undignified and unbefitting to such a fine animal.

I heard frantic voices, police sirens, and saw a good number of flashlight beams combing the area under the train. And then I heard even more frantic voices calling my name. I was the subject of an intense manhunt. I said nothing in reply and, instead, wrapped my body alongside that of the dog, holding him much the way I had held him months ago on the patch of oak leaves that had blown along the side of Pug and Vera’s bungalow.

The accident drew a banner headline in the Aurora Beacon-News. People who never heard of Jack Buffmeir attended his funeral. You would have thought Rudolph Valentino had died. To add to the pathos, the engineer insisted that he saw Oyster spending his last moment on earth trying to drag his master to safety and paying with his life.

A few days after the funeral I followed my grandmother out to Jack’s shack. She seldom left the store, and when she did, she had to walk with a cane. She removed a key from her apron pocket and opened the door. There wasn’t much inside. A bed and a dresser. A small kitchen table. There was a pantry filled with canned vegetables and fruit. Jack Buffmeir did not have a refrigerator, but an icebox. There was a bottle of sour buttermilk inside. As I sniffed it, I saw a cushion on the floor, and above it, on the wall, two paint-worn footprints. I had located the site where Jack did his hour-long daily headstands that were meant to defeat the pernicious effects of gravity on the human body.

There was a small closet filled with his dandy clothes, and, on the top, a box containing his birth certificate, a number of medical books, and an honorary discharge from the U.S. Army. In addition to this was a Purple Heart and Jack’s wallet, which contained four dollars. My grandmother handed me the box of papers, and after she locked the door, we walked back to the store together.