I heard whispering voices and paid them no mind. Radar was all I was thinking about, just her, and I knew what had to be done. I bent and gently laid her on the wedge engraved with the sheaf of wheat. She tried to raise her head but couldn’t. She laid it sideways on the stone between her paws, looking at me with her one good eye. Now she was too weak to cough and could only wheeze.
Let this be right and God, please let it work.
I knelt and grasped one of the short rods ringing the sundial’s circumference. I pulled on it with one hand, then both. Nothing happened. Radar was now making choking sounds between gasps for air. Her side went up and down like a bellows. I pulled harder. Nothing. I thought of football practice, and how I’d been the only one on the team not just able to move the tackling dummy, but to knock it over.
Pull, you son of a bitch. Pull for her life!
I gave it everything I had—legs, back, arms, shoulders. I could feel blood rushing up my straining neck and into my head. I was supposed to be quiet in Lilimar, but I couldn’t restrain a low, growling grunt of effort. Had Mr. Bowditch been able to do this? I didn’t see how.
Just when I thought I still wasn’t going to be able to budge it, I felt the first minuscule shift to the right. I couldn’t possibly pull harder, but somehow I did, every muscle in my arms, back, and neck standing out. The sundial began to move. Instead of being directly in front of me, my dog was now a little to my right. I shifted my weight the other way and started pushing for all I was worth. I thought of Claudia telling me to strain my pooper. I was straining it now for sure, probably on the verge of turning the poor thing inside out.
Once I had it started, the wheel turned more easily. The first picket was beyond me, so I grabbed another, shifted my weight again, and pulled on it as hard as I could. When that one slipped past, I grabbed yet another. It made me think of the play merry-go-round in Cavanaugh Park, and how Bertie and I used to spin it until the little kids riding on it were screaming in joy and terror and their mothers were yelling at us to stop before one of them flew off.
Radar was a third of the way around… then half… then on her way back to me. The sundial was spinning easily now. Perhaps some ancient grease-clog in the machinery beneath it had been broken, but I kept yanking on those pickets, now going hand over hand as if climbing a rope. I thought I was seeing a change in Radar but believed it might be only wishful thinking until the sundial brought her all the way back to me. Both of her eyes were open. She was coughing, but the horrible wheezing had stopped and her head was up.
The sundial moved faster and I quit pulling at the pickets. I watched Radar on her second circuit and saw her trying to rise on her front paws. Her ears were up instead of flopping dispiritedly. I squatted, breathing hard, my shirt damp against my chest and sides, trying to figure out how many turns would be enough. I realized I still didn’t know how old she was. Fourteen? Maybe even fifteen? If each circuit equaled a year, four turns on the sundial would be good. Six would put her back in the prime of life.
When she passed me, I saw she wasn’t just propping herself on her front legs; she was sitting up. And as she came around for the third time, I saw something I could hardly credit: Rades was filling out, putting on weight. She wasn’t yet the dog who had scared the shit out of Andy Chen, but she was getting there.
Only one thing bothered me—even without me yanking on the short posts, the sundial was still picking up speed. The fourth time around, I thought Radar looked worried. The fifth time she looked scared, and the wind of her passage blew the sweat-soaked hair off my forehead. I had to get her off. If I didn’t, I’d be treated to the sight of my dog becoming a puppy, and then… nothing. Overhead the clickclick-clickclick of the sunface’s eyes had become clickclickclickclick, and I knew that if I looked up I’d see its eyes going left and right faster and faster, until they were just a blur.
Amazing things can go through your mind in times of extreme stress. I flashed on a Turner Classic Movies Western I’d seen with my dad back in his drinking days. Pony Express, it was called. What I remembered was Charlton Heston, galloping hell-for-leather toward a lonely outpost where a bag of mail hung on a hook. Charlton snatched it without ever slowing his horse from its all-out gallop, and I was going to have to snatch Radar the same way. I didn’t want to shout, so I got into a crouch and held my arms out, hoping she’d understand.
When the sundial came around and she saw me, she got to her feet. The wind of the speeding disc rippled her fur like invisible stroking hands. If I missed her （Charlton Heston hadn’t missed the mailbag, but that was a movie）， I’d have to jump on myself, grab her, and jump off. I might lose one of my seventeen years in the process, but sometimes desperate measures are the only measures.