The Dogs

I don’t know why it started, but all of a sudden they were fighting.

I was barely awake at this hour, standing barefoot in the kitchen, trying to think of how to make coffee. Of course I know how to make coffee – it’s just hard in the mornings to get my brain going. I stand there and stare at things.

Sometimes things stare back.

The dogs. I let them out.

There is approximately half of a teaspoon of coffee left in the can, and I am really pissed off about it. Wouldn’t you be? If you use the coffee up, it is your obligation to open another can. What if your fucking wife would like a cup? Duhh.  Like that’s’ never happened.

That’s just common sense, which is something I sure as shit can’t expect out of Hank. So now I’ve got a situation where I have to find a can opener and do it by myself. The dogs are making a racket outside and I am just about to get a headache. I yell for them to shut up and they do, for about half a second. I need a cigarette bad. Just as soon as I get my coffee.

Something changes in the air. The dogs are at it. There’s a saying among pit lovers, “Never trust a pit bull not to fight.” No matter how sweet and loving they may be to you, they’ve still got that aggressiveness bred into them. I hear Basher yelp and I kinda think ‘Kick his ass Bebe’. I’m just joking to myself, you know, just because Basher is Hank’s dog, and my dog is tougher. I still love Basher.

I’ve just gotten the coffee open when I hear the sound. This is real. It sounds like the dinosaurs in one of those old fifties movies. I drop the can from my hands and it fans out in brown waves across the linoleum.

Basher is hurt bad, he’s bleeding and snapping wildly at the air, trying to get a piece of Bebe but failing. Jesus. Bebe is killing him. I can’t let this happen. This is Hank’s dog. Bebe has sunk her teeth into Bashers chest and has ripped a red gash into him. Red meat.

I don’t know what to do, I grab the broom and begin to hit Bebe, yelling for her to let go, stop it,  but she doesn’t even look at me. I just keep hitting her and she doesn’t even notice, she is shaking Basher, and he is looking dazed and wild, and blood is spurting from his chest, and I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what I’m doing and I get one of Hank’s guns, the pistol from the top of the refrigerator, and I don’t know anything about guns, just enough to release the safety. I run back outside, and my feet are covered in mud and coffee. I think I may be too late, but what can I do? I have to do something. This is Hank's dog. So I aim and close my eyes and fire and when I open them again Bebe is looking at me but not looking at me, and I am freaking because I have blown off half of her right rear paw, and amazingly she turns back to Basher and continues to slaughter him.

I am vaguely aware that Gwendolyn has wandered outside, and she is leaning against the screen door, watching with her mouth agape as I move closer, and this time with eyes wide open put a bullet into the back of Bebe’s head.

And I swear unto Jesus Christ, before she died, she looked up at me with those big orange eyes and sent me love.

                                                     March 2003

the pool house

The Audist

     He had never really been sure of what had happened. At two, his parents considered him precocious, but his vocabulary was still too limited to provide much in the way of context.
 
     By three, however, his gift was apparent. It was a marvelous parlor trick, one that his parents loved to display. Dad would bring him into the pub now and again, and the delighted patrons would be quick with a drink.

     By the time he was five, it was apparent that his talent no longer had a place in the family’s evolving scenario. His parents resented their lack of privacy, and were also concerned that little Johnny might be wrongly perceived as a freak of nature. They worked very hard with the boy, and before long, his gift had been forgotten.

     By the age of fourteen, John Parker was an emotional shipwreck. Pimpled and gawky. Slow; not stupid, but stunned. He was hearing voices, voices that seemed to have no meaningful agenda. Sometimes they would seem to be right beside him, whispering into his ear. He knew they were real.

     By the age of seventeen, Jade Parker knew all that he needed to know. It was an anomaly, his talent, much like color vision in a dog. In the future, he knew that it would be the norm. There were things that were gifts, and there were things that were not. His talent was special. He could pitch his hearing. At seventeen, what a blessing this was. He could hear his sophomore date confer with her senior sister, and he could react with perfection. He learned the art of blackmail, then quickly learned it wasn’t needed.

     At twenty-three he learned empathy. It was a terrible burden.

     At twenty-seven it was almost unbelievable how hard he rocked. There were no sounds other than his own as the monitors gushed forth pure color.

     At thirty-five he began to live a long quiet period of astonishment, alone in a cold remote region of Montana.

     At forty-four he was gone, not shaken, but stirred.

March 03

     August
 

Louisa could see Route 84 through a clearing in the pines, less than a hundred yards away, and that was a good thing, because at that particular point, it was only half a mile or so to Bartles Store, where she helped out two-three times a week. She had sweated right through her thin cotton dress and her hair felt plastered to her head in spite of the fact that she had it pinned, albeit carelessly.

“Ladies don’t sweat, they glow.”

She’d heard that phrase used by the wealthy ladies from Montgomery, the ones being driven through the town on their way to the seashore, driven by men who were wearing fancy suits and ties, no matter bout the heat. Men that should have been out fighting in the war, just as decent men were doing all over the country. These men looked able-bodied. What were they doing in those big air-conditioned cars, seeming like they didn’t have a care in the world. Her girlfriend Gloria had ridden in one of these cars at a funeral procession last summer and had described it as ‘heaven’.

All the good men were long gone out of Monroeville, nothing left but the old and the infirm and the crazies, not a damn one worth talking to. The war was taking them all, and fair or not, too large a number would not be coming back. Including her husband, who wasn’t worth mourning for, but still deserved better than dying without glory – pneumonia! – in Guadalcanal. Well, she was better off without him anyway, maybe not financially, but still better off. Still had her looks and no young-uns to weigh her down. She could make a new start if the men ever did come back.

It was far too hot to smoke, but Louisa nonetheless pulled out a crooked Picayune from her wrinkled pack. Damn humidity. The striking surface of her matchbox was too moist for the match to ignite, so she picked up a stone and used that to light up. Picayunes were strong as horse manure and caused a spinning in the head that she sometimes liked, and now as she moved off the dirt road and onto 84, the heat rising from the asphalt made her feel as if she were swimming, and the cigarette fell from her hand. She paused a moment and crushed it with her heel, and then rolled her shoe over it angrily, reducing it to shards, then to nothing. It was far too hot to smoke.

All that mattered now was making it to Bartles and drinking a cold Royal Crown Cola. That kept her feet moving. Sweat was burning in her eyes – if this was glowing, she was positively iridescent. Alabama in August was hell if you didn’t even have a truck, if you didn’t even have a friend to ride you to the store. She had a truck but it was long time broke. She had a friend, but her friend didn’t have a truck, nor much of her senses left, and so she walked. It would be all right soon. She would be drinking a RC and standing by the big floor fan, and she would stay at Bartles until someone – even an old one or a crazy one – could give her a ride back to her shack. Should have never left the house, but she got so restless. Summer couldn’t end soon enough.