by Toby Barlow
Somehow, that didn’t feel so good.
So he kept digging,
tracking them until he came up against
clubs no one can join
with tournaments no one can play.
But there are ways in, he’s sure,
he keeps prodding.
One clue came
from a concierge who dealt in,
among other things, children.
Wealthy pedophiles picked up what they needed from him,
along the way he picked up dirt and secrets he could sell.
Lark listened to the concierge chatter on
as they sat in a canary yellow hotel suite.
Something about a strange man
with a large silent partner.
“This man, this little man, he is quirky,
he wanted to know about fighting dogs,”
said the concierge, tapping his fingers on the chair’s armrest.
“I say to him, ‘man, that’s the one thing I don’t sell.
I hate dogs. I love drugs, any drugs,
I love pussy, young pussy, you know, but not dogs. No way.’
The little man was asking about a girl too,
someone specific, mid-twenties, blonde,
I said hey, welcome to Southern California.
I mean, good luck, right?”
Lark smiled, pressed on, chatted and pretended to barter,
picked up what more he could.
Then excused himself to hit the john.
Going in, he left the door slightly ajar.
There, while listening to the concierge whistling
some popular song.
Lark took off all his clothes
and changed,
then nosed the door open
and trotted back into the suite.
The concierge left the world
bloody and scared.
He was cleared away without a liquid trace,
the room licked clean, more pristine than
any maid could make it.
Lark follows the clue to a card game.
He sent the smart ones, Cutter and Blue,
to ask around, study the players, get into the room.
There’s something up there.
It’s tedious but worth sniffing out.
He knows it will come, he feels it, he waits.
As someone once said,
“paciencia y barajar.”
So just hold on to your patience
and keep shuffling the cards.
Wolf packs,
loose packs,
domestics.
That’s a lot of untamed territory.
And to make these moves with assurance,
Lark has to have his pack tight.
That’s why he lured Con into taking him on
showing him signs of weakness,
Sun Tzu bullshit, easy stuff,
Con took the bait and was buried in the yard.
Poor fucking Con, he was strong and he was proud,
Lark liked him fine but the pack is stronger now,
they’re solid.
“Thank you, Con,” he thinks to himself
as he puts on cuff links, straightens his tie.
He never stops,
he always thinks to himself,
and right now he’s thinking
fact
something unknown
nips him with worry.
VIII
Calley wakes up
if it could be called that
hits the phone, calls in sick
turns on the TV
lays still in the bed
opens a bottle
and wishes someone would come
and put a chain saw through his gut.
Why the hell not.
IX
It’s at the same bar, the first one, the dark one,
Anthony is sitting there sore as hell
he wrestled a Saint Bernard today
it would have been funny
if the thing hadn’t been so strong
he doesn’t mind it though
he sensed the dog wouldn’t bite.
He is beginning to know
these sorts of things.
“Is this seat taken?” she asks.
There she is. Dark hair. Cautious blue eyes.
Great.
She looks at him a little too intently,
a subdued version of the look you’d expect to get
when you finally met
your stalker.
“No, hey, no, here. Make yourself at home.”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
A strange opening bit, but, well,
he’ll take anything, let’s see where this goes.
“Yeah, I’ve seen you around.”
“You work at the pound?”
“Mmmn-hmmm.”
“I hear there’s a job opening up there.”
“Word gets around.”
“Look, you don’t know me, but, well, one of my brothers,
Bone is his name,
he’s looking for a job,
would you mind meeting him?”
“Bone’s his name?”
She pauses, smiles, “Nickname.”
“Oh, well, sure, yeah, I’d be happy to meet him.”
A small silence.
He’s desperate for a word, a thought.
His head feels like straw at the very moment when
he could sort of use a brain.
“Look, I’d buy you a beer but—”
“No,” she says. “I’ll buy, let me, please, as a way of saying thanks.”
His pride kicks in funny.
“Well, normally I’d say, um, I dunno, you know?”
He squirms a little, scratches his neck.
“What are you saying?” she asks, her hand now resting on his.
He looks at her hand, looks into those eyes, smiles and replies,
“I’m saying I think we could use a drink.”
The mixture of liquor and beauty and time
lend three hours in a bar
their own delicious alchemy.
She doesn’t say much,
asks a few questions,
“So, what do you like?”
“I like the ocean.”
“We’re in LA, that’s an easy answer.”
He smiles, shrugs. “Easy and true.”
She likes that phrase, easy and true.
She nudges him on
here to there, says some things, but mostly
listens some more
and pretty soon
Anthony has said it all.
It’s like she’s got every number
to his master lock
and now he’s wide open.
His job, the guys there at work,
Mason’s death, a cop’s questions
he unveils more, his father going,
his mother, self-medicated out of existence,
his brother, little better, long gone,
she listens, he puts a life on the table there.
He listens too, she grew up
near the beach, later he’ll remember that her father
was Italianish, her mother Mexicanish
just like him.
He fills in the rare pauses with more of him,
he tells
how he feels working with the dogs
like they’re each playing a role
every dog wanting to be wild and Anthony
just there to rein them in.
It’s animal control and
there’s a song playing in the bar
a woman singing of wild winds,
they’re drunk enough now that
Anthony can ask her to dance
so he asks and she smiles yes
they dance slow in a place that’s empty
save for the old soldier with the broken piano key teeth
who’s murmuring doggerel to
a man in a wheelchair.
The old man’s laugh crackles,
but the dancers don’t notice,
they just sway together toward the end of the song.
She looks up at Anthony,
her stalker eyes are twin blue moons looking sympathetically down
on his briar-ridden world.
“You’re very nice, Anthony,” she says
holding him tightly
for a few more breaths,
before gently pushing off and
walking out the door.
He would follow. He would, honest,
but when he held her, dancing,
everything felt good but
not everything felt right.
X
She knows Lark is watching her,
but he shouldn’t worry.
This is an easy job, three weeks.
Then that’s it, time to pick up,
move on, get out.
Maybe just swing by her old beau Pete’s
before she disappears up 101
maybe Seattle, Spokane,
or some nothing town.
She’s said this before
but now there’s something in the air,
some hidden sense that’s telling her
she better get going, because
it’s getting late.
She likes the dogcatcher
yet that’s a pointless thing,
like a candy comic
better to crumple it up and move on.
She’ll stick to Lark’s plan for now
play the dogcatcher for what he’s worth
get Bone in the door
make Lark happy
help the pack
then go.
She doesn’t need the dogcatcher
she just needs some sleep.
She likes Anthony.
Tomorrow she’ll take Bone down to meet him.
Pieces will fall into place, just like Lark says.
Three weeks, tops.
She doesn’t need the dogcatcher,
and the only thing that bothers her
is that she’s thinking about him
a little more than she should
like for instance
right now.
XI
Two days later and now the cages are really short on men,
downtown may have to get involved,
and nobody wants those suits
sorting things out.
Anthony has to call Calley.
The guy answers the phone weeping.
Jesus, he’s slobbering too.
“Come on, pull it together,” is Anthony’s general message,
and he’s not even sure why he bothers to say it.
All he hears in return is
“udde phlub bubba turner sob, fucking turner, wha.”
“What? Turner?”
The phone goes dead
as everything seems to these days.
This is definitely
one lousy job.
“Hello, dog pound, dispatch section.”
“May I please speak to Anthony Silvo?”
Anthony recognizes the cop’s voice.
“Detective Peabody? This is Anthony.”
“Anthony, yeah, I called to tell you about Turner.”
“Turner?” Anthony doesn’t like the timing,
first Calley is gurgling the name and now
only an hour later, it’s on the cop’s lips.
“Yeah, Turner, the last guy who had your job,
we can’t find him.”
“What?”
“Yeah, apparently, the week before you started
he disappeared.”
Anthony keeps listening.
“He’s not anywhere, Anthony, not with relatives,
not in the morgue, he didn’t have any friends,
he had even less money, he’s gone.”
Anthony asks if the cop has any theories.
“Maybe the guys down there are dealing drugs,
or maybe they’re selling dogs.
I don’t know Anthony,
but something is going on.”
“Selling dogs?”
“To fight leagues maybe, to gangs who pit them against one another.”
Anthony looks around the kennel’s bright fluorescent room,
he can easily see this crew doing something like that.
They already stink of being that low.
“Okay, Anthony, all I’m saying is
keep your eyes open. Something about this situation
feels a little odd.”
“Are the police going to help?”
“You know what the city dollar is like these days,
we’re stretched thin. Hell, I can’t even get a new partner.”
“We’re stretched here too,” says Anthony. “But thanks for the warning.”
XII
She told Lark what he needed to hear
that the man would help Bone get the job
that the man was worth keeping
and could be helpful
while the rest were simply trash just like Lark suspected
and that the plan was proceeding
according to plan.
Lark seemed to be waiting for something else
as she talked.
She’s speaking too fast.
When she’s done, when she pauses,
Lark reaches over and
gently touches the spot
above her collarbone, there
where the flesh sinks in
toward the heart.
All he says is,
“Be careful.”
He was the one who had brought her in.
She had met him sitting at a table on Abbott Kinney.
“Is everything okay?” he asked,
his eyes tracing the line of salt
where the tears had dried on her face
hours before.
He was a kind expression on hard features,
they had coffee. He listened for hours,
his patience becoming the bedrock
she could rest her fears upon.
They walked along the canals,
mostly in silence, Lark waiting
and patient, until she finally
opened up, choking out
the sad story
of life with Pete,
how almost every day came with
its habitual tumble of humiliation.
Lark didn’t react,
just walked her back to her house
told her to wait
while he went in to talk to Pete.
Fifteen minutes later he came out
with a duffel stuffed full of her things
then drove her to his house.
To this day she doesn’t know
what he said to Pete
she only knows
considering Pete
it must have been something
pretty strong.
She’s leaned on Lark for so long now
you’d think it was love.
The house was empty that first night
looking back, the boys must have been
on a desert run
where they often disappeared,
chasing one another for the weekend
sometimes stopping in Vegas
to feed unquenched appetites.
So there she was, alone with Lark.
He gave her a room
she slept solidly for fifteen hours
woke up and it was night again,
just a scratch of moon in the sky.
She found Lark sitting in the kitchen
with a small knife, some bandages, a bottle of wine.
Now it was his turn to talk.
“The way I see it, you have to find your own way,” he said
as they drank.
“You can’t trust anyone else for your strength,
you’ve got to find it i
nside yourself.”
He said many things as
the night wore on
and she slipped down
into the soft crook of his words.
“What I’m offering is something
that will change you completely.
Its strangeness will seem like a dream
but it comes with a certain power.
With this power, maybe you take back some of what you’ve lost.”
The talk went on until the moon disappeared,
and she bit her lip and looked down and knew that
whatever it was, she would agree.
But he kept talking,
until she finally wanted it so bad,
she could feel the night’s darkness
vibrating inside her.
Unfolding the knife, he slowly cut himself
along a well-worn pink-and-yellow scar
that ran the length of his last finger.
The knife cut through the lines
of quieter fortunes.
She shook her head,
leaned back wary, a little nervous.
Gently, he took her by the wrist
and paused for a moment,
until a glint of confidence returned to her eyes.
Then he cut into the small piece of fat beneath her thumb,
and pressed his bleeding palm against hers.
“It’s okay. It’s for you,” he said, wrapping the tape
and binding their hands together.
She looked into his eyes now, watching
as his pupils dilated wide.
She looked down to where
blood flowed across the kitchen table
a red line coolly sliding across the tile.
Three beats of the heart later it hit her.
What followed was messy,
the quick spasm, the doubling over
while her stomach clenched and heaved.
White bombs exploded through her muscles
adrenaline and heat flooded her system
she felt the red rush to her cheeks.
A piercing shriek shook the windows
and she passed out.
Unconscious on the floor
twitching and morphing,
she could not see
the silent wolf
lapping up the spilled blood
in a quiet and diligent manner.
She woke up with the sleeping pack
lying all around her like waves in a strange ocean.
She wondered how many days she had missed
as the sun slipped down again behind the hills.
All she knew was that this was a different world.
She breathed a deep
sigh of relief.
Dog or wolf? More like the one than the other
but neither exactly. Standing on four legs in her fur,