by Toby Barlow
his stomach full from all the meals she’s cooked.
Their love is just about the weight
of the casserole she’s taking out of the oven right now.
Their love is eternal because time
seems to have fled, embarrassed
to be sharing such a small apartment
with so much dumb affection.
XVI
Lark sits. He’s tired.
He’s been trotting around this neighborhood
trying to look loose and aimless.
The green lawns of Pasadena hiss with wealth.
At the moment, he’s an unleashed dog
prowling around,
causing horns to honk
as he crosses against the lights.
Circling school yards
he eyes the children
and waits for someone to call the cops.
Where is the concerned citizen?
Lark takes another rest,
looking around impatiently,
his nose full of the cut scent
of fresh grass and money.
He waits.
The Pasadena Animal Shelter is said to be
the Four Seasons and The Ritz combined.
The woman who funded it was rich enough
to distrust
all who approached. Nephews, nieces, cousins,
were turned away as she
found her only comfort
in the soft fur of her terriers’ coats.
When she died, alone, she gave to those
whose loyalty was most easily earned and hardest lost.
The Pasadena Animal Shelter has a spa. It has more vets
than the local clinic has doctors,
it has a dietician and
a masseuse.
Lark waits. He barks. A stray can’t get arrested in this town.
Finally, not seeing any option, he goes and takes
a dump on the green grass of the open plaza.
Then he does a little dance,
it’s one of the peculiar canine habits
he wishes more people would adopt.
He could have gone downtown
wound up in Anthony’s shelter,
but Anthony’s is a city kennel
and city kennels have a policy
of neutering strays.
And if there’s one thing Lark is not signing up for
it’s that.
Pasadena’s shelter is private and of a sweeter disposition
when a beast comes through the door
they don’t take a knife to its balls
first thing.
As if he needed a second reason, he suspects
the girl’s near that kennel
with her dogcatcher, and if so, they have worries enough.
He doesn’t know what that other pack is up to.
But again there were a lot of pieces of his plan
just lying out there in plain view
for Bone or Baron or any of them to put together.
In any case, his untethered wandering seems
to have finally sparked some interest.
Questions ripple through the park.
“Hey, is that your dog?” The man’s holding a cup of Starbucks.
“No,” says the woman with the yoga mat.
They briefly consult and agree,
the man goes to find a cop.
Lark sits.
He’ll eat well. Sleep. Have some time to think.
One nice thing about Pasadena, he thinks, is that
nobody’s hunting dog in this town tonight.
The man is back, he couldn’t find a cop.
He calls 911 on his cell.
The woman waits with him.
They flirt. Lark is amused to eavesdrop.
“Oh yeah, he’s a beautiful dog.”
“Looks like he’s got some shepherd in him.”
“Or wolf.”
“Yeah, he’s big. I had a dog sort of like this once…”
Lark listens to them come together,
their mutual problem solving
leading to small chuckles, nervous smiles.
Lark wonders if way back when
the first bonds, the first community
didn’t really begin
with the same simple question
“What are we going to do
with all these wild animals?”
XVII
Close by
Cutter and Blue are in a tough spot.
Two old sisters from La Jolla have them down, cornered,
The boys haven’t won a hand in hours and
they’re just a few points away
from being utterly wiped out.
Damn.
They shouldn’t be slammed like this.
But there have been some late nights of late.
The last time they talked to Lark he said
it would probably be a while till they heard from him again.
He sent them new credit cards linked to new accounts
told them to lie low and not answer the door.
He told them to keep playing.
Then he was gone.
Since then it’s been cases of Mountain Dew and mountains of Domino’s pizza.
They have been doing well, rising slowly in the various local tournaments.
And when the claustrophobia gets too bad
they drive out to the desert and run,
hunting for the occasional feral cat.
They like to think of it as a community ser vice,
after all, house cats that escape into the wild
survive on local birds, threatening the blue jays and warblers.
So hunting the felines down does protect the biodiversity,
but actually, they only do it
because dogs hate cats.
Later, in the car again, they change and they drive,
racing the dawn
back to the hotel.
When the valet greets them
they look ruffled and unkempt, their eyes burning.
They hit the beds
Two hours of sleep and they’re back to the tourney
where things had been going just fine until they met these two.
The sisters are from La Jolla, both married real estate,
worth a mint, they dress and smile like dolls.
Cutter imagines that they were lovely once.
But now they’re just quaint little grins.
He looks at the one on his left
what a biddy, who would think the gray matter
would be that sharp at that age. And then,
for a flicker there,
mischief glints in her eyes.
Is there something going on?
Cutter tries to step outside of himself
seeks a broader perspective on the game
using his imagination to walk around the table
to watch it cold
thinking it through,
looking for the solution to the puzzle.
Now there’s a game within the game.
The sisters sit erect, their posture polite,
their bidding perfectly pronounced through pursed lips.
No hidden messages there.
But Cutter keeps watching
their serene faces, their well-timed and courteous smiles.
They hold their hands straight up, as erect as their backs.
They fan out the cards, ordering them just so.
Perhaps there’s something there.
Usually, someone holding a hand
holds it the same way, game after game,
but a cheater can signal, there—he sees it—
the sister bidding holds her cards up with not just her thumbs
but with a stray finger tucked back there too,
while her sister holds her cards in a normal fashion.
They are ahead in the bidding
but Cutter’s not goin
g to give it to them.
If they win this they win it all.
He overbids the girls with no cards to support.
Cutter and a mystified Blue go down hard.
But Cutter has bought some time.
The next hand is dealt.
Now we shall see, he thinks, he waits, he waits,
the girls each organize their hand, moving the cards about.
Watching, out of the corner of his eye,
he sees one suavely tuck two fingers behind her hand
while the other sister nestles one finger back behind the cards,
and props the cards up with her thumb.
It is a casual, smooth, and practiced move,
but it makes Cutter’s pulse surge,
because it’s so clearly a signal, a cheat.
Cutter smiles, he likes these girls.
And this time he has some cards to play,
even with their slippery ways, they can’t beat his hand.
He bids low, holds the win. Then asks to take a break.
The girls sip bottled water in the corner of the stale lounge.
Blue is in the men’s room.
A club secretary approaches the ladies.
“There’s a call for you at the front desk.”
Crossing the room together, one lifts the receiver while the other watches.
Cutter’s voice growls into her ear,
“If you cheat again this match, lady,
I will chew off your fingers with my teeth
while my partner gnaws the flesh off your sister’s skull.”
He hangs up.
She hangs up.
She shakes her head, looks at her sister
and sighs. “Oh my.”
Blue and Cutter pull it out,
trouncing the ladies in a surprise comeback.
Over at the next table, the losers
are a couple from Ventura County
while the winners are a small man
who could pass for Truman Capote
and a large man who could pass for a Samoan.
XVIII
Ray vs. Sasha,
Sasha vs. Ray,
day in
day out
real chaos for the whole pack to bear.
Skulking to the sides like children
as the metal gets thrown around the kitchen the dogs listen
along with the occasional shattering of glass.
The dogs shake their heads, after all
Ray has made this bed,
he wants Sasha to keep the pack in line
but he wants her too. As his own.
She calls bullshit on his attitude every few days.
Things get physical. Both of them kick
and scream and bite.
She’s not afraid to put her fist into his face,
though she pays for it.
The back-and-forth goes on.
Blood spills on the floor.
The tussle sometimes comes when they’re wolves
sometimes when they’re just another couple
trying to make it in LA.
This fight isn’t supposed to be mortal,
merely cathartic, a bleeding of the bitterness.
They fight till they are spent, breathing heavy,
Sasha’s black hair wet with sweat,
Ray heavy in his breath like an old wrestler
and then the balance returns.
She licks his ear.
He quietly reaches out and holds her, kissing
the bruises on her arms and shoulders.
Like so much of the trouble in the world,
it simply ends with exhaustion.
Bone is watching, thinking, trying to get out from the bottom.
He stands against the wall quietly observing
as Ray sits at the center of the warehouse, listening
to Penn.
Penn is telling him about some other pack that might exist,
a San Pedro pack that he had investigated a while back for Lark.
Ray is rocking back on one leg of his chair.
Bone hopes Ray is smarter than he looks
which would be a good thing
’cause he looks about as dumb as a rock.
Too many tats but maybe some brain.
Ray’s eyes are stone and coal. His physique looks like
it was once prime, fit and tight
before slipping into this looser form, a perpetual
slow leak of flesh. He studies a map on the floor,
points to the southeast section of the city.
“So maybe cruise around in there, ask around
working in ones or in twos. I don’t care.”
Bone wonders about this. Lark always had a plan, always cared.
Ray likes to improvise,
filling in the blanks
with little more than dense muscle.
But leaning there against the wall, Bone remembers something too,
an idea Lark was toying with,
something to do with the pound.
Bone never knew exactly what the idea was or even his part.
It hurts his head to think like this,
piecing a plan together from nothing,
his mind drowning in the folds of its own confusion.
He decides to simply begin putting what he knows into motion,
figuring that if he acts out the scenes,
the rest of the play will come to him.
Later that night Sasha comes to his bed
slipping in next to him as he lies curled up on his bunk.
“Move over,” she says. Bone makes room.
They curl up like wisps of smoke
wrapped around each other.
This is the first time. Bone wonders
what it means. A promotion?
A level up in the pack? The end of the indoctrination?
“Rub my back,” she says, ever so softly exposing
something feminine in her voice.
Bone hasn’t been with a woman for a long time.
Lark took them to Vegas a while ago. But that was
somewhere beyond the distant past.
He rubs her shoulders, pushing back her hair
to touch the bare whiteness of her skin.
His breath feels shallow in his lungs.
She is silent, but her neck bends to his touch.
Her body has as many scars as a choppy sea.
Somehow she wears it well. Then, she presses her hips
against him.
Before they even begin he knows
it will be over quickly.
Bone grabs, tugs, pushes. She yelps. They keep it muffled.
No sense in waking the dogs.
His hand on her naked stomach, his teeth
on her neck, so close together he’s hearing
echoes of his breath on her flesh.
His eyes are blinded by the blackness of her hair.
He inhales deeply, trying to hold on to something from this.
Fast rhythms and heaving chests pass
and when it’s over she lies there breathing deep
for a few moments. Then, pulling her clothes on
she tells him
“Ray wants you in the first van tomorrow,”
and rolls off into the darkness.
Then there’s nothing.
No lights, just the sighs of sleeping men.
Some tossing. Some turning.
Bone almost wishes she hadn’t been there.
It’s like she only came into his world
to show him how empty it would be
without her.
XIX
In the dogcatcher’s house,
she’s beginning to worry.
When she’s in Anthony’s arms it’s not so bad.
It’s safe and quiet and warm there.
It’s the rest of the world that has her on edge.
But where is Lark?
&nbs
p; What happened to the pack?
What happens if someone shows up?
What will she say?
She wrings her hands,
pulling at the length of her finger bones
as if hoping to draw answers from her body.
The worst secrets are the ones
that sit like spiders
waiting to bite.
Anthony is aware of her in the other room.
Sometimes he wants to go in
wrap her in his arms, hold her
until her blue eyes turn their focus away
from whatever haunts her
to find him again there
kneeling beside her, patiently removing the thorns.
Strong love can hold on to anything fairly given,
he knows this.
He has held her in Pacific waves
standing against the tide that pulled firmly at their sides,
“See,” he said. “We’re stronger than this.”
She looked in his eyes.
She was almost there
but not yet.
That morning, sitting in the kitchen, she smiled.
“Why you smiling?”
She said the sweet scent of the jasmine in the garden makes her smile
and the toasted smell of the bread makes her smile
and the roasting of the coffee makes her smile.
“You’ve got a good nose,” he said, kissing her.
And like that her face froze, and she
left the room.
The same way it went down when she was reading that day
and he said, “Hey, instead of a dog,
maybe we could get a cat?”
And she said, without looking up, “No.”
“What, are you allergic to cats?”
She looked up, eyes cold. “No. I just don’t like them.
and they don’t like me.”
He worries that this
is beginning to feel like
driving in a car through the mountains,
finding a great song on the radio
and then as you pass out of its range
hearing it flicker and fade.
Snap, pop, and
then it’s gone.
XX
Lark waits in the cage.
The other dogs are worked up.
He has his own kennel but still
he has to watch his step.
Dogs will fight first, think later.
And he’s got to conserve his energy.
So he’s avoiding them.
He eats his food, tries to savor it,
but the luxury of the Pasadena Animal Shelter
turns out largely to be a myth.
It’s okay enough.