by Toby Barlow
He can stick to the plan.
He eats his food,
disappointed at every bite.
In the end, he thinks, a prison
is always a prison.
The vet was thorough with the checkup and
Lark was a little nervous
though the differences between what a dog is and what he is
are not the sort of thing anyone can easily notice,
even among experts, it takes a highly trained eye.
The vet prodded him, pressed on his glands, pulled down his eyelids
and counted his teeth.
This is where the city kennel would have spayed him,
but instead he gets a needleful of antibiotics
and a pat on the ass.
Afterward he rests, listening to the vet
on the phone carrying the weak end of a fight that slowly escalates.
“No, I can’t pick that up. It’s your prescription.”
Lark thinks, people have a tougher time working as a group than dogs do.
People make for messy packs and awkward teams.
“And I picked up the laundry last week and the week before that.”
Perhaps because people don’t resort to the decisiveness
of violence quite as quickly as dogs do.
“Listen, I have a full-time job too.”
Perhaps because they don’t submit to their leader
as completely.
“That’s not what I mean. You don’t understand.”
Perhaps being free of a language is a blessing for dogs.
“Why do you say that, why do you always have to hurt me.”
Since dogs aren’t continually surprised when
those soft and easily broken tools called words
fail them time and again.
“I love you.”
Words, those simple clumsy clay blocks
that one hopes will support such enormous walls.
“I do, I love you.”
Words, the small weak things
that come tumbling out of men.
“But I love you.”
Lark lies on the table sighing, blinking,
as the vet’s fallen tears
dampen the aluminum, bending the light.
Back in the kennel, during visiting hours,
a sloppy-looking couple comes in.
Lark doesn’t trust the man and doesn’t like
the way his shirt is untucked.
It’s these little things that matter.
An older lady comes in.
Her eyes are dark mean beans.
Lark hears her say her last dog ran away
and he’s sure he knows why.
He growls as she walks by
so softly no one can notice
but something inside her hears and she stays away.
Finally, toward the end of the day, a woman walks in.
She has some elegance, perhaps a bit of money.
She’s nervous in a nice way.
Lark likes the way her fingers dance about as she talks.
She’s looking for a big dog she says.
Lark is sitting up straight.
She lives alone, she says.
She needs one who can protect her.
As she passes by his kennel
soft paw on the cage
looking into her eyes
cocking his head sideways,
Lark groans a little
like a lovelorn Elvis.
XXI
Peabody gets another call
from the lispy fellow.
“Detective, I am sorry to hear about Calley.”
Peabody tries to take his time,
tease it out.
“No sorrier than I was. Did you know he was going to do that?”
“Not exactly,” the voice purrs. “But he was a troubled man who
obviously made some poor decisions along the way.”
Peabody signals to the guy at the next desk to start a trace.
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll all miss him. Who are you anyway?”
“I am simply an interested party, an observer on the sidelines.”
“Observing what?”
“A good question, Detective, an excellent
if slightly obvious question. But what about you?
Did you observe anything?”
“When?”
“At Calley’s house. Did you see anything unusual? Any strange people or animals?”
Why’s he saying animals?
Peabody thinks about the dog.
Why would this guy know about that?
“Not really, no.”
“No animals, really.”
The guy at the next desk says it’s coming from a lobby phone
out at a hotel in Pasadena.
Peabody nods his thanks.
No use chasing that down.
“Nope, I’m telling you, it was just Calley
with a mouthful of bullet.”
“What a shame. I was really hoping our friends would show their hands a bit.”
Peabody waits to hear more.
“Excuse me, sir, look, I’m just a cop and so I think like a cop and as far as I can tell,
there’s not much worth looking into here.”
“What about Mason and Turner?”
Peabody sits up. “As far as we know, Turner just disappeared.”
“Well, if that’s what you’re thinking, I can only say
I underestimated you, Mr. Peabody. Good day.”
The phone clicks dead.
Irritated, Peabody pulls out his notebook
and calls in the plate he saw at Calley’s house.
It’s not much, but fuck it, it’s something.
That dog he saw is alive, it’s warm,
so it’s got a trail he can follow.
XXII
Things are getting cold in Anthony’s house.
She makes strange noises when she’s sleeping,
and beneath the sheets she moves her legs
like she’s running,
chasing something.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He’s got to leave for work soon,
and though he doesn’t want to leave her like this,
he doesn’t have the time to sort through the brooding.
She’s got some books open on
the kitchen table, businesses she says
she’s thinking of opening.
“Why don’t you take your work out to a café today,”
he says. “Maybe you’ll make some new friends.”
She sips her coffee. “I had some friends,
they all disappeared.”
He kisses her forehead
“I’m sorry but, hey, you got me.”
She squeezes his hand, just enough.
It’s these small physical touches
that hold them in the moment,
keeping the goodness from slipping away.
He drives to work
wondering, what is it inside her?
He would read her diary if she kept one
read her mail if she got any.
It’s tugging at him like an undertow
toward the deep black sea.
Back in the kitchen, she’s feeling stuck.
There’s so much to move on from
so many swords hanging over her.
The future looms like a brooding cloud bank.
Step by step, she has to get free of it all.
She pours herself more coffee and thinks forward,
making a list, counting day after day
until she knows
what to do.
First things first.
In the car, the rap song has every other word beeped out
as if the small words themselves were a dangerous thing, and not
the ideas of violence and waste and ridiculous luxury
that the songs clutch
in their rough embrace.
Everyone is always looking in the wrong direction,
we worry about our lovers while losing our jobs
we stress out about cancer while our children run away
we ponder the stars while burning the earth.
Lark used to say the bullet we’re running from
is almost never the one that hits us.
She is looking, every day, slowly tracing a pattern,
hunting, seeking the scent,
beginning her search from the last known point
where the old pack’s house used to be
over to the old office space downtown
then to just outside Anthony’s kennel
where Lark’s plan first led her.
Cruising slow, eyes open, till the early afternoon
when she chooses a spot,
parks, drinks an herbal tea,
and quietly waits.
XXIII
The little man is back in his hotel suite.
It’s late, but it could be any hour as
he moves about, talking in his endless fashion,
this time about the planet Mars
which sparkled behind the sunset tonight
and set his mind buzzing.
The big man sits across the room watching
the little man, whose name is Mr. Venable.
Mr. Venable smokes a cigarette and drinks a glass of rye on ice.
He is small, nearly a third the weight of the big man, and he is wearing
a white full-length nightgown,
almost Victorian, quite elegant. It would be amusing
if he were not so serious.
The big man, still wearing his suit, listens to Mr. Venable’s ramble
waiting for him to arrive at something resembling a point.
“Remember, this is a planet we have known about for centuries, with its sister Venus
appearing just after sunrise or just after sunset, but they do avoid each other
like children playing
some sort of game,
hiding behind the horizon in the folds of their mother’s skirts.”
The big man blinks, bored, waiting for more.
It comes. It always comes.
“Do you know why they named these two lights Venus and Mars?”
The big man shakes his head no.
“Because, like love and war, they never arrive together and yet
they are always there
on the edge of the sky,
so close to us.
They never go away.”
The big man waits for more.
“We need to embrace the love and the war.
Not one, not the other,” says Mr. Venable,
gingerly closing the shade,
“We must hide from neither and master both.
If we can master both, my friend, we will
master so very much.
For that is all there is, in various shades, within us each,
behind every gesture, every nod,
A little love, a little war.”
The room is silent for the first time in a long while.
The air conditioner seethes behind the drapes.
The big man sighs
digesting all these words.
He’s heard better
but still he mulls it over,
searching out the nut, the kernel,
and finally, brow creased, he nods. “I see.”
Mr. Venable takes a last sip of his drink, crushes his smoke,
and crawls into the hotel room’s large bed.
The big man watches with studied patience, then
rising, takes off his suit, and slides naked into the bed as well.
He wraps himself gently around Mr. Venable,
a dark oyster surrounding an ivory pearl.
They rest beneath the sea of the night.
XXIV
Lark sleeps in front of the TV
Bonnie strokes his hair,
rubbing the scruff of his neck, right, there.
He had planned to lay low for a week,
figure out her story, her schedule.
Then move it into gear.
But
the good life has its numbing consequences.
Like lotus-drugged sailors in a distant land,
failing to raise their oars and return home.
Lark feels little compulsion to do
anything.
Bonnie rubs that spot behind his ears.
He spends nights of
narcotic comfort splayed out
on a sheepskin rug
at the foot of her bed.
She scratches his belly just so
as he softly kicks his leg.
The past rises like vapor to surround him,
clouds of memory float through the living room,
his first job, a law firm where
he was the too bright boy, accomplished
far beyond his age. He exalted in the firm’s appreciation,
as drunken spiraling nights out with his colleagues spilled
one into the other. The emptiness of the mornings
were soon buried beneath the successes of the day, the hollowness
of those accomplishments filled full again
with the liquid of another liquored night.
Then, early one dark morning, just after closing time,
while driving to meet up with Lark at some raucous bar,
his closest friend wrapped himself
around the streetlight and had to be rushed to the E.R.
In the waiting room, a drunken Lark passed out only to
awaken and find a strange man sitting beside him.
Lark didn’t know where he came from, but
there in the limbo of the waiting room, they began to talk.
The stranger was still sitting beside him
when Lark got the bad news.
Lark wept and, for the first time in years, felt something deeper.
The man listened, talked, helped him, guided him
and then, a few sleepless nights later, folded Lark
into his first pack.
Years passed, groups of dogs
ran this way and that
as Lark mapped his course with a sure precision,
finding his way, building his philosophy,
content, finally, to be living a true discipline,
a perfect balance,
until it all crashed down
like the timbers in a burning barn.
Bonnie massages the tuft of fur beneath his chin.
It feels good, just like that.
Lark lies in front of the TV
it’s an easy place to stay,
she watches good shows and he
actually hasn’t seen anything for years.
Running the pack didn’t leave much time for cable
but now, goodness, even the soaps are engaging
and the nightly news blows his mind,
it’s like watching the earth being skinned raw
every night at eleven.
He closes his eyes.
She scratches his hind.
Mmmn.
Sleep.
The days unfold, repeat and rerun.
Bonnie laughs at the TV. Lark gets playful,
jumps around the room
makes her laugh some more.
She brings home scraps for him from her office lunch.
She rubs his high haunches.
She picks up his shit.
Who knew
life could be this good.
It was supposed to be a week. It’s been six.
No rush, really,
the packs will still be there.
The war is waiting.
Just a little nap.
The war is always waiting for us.
XXV
Peabody the cop drives, thinking about the dogs.
An old conversation
from years past drifts back to him.
On a stakeout that tested their sanity and bore no fruit,
his partner, the wise man who taught him the clockwork of the world,
said to Peabody, “You know why we domesticated dogs and cats?”
“Why?” asked Peabody.
“Well, see, some people think it’s because they’re carnivores,
and they’ll chase down rats and mice and other vermin for us,
keeping the campsite clean, so to speak.
But my particular theory is that we keep them around because, well,
they’re funny.”
Peabody remembers the tired smile they shared at this thought.
“Funny?” Peabody asked.
“Yeah,” his partner said. “Cats chase their shadows,
hang on the curtain,
and dogs, well, they chase their tails
stick their nose in your crotch
and hump your mother-in-law’s leg.
They’re just funny.
Bunnies are cute, but they’re not funny,
so we left them in the wild.
But parrots talk funny, so we took some of them home too.”
Peabody had thought about this for a minute before offering up
what he thought was the perfect challenge.
“Monkeys.”
“What?” his partner said.
“Monkeys are funny,” said Peabody, “so, why didn’t we pick monkeys?”
His partner sighed and shook his head with sad dismay.
“Monkeys? Jesus.
Monkeys’ idea of fun
is throwing their shit at you.
Monkeys always take the joke
a step too far.”
Peabody misses his partner.
XXVI
Ray is listening. Bone knows he hasn’t got much time
Five minutes, tops.
Bone’s been low on the totem for too long
and after one night with Sasha
he’s got an appetite for more.
It’s all about pecking order in this pack
here where the hungers of the favored are fed.
So far, Ray has barely acknowledged Bone’s existence
but when he was asked for five minutes
he gave it to Bone without question.
“What’s on your mind?” asks Ray.
Bone answers provocatively; he knows it’s his moment.
“We’re stupid. Lark had plans, I know them.”
“Oh yeah?” says Ray, raising an eyebrow. “Why should we follow Lark’s plans?”
Bone’s not a lawyer like Lark or Baron, but he feels this is right.
“Lark wasn’t an idiot,” says Bone, “and if we don’t know his plan,