by Toby Barlow
scarred and tired
fighting off the world from a muddy drainage ditch.
The neighborhood widow called the city
and Turner and Mason arrived,
stepping onto the scene
with wary, bloodshot eyes,
and guns loaded with tranqs.
The dogcatchers took them back
patched them up good but rough,
then turned around and sold them
to a fuck named Ruiz.
Annie gets up and turns off the light
letting Anthony sleep
she knows
the herbs will let him drift
off to that place
where everyone you’ve ever loved
still plays in the surf
and rolls in the jungle grass.
XIX
Bonnie is so sad
she leaves work early
to put up signs reading
missing, large black dog
all around the neighborhood.
She knew that other dog was no good.
And the house seems so empty
without her Buddy.
At home she turns on the TV.
The commercial shows a local starlet
surrounded by mutts who lick her face.
“Adopt a dog today,” she coos,
silly breasts heaving, “these fellows
don’t have any issues so they’re waaaayyy
better than a boyfriend.”
The actress winks like a sloppy whore.
Bonnie is wiping away her wet tears and her running nose,
her damp hands leaving fingerprints
on the sides of her wineglass.
XX
Lark drinks his one hundredth hot lemon water of the week
hanging in the Starbucks across from Potter’s office
using the wireless access to stay in touch with the new pack.
Lark’s just trolling, waiting, sniffing.
He remembers a tale he once heard
about the town of the three-legged dogs,
some place in New Mexico where the mongrels and strays
ran wild after any pickup truck that passed by,
biting at the fenders, somehow certain they could win.
Time and again, tires squealed,
until each dog had paid the price.
He imagines them now hopping around on the red dirt roads,
their ears alert
for the sound of a car drawing near,
the fight still in them.
That’s the spirit he knows he needs.
The way warriors
who have already chosen death
are always stronger than those
fighting to live.
You don’t fight for life,
you fight for victory,
two very different things.
The morning passes,
she comes to cover the rest of the day
and Lark heads out.
The plan is simple: keep your eyes open,
watch for any stray member of the pack, anyone they know,
crossing the plaza.
It will take some time
but they will come. Lark knows this,
he sees the game, he knows the play,
all he has to do is find
just one of them.
Looking at her before he leaves, he’s worried,
seeing in the shadowed and empty
envelopes of her eyes
only sorrow
and a rock-faced coldness.
All he can do is kiss her gently
on the cheek as he goes,
she needs healing for something that can’t be healed
and he has so much work to do, so ever
onwards and forward, go.
Pulling into the Silver Lake house he hears
eighties Madonna pulsing from the windows.
He walks in to find it’s all sweat and discipline,
copies of The Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
are strewn about on the floor as Ivan and Loren do push-ups.
It’s almost cute, he thinks, watching them go.
And Chad and Bunny are running stairs, the creaking so loud
Lark wonders if the house can take it.
Bunny and Company
are on endless reps and algae banana drinks,
running six miles a day as humans
then sixteen more as dogs,
returning home with bellies full of raccoon and possum
even a wild pig they cornered up in the park.
Every breath, every exertion
all for the love of Maria,
all for the respect of Lark.
These dogs are knotting together,
working as one.
Lark looks at his watch and thinks
even with all this
they’re miles from where they should be
to take on another pack.
He grimaces to himself,
remembering something the old hounds would say
back when he was a pup,
“It’s not always the pack with the most dogs
sometimes it’s the pack with the sharpest teeth.”
Meaning maybe with enough hunger
maybe then, maybe just…
all he has to do is follow their scent.
All he has to do is find
just one of them.
XXI
Back at the coffee shop
she drinks her tea and keeps a close watch on the plaza.
They’ve been doing this for a week.
No sign of Baron, no sign of the boys.
Lark’s usually right but she’s got to wonder.
She wakes mornings in their motel room
turns on the TV, flops around,
masturbates thinking about how once upon a time,
sunny afternoons ago,
Anthony would, kissing,
move gently, lovingly, down her belly
open her with delicate attention and then
taste her like an oyster.
She comes,
cries for an hour,
bathes, puts on some lipstick
and heads off to meet Lark.
In the silence of the car,
she wonders about the easiest
way to kill yourself. Quaaludes and red wine
seem to be topping the list these days.
But a quick hot shower of silver-tipped bullets
sounds pretty good too.
In the coffee shop,
she sips her tea and watches
each one of the people coming and going,
thinking, yes, my fury could eat all of you, it really could,
the barrista boy, the fat woman with the scone, all of you,
your warm blood would fill my throat
the flesh from your limbs would be chewed and gnawed
the snapping of my teeth would splinter your bones,
your pickled livers would be licked and swallowed,
and finally, the points of my incisors would cut down
into the steaming, warm meat of your hearts.
I would wolf you down
in big, chomping bites.
And you would be gone, all of you,
the planet emptier and quiet,
all your busy rushing silenced
while my unquenchable fury
screams on.
XXII
The first light of the day
Peabody wakes in his car.
After the appearance of the dogcatcher last week
Peabody’s been glued to the inside of his vehicle.
His head is running through logical twists
composing and stitching and drawing up
meandering conspiracies that explain Anthony’s presence.
The honey in his mind has turned
to something cloudy and sour, everything’s sore.
He has call
ed the station to check in.
He’s called Venable and assured him that he’s on the case.
All the while aware that no matter what others may believe
this is his puzzle whose unwinding tale will ultimately be
his own possession, not the lisp’s or the force’s or
anyone else’s. Newborn delusions crawl from conspiracy
to gold as his delirium builds the case
that will lead to book deals and talk shows
and television appearances and radio interviews
and based-on-a-true-story movies,
lead to him sitting there, at the awards ceremony,
perhaps with his wife,
all of these visions are
floating along with him now
in that special way dreams
come to men
who sleep in their car.
Waiting, waiting, he watches, sipping coffee,
scanning the paper, almost missing it when
the two emerge,
the blonde leading the way
a sleepy and unwashed Anthony
following shabbily behind.
They get into the little truck and
the blonde drives them away,
Peabody in tow.
They stop at a medical supply store up on Lincoln
Anthony waits in the car while the blonde goes in.
Peabody studies the window filled with wheelchairs and crutches,
wondering what she’s got on her mind.
She emerges with a large box, puts it in the back.
Then she’s heading North on the Pacific Coast Highway,
turning suddenly into a meandering canyon road
whose twists and turns cover miles
through small towns
and landscapes that seem to encompass decades.
One turn, it’s the early seventies of shanty love,
the next it’s the bare western lifestyle circa 1910,
then it’s nothing but the brown hills holding the promise of
a dry and deadly future.
Down past a hill they turn into a ranch drive.
Peabody pulls over, not ready to follow them by car.
He swigs down half a bottle of water that’s too warm,
pulls his gun from the glove compartment and steps out.
He stretches his legs, wringing the creaks from his bones.
The air feels still and hot and Peabody is suddenly aware of his stickiness.
No shower, no shave, and sweat leaking down his shirt.
The fence on the property line is only three simple strands of barbed wire but still
he manages to tear his slacks as he struggles through.
Some grit and straw work their way into his shoe as he walks on,
following the driveway as it bends behind a knoll.
In about ten minutes he’s up the hill and can see
that the drive continues down a small glen,
around another bend, then out of sight.
He thinks about going back for his car
but the gravity of his curiosity
propels him forward
moving him on down the road
into the twilight’s
distant barking.
XXIII
In the coffee shop it’s the end of the day
and Lark has come to pick her up.
As she gathers her things, he glances over her shoulder,
where, through the window, across the plaza,
Baron is exiting Potter’s office.
“Jesus Christ.”
She looks too, her focus as keen as his.
“Lark, I don’t know how I missed him coming in.”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Lark, “just get the car.
I’ll stay with him. Call me on the cell
and I’ll tell you where to pick me up.”
Ten minutes later she and Lark are tailing a black van
down 101, crawling through slow traffic
until they turn into the warehouse district.
Baron pulls into a lot where three other vans sit parked.
Hanging back, they survey the scene,
watching as Baron crosses to the warehouse door.
He’s looking haggard, his face is thinner, his expression tired.
“Oh, Baron,” she murmurs, her anger slipping for a moment.
Lark doesn’t hear her as he dials Maria.
He’s going to need some help
with what comes next.
XXIV
Cutter and Blue are chuckling at the airport bar
while Venable plays twenty questions with them.
“There is something about you boys…,” he says.
They nod. They chuckle some more.
They figured out, long ago, how little this wise man knows.
Nothing really, only that there are bands of men
who will do his bidding
with little mercy and a horrific eye for detail.
When they first met him back in the bridge match,
they assumed he knew it all.
But it turns out he was only thinking about gangs
of the Sharks and Jets variety
he knows nothing of the fur or the fang.
Blue chuckles down his Diet Coke,
“We’re different all right. But so are you,” says Blue.
Venable leans back, “Interesting in what way?”
“Who do you work for? What do you do?” asks Cutter,
happy to turn the tables. “We muscle for you,
but we don’t know anything about your game.”
There is something fundamentally corroded about this airport bar,
the music leaks out, recalling some plastic era,
while the memorabilia hanging on the walls is reminiscent
of nothing worth remembering.
“Ah, well, at the moment, I work for—“
Venable smiles, catching himself, stirring his tea, “You’re right,
I have been closed off, I apologize. I will let you know some things,
I will, in time, it will all unfold.
We have to trust each other, don’t we?
We’re a team after all.”
They’ve been riding with Venable for weeks now,
working a little, insofar as they stand behind Venable
at meetings in air-conditioned suites and poolside shade,
listening to him move through this town with a tongue that is
both forked and smooth, languages spilling out of him,
Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, like some exotically fragrant bouquet.
But the main reason they stay
are the hours of bridge they play.
Venable clearly has an addiction that can’t be kicked,
perhaps the only weakness they’ve found in him so far.
Blue and Cutter share the fever, happily spending one hour and the next
cracking the code of Goyo’s brain,
working against the churning computer inside his mind.
Tonight though it’s just the three of them
in the bright glare of LAX, sipping sodas, snacking on fries
waiting for Goyo to return from a flight south.
“Look, we have no problem with whatever you do,” says Blue,
“but be straight with us. We’re straight with you.
We deserve to know.”
“Straight? Really?” Venable shakes his head.
“You both smirk like mischievous children
whenever I ask the most innocent questions about
you and your friends.”
“Yeah,” says Cutter, reaching for a fry,
“maybe it’s just that your questions
never seem that innocent.”
Smiling straight into Venable’s eyes
Cutter chews up the last of the fries.
Goyo arrives and they step into their waiting car,
Cutter and Blue in the back, idle and listening
as Venable recites into Goyo’s ear a seemingly endless series of numbers
and random acronyms.
Goyo nods, his brain working through it
like some great, lumbering waterwheel
“567802 from 02101145” nod
“86040 from 02112065” nod
etc. and on ad nauseam and
Cutter and Blue don’t even try to follow.
Cutter just looks out the window and wonders
why he spends so much time in cars
instead of running out in the canyons and in the hills.
There’s game out there to hunt.
Packs of brothers
trotting across bone-dry landscapes
through poplar, aspen and sage.
“230399 from 01315050, 209944 from 774859603”
Man’s minds dream in concrete,
pouring us into these city streets,
thinks Cutter, watching the highway,
yearning only for the feel of soft soil
beneath his paws.
They stop in front of a church,
Goyo gets out and walks inside alone.
“Why are we here?” asks Blue.
They sit in silence for a minute or two, then
finally Venable answers. “His brother was killed
one year ago. Today.”
“Were they close?”
Venable looks out the window,
“Oh, they had their differences,
but they were business partners, so yes,
in that way, and others, they were close.”
Venable’s voice drifts, as if the memory
is making him forget where he is or who he’s with.
“The servants of the house,
those who were there at the time,
described the assassin.
One maid said she moved
‘as if fire had flesh.’
I honestly don’t know what that means.
But all the other servants nodded, agreeing, as if
she was some kind of white angel
born from the shadows of their nightmares.
Perhaps that’s why they didn’t try to stop her.
Of course, like many servants,
perhaps they simply hated their master.”
Again silence while Cutter and Blue wait
for the rest, schoolboys hungry for a story.
“We’ve found her, I think,” adds Venable.
“It took some work, many questions, not surprisingly
it is quite easy for a blonde to disappear
into Southern California. But, yes, we found her.
We tracked her, and we tracked the dogs,
expensive work, but seemingly fruitful.