by Toby Barlow
And so is the dog.
Where is everybody?
He would flag down a car but that would put him
into the street, which is the no man’s land
between him and the dog
a boundary he somehow senses he shouldn’t cross.
They keep running, and now a palpable fear
is driving every one of Pete’s steps.
It would be okay,
almost like the dog was playing,
if the hair standing up on its back
didn’t suggest some
deeper threat.
His heart is thumping hard.
His Nikes are moving fast now.
The dog keeps up, it’s clear this pace
isn’t much of an effort for the beast.
There’s menace in every step of the dog’s gait.
The corners of its mouth are pulled slightly back,
revealing white teeth and pink gums.
Sprinting now and breathing hard,
Pete sees a couple of teenage boys
sitting on the curb up ahead. Pete slows,
he looks over as he does and sees the dog slow too,
but still no sign that it will cross.
“Hey guys,” says Pete.
The dumb boys look up, slightly thrown by this sweating stranger.
“Listen,” continues Pete, surprised that the fear
comes so easily to his voice, “you guys have a cell phone?”
“Yeah,” drones one of the kids.
“Okay, do me a favor. Please. Call the cops and tell them
there’s a stray dog chasing joggers. Fucking chasing me.”
The kids say,
“What dog?”
Looking around,
sure enough,
no dog.
When he reaches home
there’s a note taped to his door.
“I sent the dog and
I will keep sending the dog
and the dog will be there every day
until the dog kills you.”
The most terrifying part
is that he recognizes
the handwriting.
Six months later, he has put on fifteen pounds.
He and his wife are living in Colorado Springs.
He washes the dishes, watches TV
and never takes out the trash.
In fact,
Pete stays inside
pretty much
forever.
IX
Finally chasing Pete
seeing the panic as it hit him
block after block, wave after wave,
she could taste it and
it was like candy.
Driving now, inland,
she wishes she could chase him every day,
just run him down,
but she knows he’ll stop running now
’cause that’s Pete. Only strong, never brave.
Her small smile fades to nothing
she drives on thinking
yeah, revenge is sweet, like they say
only it leaves your stomach raw
and it will carve you out
just like any sinful dessert
it’s the course that
always promises,
but never delivers
any true satisfaction.
It’s all right, though, it’s a step back
from the shadows she’s been hiding in.
Maybe soon she’ll be ready to find Anthony again.
Then the two of them
could fight off every demon together.
She would tell him her secrets, show him
the way of her world. She paid too great a price
for hiding what she was from him.
And now she is alone.
But she could be his again. And he hers.
Driving on 10, she almost keeps going.
Her heartbeat is up and a soft thrill moving in her blood,
Then a car passes, shaking her out of her fantasy,
the shadows fall back into place and she recalls
that home is nothing now but ash
and the only slight glimmer of hope she has
is ringing right now on the cell phone.
Lark’s calling
from the lookout
“Something’s up.” he says.
“I need you now.” His voice is cold, bloodless.
“I need everyone.”
He hangs up.
She doesn’t say a word,
just hits the blinker
and quickly swerves his way.
X
Looking out the window of the Drug Enforcement Agency,
Peabody notices how clean the city looks.
Last night’s rain scrubbed the smog from the skies
restoring LA’s shine again,
like it’s been through a car wash.
He’s been waiting in the lobby
of the Santa Monica office all morning.
He came down on his own,
avoiding the official channels
since Venable has as good as told him
that all those channels are fouled.
The Fed’s name is Morrow.
He’s got a clean haircut
and suit that’s diligently pressed.
One of those valley Christians, thinks Peabody.
Mormon? Maybe.
After the introductions, Peabody asks
if the D.E.A.’s been looking
into anything on a Goyo Castillo.
Morrow nods. “Goyo Castillo is very big.”
Peabody laughs. “Yeah, I know, he’s really fat.”
Morrow shakes his head. “No, I mean his business is big.”
Morrow fills him in on how Goyo runs one of the larger operations
the D.E.A. knows of, bringing massive quantities of drugs,
mostly meth, in from across the border. At a certain point,
Morrow stops talking, obviously it’s time for Peabody to share,
“Okay, here’s what I know,
Castillo’s been working with this guy Venable.
Who is a very queer little fellow.”
Morrow pauses. His smile slips away.
“Queer?” says Morrow.
“Yeah, queer, you know, strange and kind of gay,” says Peabody.
Morrow smiles, even colder now, nodding along.
“So what I’m hearing here is,” he says, “gays are, um,
queer and strange?”
Peabody senses he’s taken a serious wrong turn.
Morrow leans back in his chair.” You know, this isn’t
the Soviet Union. If it doesn’t hurt anyone,
and if it’s consensual, people
can choose any sort of lifestyle they want
and love whoever they want,
that makes sense, doesn’t it?
That’s what freedom is,
that’s what being Ameri—”
“—Look, I’m sorry,” interrupts Peabody, “I didn’t mean anything,
really, maybe you could look in your files for him.”
Morrow slowly turns and taps on his keyboard for a few seconds.
There is a slight pause and then the files begin
popping up on the screen,
one after another.
A quiet Morrow studies the data.
A few minutes later
he looks up at Peabody and says
“You know, this is the kind of guy
who gives homosexuality
a bad name.”
XI
The sun is settling low in the sky
while Annie works out back, washing out the linens.
Palo is kneeling down in the gravel drive
hitching a third trailer to a third truck.
Two dogs are off to the side, sniffing a patch of grass,
sensing some stain of life in the dust.
Anthony emerges from th
e cabin, walking like a sleepy man.
He bites into a red apple.
“So, how long have you all had this ranch?” he asks.
“It was Ruiz’s,” says Annie. “He gave it to us.”
Anthony mulls this over, takes another bite of the apple,
“That was nice of him,” he says, heading back inside.
Annie wrings the crimson stains from the sheets.
She looks over to Palo.
“I’m not going up tonight.”
Palo shifts his focus from the truck hitch. “Why not?”
“You know why. You don’t need me.
And Ruiz isn’t well. That leg is infected.”
Palo is silent, turns back to his work.
“How much more are you going to put him through?” asks
Annie.
Palo finishes with the hitch, pulls to make sure it’s secure.
“Maybe we’ll just take a kidney and leave it at that.”
“That’s not funny.”
Palo walks toward the house, stopping at the steps to the porch,
not looking at her. “We could use you there tonight, Annie.”
“Someone has to stay and help Ruiz.”
“Okay, but come if you change your mind.”
“No. We’ll be here. Just come home to us.”
Twenty minutes later Palo and his brother leave the house.
One opens the wooden gate, the other whistles loudly,
there’s a rattle of cans and the earth softly rumbles as
the dusty pack of dogs spills out from behind the house
silently splitting into three groups
that gently jump up into the truck trailers.
Anthony walks out onto the porch, putting on his jacket.
Annie kisses him on the cheek and says,
with a voice nearly breaking,
“Just look out for Palo.”
Palo secures the trailer doors.
The two blonds and Anthony each slip in
behind the wheel of a truck, firing up
and driving away.
Anthony looks at Annie getting smaller
in the rearview mirror.
He has only a vague idea of what’s up the road, but
he doesn’t really care. It’s funny how,
when love is drained from your heart,
when only flesh and broken watch pieces lie left behind,
even something as wonderful as magic
fails to be interesting.
“Ah,” we say, or
“That’s something else,” our eyes dead
to the strange light.
He drives on toward nothing.
Annie had never promised him anything more
than a change, which was honestly all he wanted,
a new skin.
He wanted to strip away the pain but not the sadness,
he wanted to breathe real life into every memory
but still somehow let go,
he wanted to become something else
while holding on to everything he had.
All he had, it turned out, was love.
She was gone, but her love was still alive inside him.
It was the only thing keeping him on this earth,
the only reason he could find to continue,
to protect that one part of her that
still remained, her love for him,
the small ray of light that lay
within the shadowed hollows of his heart.
But he couldn’t live without her,
so he took on another kind of life.
It was that simple.
So now he is simply something more
and nothing less.
The dogs are silent in the back
as he trails Palo up Interstate 5, then follows east.
Heading into the steadily rising and endlessly broken hills.
It’s about an hour before they’ve stopped,
pulling into an abandoned tire dump
where old Firestones
Goodyears, Dunlops, B. F. Goodriches, and the odd Pirelli
Are stacked across acres like charred fingers of death.
They leave the headlights of the trucks on as
Palo opens the trailers and the dogs tumble out,
quickly vanishing into the fractured landscape
like black water soaking into the soil.
Anthony and the brother remove their shoes and their socks
and, making the change,
rise to shake off their dusty coats
and walk with Palo.
The parked trucks’ headlights,
illuminating a path
through the valley of used treads
toward a certain destination.
Beside him and around him,
across the damp earth,
amid the darkened curves,
the hundred shadows
move too.
XII
Baron hasn’t been in a limo for some time.
It makes him smile, remembering the luxury of the old pack.
He looks at Cutter and Blue, nods with a smile.
Venable is tucked into the corner
picking his cuticles while
the big man called Goyo rests with his eyes closed.
“I’ve been wondering…,” begins Baron.
“Yes?” replies Venable.
“Since they have the account numbers,
why doesn’t this crew just take the money themselves?”
“Well, I’m sure they would if they could,
but luckily, they would need to be part of Tomas’s family,
his close family, and Goyo is his only kin.
For anyone else, the information is useless.”
Baron nods. “I see.”
Venable shakes his head.
“Tomas was stupid
to steal from his brother.
We would have caught him.
He was such a child.
My god, they’re all children down there.
Were it not for Goyo’s formidable mind,
Tomas would have spent his life lacing sneakers
in the maquiladoras.
Of course, then he might still be alive.
If you call that living.”
Venable falls silent.
Baron prefers the quiet.
The limo pulls into the meeting place
followed neatly by three Econolines,
each a little battered.
Blue opens the back doors
and dozens of dogs leap out
their silhouettes cross the headlights.
Venable and Goyo walk ahead,
Venable clutching the case of money.
Baron follows a few steps behind.
Nearing the crest of the hill, they see a man with two dogs
ascending the other side.
“Seems he’s brought friends as well,” says Venable.
Baron looks around suspiciously, the air is heavy
too many smells fog his thoughts.
XIII
A few thousand feet up and a few thousand feet away
a black helicopter silently whirrs
unnoticed in the night sky.
On loan from Homeland Security,
the S–70 Blackhawk is loaded with a pilot,
a parabolic sound system, state-of-the-art electronics,
two officers from special ops named Samuels and Ryan,
the Fed named Morrow,
and Detective Peabody
who for the first time in a long while,
is beginning to feel like a cop again.
They are simply there to observe, listen, and record.
Though Samuels and Ryan are there in case
an opportunity for action arises.
Samuels is chewing gum methodically
as he plays with a wall of electronics
trying to pinpoint sounds on the ground.
Peabody and Morrow follow
the glowing orange dots of radar.
“What are those?” Peabody points
as a group of the dots slink across the screen.
“Dunno,” says Ryan. “Could be coyotes.”
“I’m getting something,” says Samuels, and Peabody puts on headphones.
Through the whispering static, he can make out a familiar lisp,
caught midmeander,
“…yes, I believe I have heard about those dogs.”
“These dogs?” This from a voice Peabody doesn’t recognize.
“Yes,” says Venable. “I believe they killed two men awhile back.”
“Just two?”
“Two that I know of.”
“Well,” says the unfamiliar voice.
“I see you brought your own dogs.”
“Protection. From those,” says Venable.
Through the crackling on the line,
this pair reminds Peabody of old radio voices
cast in some vaudeville performance.
“Are you Mr. Castillo?” says the man.
“Of course not,” says Venable. “But I speak for him.”
“Is that him behind you?” asks the man.
“I’m really not at liberty to say.”
Peabody admires Venable’s ability to sound
perfectly irritating
with every word he utters.
“Uh-huh,” says the man. “We came to meet Castillo.”
Silence. Peabody wonders who is looking at whom,
what decision is being made.
Finally Venable snaps, “In that case,
then, yes that is Castillo. Mr. Goyo Castillo.
Now, we have brought what you asked for. And we
would like to have the documents.”
Morrow looks annoyed,
this rambling information is vague and more or less useless.
Peabody feels sorry that he included him,
probably wasting his time,
but then, hey, welcome to the show.
After all, for Peabody it’s been nothing but
vagaries and half guesses all along.
“I’d like to ask Mr. Castillo a couple of questions,”
says the unknown voice.
Peabody can’t hear Venable sigh, but he can feel it.
“Surely you can’t be serious.”
“Back in Mexico, Mr. Castillo, you used dogs as guards.”
“I am growing so tired of this obsession with dogs? What the—”
The voices cut off.
Peabody turns toward the screen where
a long rectangular object
slides into the frame and stops.