by Toby Barlow
As it rises, Cutter steps into its wake,
looking up
as his friend disappears,
swallowed into the bed of the night’s
low clouds.
XXIV
The helicopter never went back for Venable
he was left to wander, broken, back
to the limo that still sat waiting, just over the hill.
Getting in, the blood and mud
leaked from his clothes, staining the perfect
white leather.
“Go,” he shrieked.
The driver, who’d been listening to his iPod
oblivious to the night’s events,
looked around for the others.
He wouldn’t budge without them, after all,
he was hired by Goyo.
He would wait.
“Goyo’s dead! Goyo’s dead!” Venable swung
for the back of the driver’s head
through the open partition.
A weeping, thrashing Venable
was pulled kicking from the car.
The driver threw him to the dirt
and spat on him for good measure
before driving away.
The driver didn’t care, fuck it,
Venable couldn’t fire him, he quit.
Venable slapped his palms on the wet earth
and collapsed into sobs that shook
the world around him.
XXV
Fifteen miles away, as they cut across the night sky,
Ryan is still on the radio, calling in descriptions
of the dog man thing that’s twitching on the tarp.
Peabody stares at it,
almost feeling the spasms and the agony in his own gut.
Whatever it is, the trembling flesh is swollen and pink,
thick strands of fur rising from patches
only to quickly recede again.
Even the bones seem agonized
as the cycle repeats itself.
Peabody can’t bear to watch
and shifts his gaze to the landscape instead.
The darkness below
makes him suspect the helicopter is headed
away from the city,
and sure enough when they finally touch down
it’s at a military base
way east and Sierra high.
A medevac team is waiting on the tarmac and within seconds
two men have jumped on board with
a needle full of something.
They dose the beast up and load it, still groaning,
onto a gurney, into an ambulance, and off they go,
taking Samuels and Ryan with them.
Morrow and Peabody are left staring
at the siren lights that disappear past a Quonset hut.
Just like that, the mystery
has vanished.
Peabody looks at Morrow. “Any idea what that was?”
“No. And the way these guys work,
I’m sure we’ll never know.”
They silently stand there,
letting their adrenaline cool.
Morrow jumps onto the tarmac
and offers a hand to Peabody.
“Come on, I’ve got a feeling we’re going to
have to find our own ride home.”
Peabody takes his hand and hops down
not saying anything as they head toward the base
their minds slightly blown
but their bodies intact.
XXVI
Anthony’s vow to Annie ended
the minute Palo closed his eyes.
Just like that, his blood hunger died away
and all he wanted to do was flee the game.
But leaving has proved tricky,
that mad and vengeful cur is still close on his heels.
What a waste. To turn and bare teeth
would be to struggle for or against something
he no longer knows or feels. The war between life and death
goes on without him tonight,
now he simply runs.
The dog maintains her pursuit,
try as she might neither losing ground nor gaining it.
They have left the dump behind
and now race through the empty veins of the city
across barely lit neighborhoods
where the people living stretched-thin lives
clutch at the edge of civilization.
Anthony runs on, along the pocked and torn roads,
past trailers lying at loose and random angles.
He barely glances back, his pace feels sure.
Eventually he can escape this dog and then,
perhaps, he’ll head back to the sea,
this strange chapter finished. But first
he just keeps running
from a dog he could take
if he even cared.
XXVII
Cutter wanders tail down back toward
the last thing he can think of as home.
It takes him longer, unsure of his way
mourning his lost friend with every step,
sniffing for traces of familiar dogs or familiar signs.
When he stops and curls up beneath the dry sagebrush,
a long, unbroken whine leaks out of him.
He remembers Blue in pale rooms full of cards,
a dog with a head full of hearts and spades and
fifty-two memories in every hand.
Cutter cries for his friend.
When the sun comes down
and our bodies rest,
our souls catch up.
Early the next morning, he rises to venture
out into the new pink light.
Chased by some kids through an abandoned lot
and slinking through alleyways eating
whatever an alley’s got,
Cutter keeps heading south.
He reaches the bunker in four days’ time.
The steel door is open, so he crosses the lot
and trots right in, his nose
up for trouble. But there are only
a handful of dogs and a couple of guys
all looking bruised, scarred, tired.
They had made it back in ones and twos,
and not many at that.
Finding a quiet corner, he lies down on the concrete floor
and changes, then searches through the warehouse
till he finds the pile of clothes he left behind.
He buttons his shirt
and nudges a guy
resting against the wall.
“What’s the plan?” Cutter asks,
The guy doesn’t even look at him as he answers.
“We wait.”
“What do we wait for?”
“We wait for Baron.”
“Is anyone sure he’s coming back?”
The guy shrugs.
Somewhere back in the shadows
a lone dog sighs
a long sigh.
XXVIII
Her body is sore
with the plain truth of exhaustion.
Her anger has burned down to small coals
as thirst pulls at a throat
scratched raw from the grit and the grime,
but she’s come so far
there’s nothing for her to do but go on trailing.
A mile on ahead, he stops, lifts his leg,
pisses against a tree,
then moves on.
Paces later she barely pauses as she passes
but sniffs the wetness, and feels the heaviness sink in.
She can sense the strength buried in his scent.
And something about it
gives her chills.
She shakes it off with a snort
and keeps going.
There are another two miles of this.
He moves with a kind of assuredness,
his body swaying with cowdog hips.
S
he blinks
half-blinded by the dirt and salt from the roads
but can’t quite see him clearly.
She watches though
with great wonder
as he slows, then pauses
at a small roadside puddle.
She approaches cautiously,
edges around him, feels nothing,
the fires inside her having
died down to smoke.
As he drinks
he steps gingerly to the side, making room.
Drops of oil paint, warped rainbows on the surface
but it’s good enough for now.
Their cold noses
just barely
touch.
He turns then
and heads back the way they came.
Blinking,
XXIX
Almost noon and Peabody’s up to his elbows
down at the station.
The phone rings and,
expecting news on an abuse case,
he’s surprised to hear a familiar lisp.
“Detective?”
“Ah,” Peabody settles in. “I guess I was expecting
to hear from you.”
Silence.
“You were there, I assume?” asks Venable.
“Yes.” Peabody leafs through a stack of papers,
waiting for the conversation to move on.
“I was quite surprised by it all. By everything.”
“Yep. Me too,” says Peabody.
Silence, silence, silence.
“So, what are you doing about it?”
“Hmmm.” Peabody leans back in his chair. “Well,
I had a partner once,
a long time ago, back when
I was young and he wasn’t.
Anyway, you know what he would always say?”
“What was that.”
“Well, Mr. Venable, he would say, ‘You gotta remember, kid,
this universe was built by the low bidder.’”
Silence, silence, silence.
Peabody picks some dry skin on his knuckle.
“I’m not sure I see,” says Venable.
“Well, that’s all I’ve got. Good luck, Mr. Venable.”
Peabody hangs up the phone.
He looks at the photo of his boy and his wife.
And, diving back into his papers, he reaches out
in an offhand way and touches the picture frame,
almost for luck, mostly for love.
XXX
When the time came,
when Anthony changed back
as they lay in the shade of a room
with rough lumber walls and a clay dirt floor
in a corner of the canyon ranch he had led them to,
she watched, still a beast,
as his flesh slid into its familiar shape.
Not believing, not trusting, but knowing and feeling
her eyes grew wider as
his muscles were reborn and his slender cheekbones
fell back into place.
Her heart surged, her breath lifting
to the top of her chest
as he emerged whole, like a gift from the gods.
Lying out before her on the floor naked and beautiful
softly breathing, he did not know her, not yet,
that would come soon,
but for now her tail was thumping on the soft earth
with the solid rhythm of joy.
And then
when she changed back
Anthony didn’t say anything,
his whole body frozen in tense disbelief.
Again, he waited for the hand that would shake him,
wake him sleepy there on the beach of Venice,
but no hand came.
The dream reality kept unfolding, her taut stomach,
the line of her breasts,
the hair between her legs and
the curve of her thighs.
Even before her face was back,
he knew, his muscles clenched with joy.
As her eyes recast themselves,
he gently reached
across the floor with an open hand
which she seized and held.
He pulled her close, wrapped himself around her white skin,
kissing small pieces of her, salty and wet from the change
touching like a blind man
every mole he had memorized,
breathing the scent of her in.
They didn’t speak, they didn’t explain
their embrace said it all with
familiar tastes lips touching lips and neck and ear,
the perfect familiar nature rushed
like white water through their spinning minds,
muscles pulling shoulders and hips close
as the rough soil scratched against their skin.
Palms and fingers ran along chests and thighs.
They shook with something that was almost anger
or frustration but truly
only the violent reassurance
of lost things found
driving through them
like a stake.
Kiss embrace kiss shaking off and shivering
embracing in the nakedness of the noon day light.
Afterward, looking out a small window where the blue sky entered,
she listened to the sounds of the ranch,
metal clanging, a man’s voice
a girl’s voice, she heard all this
as Anthony held her still.
Then, like a knot
finally released
she exhaled.
A few moments later,
wearing a borrowed blue dress, she waited as
the girl named Annie talked to Anthony.
Behind them in the driveway, a scarred old man
sat idling in a pickup.
“We’re going up the coast,” the Annie girl said.
“What about the other dogs?” Anthony asked.
“You’re the only one who came back.”
Annie looked like she was pretty once,
sometime before
she was so infinitely sad.
XXXI
With the advertising money gone,
the once burgeoning drive to adopt dogs
in the county of Los Angeles withers,
the strays pile up in the kennels
and the short-lived reverse on putting them down
is, predictably, re-reversed
by a clearly regretful but pressured city council.
Dogs who have been passed over
are led to a room where the nurse holds the paw
and the veterinarian slips a thin needle into the living vein.
The dog breathes heavily and the lids flicker
dying down
to nothing.
There are three dogs playing in three separate yards
for whom the machinery of the pound
no longer matter, four months ago they were taken in
by the owner of a deli,
by the daughter of a gym coach,
and by an art teacher
up in the Valley.
These dogs have by now lost their memory of one another
as distant faces and shared scents have been rinsed away
by happier days.
They have forgotten too the man
who once quietly sheltered them
from the chemical jaws of the system.
But they never forget,
the taste
of those carne asada
tacos.
At the edge and the center of heaven,
coyote naps
in the prime mover’s shade.
XXXII
Peabody’s driving home,
he’s blinking hard, pushing it all back,
the memory of the blonde
smiling at him in the San Pedro twilight,
Anthony kneeling
, weeping
in the coals of his burnt-out house,
even the smell of the dogs that surrounded him
in the dry heat of the ranch that day.
He lifts each memory up to the light,
then buries them all.
Peabody learned long ago
that holding on to anything too tight, even the truth,
can drive you to places no one should see.
Peabody learned long ago
that having all the answers
was something quite different
from simply saying
case closed.
Case closed.
XXXIII
Moons slide by.
On the beaches of Santa Cruz
two dogs play,
watched over by Annie, the nice young lady
everyone knows, whose laughter
is all ice cream sweetness,
who befriends the homeless, bringing them
curried egg sandwiches and listening to their raspy tales
of who they were before they were this.
Annie takes in the sunset, sitting on benches
amid the lost carnival souls. The broken voices ramble on,
their sad pirate tales curling in the air, but she’s silent now,
the rose color fading from her cheeks
her gaze as wide as the empty horizon
and an expression slipping to pebble hard
as if she’s only waiting now
for the ocean to rise
and drown the pain.
On the beaches of Santa Cruz
two dogs play,
silently watched by a one-armed man
with lines on his face
hard as ridges on redwood bark.
He sits, never talking to passersby,
never offering his name,
simply chews on his lips and sighs through the days.
He lets the dogs play for hours
before limping after them
toward the soft light of home.
On the beaches of Santa Cruz
two lovers sit on a bench at night
curled up in their small
corner of the world.
She laughs, thinking
of the crooked path they tumbled down
to get here,
where the act of falling finds only
the assurance of another embrace,
where hands are held
with unthinking constancy.
Pointing up at the sky
their voices gild the perfect quiet
as they softly whisper names;
pearl moon,
skillet moon,
lemon moon,