by Ann Pancake
Ed. Kind of dog you looked at and knew he was a boy, didn’t have to glimpse his privates. You knew from the jog-prance of those stumpy legs, cock-of-the-walk strut, all the time swinging his head from side to side so not to miss anything, tongue flopping out and a big grin in his eyes. Essence of little boy, he was, core, heart, whatever you want to call it. There it sat in a dog. Ed would try anything once and had to get hurt pretty bad before he’d give up, and he’d eat anything twice. That one time, cold night, Matley let him in the camper, and Ed gagged and puked up a deer liver on Matley’s carpet remnant, the liver intact, though a little rotty. There it came. Out. Ed’s equipment was hung too close to the ground, that’s how Mr. Mitchell explained it, “his dick’s hung too close to the ground, way it almost scrapes stuff, would make you crazy or stupid, and he’s stupid,” Mr. Mitchell’d say. Ed went on August 10.
Ghostdog. The most mysterious of the lot, even more so than Guinea, Ghostdog never made a sound; not a whimper, not a grunt, not a snore. A whitish ripple, Ghostdog was steam moving in skin, the way she’d ghost-coast around the place, a glow-in-the-dark angel cast to her, so that to sit by the househole of a summer night and watch that dog move across the field, a luminous padding, it was to learn how a nocturnal animal sees. Ghostdog’d give Matley that vision, she would make him understand, raccoon eyes, cat eyes, deer. And not only did Ghostdog show Matley night sight, through Ghostdog he could see also smells. He learned to see the shape of a smell, watching her with her head tilted, an odor entering nostrils on breeze, he could see the smell shape, “shape” being the only word he had for how the odors were, but “shape” not it at all. Still. She showed him. Ghostdog went on August 19.
Blackie was the only one who ever came home. He returned a strange and horrid sick, raspy purr to his breath like a locust. Kept crawling places to die, but Matley, for a while, just couldn’t let him go, even though he knew it was terribly selfish. Blackie’d crawl in a place, and Matley’d pull him back out, gentle, until Matley finally fell asleep despite himself, which gave Blackie time to get under the bed and pass on. September 2. But Blackie was the only one who came home like that. The others just went away.
BEFORE MOM REVIE died, he could only keep one dog at a time. She was too cheap to feed more, and she wouldn’t let a dog inside the house until the late 1970s; she was country people, and that was how they did their dogs, left them outside like pigs or sheep. For many years, Matley made do with his collection, dogs of ceramic and pewter, plastic and fake fur, and when he was little, Revie’s rules didn’t matter so much, because if he shone on the little dogs his heart and mind, Matley made them live. Then he grew up and couldn’t do that anymore.
When he first started collecting live dogs after Mom Revie was gone, he got them out of the paper, and if pickings there were slim, he drove around and scooped up strays. Pretty soon, people caught on, and he didn’t have to go anywhere for them; folks just started dumping unwanteds along the road above his place. Not usually pups, no, they were mostly dogs who’d hit that ornery stage between cooey-cute puppyhood and mellow you-don’t-have-to-pay-them-much-mind adult. That in-between stage was the dumping stage. The only humans Matley talked to much were the Mitchells, and more than once, before the dogs started disappearing, Mrs. Mitchell to Matley would gentle say, “Now, you know, Matley, I like dogs myself. But I never did want to have more than two or three at a time.” And Matley, maybe him sitting across the table from her with a cup of instant coffee, maybe them in the yard down at his place with a couple of dogs nosing her legs, a couple peeing on her tires, Matley’d nod, he’d hear the question in what she said, but he does not, could not, never out loud say . . .
How he was always a little loose inside, but looser always in the nights. The daylight makes it scurry down, but come darkness, nothing tamps it, you never know (hold on tight). So even before Matley lost a single dog, many nights he’d wake, not out of nightmare, but worse. Out of nothing. Matley would wake, a hard sock in his chest, his lungs aflutter, his body not knowing where it was, it not knowing, and Matley’s eyes’d ball open in the dark, and behind the eyes: a galaxy of empty. Matley would gasp. Why be alive? This was what it told him. Why be alive?
There Matley would lie in peril. The loose part in him. Matley opened to emptiness, that bottomless gasp. Matley falling, Matley down-swirling (you got to hold), Matley understanding how the loose part had give, and if he wasn’t to drop all the way out, he’d have to find something to hold on tight (yeah boy. Tight. Tight. Tighty tight tight.). Matley on the all-out plummet, Matley tumbling head over butt down, Matley going almost gone, his arms outspread, him reaching, flailing, whopping. . . . Until, finally. Matley hits dog. Matley’s arms drop over the bunk side and hit dog. And right there Matley stops, he grabs hold, and Matley . . . stroke. Stroke, stroke. There, Matley. There.
Yeah, the loose part Matley held with dog. He packed the emptiness with pup. Took comfort in their scents, nose-buried in their coats, he inhaled their different smells, corn chips, chicken stock, meekish skunk. He’d listen to their breathing, march his breath in step with theirs, he’d hear them live, alive, their sleeping songs, them lapping themselves and recurling themselves, snoring and dreaming, settle and sigh. The dogs a soft putty, the loose part, sticking. There, Matley. There. He’d stroke their stomachs, finger-comb their flanks, knead their chests, Matley would hold on, and finally he’d get to the only true pleasure he’d ever known that wasn’t also a sin. Rubbing the deep velvet of a dog’s underthroat.
BY LATE AUGUST, Matley had broke down and paid for ads in the paper, and he got calls, most of the calls people trying to give him dogs they wanted to get rid of, but some people thinking they’d found dogs he’d lost. Matley’d get in his car and run out to wherever the caller said the dog was, but it was never his dog. And, yeah, he had his local suspicions, but soft old people like the ones on the ridge, it was hard to believe they’d do such a thing. So first he just ran the road. Matley beetling his rain-colored Chevette up and down the twelve-mile-long road that connected the highway and his once-was farm. Holding the wheels to the road entirely through habit, wasn’t no sight to it, sight he couldn’t spare, Matley squinting into trees, fields, brush, until he’d enter the realm of dog mirage. Every rock, dirt mound, deer, piece of trash, he’d see it at first and think “Dog!” his heart bulging big with the hope. Crushed like an egg when he recognized the mistake. And all the while, the little dog haunts scampered the corners of his eyes, dissolving as soon as he turned to see. Every now and then he’d slam out and yell, try Revie’s different calling songs, call, “Here, Ghostdog, here! Come, girl, come!” Call, “Yah, Ed, yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!” Whistle and clap, cluck and whoop. But the only live thing he’d see besides groundhogs and deer was that ole boy Johnby, hulking along.
Matley didn’t usually pay Johnby much mind, he was used to him, had gone to school with him even though Johnby was a good bit older. Johnby was one of those kids who comes every year but don’t graduate until they’re so old the board gives them a certificate and throws them out. But today Matley watched ole Johnby lurching along, pretend-hunting, the gun, everyone had to assume, unloaded, and why the family let him out with guns, knives, Matley wasn’t sure, but figured it was just nobody wanted to watch him. Throughout late summer, Mrs. Mitchell’d bring Matley deer parts from the ones they’d shot with crop damage permits, oh how the dogs loved those deer legs, and the rib cages, and the hearts. One day she’d brought Johnby along, Johnby’d catch a ride anywhere you’d take him, and Matley’d looked at Johnby, how his face’d gone old while the mind behind it never would, Johnby flipping through his wallet scraps, what he did when he got nervous. He flipped through the wallet while he stared gape-jawed at the dogs, gnawing those deer legs from hipbone to hoof. “I’m just as sorry as I can be,” Mrs. Mitchell was saying, talking about the loss of the dogs. “Just as sorry as I can be.” “If there’s anything,” Mrs. Mitchell would say, “anything we can do. And you know I always keep
an eye out.”
Matley fondled Guinea in his pocket, felt her quiver and live. You got to keep everything else in you soldered tight to make stay in place the loose part that wasn’t. You got to grip. Matley looked at Johnby, shuffling through his wallet scraps, and Matley said to him, “You got a dog, Johnby?” and Johnby said, “I got a dog,” he said. “I got a dog with a white eye turns red when you shine a flashlight in it,” Johnby said. “You ever hearda that kinda dog?”
WHAT MADE IT so awful, if awfuller it could be, was Matley never got a chance to heal. Dogs just kept going, so right about the time the wound scabbed a little, he’d get another slash. He’d scab a little, then it would get knocked off, the deep gash deeper, while the eulogies piled higher in his head:
Cese. Something got hold his head when he was wee little. Matley never knew if it was a big dog or a bear or a panther or what it was, but it happened. Didn’t kill him, but left him forever after wobbling around like a stroke victim with a stiff right front leg and the eye on the same side wouldn’t open all the way, matter always crusted in that eye, although he didn’t drool. Cese’d only eat soft food, canned, favored Luck’s pinto beans when he could get them, yeah, Matley gave him the deluxe treatment, fed him on top an old chest of drawers against the propane tank so nobody could steal his supper. Cese went on September 9.
Leesburg. Called so because Matley found him dumped on a Virginia map that must have fallen out of the car by accident. Two pups on a map of Virginia and a crushed McDonald’s bag, one pup dead, the other live, still teeny enough to suck Matley’s little finger, and he decided on the name Leesburg over Big Mac, more dignity there. When that train first started running, Leesburg would storm the wheels, never fooled with the chickenfeed freight train, he knew where the trouble was. Fire himself at the wheels, snarling and barking, chasing and snap, and he scared some of the sightseers, who slammed their windows shut. Although a few threw food at him from the dining coach. Then one afternoon Matley was coming down the tracks after scavenging spikes, and he spotted a big wad of fur between two ties and thought, “That Missy’s really shedding,” because Missy was the longest-haired dog he had at the time, and this was a sizable hair hunk. But when he got home, here came Leesburg wagging a piece of bloody bone sheathed in a shredded tail. Train’d took it, bone sticking out that bloody hair like a half-shucked ear of corn, and Matley had to haul him off to Dr. Simmons, who’d docked it down like a Doberman. Leesburg went on the thirtieth of September.
That sweet, sweet Carmel. Bless her heart. Sure, most of them, you tender them and they’ll tender you back, but Carmel, she’d not just reciprocate, she’d soak up the littlest love piece you gave her and return it tenfold power. She would. Swan her neck back and around, reach to Matley’s ear with her tiny front teeth and air-nibble as for fleas. Love solidified in a dog suit. Sometimes Matley’d break down and buy her a little bacon, feed it to her with one hand while he rump-scratched with his other, oh, Carmel curling into U-shaped bliss. That was what happiness looked like, purity, good. Matley knew. Carmel disappeared five days after Cese.
Guinea he held even closer, that Guinea a solder, a plug, a glue. Guinea he could not lose. Now Guinea wasn’t one he found, she came from up at Mitchell’s, he got her as a pup. Her mother was a slick-skinned beaglish creature, real nervous little dog, Matley saw the whole litter. Two pups came out normal, two did not, seemed the genes leaked around in the mother’s belly and swapped birth bags, ended up making one enormous lumbery, retarded pup, twice the size the normal ones, and then, like an afterbirth with fur and feet, came Guinea. A scrap of leftover animal material, looked more like a possum than a dog, and more like a guinea pig than either one, the scrap as bright as the big pup was dumb, yes, she was a genius if you factored in her being a dog, but Matley was the only one who’d take her. “Nobody else even believes what she is!” Mrs. Mitchell said. From the start, Guinea craved pockets, and that was when Matley started going about in sweatshirts with big muff-like pockets in front, cut-off sleeves for the heat, and little Guinea with him always, in the pocket sling, like a baby possum or a baby roo or, hell, like a baby baby. Guinea luxuring in those pockets. Pretending it was back before she was born and came out to realize there wasn’t another creature like her on earth. Matley understood. Guinea he kept close.
COLUMBUS DAY WEEKEND. Nine dogs down. Matley collapsed in his lawn chair by the househole. Matley spent quite a bit of time in his lawn chair by the househole, didn’t own a TV and didn’t read much besides Coonhound Bloodlines and Better Beagling magazines, Matley would sit there and knuckle little Guinea’s head. Fifteen years it had been since the house swam off, the househole now slow-filling with the hardy plants, locust and cockaburs and briar, the old coal furnace a-crawl with poison ivy. Fifteen years, and across the tracks, what had been the most fertile piece of bottom in the valley, now smothered with the every-year-denser ragweed and stickweed and mock orange and puny too-many sycamore saplings. Matley could feel the loose part slipping, the emptiness pitting, he held Guinea close in his pocket. Way up the tracks, the tourist train, mumbling. Matley shifted a little and gritted his teeth.
The Mitchells had ridden the train once, when they had a special price for locals, they said the train people told a story for every sight. Seemed if there wasn’t something real to tell, the train people made something up, and if there was something to tell, but it wasn’t good enough, they stretched it. Said they told that the goats that had run off from Revie decades ago and gone feral up in the Trough were wild mountain goats, like you’d see out West. Said they told how George Washington’s brother had stayed at the Puffinburger place and choked to death on a country ham sandwich. Said they pointed to this tree in the Malcolms’ yard and told how a Confederate spy had been hanged from it, and Mr. Mitchell said, “That oak tree’s old, but even if it was around a hundred and forty years ago, wasn’t big enough to hang a spy. Not to mention around here they’d be more likely to hang a Yankee.” Matley couldn’t help wondering what they told on him, but he didn’t ask. He’d never thought much about how his place looked until he had all the time these train people looking at him. He was afraid to ask. And he considered those mutt puppies, sleeping forever.
By that time, he’d made more than a few trips to Oaken Acre Estates despite himself (how old soft people could do such a thing). He’d sneak up in there and spy around, never following the new road on top the ridge, but by another way he knew. A path you picked up behind where the sheep barn used to be, the barn now collapsed into a quarter-acre sprawl of buckled rusty tin, but if you skirted it careful, leery of the snakes, there was a game path above the kudzu patch. He usually took four or five dogs, Hickory and Tick, they liked to travel, and Guinea in his pocket, of course Guinea went. They’d scramble up into the stand of woods between househole and subdivision, Matley scuttling the path on the edges of his feet, steep in there, his one leg higher than the other, steadying Guinea with one hand. Matley tended towards clumsy and worried about falling and squashing Guinea dead. This little piece of woods was still Matley’s piece of woods, had been deeded to him, and Matley, when he moved on that little land, could feel beyond him, on his bare shoulders and arms, how far the land went before. Matley angled along, keen for any dog sign, dog sound, dog sight, yeah, even dead dog odor. But there was nothing to see, hear, stink.
Then they’d come out of the woods to the bottoms of the slopey backyards, shaley and dry with the struggling grass where the outsiders played at recreating those Washington suburbs they’d so desperately fled. Gated-off, security-systemed, empty yard after empty yard after empty, everything stripped down past stump, no sign of a living thing up in there, nor even a once-live thing dead. Hickory and Tick and whoever else had come would sniff, then piss, the lawns, been here, yeah, me, while Matley kept to the woods edge, kept to shelter, kept to shade. Guinea breathing under his chest. He had no idea where the pureblood-dog people lived, and they left no sign, no dogs, no pens, no fences, and although the
ridge was full, of lookalike houses garages gazebos utility sheds a swimming pool, it was the emptiest place he’d ever felt. How you could kill a piece of ground without moving it anywhere. And Matley’d watch, he’d listen, he’d sniff best he could. But no dog sights, no dog sounds, no smells, and nothing to feel but his own sticky sweat. Matley’d never discover a thing.
Matley tensed in his lawn chair, nine dogs gone, Guinea in his pocket, Junior Junior cranky in his lap. He listened to that train creak and come, the train was coming and coming it was always coming and you would never get away. The train slunk around the turn and into sight, its bad music an earbeat, a gutbeat, ta TA ta TA ta TA, locomotive slow-pulling for the sightseers to better see the sights, and how did they explain Matley? Plopped between Winnebagos and househole with some eighteen doghouses up his yard. How did he fit into this land that time forgot? ta TA ta TA ta TA, the beat when it passed the joints in the rails, and the screee sound over the rail beat, and even over top that, a squealing, that ear-twisting song, a sorry mean ear-paining song. Starers shouldered up in open cars with cameras bouncing off golf-shirted bellies, and from the enclosed cars, some would wave. They would only wave if they were behind glass. And Matley would never wave back.
HE COMES TO know. In the dream, he is a younger man than young he ever was, younger than he was born, and the hillside he hell-heaves, it’s hill without end. The leaves loud under snow crust, his boots busting, ground cracking, the whole earth moanering, and him, him helling. Snow lying in dapples, mottles, over hillside, ridgeside, dog-marked like that, saddles, white snow saddles, see, his side seizing, breath in a blade, and the dog. Who he dream-knows is a girl dog, he knows that, the dog haunch-sat waiting pant, pant, pant. His hill pant, her dog pant, the blade in his ribs, who pants? say good dog “good dog” good, him helling and the dog roped leashed tethered to a cat-faced red oak black against the snow blank, dog a darker white than the snow white and. He cannot ever reach her.