I brought home a dog that reminded me of my sister. Not in that they look alike, but that this is the dog she always told me that she wanted when we were six, underneath our mother's kitchen table, the chairs pulled back with three comforters thrown over the top. I was eight, probably too old for blanket forts, and she was six, and we were drawing, she with crayons and me with colored pencils because I felt they were more refined. She told it to me like this:
"He's going to be a German Shepard with one brown ear, and one not so brown ear. He won't have a light colored tummy like most dogs, he'll be all over black except for that ear and around his eyes, they'll be brown, and he'll have a ghost mark."
"A ghost mark?" I'd asked, curious to what a something like that could be.
"Yeah," she snapped back, pushing harder on her crayons. She was drawing a "green bush" that looked like a small tree.
"What's a ghost mark?"
"It's a mark left by a ghost. He's gonna get it after he sees somebody die and then try to help them. It'll be a nice lady that gets stabbed in the stomach and he'l get real close, close enough for her to touch him on the nose before she dies. Where she touches him will be the ghost mark. He'll be really smart because of it, and he'll care about everybody a whole. That's how I'll know him. His name will be Hon."
I nodded, "That sounds like a cool dog. I want a corgi named Blast Off."
"That sounds good too." She said, and we both kept drawing until our mother came home and yelled at us for making a fort in the kitchen. The kitchen was for food is what she would tell us, not blankets.
Twenty years later I'm in an animal hospital putting dogs to sleep. Its not as you would think. I find the big vein that wraps around their shoulder running up to their brain and shoot them full of enough tranquilizers to make them falls asleep and then stop their heart. Its really not bad, I don't get sad. The guy before me had to quit though. Dr. Adler got weepy one day when he had to put down a Labrador, chocolate colored, his hand shook too much and the dog didn't know what was going on and bit him on the hand. I was working in the back sorting prescriptions and he handed me a syringe. I put Flossy down easy. Flossy was the chocolate labs name. I learned that from her tags, which we kept because the owner didn't want them. Flossy was a breeding dog that got liver cancer and diabetes, and after she couldn't support a litter he dropped her off here. We keep the tags if they don't want them. And I feel a little better knowing that we do.
I was eight dogs in that day, George, Nibbles, Smokey, Big Guard, Downey, Sparkle, Freddie, and Ray Liotta. Ray Liotta was an English bulldog that lost half of his jaw in a fight with a garbage truck. It got so bad that he couldn't even eat the watery mash that his owner provided to him, couldn't make him eat by sticking his fingers in the gap where Ray's jaw used to be and pull it open, the dog had figured out a way to make himself throw up. So the owner asked to put him down, and I obliged.
That day was a little slow, eight dogs is a little slow when you understand how many dogs there are in Hunter's Hills, which is the name of the town. There are over eight hundred stray dogs for a population of five thousand. At one point the economy was based around puppy kennels for other counties, but some new laws got put into place and things are changing. It still means I have quite a job. After I got my degree to practice medicine, on animals, I wound up here, it was the closest place to my university with an opening for a specialist in anesthesia and medicine, and I learned four years enough to get the job.
At two thirty the receptionist called from the front room that there was only left. I hadn't learned her name yet, even though she had been on the same shifts as me for two weeks. I had just found a girlfriend and every other woman on the street was just that to me. I was bad with names too.
"One more," I heard as the metal door clanged against the metal cabinets on the inside of the operating room. I scanned the thirteen chairs in the waiting room for an old man whispering sweet goodbyes to an animal that could never understand him or an young woman who had just finished crying, and couldn't see any. I turned my head to the receptionist across the space behind the counter that ran up to her neck. She stood up and reached over the counter, pointing down and across the room.
"There," she said. "One more."
I swiveled my head back around and sitting to the left of the doorframe, staring out through the wall length window was a dog, a German shepherd. It craned its head to look at me as I looked at it and there were three white stripes across its muzzle, running from the top of the snout and then swiping down along its right side.
"Where's the owner?" I asked the dog, without meaning to, I just kept staring at it.
The dog stared back and dropped his jaw as if to speak but the receptionist answer first. I found out later her name was Julie.
"He's all signed out. I just filed all of the paperwork away. He's set up to go in the back." Go in the back was our code word, I always told Dr. Adler that we should have a better one, even a dog could figure that one out. And as if he could the dog stood up and walked around to face me, looking now into the operating room. I still watched him.
"What's wrong with him?" The receptionist brought her tan arm back behind the cover.
"No reason. Owner cannot fully care for the animal anymore, in this state that's legal."
"Seems like a lousy thing to do." The dog waited at the lip of the doorway and I scouted back a bit and he scooted forward.
"It was a part of a will. I remember her saying that."
"Oh." I turned away to get a new pair of gloves and the dog walked in after me. Without my usual needed gesture or beckoning he hopped to the table and sat on it. This was unusual, there was never a dog so eager to have his heart stop before, so as I closed the door and locked it I kept the gloves balled up for a moment walked to inspect him. Nothing shot into my mind except that he was very dark for German Shepard; they are bred to have that cookie-brown stomach, which was all dark on him. There's a memory buzz in the back of my head that doesn't click the hammer all the way back until I run my fingers beneath his collar and bull the jangle of tags into the light. Then he and I spend a moment stuck.
Twenty minutes later the clinic closes and I heard Hon into my car. Julie doesn't look up from the desk because she isn't there anymore. She had been leaving fifteen minutes early the entire two weeks we've been working together and Hon jumped into my car like this was a thing we did together, I almost put him to sleep and instead to drive him back to my apartment and keep him every day. I rolled down the window so he could stick his head out, but he sat still, finding it better to look forward instead.
The ride home was spent in near silence, I turned the radio down low, but could still hear the twang of a steel guitar when the wind died down. Meredith, my sister, lived half the country away in New Jersey and I highly doubted someone trekked all the way out here to send me some kind of sign. This was a really ham-fisted way for God to tell me to call my sister, but it worked anyway.
Hon followed me up the stairs to the third floor like a shaggy ghost. I never asked him to do anything, he just did, mirroring my movements, which is a little sad when you think about it. A dog this attentive and intelligent was given to me to be killed, but that’s just preaching, and I’m not all that much about morals. I got inside and there’s not much to see.
“Hello,” I actually speak first, a nervous habit that I have that hopefully she will remember. “Hello Mery?”
There wasn’t an answer for a little while.
“Del?” There was a crinkle that I can be either a break in reception or a snap in her voice.
“Yeah, is this a bad time? I don’t want to bother you.” That was just how I opened conversation. I never meant to say it, but I got anxious trying for the door handle to step out. I hadn’t talked to my sister in the better part of a year, after she had gotten married to the man who had gotten her pregnant two years ago. They weren’t going to get married, but when she got pregnant there was a kindling there, some kind of unsaid incentive on both parties. I had watched them kiss with their eyes open, and he held her hand afterward.
“Its been a bad time to call for a long while.” She snuffled in a way that can be clearing a nose or can mean recent crying. You hear a lot of voices like that when you put animals down.
“But, I’m still talking, so, what’s going on Del?”
“I think I have a special dog.” I wanted to take the sentence back. I wanted to ask ‘How is Abel? How’s the new house? How is anything but asking you if you remember a dog when you were six?’
“What? You mean from the hospital, did something happen?” There was a whine in the background, the noise goes garbled for a minute as I can tell Mery’s body moved from one room to another, the stomp of her feet. “Hold on Del.” And she cooed out and Abel must have fallen. I imagined him in the living room, the plush olive arm chair in one corner, its base cushion missing as he had tugged it off and landed hard on his butt. Abel had always been a grabby kid.
After a moment the line crinkled clear and Mery’s voice is back, but quicker, a little nervous. “Del, you there? I’m sorry, Abel just scared himself.”
“Yeah,” I said, and Hon is sitting on my bed and looks at me at eye level. “Are you okay? You sound a little stressed.”
There was a laugh that might be a sniffle.
“You don’t know my half of it. Sang left a month ago. And everything has been falling out, or over. I can’t seem to keep Abel upright, well…” And she stopped and Abel mutters something wild and Hon’s ears fluxed like radar dishes at it. I knew Sang-Ho wouldn’t stay, but I figured he would wait until Abel was older. I thought that maybe I could talk to him, missed my chance.
“Do you need some help? You want me to come by for the weekend?” I haven’t driven to New Jersey since the years around high school, but I can still remember the way.
There’s another silence for a little while.
“Hello?,” I said, “Hello, Mery?”
“Yeah,” she said quickly. “Yeah, I need your help.”
“Do you mind if I bring a dog?” And Hon’s ears went straight again, he sneezed as the sun from the bedroom window comes out from the clouds.
“What?” she asked again, “What do you mean?”
“I have a dog, “ I said, “He’s special, I think you’d like him.”
Another silence and she agreed.
“You just need to leave as soon as possible.” she said, and I started to pack a bag next to Hon as he watches.
“Is everything all right?” The receiver was jammed into my ear at an odd angle and I had to speak louder for her to hear me as I grab handfuls of clothes I think look good on me from a hamper.
“No,” she said, “Sang left. He took almost everything with him.”
“Oh. I see.” It was all I can muster. Hon takes a step towards me, looking up like he’s asking for the receiver.
“Just get here, Del.”
“Okay,” I said. “Blow a raspberry on Abel for me.”
“Shut up Del.”
--
The gas station outside of Devil’s Lake sold leashes and I picked out a pink one because I know it wouldn’t hurt Hon’s feelings. After I finished filling the tank, I slipped it around his neck. He even leaned in closer so I didn’t have to fumble with the buckle. We headed east and the way that Hon didn’t look at me makes me shift around a bit in my seat. Something came over me, I had to clear the air, I feel like Hon wasn’t prepared for what we were driving into, so I start to talk.
“ I left Meredith twice before.” I said, and leave it at that to perk his interest. He hid it well and continued to stare out the dash window. After a few minutes I went on. “I always felt like a bum after our grandparents died and went out to find myself. Without telling anyone we drove down to New Orleans and started a punk band-Gunn Ray and the Light Wounds, we weren’t good, but we made a lot of friends and I got a lot of tattoos that you shouldn’t see. Anyway, I was gone about, well, more than a year, and one day something flips inside of me and I decide to come back. I haven’t called or written or anything in that whole stint, they have had no idea where I am. I get a ride from a friend into our small place in Minnesota and walked across town to our old home. The side door to the garage is always open, always has been and I walk inside, to what I think is Meredith kissing the unpainted far side wall, then I notice a second set of hands wrapped over hers, not around or with, but over. I’m watching from the door and I can see all of it as this hand unfolds from around hers and goes to her hip and she turns away from it, slowly, still kissing this man a head shorter than her, who is Korean and a older than her. He still tries to go for her hip, and she still turns until Meredith is back against the wall and Sang-Ho’s back is to me and he can’t reach for her anymore so he goes back to holding over her hands. I don’t know what kept me there so long, maybe it was just the fact that I thought I would never see my sister kiss another human being, and all the warm feeling I had running around went a little off. But I walked inside without disturbing them and fell asleep on the living room floor where I knew they would find me.
It was a surprisingly easy transition back into the swing of things. Our parents weren’t as mad as happy I was still alive. I got a job at a warehouse and took summer classes to finish the GED I thought I didn’t want. In the meantime Meredith finished high school, got pregnant and engaged to Sang-Ho from it.” I paused to switch on the headlights and clear the windshield of bugs, Hon’s ears twitched, and I knew he wanted more.
“There were six of us, counting Abel still to be born, under the roof. I worked second shift at the warehouse and took classes in the morning, and Mery was at home most of the day. She had an almost free ride to Dartmouth because of a grant, but let it slide away because of the situation with Abel. We talked in those days, a lot, to catch up, and she didn’t believe half of the stories I told her, and I didn’t believe any of the stories she told me about Sang-Ho, about him being such a strong man, until I had a confrontation with him.” I paused again. Hon turned his snout to me, just enough so that he wasn’t looking directly forward.
“The wedding snuck up quicker than planned because Abel was growing and fussing like nobody’s business and they didn’t want to stress Mery in her last month or so. Our parents footed near everything of the bill, Sang-Ho only had an ‘uncle’ who brought him over from Korea who nobody talked to. The ceremony was outside, on this hill overlooking a large bowl of wet grass because the man-made pond had been drained. It rained that day and everybody huddled under the reception’s pop tent. The whole time I watch Mery and Sang-Ho at the far end, and he’s got his hands over hers again, his palms over her knuckles, like he’s trying to swallow them up, and maybe it’s the blue clouds overhead or the smell of wet pollen but something makes me move my feet, skirting at the edge of the tent and go to them. I pull their hands apart and then lace them up together again, finger by finger till they are holding hands again. Mery is a bit embarrassed, but Sang-Ho wears this look which I could never place. He doesn’t show any emotion, nothing moves or twitches, but his eyes have a way about them, a clearness, or maybe a realness, and I understand when a shiver goes through me what Mery has always said about his strength.
‘Better,’ I tell them and try to laugh, ‘That’s always bugged me.’
And from there I drank for most of the ceremony, and I was never sure why.
Mery has Abel a few months later and I move out, but this time I leave a note. I tell them I found a university in Minnesota where I can get a two year degree to practice medicine on animals, that I already have it covered in government aid, that I’m getting a ride for my friends, and to send me pictures of Abel. I don’t give them a number. I call sometimes from pay phones and learn that Mery and Sang-Ho were expecting another kid after Abel, and that they had plans to move out East, New Jersey, to open a restaurant with a friend of Sang-Ho’s. I gave them a P.O. box I was using for everything and got to see pictures of Abel in a onesie and the house. It looked fantastic.”
Hon relaxed in his stance, ears loose, not pert and up. He watched the land outside pass through the passenger side window.
“They lost that baby though.” I told Hon. “Complications in the womb, a genetic disorder that marked the baby as a foreign body and her body attacked it.”
I finished there and we were still a ways out. I don’t talk for a while, and we pass out of the “Mid-West” and into the blurred line of Appalachia and East Coast. Just as we’re about to get into Pennsylvania, Hon started tapping at the handle of the door though, with the nails of his paw, so much so that I think he might pop it open. He didn’t stop when I asked him to so I pulled over to the shoulder. It was a sharp slope down into a field that stretches for a ways into farmland and when I let him out Hon trotted down the steep hill like nothing and made it to the bottom, where I watched him, and he watched me. His head went down and he smelled at the earth, the first time I’d ever seen him do something so basic for a dog. I think that in all the time I had him I hadn’t seen him itch himself, bite at an itch, whimper, bark, anything. But he lifted a leg far out in the field, as if he was trying to not let me see it, and after a moment he comes back and sit in the same seats, quiet, like normal passengers.
---
I was so deep inside of my head that Hon’s doggy breath in my ear takes a moment to register. We’d been idling outside of Meredith’s place for probably close to twenty minutes. Hon was outside of the car, his front paws on the driver’s side window sill, breathing close to me. His door was open, and I trace the paw prints path in the sandy gravel driveway pace back and forth and then go in a far arc up to the porch of the house, then back down, where he was, staring at me.
“I get it,” I say and he dropped and I got out. I shut his door and then stand, looking at the house. It was a deep forest green, two stories, with a brown roof that had specks of purple in it. There was a light on in the second floor but everything else is dark. It wiggle two fingers for Hon to follow me and he does, all the way up the steps, on to the front porch where I tried to remember what I did with all the photographs my mother sent me of this house. I tried to remember them all, clean white carpeting, hard wood in the hallways. There were three rooms upstairs, two bathrooms, and a basement that should be furnished by now, the pictures had buckets of paint stacked in each room. I wondered what color Abel’s room is as I ring the buzzer, and it echoed through the house, bouncing like a shout in a cave.
I could hear every step Mery takes as she climbs down the steps, the front door was glass but fogged from the humidity and the rain, and she stood ghost-like behind it, her body a white pillar in silver murk. She swung the door open and I remark that she was still taller than me, but her hair was longer then before I went to Minnesota and dyed a deep red. It looked good on her, makes her lips pop for some reason, might have played against her eyes. Hon stood next to me, he wagged his tail for the first time ever. Her face, pulled into a barely passable smile at the corners. She had aged, skin sagged under her eyes, skin no longer pink. I’m waiting for her to frown, but she doesn’t, the corners of her lips stay ever so slightly taught as her eyes drop to Hon.
“Holy Shit.” she said. “I remember wanting this dog forever.”
“His name is Hon.” I said.
“I remember,” she said, “That’s the name I wanted to give him.”
She bent down to get a closer look at him. She was wearing earings, and they twitch and sway with the movement as she bends down, and for some reason I wanted to touch them, maybe pluck one out of the ear, just so I could have felt how warm she was. It was a stupid thought, and I didn’t act on it.
“Its good to see you,” I said. I wasn’t sure if a hug was appropriate. I rolled my shoulders back in anticipation of something, but she held herself the same, loose, with that taught smile.
“You too,” she said, “Come in.” She moved to the side and Hon ran in front of me. She let him go and then stopped me, her hand with fingers splayed out in front of my chest. I wanted to walk into it, to make her feel some part of me, but I didn’t, I watched her hand.
“I have to tell you.” she said. “The reason I asked you to come is because there’s a gun in the house. I can’t find it.”
“What?” I watched as Hon disappeared into another room. From the pictures in my head I tried to remember where he went, through a living room, through a kitchen, all of them so white, no color.
“Sang-Ho left a gun. He called me, like two weeks ago, telling me it was still there. He said he wasn’t coming back for it.”
“You need my help to find it?” And Hon rounded his way back in from a different angle, sitting, looking up at us.
“Yeah, is that okay?”
“You’re my sister.” Is all I said, and she drops her hand and I walked through.
--
Meredith rubbed Abel’s small back the way you would caress a house cat. I realized I hadn’t seen him with his hair so long, black and curly around his ears. Hon was as content to sit bolt upright on the ottoman as he was in the passenger seat of the car for three hundred miles, so I don’t bug him as he watched Abel watch him, his brown eyes on Abel’s blue eyes.
“So this is him?” Meredith asked
I realized that I haven’t ever once put a hand as gentle on Hon as she had on Abel. Not once since I took him out of the hospital. My fingers played with the pilled edges of the armrests in the plump olive chair and I thought about reaching out from the scruff along his back, but was afraid he would notice that I was trying, perhaps too hard.
“Yeah,” I wanted to get up and ask her if she wanted a glass of water in her own home, anything to get me out of the chair and into another room for a moment. The itch had come back.
“He’s your dream dog.”
Meredith laughed and I can see the lines in her face move in the same way they did at the wedding, when I held Abel, and didn’t have a dog.
“ But I guess that’s not the reason I’m here anymore, huh?” Meredith picked Abel up by the armpits and set him into her lap. Abel was almost old enough to walk on his own and his fingers twitch towards Hon, but Hon didn’t move from his spot.
“You have any idea where he would have left it? Closet or something?”
“Del, you think I’m some kind of absentee? I’ve checked everywhere. Even the closet.” Her eyes were on Abel but her voice was firm and pressing hard on me.
“San had a lot of things that he kept to himself. I’d see money sometimes, pictures, and then he’d place them somewhere and I’d never see them again. But I found them all, in the backs of cupboards on in the rafters of the attic. I just haven’t found the gun. And I haven’t been able to sleep knowing that.”
She stopped caressing Abel and he gurgled, bending at the waist towards Hon, his arms full out, smiling. Hon wags his tail again, and I wondered if Hon was never this cordial around me because to him the trip was business. He had to get here somehow, and I was the means, simple business, not play. But he stops when Mery starts talking again.
“I keep having this dream where Abel finds it beneath the sink and is sitting in the kitchen with it, holding it with both hands. I walk in and walk slow and Abel smiles, and his figures fidget around the metal, and I can’t breath as he hefts the gun up and it goes off.”
Hon’s ears went flat and for the first time he moved his head, looking out the side window into the wilderness outside. The tree line swayed in the wind. “He never shoots himself Del, he always shoots me.”
“I’m sorry.” There’s a silence until Hon hops off of the ottoman and sat in front of Abel, looking down at him. Hon switched glances from Abel to Mery, until she got it and let him down from her arms, to the floor and Abel stands, using his mother’s hand for balance before waddling slowly toward the chest of Hon, who is tall for a dog, and then lying against him, hands full of tufts of fur. Abel laughed and so does Mery. I stood up, I didn’t know what else to do
“Did you want to start today?” I ask and Meredith looked up at me, like out of a daze, like she had forgotten what we were talking about all together.
“It’s late,” she said, “We can start early tomorrow.” She wrapped up Abel in her arms again and stood. He refused to let go of Hon, until a shake from her made him loose his grip, he gurgled, but didn’t cry and Hon and I followed her out of the room, up the stairs in the center hallway, to the left, and onto the bed, where I sat and watched her and Abel stand in the doorway.
“You need food or anything?” she asked. Hon skirted to the side of the bed and laid down.
“Water for him maybe, if you wouldn’t mind. I’ll be okay.”
She came back up the stairs with a big ceramic bowl of water, setting it by the door. I was lying down with my eyes closed.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“I’m your brother.” I said. And I fall asleep quicker than I ever have before.
--
The next day went by quickly. We ate breakfast at seven thirty, she changed into clothes that look dull and tied a bandanna around her head. I wore a pair of basketball shorts I packed to sleep in as we go up into the attic. It was a drawstring door hanging in the middle of the ceiling and a set of stairs drop down and bounce off the rug when Mery pulls them down. The stairs were steep, but when we left it down so the light from the hallway could get up, Hon managed to follow us up. I saw his head coming from the porthole down and then he was sniffing around the beams of the attic, getting close to the insulation. I was afraid he’ll take a misstep and plummet through the ceiling. I had seen dogs with fiberglass slivers and they aren’t fun to treat, you had to soak the wound in salt water so it bloats and then tweeze out the tiny fragments of glass so infection doesn’t set it, then another salt bath. I told Mery all this as we stuck our hands into the pink mounds of insulation, trying to find something heavy and cold. Hon skirted around the beams like it was nothing, didn’t breath heavy even though the humidity in the attic is making me sweat through the shirt I have on.
“Do you love the job you do?” Meredith was standing over me, checking the supporting ties that run diagonal with the shape of the roof while I worked the ones below.
“I love to help animals.”
“But not people?”
She was sitting near the folding stairs, bandana over her mouth and I shook my head.
“I’m here aren’t I? I’m trying to help.” I rubbed where a nail had caught me on my leg. “Isn’t that something?”
Hon walked up to Meredith and she rubbed the fur below his jaw. I went back to work.
After five hours up there we didn’t find it. We even got a stepstool and swept with bare fingers over every rafter and supporting board to the roof.
We spent the middle of the day with Abel, eating lunch; sandwiches with turkey and American cheese on white bread. I asked her how its been with Abel.
“I’m not falling apart Del,” she said. “I’m not going to run away. That’s why we’re trying to find the gun.”
I asked her why he left in the first place. Why did he need the gun?
“He had more guns.” she said, scooping away the ripped apart bread that Abel refused to eat and pushing it to the wooden floor near where Hon was. He didn’t eat it until I pointed at it and gave a thumbs up. “He said it was for protection. Not physical, state of mind. That’s what he always said to me.”
“Why leave though?”
“Wasn’t happy, I guess. We fought about losing the second baby a lot. After a bit he packed up and went with whatever friend promised him the restaurant. He said to keep the house. Its paid off Del, there’s never been a bill come in.”
Hon finished eating the bread and wandered over to my feet.
“Doesn’t stop me from hating him though,” she said. “Just another man who left in my life.”
I didn’t move or say anything until she goaded me downstairs into the basement full of cardboard boxes and things given to them in the wedding. There were towers of appliances covered with dust that reach the ceiling, so many that it looks like one of the towers could topple any moment. We silently moved each box and checked inside, pulling out blenders, juicers, mixers, grillers, and then puting them back again. Hon walked silently down the steps after us.
"Do we have to find it?" It was dirty in the basement and I had found black mold beneath old boxes. Hon was sitting on the bottom step watching us. None of us knew where the gun is.
"Can't we just leave the house?"
"And do what Del? Leave a note? 'Sorry, my ex left a loaded .22 somewhere, hope you don't find it, sometimes the pilot light goes out.'"
"Well, maybe. If its this much gone, how they ever find it?"
"I don't want to do that." she said, "I don't want my problem to be someone else's."
Hon had moved, his head buried sideways between two milk crates, cobwebs pulled in around his neck like mosquito netting into a funnel.
"See, even your dog is helping. He gives a shit about me."
"Mery," I started but she said it-and I did want to leave, like I always left, like I had before.
"Del?"
"We could go to Ann Arbor, or maybe Minocqua, like we did as kids. Just us, not worrying."
"Don't start with that shit again." And Hon pulled his head out, his face covered in dust, His dark brown eyes alive behind that mask of gray.
"You'd just leave me there. Where ever we went you'd leave us there."
I stood up and walked out of the basement, because that’s what I was supposed to do. I leave. Hon stayed down for a moment, then followed me up, rapping on the door to our guest room with his paw until I let him in.
--
I didn’t sleep, or do anything beside lie down, until it got dark. I felt my body go slack and something close to a trance hit me. I didn’t feel tired, I felt something stretching, like the colors blurred around me and everything didn’t go dark, but went hazy. I wondered if this was what its like for all the dogs I’ve put down, is this is what the last few moments register as, the edge of lucidness, a fever dream brought out from a prick in the back of the neck that you don’t get better from. I thought that before the sun came up I’d throw everything back into my bag to see if I could get into Pennsylvania before everything got too bright. I would leave Hon, if he wasn’t up. He seemed to like it there. I’d go home, I’d put more dogs to sleep and I’d be happy about it. That’s what I’d do. And the next time I found a magic dog, I’d put it to sleep. When I turned my head to look for Hon, it seemed too slow, and everything seemed fuzzy, or of independent dots, all whizzing by me to form the room in whole. The door was open and, before I realize what I’m doing, I went down the stairwell, my hand on the bannister. It was raining, and I could hear each heavy drop smack the soaking rug at the base of the open door. Outside, and the rain didn’t feel cold. It was the same temperature as the air, almost the same as body heat and I moved through it, following paw prints in the muddy soil near the molding of the house, all the way around the front porch. The raindrops made my clothes heavy, pulling them down, covering my face in a warm wetness like tears. The footprints were in circles, around trees, under bushes, into the backyard, where a few holes were dug, only surface level deep. Hon was all the way at the far side of the yard, near the fence of a neighbor, the rain had soaked him down and made him look huge and rat-like. In his mouth was the gun. I watched him dig a deep hole and he doesn’t notice. I took a step forward into a hole that had collected water and my foot went into the ankle, my toes sank into the clay like soil. I took another step out and Hon noticed me. He was doing a great job, the hole was deep, and he paused at the lip as I move closer. I wanted to tell him to keep going, that’s what playing in my head, to finish it off, dig a hole so deep she won’t ever find it. I wanted to help him, stick my arms in to the elbows and hoist away earth. But instead my body bent down, my hand out, palm up. Hon watched my hand, unsure of what to do.
“We can’t bury everything away.” I say. “Sometimes it’s better to see what we’re afraid of.”
Hon held the gun above the hole, then let his jaw go slack, letting it fall in. The rain rolled in drips off the point of my nose and lips, around the sockets of my eyes as I looked down. The gun was covered in water, and I could see my reflection shaking in it. It was so still that I didn’t want to move it, just wanted to push it down deeper into the soft earth, with one finger. But instead, I plunged my hand inside, pulling up the gun, that felt heavier than you would ever think, and I stood, my arm low holding the gun and walked, all the way away, to the front door, up the stairs and into my bedroom.
The next morning I woke up--dirt caked and sopping--with the gun in my hand.
--
Mery and I took it to the police station in a white shoebox with the word “GUN” written on the top and sides. They take it without a fuss. And Meredith is in a better mood than I have ever seen her. We don’t speak a lot, but she’s smiling, and I’m smiling. And she thanks Hon all day for finding the gun by giving him a good scratch behind the ears.
There is no sign of the storm from last night, even the holes have been filled in, Hon’s last trick. And we decide to drive an hour and half to the beach. Abel has blue trunks and I use the same basketball shorts as before. We drive from small residential to highway, to trees, and trees, and highway again, to Woodbine, a small tourist trap with an extended. Meredith has an old two piece that she doesn’t show. The sun shines on the small section we park in. We have to walk three blocks and cut through a side yard. The beach has a lot of sharp shells that Abel has to be carried over and Hon runs to the silty sand near the water. For an hour Abel plays in the tide pool, and Hon brings him a hermit crab he found. I sit on a towel and know I’ll burn and think about how nice it would be to tell Abel about each and every one of my tatoos, and maybe take him to school, and I think, if I could be a father. Hon stands near the waves and for the first time I can remember barks to get my attention. I stand and walk into the water and it swallows me up to the waist.
No comments:
Post a Comment