Jon Natzke
Joe Meno
Advanced Fiction
3/31/2012
Six Swift Dogs
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. 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 sheperd. 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." This is where 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 is spent in near silence, I turn the radio down low, but I can still hear the twang of a steel guitar when the wind dies down. Meredith, my sister, lived half the country away in upstate New York and I highly doubted someone trekked all the way out here to send me some kind of sign. This is 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 followed, which is a little sad when you think about it. A dog this attentive and intelligent was thrown to me, but that’s just preaching, and I’m not all that much about morals. I get 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 isn’t an answer for a little while.
“Del?” There’s 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 mean to say it, but whenever I get anxious I keep 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 again 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 snuffles 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 want to take the sentence back. I want 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’s a whine in the background the noise goes garbled for a minute as I can tell Mery’s body moves from one room to another, the stamps of her feet are heard. “Hold on Del.” And she coos out and Abel must have fallen. I imagine 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 crinkles clear and Mery’s voice is back, but quicker, a little nervous. “Del, you there? I’m sorry, Abel just scared himself.”
“Yeah,” I say, and I notice that Hon is sitting on my bed and looks at me at eye level. “Are you okay? You sound a little stressed.”
There’s 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 stops and Abel mutters something wild and Hon’s ears flux like radar dishes at it. I knew Sang-Ho wouldn’t stay, but I figured he would wait until this one was born. I thought that maybe I could talk to him, missed my chance I guess.
“Do you need some help? You want me to come by for the weekend?” I haven’t driven to New York since the wedding, but I can still remember the way.
There’s another silence for a little while.“Hello?,” I say, “Hello, Mery?”
“Yeah,” she says back to me quickly. “Yeah, I need your help.”
“Do you mind if I bring a dog?” And Hon’s ears go straight again, he sneezes as the sun from the bedroom window comes out from the clouds.
“What?” she asks again, “What do you mean?”
“I have a dog, “ I say, “He’s special, I think you’d like him.”Another silence and she agrees.
“You just need to leave as soon as possible.” she says, and I start to pack a bag next to Hon as he watches.
“Is everything all right?” The receiver is jammed into my ear at an odd angle and I have 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 says, “Sang left. He took almost everything with him.”
“Oh. I see.” Its all I can muster. Hon takes a step towards me, looking up like he’s asking for the reciever.
“Just get here, Del.”
“Okay,” I say. “Blow a raspberry on Abel for me.”
“Shut up Del.”
--The gas station just east of Devil’s Lake sells leashes, I pick out a pink one, three sticks of beef jerky and another six bottles of water. I’ve been pouring water into the drink holder in the center console and when he’s ready Hon will bend down and take a drink. I’ve been too hesitant to put the leash on him yet, he’s never shown a need for one. Instead I’ve started to tell him stories. I told him about why we are going, to show Meredith that you exist. I tell him the stories about us growing up, how I was eight and she was six and that we did a lot of things together. She was always into animals more than I was, even wanted to be a vet. I never knew what I wanted to do. I ate two of the beef jerky sticks, quickly, and made myself a little sick, Hon ate his in a big gulp like a duck and seemed to be unbothered by it. I told him about how after our grandmother died that I went out to the bridge by Calcutta road, where the moss grew over everything because of the drainage pond for the dairy plant a road over and drank cheap vodka in hearty slugs with friends that I only drank with. It became a place to do things in the warm summer weather, but when it got cold all six of us headed to Mika’s place, a polish immagrant, and drank his father’s rum supply in the kitchen because he never got home before nine at night from the dairy plant. To prove to everyone I wasn’t a light weight I always drank the quickest early, then went easy. The air in his house was dry and lights were off in any room you weren’t in. It became night early and I dropped the windows of the car and spoke over the wind coming in, Hon watched me the whole time, like he was afraid he would miss something. I told him that Meredith went into High School the head of her class and stayed there, I did all right, but I didn’t just drink by the time she made it up there. I was a senior and she was a freshman, and instead of walking home together I gave her money for the corner store and walked to the bush line behind my friend, who really was my friend, not just a drinking friend, Matt Steele’s, and we would smoke weed out of anything we could find, it was usually fruits, you could hollow out the center of an apple with a pair of thin scissors and a pencil to make a choke and a mouth piece, your breath would come out smelling like burnt cider. I did a lot of other things too, when two years after her death our grandfather killed himself, with a hunting rifle. Our father found him, and he wasn’t all right for a while. Hon had to get let out every forty-five minutes or so because he would claw at the door handle and if I didn’t stop he would have just gotten the door to pop, the Cavalier had cheap locks and they had stopped working on the passenger side. He would go out, to wherever we were, and stand a few feet down the slope, possibly staring up a tree or down a hole, never barking, only opening his mouth. And after a moment he would relieve himself or turn around and come back to the car, each time as I shut the door I would catch different sized jewels moving in the dark, the eye glints of animals watching us roll away. I told Hon about how I would take road trips with Matt Steele to as far away New Orleans, where his uncle had a tattoo parlor, and we’d stay up the whole trips and piss into bottles and stare out into the Mississippi with uppers and psychedelics mixed together. I dropped out of my last half of my senior year because I was out of the state for most of it. I stayed down there a long time, a lot longer than I thought I had been. I got a lot of tattoos, and wear long sleeve shirts now to cover them up now. One of them I can’t though, its of four letters on my wrist that say S.G.M.P. which stand for Secret Gay Mannequin Party, it was a punk band Matt Steele and I were in together. It started in New Orleans and then, when Matt traded his compact for a van with a shitty catalytic converter we swooped north east to more noticeably southern states. I got more tattoos, one of Ohio, another of a plane crash, another of a hunting rifle with the barrel bent into a heart. I got real thin too. Meredith was still doing well, still got good grades. I gave her a call from a pay phone in east Tennessee when we thought we had a good place to stay, we didn’t the shack we were going to rent and work out of was burned down by the same friend who told us we could stay there. I was coming down off a lot of things, and had just enough to call back home. I didn’t expect Meredith to pick up. The conversation went something like this:
“Hey,” I think this was the first time I ever did this, speak before they did, probably because everything was jitters inside of me. “Hello?”There was silence on the line for a little while.
“Del?” the voice sounded like my mother’s, but it didn’t crackle with menthol wear. “Where are you?”
“Outside of Knoxville. I think. Meredith?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you the only one there?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is everybody?”
“Working.”
Another silence.
“You coming home?” She asked.
“I don’t know. Should I?”
“Would you?”
A few days short of two weeks and we were back in Illinois. Something in Mery’s voice made me want to, so bad, because I could tell she needed something, even though she would never say it, I could tell. Its the way he voice goes flat at the end of questions, which to some people make her sound bored, but really she’s throwing down emotion into her guts, where it will stay, so she doesn’t ever have to ask for anything. After driving up I stayed for a three days at Matt’s place, before deciding to head back to the house. I sat in the front porch for a while, then tried the back door that led into the garage, and it was open, something that had stayed the same. I had a sleeping bag with me and rolled it out in there, there were no cars, only a few storage racks for things and tools our parents didn’t use all that often. I slept on the floor until Meredith woke me up. She was a junior now, just a few weeks into the semester. I showed her tattoos I had gotten and we waited for our parents to come back.
I asked her for a jug of water and to keep it dark because I knew I was going to sweat something out of my system and it would be painful.
“Don’t tell them I’m in here until tomorrow morning.” I knew when the weather was nice my parents parked their cars outside.
“All right.” she said, and she didn’t. I was proud of that, even when I dry heaved into a ceramic pot for an hour. Something about us working together, like I hadn’t been away for a year and a half, like we were still a family, the two of us. It made the shivers okay for a while.
I stopped telling Hon stories when I could begin to see the sun rise up. When day broke in front of us we were a few miles out still, but close. For the first time I put the leash on Hon and we walked into a diner together. I asked if we could eat together, that the dog was well trained, and the waitress didn’t mind. I told her that I’d tip well and she said louder that she didn’t mind. I ordered for both of us and we sat on the cold vinyl seats as the sun came up and up in the windows. I finished my story.
“After that I worked for a long time, there was a shipping warehouse in our town that allowed me to work double shifts for a little while, until I could apply to get back to high school and finished everything up. The time went by quicker than you’d think. My parents were the same, seemed to be happy to have me back. Meredith was happy too, but different, she didn’t talk as much, kept a lot of time to herself. She started dating Sang Ho the week I finished high school, which was a bit after she graduated. And everything was okay for a little bit. But it never stays that way Hon. “
The waitress brought us food, eggs and bacon for me and eggs and bacon for Hon.
“I mean, what are big brothers for if not for leaving when they’re most needed?” Hon waited for me to eat to start himself and ate slower and finished after I did.
--
It rained on their wedding day. “That’s supposed to be good luck.” It was the response from my polish great grandmother, who had managed to outlive both her step-son and daughter, our grandmother. She stood all by herself, ninety-three, as we all huddled beneath a tarp at the edge of the field where Meredith and Sang-ho were supposed to get married. A little cousin asks her something I can’t hear as I watch Sang-Ho hold Meredith’s hand in a way that I never liked, like a child, his whole hand over her fist. It seemed wrong, like he would be ready to crush her.
“It’s Polish.” I heard my great grandmother say, “In Poland if it rains on your wedding day, then it was said that all of the bad luck would be out early, and that there would be sunny days ahead.”
“This isn’t Poland.” I heard her now, but couldn’t see her, there were too many bodies, the suit I wore rubbed at my forearms and elbows from the way I folded my arms so that I would not lean on someone else. “This is Ohio.”
“Well, its not just Poland, its everywhere.” And the little girl seems satiated at that. I look at Sang-Ho and he isn’t holding her hand anymore. And that’s worse somehow, to stand farther away like that, to watch her instead of standing right beside, to be right next to her.
Sang-Ho had always done that, since the first time I saw them together, holding hands, it was always him holding her, never mutual. It was in the garage, the same place I had slept after coming back, they were together, she was always taller than him, and from the way they were kissing I would have thought she was licking the wall of the garage, but both of her hands were in fists, and fingers were wrapped around them. I had gotten out of my job at the warehouse and leaned from the doorway into the garage to throw my work clothes into the pile I made by the side door, and they were there. I could hear them kissing, but I couldn’t see the boy, so I kept watching, until his left hand unfurled from around hers, I could see the way her skin on her fingers were red and he rode the curve of her hip all the way down and she turned, noticing him do it, so that they spun to profile to me. And still neither of them opened their eyes but I could see the way that he smiled in between breaths, like a smirk, like something close to it. she kept turning so that he could never fully grab her and eventually relinquinshed his hands into holding hers again, now with him pushing her into the wall. This is when Mery saw me, my upper body leaning in, and our eyes met, she was surprised, and he eyes grew big but I tried to keep a dopey big brother smile on my face as I pulled myself back in through the doorway and out of the darkness of the garage. I would catch them like that a few times more, and each time I would try to keep that smile. Some nights Mery would tell me about how strong Sang-Ho was, not physically, she could probably pin him to the ground if she needed to, but emotionally, mentally, on the inside. He was a South Korean survivor of a conflict with the North that took the life of his parents when was eight. He and an uncle were able to make it to a neighboring nation and then to the states. He was four years older than her, a year older than me. They had met at the community college she was going to get her gen eds out of the way. But then she got pregnant, and she didn’t go as much, and eventually dropped out. He stayed to finish a degree in small business. I was there throughout it all, but I never felt I had the right to say much to her because of how I had left. I was the kid who ran away, and she stayed, so there was no way for me to intrude.
A few minutes later the weather gives way and it gets so got that all the wedding-goers can see the water on the grass turn to wavering vapor. We all stand where we were before, instead of sit, because the chairs laid out on the lawn are still slick with water, except for my great grandmother, who sits, her hands in her lap, and watches everything through a thin line between people. I should have been watching the thin side of Meredith watching Sang-Ho, the slight bump showing on her, but I watch Nana, and think about how happy she could be right now, even through losing a son and daughter, and a husband, and even me for a while. I wonder if she is even that happy, if she knows, that just like my cousin Cole there will be something else, something else to get ready so it can all fall apart. But she smiles, still, and everyone cheers and I look and they are just past the point of kissing, their lips coming apart, and their eyes beginning to open, and Meredith looks up at him and he looks down at her hands and like before, both of his hands are covering her fists. And I think that I’m the only that notice, that I’m the only one that still noticed, but I cheered and clapped, and later I would drink two whiskey ginger ales and an old fashioned in under an hour from the open bar. And when I saw him doing it again, even when they were talking, I walked into the whole group of them and knocked his hand away, and shook each of their wrists like dish rags and then put them together, lacing the fingers one by one, saying “There, better.” I drank for the rest of the night and didn’t understand why.
--
It takes us seven hours from the diner to get to Meri's place, a hooking shot up a highway that bleeds into the rest of the traveling. My mind is usually taken in concentration but the closer we got to the house the more the land streams together out of the window. I don't talk to Hon for the rest of the trip and he seems okay with it, he looks over at me more, like he might at any moment interject with a joke to kill the tension, but he doesn't, and I'm glad. There's more to the story that I want to tell him, to let him know that there is plenty more, but I don't want him to think I'm a bad person, any more so than I could be.
I want to tell him that I let again, before they were settled. Our parents footed a lot of the bill and the bill was slowly being paid, but there was so much more going on. Meredith was still pregnant with the second child, Abel was six months old, and she was carrying another and all of us, Abel, Meredith, Sang-Ho and me were under the roof of my father and mother. I think it got to him first, Sang-ho, he was always quiet but he got worse, then left a lot. He went out on weekends, said he was "looking for a place to start a home". I always thought that was weird phrasing, not a family, just a home, seemed a bit selfish. He was gone for days, then sometimes weeks, and Meredith got more and more pregnant, and I got a job at a shipping warehouse loading trucks. There isn't much you can do with a G.E.D. and a few warrants in southern states that you have to list because they are "minor felonies", did you know spray-painting graffiti in Illinois is a felony? So is stealing cable. I have both of those on my record. So the warehouse work was all I had to get me out of the house where everybody was at one moment and nobody was at the second. And then one day, while I was out working, Meredith lost her new baby. I came home and there was blood in a trail to her bedroom, to the bathroom, a pool in the kitchen, back to the bedroom. I sat with her, in the blood on her bed for a while, and we talked. She said she didn't notice it until she woke up from a nap, and then didn't know what to do, but could just tell, she could just tell what had happened and she didn't know what to say or who to call, she locked up.
There was a foggy month where Meredith is at doctors or at home. Our parents take time off of work to figure out everything that needs to be done. They find out that the miscarriage was a combination of a genetic defect in the child that made her NK cells, the ones that attack bacteria and foreign bodies, attack the child like it wasn’t something that was supposed to be there. As they cater to her, I apply to a technical college to veternary medicine, that will get me a degree in two years that will allow me to fill prescriptions and handle animals with the knowledge of a animal nurse. Meredith is home a lot, and Sang-Ho is gone a lot. Whenever she was home I make her food, and I try to tell her another story she hasn’t heard before. I get a letter that I’ve been accepted, but the school is in Minnesota, I hold onto the letter until two weeks before I have to go. I don’t have to worry about money, I applied for a grant that will get me halfway through, and the other half will be paid by working and living on campus. Each time I think of telling everyone something a new moment pops up. Sang-Ho finds a house near a friend of his in Jersey, they plan on opening a Korean restaurant together, all they need is a little money from our parents, but its tied up in medical bills. After fighting for “his future” with them he gets a loan from a friend instead. Meredith won’t talk to a lot of people, she gets quiet around the doctors and one night as I’m packing a bag at one in the morning she walks in and we talk. She’s smiling, happier than I remember in quite some time.
“You leaving for somewhere?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll be gone for sometime.”
“When are you leaving?” she asks, sitting down on the bed.
“In a few minutes.” I said
I smile back at her. She’s gotten as thin as I have, and I haven’t noticed that she’s taller than me. I tell her I’m leaving for Minnesota, getting a friend to drive me, from my time back in New Orleans, he works at a fishing resort in the middle of the state where the school is near. She doesn’t smile as I give her a hug as a kiss on the cheek. But before she leaves she stops me.
“Is it all right to leave? Does it feel better than staying?”
What I tell her is this: “You feel weightless for a few days, then heavier than you’ve ever been. Its different, not better. You’ll see when you move out of here.”
“Just like that?” she says. And I say, I guess so before I head out the door.
Looking back I’m not certain why I did it like that. Maybe that I felt I was becoming a part of the wallpaper, and needed to leave. But I’ll never understand why I just walked out like that, why I did that to her. I might have been resentful of her, that all this calamity was happening and people carried her in a dark moment, where I never had that. I smoked a lot of cigarettes on the way to Minnesota, five packs in seventy-two hours and I had developed a cough that hurt in the cold air.
I’m so deep inside of my head that Hon’s doggy breath in my ear takes a moment to register. We’ve been idling outside of Meredith’s place for probably close to twenty minutes. Hon is outside of the car, his front paws on the driver’s side window sill, breathing close to me. I look to the right and his door is open, and I can watch the paw prints 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 is now, staring at me.
“I get it,” I say and he drops so I can get out. I go to shut his door and then stand for a moment longer looking at all of the house. Its a deep forest green, two stories, with a brown roof that has specks of purple in it. There’s a light on in the second floor but everything else is dark. I gesture for Hon to follow me and he does all the way up the steps, on the front porch where I stand again and try to remember what I did with all the photographs my mother sent me of this house. I can still remember them all, clean white carpeting, hard wood in the hallways. There are 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 wonder what color Abel’s room is as I ring the buzzer, and it echoes through the house, bouncing like a shout in a cave.
I can hear every step Mery takes as she climbs down the steps, the front door is glass but fogged from the humidity and the rain, and she stands ghost-like behind it for a moment, a white light in the blackness behind her before she swings it open. She is still taller than me, but her hair is longer and dyed a deep red, it looks good on her, makes her lips pop for some reason. Hon stands next to me and looks up at her, he wags his tail for the first time ever. I watch her face, its tight lines that pull at the corners, sagging under her eyes, skin no longer pink. I’m waiting for her to frown, but she doesn’t, the corners of her lips pull so slightly as her eyes drop to Hon.
“Holy Shit.” she says. “I remember wanting this dog forever.”
“His name is Hon.” I say.
“I remember,” she says, “That’s the name I wanted to give him.”
Another pause as she bends down to get a closer look at him. She’s wearing earings, and they twitch and sway with the movement as she bends down.
“Its good to see you,” I say, and I take a step, I’m not sure if a hug is appropriate, or if I should just wait, when she stands back up she still has that faint smile.
“You too,” she says, “Come in.” And moves to the side and Hon runs in front of me. She watches him go and then stops me, her hand with fingers splayed out in front of my chest.
“I have to tell you.” she says. “The reason I asked you to come is because there’s a gun in the house. I can’t find it.”
“What?” I ask and watch as Hon dissappears into another room.
“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?” I ask and Hon rounds his way back in from a different angle, sitting, looking up at us.
“Yeah, is that okay?” she say.
“You’re my sister.” Is all I say, and she drops her hand and I walk through.
--
Meredith rubs Abel’s small back the way you would caress a house cat and I realize I haven’t seen him with his hair so long, black and curly around his ears. Hon is as content to sit bolt upright on the ottoman as he was in the passenger seat of the car for three hundred miles. He is watching Abel watch him, his brown eyes on Abel’s blue eyes.
“So this is him?” Meredith asks and I realize that I haven’t ever once put a hand as gentle on Hon as she is on Abel. Not once since I took him out of the hospital. My fingers play with the pilled edges of the armrests in the plump olive chair and I think about reaching out from the scruff along his back, but I’m afraid he would notice that I was trying, perhaps too hard.“Yeah,” I want to get up and ask her if she wants a glass of water in her own home, anything to get me out of the chair and into another room for a moment.
“He’s your dream dog.”
Meredith laughs 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?” I ask and Meredith picks Abel up by the armpits and sets him into her lap. Abel almost old enough to walk on his own and his fingers twitch towards Hon, but Hon doesn’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.” He eyes are on Abel but her voice is 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 stops caressing Abel and he gurgles and bends at the waist towards Hon, his arms full out, smiling. Hon doesn’t move at all.
“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 go flat and for the first time he moves his head, looking out the side window into the wilderness outside, the tree line swaying in the wind. “He never shoots himself Del, he always shoots me.”“I’m sorry.” Is all I can say, and we sit in silence, until Hon hops off of the ottoman and sits in front of Abel, looking down at him. Hon switches glances from Abel to Mery, until she gets it and lets him down from her, to the floor and Abel stands, using his mother’s hand for balance before waddling slowly towards the chest of Hon, who is tall for a dog, and then laying against him, hands full of tufts of fur. Abel laughs and so does Mery. I stand up.
“Did you want to start today?” Meredith looks up at me, like out of a daze, like she had forgotten what we were talking about all together.
“It’s late,” she says, “We can start early tomorrow.” And she stands up too, taking Abel up in her arms who refuses to let go of Hon, until a shake from her makes him loose his grip, he gurgles, but doesn’t cry and Hon and I follow her out of the room, up the stairs in the center hallway, to the left, and onto the bed, where I sit and watch her and Abel standing in the doorway.
“You need food or anything?” she aks, Hon skirts to the side of the bed and lays down.
“Water for him maybe, if you wouldn’t mind. I’ll be okay.”
She comes back up the stairs with a big ceramic bowl of water, setting it by the door. I’m laying down with my eyes closed.
“Thanks for coming,” she says.
“I’m your brother.” I say. And I fall asleep quicker than I ever have before.
--
The next day goes by quickly. We sit down and eat breakfast at seven thirty and then she changes into clothes that look dull and ties a bandanna around her head. I wear a pair of basketball shorts I packed to sleep in as we go up into the attic. Its a drawstring door hanging in the middle of the ceiling and set of stairs are steep to get up to, but we leave it down so the light from the hallway can get up and Hon manages to follow us up. I see his head coming from the porthole down and then he’s sniffing around the beams and getting close to the insulation. I’m afraid he’ll take a misstep and plummet through the ceiling. I’ve seen dogs with fiberglass slivers and they aren’t fun to treat, you have to soak the wound in salt water so it bloats and then tweeze out the tiny fragments of glass by hand so infection doesn’t set it, then another salt bath. I tell Mery all this as we stick our hands into the pink mounds of insulation, trying to find something heavy and cold. Hon skirts around the beams like its nothing, doesn’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?” She asks me.
I say, “I love to help animals.”
“But not people.”
She’s sitting near the folding stairs and looking at me, she has the bandana over her mouth and I shake my head.
“I’m here aren’t I? I’m trying to help.” I say, and rub where a nail had caught me on my leg. “Isn’t that something.”
Hon walks up to Meredith and she rubs the mane below his jaw. I go back to work.
After five hours up there we don’t find it. We even get a stepstool and sweep with bare fingers over ever rafter and supporting board to the roof.
We spend the middle of the day with Abel, eating lunch. We eat sandwiches with turkey and american on white bread. I ask her how its been with Abel.
“I’m not falling apart Del.” she says. “I’m not going to run away. That’s why we’re trying to find the gun.”
I ask 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 finishes eating the bread and wanders over to my feet.
“Doesn’t stop me from hating him though,” she says. “Just another man who left in my life.”
I don’t move or say anything until she goads me downstairs into the basement. Its full of cardboard boxes and things given to them in the wedding. There are towers of appliances covered with dust that reach the ceiling, so many that it looks like one of the towers could topple any minute. We begin to silently move each box and check into. I pull out blenders, juicers, mixers, grillers, and then put them back again. Hon walks silently down the steps after us.
"Do we have to find it?" I ask Meredith. It's dirty in the basement and I've found black mold beneath old boxes. Hon is sitting on the bottom step watching us. None of us know 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 says, "I don't want my problem to be someone else's."
There's a pause where I look behind and Hon has moved, his head buried sideways between two milk crates, cobwebs are 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 start but she's said it-and I want to leave, like I always leave, like I have 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 pulls his head out and his face is covered in dust. He looks to me and his dark brown eyes as alive behind his mask of gray.
"You'd just leave me there. Where ever we went you'd leave us there."
I stand up and walk out of the basement, because that’s what I do. I leave. Hon stays down for a moment, then follows me up a few minutes later, rapping on the door to our guest room with his paw until I let him in.
--I don’t sleep, or do anything beside lay down for a while, until it gets dark. I feel my body go slack and something close to a trance hits me. I don’t feel tired, I feel like the colors blur around me and everything doesn’t go dark, but goes hazy. I wonder if this is what its like for all the dogs I’ve put down, is this what the last few moments are like? A fever dream brought out from a prick in the back of the neck that can never clear. I think that before the sun comes up I’ll throw everything back into the bag and see if I can get into Pennsylvania before everything gets too bright. I’ll leave Hon, if he isn’t up, he seems to like it here. I’ll go home, I’ll put more dogs to sleep and I’ll be happy about it. That’s what I’ll do. And the next time I find a magic dog, I’ll put it to sleep. When I turn my head to look for Hon, it seems too slow, and everything seems fuzzy, or of independent dots, all whizzing by me to form the picture. The door is open and I get up, before I realize what I’m doing I’m going down the stairwell, my hand on the bannister. Its raining, I can hear it through the open front door, each heavy drop as it smack the soaking rug at the base of the door. I go outside, and the rain doesn’t feel cold, it the same temperature as the air, almost the same as body heat and I move through it, following paw prints in the muddy soil near the molding of the house, all the way around the front porch, the rain drops making my clothes heavy, pulling them down, covering my face in a wetness like tears. The footprints are 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 watch him from a distance as he continues to dig a hole and he doesn’t notice. I take a step forward into a hole that has collect water and my foot goes into the ankle, my toes sink into the clay like soil. I take another step out and Hon notices me. He’s doing a great job, the hole is deep, and he pauses at the lip and watches as I move closer. I want to tell him to keep going, that’s what playing in my head, to finish it off, dig a hole so deep she’ll never find it. I want to help him, stick my arms in to the elbows and hoist away earth. But instead my body bends down and a crouch beside him, my hand out, palm up. Hon watches 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 holds the gun above the hole still, and then lets his jaw go slack, letting it fall in and walk away. I look over the hole and the rain rolls around my ears and drips off the point of my nose and lips, around the sockets of my eyes. The gun is covered in water, and i can see my reflection shaking in it. Its so still that I don’t want to move it, just want to pile it down deeper, with one finger. But, I shake away that thought now, on my own and plunge my hand inside, pulling up the gun, that feels heavier than you would ever think, and I stand, my arm low holding the gun and walk all the way away, to the front door, up the stairs and into my bedroom.
The next morning I wake up dirt caked and sopping, 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.
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