2 Stories

Lost Dog

It was just over a year ago, now, that my dog broke free from his leash and disappeared into a remote wooded area several miles from my home. Near the edge of that wooded area there lived a rural type of gentleman, and in the days that followed, traversing the network of trails (some man-made and others tamped down by the deer whose scent my dog had probably been drawn by in the first place when he broke free and dashed off into the great density of it all) calling out my dog’s name with decreasing optimism, I would sometimes see this gentleman walking his “flock,” if that’s indeed the word, of guinea fowl – at least a dozen of them, in total, all crowing cawing and pecking at the ground in search of whatever it is that guinea fowl seek. Sometimes the gentleman was alone with the birds and other times he was, in addition to by the birds, accompanied by his children and his wife, a hale sort of woman who looked, as one would expect, more than capable of carrying her weight in whatever it was that happened to need carrying at this or that given moment. Whatever the case, when I saw him, I would always think to myself, look at this guy walking a whole flock of birds like it’s nothing and meanwhile I couldn’t even manage to get my fucking dog back to the car in one piece, and then in addition to my despair over my lost companion I would also feel like a real piece of shit. On the third day into this terrible saga, I encountered the gentleman out in front of his property, which like him and his family and his birds and everything else around there had a very rural appearance, which in the context means I felt certain there was no way they had internet access. Familiar, by then, with my situation, the gentleman inquired as to how things were going and whether I’d turned up any leads – a bit of fur, perhaps, or someone who thought maybe they’d seen the shadow or outline of what could at least in theory possibly have been a dog darting through the underbrush. I had not, I told him, and what’s more, with it being two nights and now nearly three full days, I found it difficult to imagine that the dog hadn’t perished already, whether gutted by a bobcat or, immobilized, his collar tangled around a tree root, of hunger and thirst, in that order.

“Hey now,” the rural type of gentleman replied. “Don’t forget that the spirit of living is strong.”

“And yet,” I said, not without a certain measure of bitterness, “the spirit of dying always seems to win out in the end, somehow.”

“Well, that much definitely is true,” the gentleman conceded (he was dressed in overalls, I remember, with black hair and a black beard that was neither neatly trimmed nor altogether neglected in the fashion of the stereotypical hillbilly) before adding, with a twinkle in his eye and the upturned beginnings of a grin at one corner of his mouth: “Matter of fact, I got a couple hogs out back who are going to find that out this weekend by way of what you might call firsthand experience.”

I presumed he was planning to slaughter them for the purpose of eating them, this being part of the rural lifestyle in which life and death were entwined rather than oppositionally constitutive of one another.

“No, no,” the gentleman clarified. “I just need someone to practice my machete work on, and I figure better the hogs than the wife and kids. At least in the eyes of the law, that is, ha ha ha!”

“When you say machete work…?” I asked open-endedly.

“Oh, mostly just swinging and hacking at stuff,” he expounded. “I’d be reluctant to call it haphazard, but at the same time, it’s not the kind of thing I go into with much of a plan. More along the lines of two parts bloodlust, one part intuition. But then again, the good thing about working with a machete is that you don’t really have to be that precise to do what you came to do. To put it otherwise, even if your intuition sucks, which mine usually does, you’re still going to end up getting the job done.”

The next day, my dog came back; subsequently, we moved to the city.

My Old Man

Sometimes, heading into the bathroom to pee, yet again, in the middle of the night, I’ll spy, out of the corner of my eye, an old man looking back at me in the mirror. “Damn it,” I’ll think to myself, “that old man is me,” and right away start in reflecting on how our lives slip through our fingers passing moment by passing moment, and ruminating on what I recently heard on the radio, which is that we only live about four thousand weeks on average, a statistic that can really make you question your habit of showing up at work on Monday morning wishing you could just go ahead and hit the fast forward button to Friday afternoon. Usually, it’s around this time in my thought process that I remember, with a real sense of relief, the old man I brought home five months ago from Fast Eddy’s Old Man Sales and Service near the corner of Mill Road and Windsor Way. I bought him in the first place because I thought he’d be able to teach me how to play chess, and even though that didn’t work out (honestly, it was my fault) decided to keep him around for the occasional pearls of wisdom he imparts. Recently, however, he’s started following me into the bathroom like a psychopath. “What the fuck, bro,” I’ll say to him, “this isn’t a performance and I don’t need an audience,” to which he’ll reply: “Holding a grudge is like holding a bag of shit. If it’s yours, it still stinks, but for some reason the smell doesn’t bother you the same way it would if it was somebody else’s.”

Point being, that’s actually true if you stop to think about it, but I swear to God if this guy doesn’t stop following me into the bathroom I’m going to get rid of him all the same.