Sky

7.

The morning swung in knotted and gray. The worn blanket was twisted, binding my legs, suggesting a thrash and fight against something in sleep. Last night’s liquor circled in my temples, a sharp, taunting ache as if to say you’re not ready for this. The dog lay a few feet from me, front legs splayed out as if bracing against the day. Her grayed snout was open a bit and her breath was a ragged effort. I crawled to her and she aimed her cataracts at me a moment — autumn sun through seawater -- and licked my chin. I didn’t even mind the stench of her rotting breath. I washed up and scribbled a few lines while my brother grilled meat, its sweet hiss riding an invisible current. He called me over. The sirloin had curled itself into the shape of a heart. She ate it not with the ravenous, desperate glee of the past, but with a gruff, full pleasure still. After, we carried her outside. She shit and ambled shaky inch by inch toward the park, the vague duty of play still snapping in her mind. Or perhaps she didn’t want to waste the immense effort that it took to hoist herself up, commit to motion.

Inside, we lit candles and arranged her under a thick blanket, adjusting the one back leg several times so she could pay attention to more than the pain. My father read a letter of farewell, I read my elegiac scribbles from the last hour, and my brother simply thanked her and stroked her ear. As if on cue, the vet arrived. She was quiet and her grip was cool and firm. The first shot released ease into the dog, like a long, steady swallow of whisky, and eventually she forgot about the sterile stranger at her back, the strange arrangement of her masters around her, the strange chemical scents, and the feather brush of pain that basted her spine, her joints, her back leg, and she put her head down between her paws in a way I hadn’t seen for years.

The poison was blue – as blue as the Alabama skies I left to come here, as blue as the waters I’d been headed towards. A glorious, aqua blue, the blue of vacations, of summer. The vet missed the vein twice. The third time, crimson flew into the cartridge and the sharp hues spun round and round in that glass, like two dogs meeting in the park. The vet said something rote and sweet. The dog sighed.

6b.

The dog had been limping since Minnesota. Since the first day in Minnesota, actually, which was the beginning of a ten-day, seventeen lakes, fourteen island camping odyssey in the borderlands, that pockmarked wilderness that separates two nations with a vast wildness instead of razor wire and armed men. The vet in Duluth said to X-ray her when we got home. At home, the veteran veterinarian with soft voice and hands and sad eyes said the leg was broken. It was broken because of cancer. Because it was cancer, it had to be amputated. Because it was cancer, she would probably die. My girlfriend sat awkwardly in the kitchen with my father and their words rose and tangled in the August twilight. In the next room, I held the dog and rubbed my sobs into her neck.

6a.

The dog hauled eyelids up. One, two, three tries and they stayed open. Then she lifted her head, shook grog from it like she was wet. The tail began its metronome whack! Whack! On the carpet. She turned between us, greeting us with dull pleasure as if we had just walked through the door. After a moment she turned to the stump. They had taken off the right back leg high up, on the haunch. The tail fell to the floor like a shot bird. Her snout circled and stabbed, nudged and nuzzled. Confusion dropped her ears flat. We waited as in the cliched hospital scene when the patient’s face is unwrapped, slowly, revealing his or her new identity. Then, after a couple of moments, this is what happened: she let out a huff. She stood, pushing hard with the front legs. She tested the remaining back leg. Hopped in a circle looking over her shoulder at it, like a cyclist checking a suspicious tire. As she sniffed at the absence, she spotted her ball. She went to it, deftly. She plucked it out of the black shag carpet and moved to the door, the tail back in action, flashing pleas at us with her bright eyes.

5.

I met her at a dark party on the water. A long afternoon of drama and drugs was just closing, long miles of trudging in the rain, ducking squad cars and hiding out in the corners of cafes; ease was secreting itself into me with the cheap brew I leaned and slugged. I’d seen her a handful of times before but she had been but a flash and a crackle, a promising smile, a hope of sometime, and nothing more. That night, though, she slid up to my side like shadow cast by a roaming cloud over a blazing sun and asked me in my ear where I’d been her whole life. It was just strange enough for me to reply, looking for you, and it seemed true. She kissed me and there it began. The thrash of passion heaved us through the deaths, addictions, violence, incarcerations, and even the loss of an undetected child that composed our teenage world. The night that it imploded and she left me, I pushed my car over slick roads, through curtains of rain, wanting halfway to wrap it around something solid and get to a peace that I knew would elude me for so, so long. But I made it home. The dog stirred up shadow when I entered, the tail beating metrically into the sofa but my one-handed pass over her told her I would be distant. I stood watching the world distort through the sliding magnifications of rain on the pane. I lingered in that place where all the clichés about hard love are true and none carry any solace, and felt the hollow begin to fester and swell. I was not loved. It had been over for a long time. And the insanity of the loss of something I never had hurled me to the floor and my tears began. The dog was black and I watched her form slowly out of the dark of the room. She approached tentatively, head down, eyes up. Through my weeping she was distorted all the more, just a shimmering ghost of motion inching near. I think it took her several minutes to reach me and when she did she lay by my side, quiet. When my sobs finished, more from fatigue than real release, she licked at my stained face and even though I pushed her away, she persisted until not only were the tears erased but a dry, cracked laugh shook me once, and tomorrow began to fall, cold and pink, through the glass.

4.

The little square of paper tasted like metal. I chewed it and sucked on it; terrified but committed to do this fully if I was going to do it at all. James had told me not to bring the dog. No way man, bad call he’d said as I held the door to the stairs for her and let her tromp ahead of us down into my room, dogs can be scary. I told him we didn’t have any choice; she always slept with me. To abandon her to the kitchen floor would cause suspicion from my otherwise fatigued (if not totally unsuspicious) father. It all began as a dull tingling, a lightening of the limbs. The USA Up All Night movie became ridiculously funny. Then I couldn’t follow what was going on anymore. Then Gilbert Gottfried became terrifying and I turned it off. This was when the dog retreated to a shadowed corner of the sagging sofa and began to watch. James had turned on the stereo low. He danced weird contortions to the Doors – he fancied himself some sort of acid guru, almost a full three decades after such a thing had really been chic. Some hours crept by, others rushed. My body traveled between a frightening numb, as if it were not mine, but some container I had been poured into, and acutely responsive where the slightest brush with a bookcase or wall sent the suggestions of great pain through me.

The dog watched. She did not move. James did not acknowledge her, but he stayed on the other side of the room. I talked to her from a distance, trying to coax her out from the cloak of shadow she’d chosen, but I felt somehow ashamed. When I scooted close enough to see her eyes, they were disappointed, scolding. There was a finger wagging, a head shaking behind her steady gaze. The dark became inky outside the window; everything but the room and the giddy fear ceased. Then the dawn rose and spread its bleary light, too soon. The gunmetal gray light slid like ashy ice into our world. The dog did not move from her spot. James became incoherent, he spoke in a tongue I didn’t understand and when I begged him to stop, he laughed in my face. At this, the dog lifted her head and, from across the room, aimed her snout at his chest. That was all. He folded himself into the closet, closed it, and soon was sleeping – or something like it. Edges and colors melted into a stream. I covered the window with a pillow. My spine ached. As I heard the horrid thunder of my father’s footfalls that suggested only a few hours till I would be roused to work, I crawled to the dog. I placed my head on her front legs. For a moment she sat stiffly, then huffed deeply, once. She licked my cold ear and made room for me on the sofa. I slept the sleep of the dead for two hours.

3.

My father’s and stepmother’s fights ordinarily began as dull thunder; they paced and stomped above us, their voices nothing more than a wicked muffle, but the motion of their conflict like a circling storm. Almost invariably, though, they wound up in the kitchen where, strangely, as it intensified, they would sit. There was an air vent, a grated, camouflaged bug that would carry their twisted matrimony down to us in the basement. I would crouch with my brother sometimes, with the dog always, ringside and cheer silently for our father, half hoping that he would floor the raving bitch who had waltzed into our lives and was, seemingly in a calculated manner, eroding and destroying us. This never happened. The crests and breaks of rage and curses would usually morph into a tense armistice, often with my father apologizing. The dog’s ears would lift to rigid when she heard his voice softened; they pricked and then flattened and she moped anxious and guilty when, earlier in the bout, she heard the loud, ragged edge to his words. The conclusion to this left the dog and I restless in the basement; my brother would recline, placated, in the shift and flip of the big screen. Sometimes, I would steal up the stairs and into the polished kitchen where the ghosts of their anger still stirred, open the fridge and remove – as if it were a booby trapped jewel – a sea green bottle of her good Chardonnay. Tipping a few mouthfuls into a cup, I would replace the bottle and retreat to my depths where the dog would be waiting with bright eyes and cocked head. Soon we would be out in the night, sitting together in the cold gold of a streetlight, at the top of a tree-enclosed staircase, watching the winter moon linger and suggest. Sometimes the dog would see an insomniac squirrel but she would not give chase. Usually she lay on the cold stair; huffed, and watched over the vigil I was holding for my family.

2.

My father joked: the dog can run like a mare, leap like a kangaroo, swim like a seal – she can’t possibly dig, too. He said this the night before the first day that we left her alone in the yard of a new house. I was nervous about her escaping. It was a decent yard, skinny but long and with enough healthy grass for her to graze for months – which she loved to do. Also, there were slits between the flaking blue fence posts, wide enough for her to watch the neighborhood action. When we all converged back on the house that next evening we found that she had, indeed, tunneled like a desperate lifer under the fence and joined in no small part of the neighborhood action.

Next, she was sequestered in the garage – spacious enough, littered with her toys, her chow, a bucket of cold water, and my father’s vehicular compromise between youth and practicality: a two-door, Subaru XLT, a horrid, runty, angular little number, a slider pitched at my father’s strata: single, middle-aged dads. Worried more than anything that she might have employed the massive strength derived from a pit bull mother and pried up the garage door with her jaws, we all hurried home the next day. The dog was still there. Her food was untouched, her toys all where they had been placed in the morning. The garage floor, though, was littered by a tempest of debris, as if a large public gathering had taken place. Proud and triumphant, the dog plucked a chunk of plastic from the ground and tossed it skyward, skittering after it like it had come to life. And during the arc and fall of that little object, my father realized. He bent to his car, disbelief deposing confusion on his face. The Subaru was missing a bumper. Actually, it was still attached, clinging by a few rubbery tendons at one end, but for the most part it had been pulled off and methodically destroyed. Just as my father’s disbelief was giving way to incredible rage, just as he began to kick at the car and fire off those little curses like muffled gunshots that we knew meant trouble, one of us (either me or my brother, I don’t recall) stopped him. We pointed out something that made the punishment of the dog and the integrity of Subaru questionable: there was a hell of a lot of Styrofoam mixed into the shards of plastic. It coated the floor in places like a light dusting of snow; larger pieces sat about like albino rocks. Taken altogether it must have accounted for a significant portion of the inside of the bumper. The dog circled us, wagging wildly, one of those inexplicable canine smiles curling around the jagged piece of her prize that she held in her jaws. My father got an incredible deal on a trade-in.

1.

Midday. We drove into the pure blue heart of early June in a rattling minivan, singing goofy songs. Several days lay before us, blazing with the promise of ease and magic, and everything that the raggedly majestic Cascades, their alpine lakes and rivers, their sweetened winds, carried. When a father and his sons escape the city and its crush, when they have the time to pulse and flow and leap to great heights in each others’ vision, there is very little beyond this that they need. But we needed groceries so we swung toward Safeway in a country highway town.

We pulled ourselves across the hot asphalt at a good clip; shoeless and, besides, the errand was an obstacle to the wonders of nature. Mud-splattered pickups angled together like linebackers at half time. From the cabs, good ol’ guitar riffs licked up at the cobalt slate and splintered golden light above. Just as we were about to be consumed by the quiet whoosh and bite of the automatic doors and AC, we all stopped next to the generic soda machines and firewood, our hurry excised in an instant. There was a bedraggled girl sitting against the wall with a battered box at her side. And within the four walls of cardboard, furry, mewling life swarmed and clambered. The girl angled her eyes up at us, but I don’t think she said anything. There was a sign so she wouldn’t have to: Free Puppies. The box shuddered. It seemed only one dog at a time could manage its hind legs to peer out into the gargantuan, weird world before being toppled back into the pack. As we watched, a black, fist-sized face with a sporty white stripe and hazel eyes hung itself over the edge. Leaf-like ears gave a little flutter and the head cocked to the side before vanishing with a thud back into the mess of its kin. My brother and I looked to each other, sliding silent pledges of teamwork back and forth. Then we turned to my father, framed there against the massive glow of summer sky. But his eyes were already on us, flashing, asking, needlessly, what do you think?

Eli Hastings