Bobby D. Lux - Dog Duty (22 page)

“No
, you can’t,” Clay said, circling Nipper and Ernie as he closed what little distance was left between them with each turn. Ernie crouched down, ready to strike, while Clay strolled nonchalantly. He drew an invisible wall around Nipper and Ernie. In a moment of pure desperation or genius, Nipper barked non-stop as loud as he could.

“You trying to scare him?” Scamper said. “You must be the most inept mutt I’ve ever seen. Look at him. You’re going to strain your itty-bitty little voice there. Why can’t a dog just shut up and get mauled with honor? Why is that I wonder?”

Nipper was in his own world. He barked with a passion he’d never felt before. Like he knew that suddenly there was a good chance he’d never see tomorrow unless he kept shouting with everything he had. The sheer volume began to unnerve Clay and made him stop his rounding. He lowered down to attack.

The light on the front porch of Officer Hart’s house flipped on and sent a cloud of light behind Nipper and Ernie that flooded Clay. Officer Hart appeared in pajama pants. He took a few steps beyond the porch with his hand extended parallel to his brow like he was staring into the sun. He said “ow” as he stepped onto a particularly pointed piece of cracked driveway. Nipper slowed the pace of his manic barks and let out a final barrage in deliberate secession.

“Nipper?” Officer Hart said. “Is that you? Come here. Where’s Fritz?”

Clay turned his locked jaw towards Officer Hart and approached.

“Leave him alone,” Ernie said.

“If I were you,” Scamper said, “I wouldn’t look this gift horse in the mouth and I’d take the chance to escape.”

“Get out of here,” Officer Hart said, to Clay, who responded with a growl. Officer Hart swore to himself and reached down for the hose curled up in front of the house. He pointed it at Clay, put his thumb partially over the spout, and turned on the water full blast. Clay stopped at the end of the empty driveway just outside the range of the water. Officer Hart flipped his wrist up and sent a freezing waterfall onto Clay’s head. While Clay shook the dripping water away from his eyes, Nipper took off and made it into the house. Ernie followed but stayed next to Officer Hart at the start of the driveway.

“Aww, sorry about your plans,” Ernie said.

“This isn’t over,” Clay said, as Officer Hart blasted him straight on in the chest. Clay backed off the sidewalk into the street.

“Get the other one too,” Ernie barked
, to Officer Hart. “Get him too. Right in the face. Give him pneumonia.”

“Okay,” Officer Hart said, as h
e gave Ernie the single best and most relaxing pair of behind-the-ear scratches he’d ever felt in his life. “Calm down, Ernie. They’re going away. We got ‘um. I’d hose the runt down but he was smart enough to run away across the street. Come on, let’s go back inside and get you guys some food.”

As Ernie went inside, and while Officer
Hart rolled the hose back up, the Intimidator pulled into the driveway. Mrs. Hart held her face in her hands for a long moment before shutting the engine off and getting out of the car. She took a few stumbled steps before she stopped in front of Officer Hart.

“Why is the driveway all wet?” Mrs. Hart said.

“Where were you?” Officer Hart said. “I was worried.”

“I told you I was working.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Are you going to explain to me what you’re doing up this late? Don’t you have to be at work in three hours?”

“Those aren’t the clothes you went to work in.”

“I brought a change for after the gym,”
Mrs. Hart said.

“You brought clothes for after the gym that are nicer than what you went to work in? Is that your story? Are you going to stick to that? I’m tired of this. The dogs are home.
I think Fritz is out here too somewhere. I’m going to look for him.”

Mrs. Hart walked past the two of them. She tried and failed to stand erect and walked like a zombie.

“That’s a good boy,” Mrs. Hart said, to Ernie, as she patted him too hard on the top of his head like a bongo player. “You’re a good doggy, Ernie. You were always my favorite. I like you.”       

Meanwhile, my wandering took me to the edge of town to the North Grand City Industrial Train Depot on the other side of the Trio-3 Screen Drive-In where a dozen or so men tried to both work and stay awake. The ones who succeeded in their endeavor hadn’t noticed the hobbling dog who passed through.

A loading area three
train cars back from the end was void of any human activity. The ramp that led to the next to last car was still lowered down. I decided to open my eyes somewhere beyond Grand City for the first time in my life. No one saw me sneak onto the half-empty car. No one saw me find a spot to hide in between the crates, which were placed in the car with no apparent intent or design.

I found a spot in the corner and wanted to be asleep before the train awoke. I heard a shuffle and a thump like something else had jumped onto the train. I couldn’t smell anything but I felt a weight on me that told me I wasn’t alone. Something followed me. 

“Who’s there?” I said, facing my shadow.

Just me.

“Who are you?” I said.

You know who I am, my shadow said.

“I’m getting real tired of playing these talking games that everyone else seems to enjoy. I ask a question, you answer. And you answer with a statement, not some other question asking me why I asked that or why I’d want an answer.”

You’re awfully testy.

“I’ve had a bad day.”

No
, you haven’t.

“This has been the worst day of my life.”

You learned something about yourself, right? How bad could it really have been then?

“There’s no lesson
in what I learned today.”

I don’t believe that for one second of one second.

“How can there be a second in a second?”

I don’t know. You’re giving yourself a headache
here. Don’t you have enough aches?

“You don’t know anything about my aches.”

I know that these aches of yours define every breathing moment of your life. 

“Who asked you?” I
said. I imagined what this shadow looked like: sagging face (especially below the jaw), bright spots of decay on the nose, fallen ears with a reaction time south of a molasses drip, faded fur sprinting from the nose to the eyes, broken teeth, a shrinking gum line, bony arms with nasty veins showing from paw-to-shoulder, hips with the stability of shattered glass, and a tail with all the efficiency of a frayed shoelace.

You asked me, my shadow said. I don’t want to bother you, so if you want me to shut up all you have to do is just turn back around and do your best to pretend that I’m not here. In the meantime, I’ll stick around and just get bigger. Should you ever want someone to talk to, I’ll be here. Great plan you have going on, by the way.

“I don’t have any plan,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Make no mistake, Fritz, not having a plan is no different than executing the most detailed course of action. Not having a plan
is
your plan. You may not know where you’re running to, but as long as you run from something, that’s good enough for you, am I right?

“Who says I’m running from anything?”
I said.

I do. I knew that the moment I saw you. That’s why I’ve been following you. If you’re running towards something, there better be something you’re running from. The farther and faster you run, the bigger I get.

“I’ve never seen you before.”

But you know I’ve been there. You’ve just been too afraid to turn and face me.

“You’re crazy.”

Says the dog talking to a shadow. Whatever you say, pal.

“You have a better idea?”

It’s not
my place to have a better idea. You get on a train to ride the rails and find somewhere new, and I just happened to be in the same car as you.

“You wouldn’t understand. I used to be something.”

We all used to be something. So what? Some of us were cops. Some were firedogs. What’s your point? You used to be a puppy. You used to be this. You used to be that. What are you now? That’s the only thing you should be worrying about. So, what is it? What are you right now?

“I’m nothing.
I’m an ex-cop with nothing else to live for. Everything I’ve been was ripped away from me and there’s nothing, not a thing, that I can ever do about that.”

Is that it?

“I’m a broken and crippled dog with nothing left to offer anyone, not even myself.”

And?

“You know if that ramp wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have been able to get into this car.”

But here you are. Now what?

“There’s only one thing left for me to be that I haven’t been yet. The sooner that comes, the better.”

W
hat are you waiting for?

“Pardon me.”

Get it over with. If there’s only one thing left to do, do it. If you’re nothing, it should be easy.

“You don’t scare me.”

I’m not trying to scare you. All I wanted was for you is to realize that I’m here. If you want me to go, all you had to do is look at me. Since you’ve done that, I suppose it’s time for me to get off this train. What do you think?

The car jerked and
I sprung back to my feet. It crawled along the tracks as the engine sputtered to life. I didn’t want to sit down anymore. I walked over to the side of the car and looked out. Grand City slept in the distance. I had to be there when she woke up. I had to.

I backed myself against the cold railing on the opposite side of the car. My ches
t rippled with anxiety. The final train whistle blew and the engine rumbled through the floor into my feet. The rumbling shook me loose. My legs pushed away from the rail and off I ran towards that opening in the train car. The light reflected into the car as we passed a blank screen at the drive in. My shadow was gone. I sprinted towards the moonlight that beamed through the door. I jumped.

E
verything was beautiful. I looked down and saw myself glide above the ground as the moon’s spotlight blurred everything around me. There was nothing except me. I was in the air and was something greater than a dog who jumped from a moving train. I couldn’t feel anything on my body. Not the air on my hanging tongue. Not my ears pressed down along my head. Not my tail perfectly aligned with my spine. Not my outstretched arms reaching for everything. And certainly not my wonderfully damaged leg.

I took a breath through my nose and it was the greatest air ever inhaled.
It was air created for only me as if it knew to be there and to wait for me until I needed it more than anything else in the world. It washed my lungs and inflated my body as the train ricocheted behind me, stabbing through the still night.

I landed hard on the
ground into a patch of grass and soft dirt. I exhaled every bit of that magical breath. The flashing light from the last train car turned off towards the mountains. A slight breeze caressed my extended ears. Air reentered my nose like data entry and everything shifted back into crystal focus. I felt my body again. My face was warm and healthy. My arms, embedded into the ground, pulled themselves free. My chest and ribs expanded with plain old air like they always had. My tail hovered above the ground, ready to guide me back to life. My leg waited for me to buckle under the pain. It hurt. I won’t pretend it didn’t, but I stood there in the darkness and I was going to keep it that way. I’d be damned if the pain didn’t respect me. If it was a fight that the pain wanted, I would be thrilled to oblige.

If you listen to enough advice, you’ll inevitably hear that you have to live like it’s your last day. I’m telling you right now, that is the single biggest line of nonsense ever uttered. Living everyday like it’
s your last is how you wind up on a train headed to nowhere.

I shook my leg out to let it know that I knew it was
still there, but that I had other things to concern myself with. I had no idea where I would end up at the end of this, but when I finally rested, it was going to be at home.

The sun was up by the time I returned to Officer Hart’s house. I took cover behind the boat in their neighbor’s driveway. Mrs. Hart flung the front door to the house open with a swollen duffle bag in each hand. She tossed both bags in the back of the Intimidator and slammed the trunk closed with the fury of a game show contestant spinning the big wheel. She adjusted her sleek dark dress and pushed her hair down. She grabbed a cigarette from her purse that hung high off her shoulder. She lit the thing and took an obnoxiously long drag off the stick, savoring as she held her breath. Mrs. Hart exhaled and wiped the smoke away from her face.

Simon came out of the house and looked the best I’d ever seen him. His shirt was clean and tucked in.
 

“I told you to leave the game in the
house,” Mrs. Hart said, as she snuck another quick, concealed puff.

“But it’s just for the car ride,” Simon said. “I won’t bring it inside. I promise.”

“I told you no,” she said, with an exhale that she wanted to enjoy more than she did. “We’re only going to be in the car for fifteen minutes.”

“
Fifteen?
That’s forever. Please, Mom. That’s like half of a whole cartoon. Come on.” She ignored him and dropped the partially-finished cigarette under the front tire. She drove the point of her heel through the lit end like a corkscrew and took out two pieces of gum from her purse. “Can I have a piece of-”

“No. Not in the car.”

“Come on-”

“I’m tired of cleaning your gum off the seats. This car is worth a lot of money and every time you do that, it ruins the value.”

“Okay, Mom. Sorry.” 

She revved the engine and honked the horn,
which startled a sulking Simon. After a second series of honks, Officer Hart came out of the house looking great from the neck down in a light suit. From the neck up, he was a wreck.

He
held Missy in an oblong crate in his left hand. His right hand pleaded with Mrs. Hart to calm down while he locked the front door. Missy spun inside the crate and forced Officer Hart to carry it with both hands as he placed her in the back seat next to Simon. A crate within a crate.

They drove away
southbound from the house. As they curved out of sight, I walked over to the fence to the back yard. I looked in through a break in the fence posts. Nipper and Ernie sat and ate at their bowls.

“Was it just me,” Ernie said, “or do they seem particularly more mad at us than usual?”

“It’s not just you,” Nipper said.

“How long you think it’ll last?”

“Hard to say. We’ve never done anything this bad, she said. Which, come to think of it, what did we do that was so awful anyway? Okay, sure we shouldn’t have escaped, but we came home.”

“W
e didn’t all come home,” Ernie said.

“And whose fault was that?” Nipper said.

“Maybe they’re mad because Fritz didn’t come home? She didn’t seem to care, but he didn’t sleep last night. He was up watching the TV and just pacing across the house. He was even punching the air a few times and then it looked like he was crying. He’s probably worried about Fritz.”

“He’ll get over it,” Nipper said.
“You heard the kid. He was hoping we’d not come back so he could get a rhino in the yard.”

“Nipper, you smell something?”
Ernie said.

“Just a fresh meal. I kno
w we weren’t gone long, but man, you miss the simple things.”

“No, not the food. Hey,
where do you think Fritz went? You think he’s gonna get that dog?”

“He had his chance, Ernie. Remember? As in yesterday? No, I don’t think so, and no, I don’t have the faintest clue as to where he’s headed or where he went. Sorry.”

“I don’t get why you don’t like him so much.”

“You’re right. I didn’t like him when he first got here. This is our home
and he just shows up and expected us to welcome him because he’s some cop. But then I trusted him and went along with his ridiculous plan because I could see how important it was to him and you liked him and I didn’t want to lose you as my friend, so I played along with his scheme. Then what happened? He left us high and dry, Ernie. Strung us up and threw us to the wolves. And you know what, yeah, I did start to like him, but he went his way and we went ours. There’s nothing we can do about that now.”

“Hey,” I mumbled
, through the fence.

“It’s weird though,” Ernie said.
“It’s like I can still feel him. Like he’s here.”

“Ernie,” I said.

“Like I can hear him. I can still hear his voice, calling out to me.”

“You’re crazy,
” Nipper said. “Wait a second, I heard him too. Ernie, I think your strangeness is finally rubbing off on me. Or maybe we’re just famished and hallucinating.”

“Hey!” I said.

“Fritz?” Ernie said, as he stepped towards the fence.

“It’s me,
” I said.

“I knew that was your scent,” Ernie said.
“What’re you doing here? You come back home.”

“Not yet. We still have a case to put on these dogs
and I can’t do it without you guys.”

“No dice,” Nipper said. “I’m done playing your games.”

“You better watch out,” Ernie said, as he pushed his face right up to the fence to sniff my nose, then he tilted his head sideways and put his eye and all its darting lines across it up to the fence. “They’re going to see you standing out there.”

“They just left,” I said. “This is our chance to get out of here.”

“Did you ever think that maybe we don’t want to leave this time?” Nipper said.

“I want to go,” Ernie said.

“That’s because you always want to go,” Nipper said. “Nothing’s ever good enough for you, Ernie. We’ve got it all here. Food, water, when it rains we can go inside, they pamper us with toys and treats, and on their holidays we get the leftovers.”

“And it’s boring!” Ernie said
, with more passion and fury than I’d ever heard from him. “It’s the same thing around here every day. You get up, you walk around, you take a nap, you eat the same food from the same bowl, the exact same little dry chunks of food, you can’t get a good run here, you get to
play
with the little spazz from inside, which to him playing means hitting you and throwing robot parts at you and then him wondering why you don’t feel like chasing them. If you do anything fun like dig or bark or try to climb the wall, you get yelled at, so sorry if that sounds like the good life to you, Nipper, but to me it sounds like a life spent wasted. I agree, we’re safe here, but it’s way more fun out there.”

“I didn’t know you feel that way,” Nipper said.

“I do and I can’t help it,” Ernie said.

“So
, what are you going to do about it?” I said.

“I’m out of here,”
Ernie said, as he flickered between the fence posts and went to the front corner of the fence that separated Officer Hart’s house from the neighbor’s. The fence gently wiggled in front of me. Ernie cursed and barked and kicked the fence.

“He fixed it?
” Ernie said. “That plank has been broken ever since I’ve been here and he picks
now
to fix it? Did you know about this, Nipper?”

“I didn’t even know th
e fence was broke to begin with,” Nipper said.

“How
do you think I’d get out to visit Saucy all those times when you were sleeping?”

“Ummm,
because I was sleeping.”

“N
ipper, we have to go with Fritz. Whether you want to or not. They came here looking for us. They’re gonna come back.”

“Who came here?” I said.

“Your friend and his racing dog,” Nipper said. “They were waiting for us, or they followed us, or I don’t know, but they showed up out of nowhere last night and he came out from inside and hosed them off and they disappeared.”

“Is this for real with you now, Fritz?” Ernie said.

“It is,” I said. “It’s my fault that the two of you were in danger. And I’m going to fix that. I’ve never been in the habit of putting my friends in harm’s way. I’m not starting now. We’re ending this.”

“Stand back,” Ernie said,
as his voice echoed back to the other end of the yard. I moved to the side and lost peripheral vision on Ernie through the breaks in the fence posts. After a couple of deep breaths, Ernie’s paws slammed into the ground as he hurled himself towards the fence. Nipper shouted as the impact of Ernie crashing into the fence split the air. Shards of wood blasted into the front yard while Ernie pulled the rest of his body through the hole made by his shoulder and skull. As Ernie climbed through the hole, he pushed out the rest of the broken fencing.

“Whew,” Ernie said,
as he shook himself off. “My head’s spinning a little bit.”

Nipper stood at the opening in the fence
and looked at us on the other side of the smashed fence. He knew Ernie just gave him no choice.

“You coming?” I said. “Ernie did the hard work. It’s plenty large enough for you to walk through. It’s up to you, Nipper.”

I expected another righteously indignant speech from Nipper. I expected more coaxing from Ernie. But there was none of that. No hyper-dramatic moment of
should I or shouldn’t I
, no trepidation in his face, and no inner monologue as far as I could see.

“Let’s go,” Nipper said. He walked through the hole
Ernie made the fence, even breaking off a piece of fencing that wasn’t necessarily in his way. “It is more fun out here.”    

“Wait a second,” I said,
as we escaped out of the maze of homes. “You had a way of out there the whole time I was here?”

“Yeah,
” Ernie said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?
” I said. “It would’ve been a lot easier than escaping from the park.”

“Yeah. It would have, Ernie,” Nipper said. “Would have a lot easier.
On all of us.”

“B
ut how much fun would that have been?” Ernie said. “I thought your plan sounded cool. Besides, I didn’t think I’d ever have gotten Nipper to just sneak out through the fence.”

“You’re probably right about that,” Nipper said.

We navigated our way out of the neighborhood at a brisk pace, not quite an all out run, but we weren’t dragging our cans either.

“So where were you?
” Ernie said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Come on,” Ernie said.

“I was o
n a train talking to my shadow. I finally faced it and it went away. Then the train started to move, so I went to one end of the car and I jumped off when the train was going. I flew through the air and walked all night back here”

“Okay,” Ernie said. “I get it. Yeah, and I was driving a car too.
A real nice one. Power steering with the top down and music blasting. You’re right. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

We were a block away from the main street out of the neighborhood when Ernie abruptly turned right and sprinted towards a nond
escript single story residence on the corner.

“One condition for all of this,” Ernie said,
as he stopped behind the house. “Saucy comes with us. And don’t even think about giving me the ‘It’s too dangerous’ speech or a ‘we don’t have time for this.’ If I’m going to risk the worse trouble I can think of back home by wrecking their fence, and you know what I’m talking about, I’m making sure she comes with me.”

Nipper and I stayed on the sidewalk and watched Ernie try to jump up onto the wall to get her attention. We tried not to listen while he pleaded with her and explained how he ran head first
through the fence to get here. Ernie didn’t bust through that fence just to escape the humdrum life of the backyard. He didn’t do it to go on some quest with me. He was going make sure that there was never anything that would keep him away from being able to see Saucy whenever he felt like it.

We watched his head fa
ll between his arms while he was up on his hind legs against the wall. He looked like he would push that wall over if he could. We tried not to stare while the kick in his step vanished like a gust of wind stealing a napkin from a picnic table.

“She’s not coming,” he said,
as he returned to us. “She has to go with Scarlet to the dog show today. She always gets in these lousy moods whenever they all go to those stupid things. Scarlet this, and Scarlet that. Scarlet is supposed to be so pretty, and no offense to you dogs, but I just don’t see it. I can see where others might think she’s pretty, but she doesn’t do it for me. I try to tell Saucy that, but she never listens to me. So, now great, I break down the fence, they’ll probably
fix
me when we get home. I‘ve heard horror stories of dogs getting fixed for far less. And for what? Saucy can’t come with us, and then she says that even if she could get away, she doesn’t know if she’d want to in the first place.”