too cold out for that dog
by Matt Starr
I live in what is generally considered a “nice” town—various magazines and websites have, in fact, called it a “nice” town—but if I’ve learned anything it’s that people are shitty all over. I’ll give you an example. I run a lot. All over town. Any time of day, any time of year. I have to if I want to keep my discipline, if I don’t want the screws to come loose.
I run past this one part of town pretty regular. It’s tucked away a few blocks behind the main through-road. Cozy ranch-style homes there, a good chunk of which were built in the 70s. There’s this one little brick house toward the end of the community with a beat-up blackjack oak in the back. Bound to it at the trunk, by a six-foot-long chain, is a dog of indiscernible breed and age. Some kind of Rotty mutt. A girl. Every time I run past that backyard, the dog just lays there, parked on her haunches, watching me with the floppiest ears, the saddest eyes God ever put in a head.
The condition she’s kept in is never right, but these days it’s especially wrong because we’re in the middle of winter. I mean we had snow a couple days ago, for chrissakes. I often think about my two dogs when I look at her: soft, needy creatures that couldn’t cut it an hour without their blankies and toys and slices of bananas we use to give them their medicine. The thought of either of them being tied up in such a way as this makes me ill to my gut.
One Saturday afternoon it’s in the upper twenties, so I throw on a hoodie, some running shorts, a pair of gloves. Two miles into my workout, and I’m at the house. That pitiful dog is out there, like death and taxes, just staring at me, and I imagine an aching somewhere bone deep. A hurt and a sorrow that are too buried to show to the light. Animals, after all, are built to hide their suffering. It’s instinct. To conceal your vulnerabilities from the things that would eat you if they had half a chance. I cuss smoke into the air, keep it moving. But when I hit the end of the street, I swing a u-ey. Have to. To my surprise, the owner, a middle-aged lady, is out on her stoop, doing something or another to the shoe mat at the back door of the house. Soon as she notices me coming her way, she begins to eyeball me. She catches me looking
And she has the nerve to say it, jokingly: “You are gonna freeze. To. Death.”
For a moment, I’m blind with anger. Then I say my piece without breaking stride: “Why don’t you worry about your poor dog, you goddamn bum?”
“Huh?” she calls from behind me.
“Too cold out for that dog,” I holler back, and then I’m gone. The whole way home I think maybe I’m being dramatic. I am, after all, a dramatic person. But the thing is I drive by that house late at night, and the dog is still out there. Washed in a dim, yellow light. Shivering.
***
I didn’t always reside in the place that is known as “The Peak of Good Living.” There was a time when I was a college dropout, posted up at my mama’s house, heading out every night in search of new ways to quiet the noise. I was going through some shit. My deddy had died. I had me a friend with an apartment to himself most nights out of the week. We’d sit around and drink ourselves shitfaced and chainsmoke cigarettes. Watch sports. Sometimes we’d drive out to the bar, and on the way I’d pop a Benadryl or snort half an Ativan. Anything to get me out of the light.
One night I brought over a twelve pack of PBR bottles, but that didn’t seem to do the trick. So, once we’d polished off the beers, we did shots of this Canadian honey whiskey that had a big buck deer on the bottle. Why? Because it was a Wednesday. Needless to say, I blacked out. I was so off my ass, I’d later learn, that we were outside hitting softballs into the woods, and I couldn’t keep from whiffing and then falling down after every swing. When I woke up on my buddy’s couch the next day, I was still very drunk. But I was only five minutes from my mama’s house.
“I’ll be all right if I can just find my cigs,” I said aloud, stumbling from couch to table to counter.
I didn’t find my cigs.
I got pulled over in my deddy’s truck a stone’s throw from my destination for going forty-nine in a thirty-five. Driving straight as an arrow, but speeding. Ain’t that some shit? The officer’s name was Chance, and I found that especially cruel. He went through the formalities with me, had me blow into the whole tube deal. I didn’t know until we got back to the station that I’d registered twice the legal limit.
Outside I walked the line. I closed my eyes, one leg up, and touched my nose with either hand. I marched like a toy soldier. All I could think about, all I can still think about, sometimes, was those people driving past on their commute. Watching me perform a field sobriety test at seven o’clock in the morning. How did I look to them?
Ol’ Chance cuffed me. Took me down to the jailhouse. In the cold holding area, I cried. It was August, but the drunk was making its slow, grueling transition into a hangover. And with that came the tremors. And with that a great chill flashed through me. I shuddered.
***
Ain’t sitting right with me. I’m not the type of person who can just ignore those feelings. They eat away at me like a critter gnawing on an apple core. All there’s left is seeds of poison. I’m gonna go on my run today, and what happens, happens. It is what it is. That all flies out the window, of course, when I wheel into the neighborhood, find the dog in her bitter, fenceless cage. With every footfall, the guilt wells up in me, threatens the walls I’ve built around myself with hairline cracks that will soon become deeper. More devastating. I lope by the dog, twitching my head at her rapidfire like a wild bird.
Fuck it, man.
I circle around, jog into the yard. Careful to make sure I haven’t been clocked. I can tell the dog is friendly by the way she hasn’t gotten defensive, hasn’t reacted at all. I creep closer to her, and she studies me with an idle fascination. With those shadowy, woeful eyes.
“Good girl,” I say, reaching out, and she sniffs, licks my knuckles. Snorts like a small horse.
I unhook her. I don’t know what we’ll do, but we’ll do it. I don’t know where we’ll go, but we’ll go. Anywhere to get her out of the cold.
“Come on, girl,” I say, patting my thigh, gesturing toward the road.
But she doesn’t. She won’t even move, save for whatever motion is required to watch my silly dancing. Save for her shivering.
More animated: “Come on now, girl, let’s go. You wanna go?”
Still, she sits there. Maybe she can sense the desperation. Dogs don’t really respond to all that. Either way, I know it is only a matter of time before someone sees me and calls the cops. Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe they’ll let the owner know she’s breaking the law. But what’s more likely is I’ll be hit with trespassing. What’s more likely is I’m an asshole. I panic, beckon the dog once more.
Nothing doing.
I cuss and run back into the road, hoping she will follow. Yet she just keeps staring at me with that hopeless expression, the kind that puts you in mind of Sarah McLachlan.
***
I swore off drinking after I was arrested. Swore off anything “bad,” really. I had fucked up, and I needed my due penance. I decided to cool it. That lasted for about two weeks. My license had been suspended until I was to have my day in court, so I walked the few blocks from my mama’s house to this new taproom uptown. By myself. My drinking pace went like the Bible: One beer begat another, and so on and so forth. I got hammered. People came and people went.
At one point the bartender, with whom I was friendly enough, came up to me and said, “You realize you’ve had eight 7% beers, right?”
“What can I say?” I said. “I’m not a cheap date.” Or some other equally bad joke.
He laughed out of pity, wiped the other end of the bar.
My lawyer, a good ol’ boy from out to Enochville who claimed he specialized in DWI, hell, he’d had a DWI, said one time he saw an angel after his dad had shot hisself in the face while putting the gun back in the truck on a hunting trip. I wanted to see an angel, too. I wanted one to sit on that stool right next to me. Unleash me from my hate. Turn me from it. But I just fell asleep with my head in my arms until I was told to go home.
I went home, but it took a few years for me to wake up. Now I harm myself in different ways–– like running past that damn dog every day. And would you know it, she still lazes there in that yard, on that chain, and you’d think I was a dummy the way she looks at me. I’ve even filed a report, but the authorities haven’t done nothing. Maybe it’s for the best. What good would a meaningless fine or a warning do, if things only stayed the same? That’s not what I want.
I want to ask the dog what’s her name. I want to know if she likes belly rubs like my dogs. I want to ask her why she didn’t come with me. Why she chose pain when she had an alternative. How brown eyes can be so blue. I want to ask her why her nature is ruin. But I think I know the answer to that. Who are you to tell me I don’t?
Matt Starr is from North Carolina.