Jon McLelland
Gone to the Dogs
It had all seemed like such a good idea at the time.
Darren Blevins bent over, put his hands on his knees and leaned his rump against the side of his pickup. He stared at the toes of his work boots and breathed in and out through his nose. That wasn't enough, so he breathed through his mouth, sucking in through his teeth and exhaling through pursed lips, until he had to sit on the asphalt because he thought he'd faint.
Thank God nobody could see him sitting there, on the asphalt behind the abandoned Western Sizzlin' steakhouse, head between his knees now, dizzy and nauseated. It was eighty degrees in the summer night, but Darren was clammy and shaking.
It was a soft, still, moonlit night, and behind the ex-restaurant the frogs in the drainage ditch down the embankment chorused their desire. When the light-headedness and nausea began to ease, his breathing slowed, and Darren leaned his head back against the warm metal of the pickup. Even in the dark, the pearlescent lettering of the decal gleamed along the full length of the truck bed. It gathered in the moonlight and broadcast its message: CHIHWEENIES-R-US ASK ME ABOUT EM!!!
Darren reached for the paper sack on the ground beside him and pulled out a 16-ounce plastic bottle of Coke and a plastic flask of Evan Williams. He opened the Coke bottle, drank a long pull, burped roundly, and poured a third of the bottle's contents onto the pavement. Then he unscrewed the cap of the bourbon and decanted half of it into the Coca Cola. He took three long swallows of the warm, sweet fizz, leaned his head back against the truck again and let the football stadium aroma of bourbon and Coke envelope and settle over him like love. He felt his shoulders begin to relax, felt his face flush, and knew with deepening satisfaction that coming here, with the bourbon and Coke, had been a good idea, had been the right thing to do. He took another long drink from the bottle, burped quietly this time, and emptied the rest of the whiskey into the soda bottle.
He had had to get out of that hospital room, away from the frightening antiseptic smells and the high-pitched beeping of the monitors and the sight of Brenda in that bed with all those tubes and all those bandages. And there was Brenda's sister, Linda, and her husband, Bennie, who wouldn't shut the fuck up, trying to get everybody to hold hands and pray, and the sheriff's deputy, and the man from animal control, and somebody from the fucking game warden's office, for God's sake.
Why the fuck would the game warden care? Were the dogs fucking game now? Or, maybe the game warden was worried the dogs'd eat the deer? Shit, could be. Hell, they could eat fucking cattle. Might be right now. Or, might be eating people. Might be sneaking up on some damn poor bastards right now, out in the dark. But they couldn't sneak. Too loud and too jittery. So people were probably okay. They'd never manage to sneak up on a deer. And they were too stupid. Cows, that'd be the thing. Shit. Why the fucking game warden? Darren took a deep drink from the Coke bottle, swallowed, and took another deeper drink.
In the cab of the truck, Dwayne gave a Woof that sounded like it came from inside an oil drum and began to moan in his sleep. Nobody could explain how a dog that size could make a sound like that. Before all of this shit, Darren had been meaning to call Bose about it, to see if they might could use the Duanes to come up with a new way to make little speakers sound big. Some new kind of woofer. Woofer. Darren snorted. The snort turned into a spreading, slow-motion grin, swelled into a laugh that went all the way to his stomach, and in no time Darren was writhing and roaring against the side of the pick-up. He leaned his head back against the decal-ed side off the truck and laughed a gale into the night sky that momentarily silenced the frogs. The tears streamed down his red face as his abdomen cramped and the laughter tailed off into a drawn-out, high-pitched wheeze. With his head still leaned back against the truck, Darren stared into the sky. Strip-center lights bathed the boggy exhalations of the drainage ditch, hiding the stars with a velvety, navy blue polyester sheen. His vision swam with drunken dizziness, and tears that welled on their own rolled down his face and onto his shirt. His heartbeat rushed in his ears, sudden, fast, and insistent, a pulsing, whooshing white noise counterpoint to the frogs’ unworried rhythm. He breathed in great gulps and the pounding slowed. The rushing in his ears faded, but Darren didn’t notice. The frogs had started back up, but Darren longer heard them. Shit how did it come to this?
Darren’s hands tingled, and his face pulsed like the night was pulling on it. To his left, thirty yards away at the back corner of the parking lot, a pole-mounted light cast its orange glow over the cracked asphalt and broken glass. A single power line tapped it from across the ditch, pulling at the pole so that it leaned back toward the woods. Moths and smaller flying insects swarmed in a tight ball around the light, and bats dove in and out of the swarm, cutting through it in jerky, high-speed arcs. Darren liked nature shows, and the bats reminded him of sailfish slicing through a ball of anchovies. Or wolves chasing caribou. Or the dogs. Chasing anything. Darren set the bottle down and put his hands over his face. His breath caught in his chest, and tears ran down his nose.
With his eyes closed and his body feeling very far away, Darren could see Brenda leaning on her elbow in the bed, her eyes on the sheet between them as she saw the future that their new dog-breeding business would build. They would make it. Chiweenie puppies went for five hundred or even a thousand dollars. They weren’t scared of working. They knew about dogs. It would work. Darren had had tears in his eyes then, too, as he watched her face while she described the future they would have, calling it into being as surely as if she’d been making an incantation. It wasn’t the vision of prosperity that moved him, it was the vision of her. He loved her, and the story of the future she was telling was part of her, and she was telling it with him in it. It could have been a vision of a burger joint or a hardware store or a shop selling harpoons to Eskimos in Alaska, and he would have been just as moved and just as ready to pledge his life to seeing it fulfilled. Darren bumped his head against the side of his truck as the tears streamed down his face. It made a hollow sound and he did it again, harder. And again, and again. It didn’t hurt, but a far-off-seeming part of him called from somewhere that it would hurt later, and that he should stop. He banged it one more time in defiance, the way he would’ve if he’d been sixteen and his brother had told him to stop doing something stupid, and then he stopped. The blood pulsed rhythmically in his ears, and it occurred to him that this must be what a big bell feels like when it stops ringing. There were waves of feeling at the back of his head. Not pain, just waves. He looked at the light and the bugs swarming around it. It pulsed as well, in time with the waves in his head.
The Chihweenies were fine. They were sweet little things, sweeter than either of the breeds they came from, and cuter, which was the main thing for sales. It was like Brenda had said, they couldn’t keep enough of them. They got more breeding pairs and had more litters. And it wasn’t like those places you hear about, Darren knew. Brenda loved them all. Darren had seen All Creatures Great and Small on television as a kid, and Brenda was like those English sheep farmers. She worked hard for those dogs, and loved every one of them. Darren worked with her when he got home in the evening from his job with the Department of Transportation maintenance crew. He could spend all day clearing roadsides, and coming home to work way past dark with Brenda was like getting to go on vacation every day. He didn’t mind any of the work. Brenda the dog farmer was building the future she’d seen projected on the bedsheet between them that first night, and Darren had never felt more gratitude or satisfaction in his life than he did at being included by Brenda in her dream. He could have hosed dog shit off of concrete pads every night until he dropped from exhaustion and never would have minded it one bit.
Linda and her fucking Great Dane.
Darren had never liked Linda. If Brenda was a solid gold coin, Linda was a game token from Chuck-E-Cheese. As much as they looked alike, and as much as Brenda was beautiful to him, Darren had thought Linda was wrong from the first time he met her. Brenda’s lovely delicate face on Linda looked ferrety. Her blue eyes were broken glass, where Brenda’s were deep pools. Her hair was always a shade of too much, whatever color it happened to be, and she laughed short, harsh bursts over mean jokes about people. And she had fucking Bennie, and they had that fucking dog. And Brenda loved her sister. Darren closed his eyes again and blew an angry breath out between his lips.
“It might be worth trying,” Linda had said. Nobody had ever thought of crossing Chihuahuas with Great Danes before, she said. Of course they fucking hadn’t, Darren had thought, but at the time he’d only looked at the ceiling. Brenda wanted her sister to finally be happy, to finally have something work out right, to finally realize what a good person she could be, and how much happier that’d make her. She didn’t have to say any of that, because it had all been said one way or another a hundred different times, after some goddamn dumb-ass thing, or after Linda had been cruel again and cried and apologized and begged forgiveness and said how she just wanted to be like Brenda. Fuck. So he’d just said, “Well, I don’t know,” and then he’d gone along with it and thrown himself into it because Brenda had. And for a while, by God, it looked like it was a great damn idea.
They’d had to work at it for a while, to see what the crosses would produce. (You never know what you’re gonna git, Darren would say, and Linda would say That’s right, Forrest, because she knew that he didn’t like the idea, so she went along with the Gump jokes he made to cover it up.) Great Danes are big, simple, stupid, inbred things. Every damn one of them reminded him of a 1975 Chrysler. But Chihuahuas are complicated. Darren thought that they were mostly so nervous because too much was packed into too little space. Exactly the opposite of a Great Dane. Hell, he'd thought, maybe the Chihuahua blood would fill up the empty space under that oversized hood, and all that space would give the overpacked Chihuahuas the room they needed. Seemed reasonable. Some of the early crosses were too awful to talk about. Most of those died. The worst litter of all was the one that finally had two puppies that showed promise. There were eight altogether, and Darren smothered six of them. He’d cried like a baby and had gone off by himself and gotten drunk then, too, because he was so angry he couldn’t stand it. When the first Duane puppy was weaned, Brenda gave it to him. She slid him onto their bed like a warm rubber water bottle.
Darren took a long, slow breath and let his eyes swerve up the scuffed and filthy back wall of the old steak house. He took another pull at the Coke bottle and felt his body pulsing, but way off, like an ape stuffed in a snow suit, at the far end of a long pipe that he was looking through.
Two more years it took, and all those other puppies. Another man would have made Linda and Bennie deal with the ones that had to be got rid of, but Darren couldn't stand the thought of what they might do to the poor damn things, and Brenda never said, but she loved him that much more for it. And then it was done. They had six pairs of Great Duanes and six of Gihuahuas. And, my god, the sound. You wait, Linda had said, as they stood looking at the dogs in the pens, Two thousand a puppy. More. Darren built new pens for Linda and Bennie. They're yours, he'd said. He'd actually wept in the truck for those dogs as he drove home from Linda and Bennie's place, but he'd done what he had to do for Brenda's sister, and now they'd be free. The Chihweenie business had suffered while he worked to build the new breeds, but in a year or so they'd be back to where they should be. Nothing left but clear work, and he'd make sure Brenda and their dogs were comfortable and happy and safe. No more of that awful shit. And he'd keep his job with the Department, just to be sure of things, unless the Chihweenie business got so good they knew they were set for life. But he wasn't counting on that, and that was fine. He didn't care if the dog business never did more than grocery money, as long as Brenda was happy.
It was all so clear in his mind that he felt like he could touch it. Darren turned his head toward the light pole, and his vision swam, the orange sodium light painting beautiful, lazy swirls across the night, but the vision of that evening was perfectly steady in his mind's eye: Brenda closing the gate of the chain-link pen with her right hand and holding the puppy in her left, turning toward the house and seeing him as he walked toward her. No more complications. He'd worked hard, and made it all go away, and she was happy and he was happy and the dogs were happy and every damn body was happy.
They ate supper and talked about what they'd do. She had the breeding planned out for three seasons. She had rebuilt their website. There was going to be a conference for cross-breeders in Indianapolis next year. They'd learn all kinds of things about how to improve the puppies. Maybe they'd go to a race while they were up there. Indianapolis. Sounded exciting. But mostly he just listened to the music of their conversation. He loved the sound of her voice, and the rhythm of their voices together. The details of what got said were more or less all the same to him. It made him happy.
Dwayne's one great booming Woof was the first he knew of everything coming apart. Darren liked the Duanes. That was one more of the damn things about all of this, he thought, I love the Duanes. No damn way not to. His Duane — Dwayne — like all the others, was way past calm. He was a warm bag of liquid dog. The magic marble sack of dog traits had shaken around inside the breeding pairs of Great Danes and Chihuahuas, and the Duanes had won the lottery. It was the sense of contentment that got you first. Like cats, but without the killer instinct. They were completely content, and they didn’t have a vicious bone in their bodies. Like sloths, but only inert because they were so happy with wherever they were and whatever gravity wanted with them. Of course, the other thing about them was that they seemed not to have any bones in their bodies. Full-grown, they looked like quarter-sized Great Danes, but mostly made of rubber inside, and without the basic wrongness of Great Danes. They never had to live as pony-sized carnivores in constant submission to small, weak masters, and they never had to learn how to not to kill what they loved. Dwayne loved to slide off of things, or be poured out of things. Darren would take him to the church playground, and Dwayne would take turns with the children on the slide. He'd go down forwards or backwards, on his stomach or his back. He'd spill into a sort of puddle at the bottom, and then spring back up, like a Slinky dog, and lope back around to the ladder to go again. And the Duanes kept the Great Danes' bark, note for note, decibel for decibel, just as low, just as resonant, only the sound came from something far too small to make it. Darren told Brenda that watching Dwayne bark was like watching a squirrel sing opera. Darren sometimes wondered whether God made heaven for some really good people by putting their souls in Duanes when they died. He never said it out loud, but he really did wonder it sometimes. But when the bag was through shaking and the Duanes got the good stuff, what the Gihuahuas got was all the rest.
One deep, round woof was all Dwayne gave. It was a quarter to five in the morning, and Darren stood in the kitchen finishing his coffee. Dwayne was a warm, brown pool of unconcern on the pale green vinyl floor. Darren drained the last sip, set the empty cup in the sink, and turned for the back door just as Dwayne lifted his head. Not the way a dog would do it, Dwayne extended his head from the puddle of himself like a snail extending its eye on a stalk. As it rose from the floor, Dwayne’s head rotated toward the door in one too-smooth movement, his liquid ears lifting, his liquid brow furrowing into a series of standing waves. Darren watched as Dwayne stared, motionless, through the kitchen wall. For ten seconds, Dwayne didn't move and neither did Darren. Dwayne pulled one long, whooshing breath in through his nose, swelling as he did like a thick brown balloon, and he barked one time. One booming WOOF, like the sound of a cannon fired from the other side of a bay, but somehow close enough to touch. Just once. Then the ears wilted, the brow flattened, and Dwayne's head subsided into the rest of him, finding its level.
Darren stood staring at Dwayne, waiting to see if he’d give another sign of what he’d heard, but Dwayne only blinked a couple of times, sighed, and went to sleep. Darren opened the back door and stood on the stoop. There was no moon, and the night beyond the kitchen glow was black. Dawn was still too far off for the birds, and he could hear nothing else that he could think might have bothered Dwayne. Could’ve been anything. Deer, possum, coyote. They could all be nearly silent, and Dwayne’s bark would have scared them off or scared them still. Darren patted his pockets to make sure he had his wallet and phone, locked the back door, and headed off to work. Later, of course, it was obvious. The Archangel Dwayne, with a with a bass drum he could only hit once.
He was out with a mowing crew just after seven o’clock, on the sloped bank of a county road half way to Buhl when his phone rang. Darren, was all she said, before the sound of the dogs rose out of the phone like a thing. There was one sharp bang as the phone fell, and the connection broke.
He called 911, and he called Linda. Her voicemail message said You've reached Dynasty Kennels, world-famous developer of the Gihuahua and the Great Duane! We have new litters! Leave us a message!
Darren tilted the Coke bottle back and drank off the last of it. He threw the bottle at the back of the dead steak house, enjoying the slow-motion, liquid-looking path that his bourbon-soaked eyes gave it, and listening to the manic, high-pitched, plastic hollowness as it bounced against the wall and the parking lot. The pitch threw him off balance, and he toppled onto his right side, bumping his cheek on the loose gravel scattered over the asphalt. The horizon bounced with him, and wavered, and he worked with his eyes to hold the swaying orange light at the end of the canted wooden pole. He breathed slowly through his mouth, and the swaying pole steadied, settling into a gentle oscillation, like the light on the end of a sailboat's mast after a big wave has passed and the water has settled down to a gentle background swell. This must be what it's like to be a Duane, he thought, and let himself settle into the pavement, trying to let his body ooze into complete relaxation like a Duane would.
As his eyes closed, his vision passed from the gently bobbing light to the landscape of his mind's eye. He could see in the dark, across the pasture, to where the running shapes came out of the woods. In the monochromatic moonlight, he could see the bouncing, frenetic way that they ran, their huge heads swinging from side to side. In the dream he raised his head from the puddle that he was, and drew a great barrel full of air in through his nose. He would warn them all. He could feel the force of the bark building inside him, rising through the smoothness, gathering in his chest, about to explode. But then, Brenda laid her head against him, and the warm, liquid weight of her drew him into the pool that their two bodies made. He could hear the ravenous quarreling of the Gihuahuas as they crossed the pasture, headed away. Brenda sighed in her sleep and settled more deeply into Darren's side. Let them go. Darren relaxed his chest and let the air stream from his nose. Let them go.
Jon McLelland is an architect during the day, and runs a small practice with offices in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee. Besides writing, his other part-time gig is teaching seminars on Sustainability at the University of Alabama. He and his wife (who did not know each other growing up) both left their birthplaces expecting never to return, she toward Asia and he for Europe. They have since returned to the American South, a Möbius strip of weirdness, banality, kindness, cruelty, and wonder (and more weirdness). He has previously published in RUST Keepers, Every Day Fiction, Defenestration, The Bacopa Literary Review, and Drunk Monkeys.
