Benjy was sick again. Still half-asleep, moaning and snuffing in the back of the cab. The heat was stomach-breath and total and my truck was old and the drive felt like a return to a tangible hell of pure suffering and speed generally unheard of in modern times. To me, I guess.
I knew she was sick despite and even through her low atavistic murmurs. She needed some real air and I had no water so I pulled off the big road then off a little road to the dirt side of a field of early summer wheat across from a modest Amish residence and on a forest’s edge: the kind of pristine, adventurous landscape fit for daringness or docility, and where was her bowl her fucking bowl again with this. I got out of the truck and searched the cab and the bed loaded hunched and sagging with all my worldly possessions—no dice.
I poured half of my large Frost Blue Zero Sugar Gatorade into a small plastic Tupperware container formerly the host of a large assortment of plastic silverware and woke her up with a firm hand on the belly. It’s not easy for dogs to sleep in cars, let alone the heat, Jesus. The plastic was like a mock ocean and she sniffed it, panting still.
You go on I said. Go on.
With assurance, she lapped it up quickly, gratefully, or even without emotion at all. Or with something simpler still, an unfailing will from which in our extrapolations we derive the strange, lesser feelings we understand to constitute a life. She finished it all and got dirt on my shoes. She urinated a deep sulphuric yellow and set to running. I wasn’t worried about the heat. I had half the bottle left.
I sat sideways in the passenger seat with the door open, the baked cloth heat of the cab transferring seamlessly to the wide heat of the angled earth, wide bright heat like the sky and what’s above it. Just hearing the truck low and murmur heavily like quieted cattle, furiously inert in its great steel potential. I had been driving for five hours straight. The state should have been an easy drive; it was only across the state. A state is one thing permanent and delineated, and therefore seven hours across one state is seven hours continuous, unbroken. But the heat and the dog sickness. But look how she runs across the field now, unfazed as dogs are, deerlike and horselike in her shambling, leggy trot. Dogs are like that.
I saw her impotent yet rigorous, chasing phantom rustlings and creatures that take to flight. She was like that, undeterred, her vestigial life rich in useless frenzy. Some obverse and ignorant fumbling somehow distinctly unpathetic, even noble. So I thought. She shat next to a telephone pole on the road. The invisible danger never leaves because all of your ancestors were killed by the one thing which you will never face.
She loped away again, alert and self-centered, in abnegation of her own servility, domesticated only in bliss. I watched her and thought how nice it would be if she could run in the field all day under my watchful eye and guidance but without my hand or person. Running, vaulting in spite of time, circumstance, and repression, chasing the dumb and the minor creatures of the earth. Sleeping fat and belly-up in the long and breathlessly hot nights, the forest sibilant with little life and little earth.
Go on I called. Good girl. She did not turn.
But there was the heat of the day, and I shifted in the seat and knew that dream would not last. She would be sick again in the back of the cab. Her vitality drained. Dreaming again, kicking, snuffling, haunted by the grave import of the little creatures and following dimly the code of her blood, unthinking and ill-equipped.
Her and I traveling in the baked metal husk which runs on something outmoded and intangible, flying down the road I’ve chosen. I her owner but she unobeying and giddy in her submission.
Dog the unanimal of animal man. Man unanimal but I still look for women’s underwear on the Amish clothesline across the street. Hanging out there on the side of the house like it’s nothing. Something small and weightless waiting for a body. And the women in the houses curtainless. Chaste in their immodesty.
And the fucking dog bowl. I know where I left it. Lower left cabinet, of course. She was running faster now across the field, farther from view, movement preceding body. For the first time I became really afraid she would die. She could, she easily could. It seemed improbable, even, that she would not die. How tenuous, how heat-stroked the day and the earth. How fragile and necessity-driven and generally labored and impossible life really is.
Benjy I called out, my voice not rising from spoken tone.
So many items for life, and where did I leave them. I left the bowl in the lower left cabinet by the Dentastix, the “dog cabinet.” I left her sitting there, face crumpled in that lumpy armchair, still not crying. Just hoarsely verbalizing and breathing and shoring herself up again to scream and insult, to put me in my place. And it, well, fuck if I know where she left it. Flushed, gone, biohazarded. Flippers and heartbeat yet unsexed, weak and barely lifeless. On the earlier side of death still undeath but not life, please not life. Separated from us the living by a warm sheet unopaque and blowing, its form yet unhinted and cursory, hers, his.
There were the unlived and the dead, and then us who do live in the world, who feel the code and the message of life and seek to live it by various means of repressions, substitutions, and numbing agents. Chasing nothing-creatures, feckless, with no possibility for blood or triumph, and death to run out time in the end. Growing slowly sloven and gelded. We bide time as we mount the other phantoms living among us, the rubber and the waste fertile with our unhurried seed. Humping PetSmart beds. Well, dogs are like that.
I looked up from the ground and out across the field and I couldn’t see her anymore. My skin was hot to the touch and I could not stop feeling it. I stood up. I felt like her now, scanning for the rustling of life in the brush, watching for the darting blur, ocular remnants of motion. I did not see her. I thought she was going to die. I felt like her watching as I had felt like her so many times before. I felt like both of them.
Of course I knew what had been going on in her head and why she did the things she did, and I hated her for that old human bite of ineffectual evil but of course I loved her for it in the end. I tried to tell her that I knew but of course she did not believe me but knew it was true and then hated me for that too. We’re like that. All of that trouble and then finally for me to be punished for the most natural in the world, the reason for life—for creating something and not wanting it to be destroyed. But of course what would I do if it was not. And presently I found myself running after Benjy, or where I thought she might have gone.
To the end of the field and back, around the forest perimeter, the sky cracked white stone baking above me dripping and drooling as I began to run faster and then call, hysterical and unvoiced, Benjy! The last vowel long like a cry, an exaggerated shriek of a mindless child.
Ben-geeeeee. Calling that little boy’s name she gave to her like a joke when we first saw her, puppy-blind and stumbling suckling, unsexed and so therefore attached to her mother’s. Benjy, short for nothing, bouncing vowels and elastic consonants, slinging like a rubber band out of the mouth hoarse and bellowed, and if she heard it it meant nothing to her. I just love when dogs have odd little human names she said at the time. Like Rupert. But its Benjy like bungee jump. It’s cute she said and I said nothing.
After yelling again I stopped and I felt silly, like a baby. I was exhausted, and a dull ache rang in my head and at my ears.
Where is she, I wondered. That bitch. Where is she. A slow anger shored itself against me, purposeful and armed. Fear and anger were tied up in the same things. Because at a certain point you’re honest with yourself that you’re the master here… biological drives and affection aside, you’re the master here, and more than anything this is an act of open and flagrant rebellion. That bitch.
The anger stilled me, made my heavy stride graceful and deliberate and loping, my feet hurled along by the dry earth, back towards the road and my truck and the heat. My eyes were steady. And the world rewarded me for my righteous wrath and I saw a glimpse of her, small and the color of clay, on the other side of the street, darting blurry behind the squat Amish house. Maybe they were Mennonites.
So I ran. I could have leapt across the road in a single vault. Even my breathing had grown quiet now, measured, undifferentiated.
It takes a steady hand in times of panic and uncertainty. It takes absolute clarity and undivided effort. That bitch. And I, forever undermined in my path towards a glorious future, of my clear intentions, with myriad distractions, objections, hystericisms, consternations. The sky was white. And I have never laid my hand on a woman, ever. But I have also not destroyed a life. Her just sitting there in that same armchair black hair smoldering, reproachful, ununderstanding and wall-like. I’m sorry I was not neutered and you not spayed, I’m sorry I said.
But I did not say that. What I really said was I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I love you and I support anything you choose. I am a supporter of you as a person. I’m so sorry. And then there was silence and she looked at me with her eyes squinted and her face tilted as she did sometimes and said the same.
But then in the weeks to come it was silence and sulking until even I couldn’t stand it so we tried to talk again, right? And she lays some Hills Like White Elephants shit on me. But I knew what she was saying. She said your life is not your own you know, she said it’s just you it’s just your failure.
And at a certain point the words could not even be terse and vague because the words never came. Only gestures pained and planned. Then the road between us was closed and I realized it was never founded upon anything really. We failed to build upon it in turn. There were only empty facades, prefabricated edifices for our unancient lives, erected mercilessly, their dereliction guaranteed. What was natural was destruction.
But I did not say that. What I really said was I’m sorry and I love you and what did she say. And so my flight and the pilgrimage and the back-of-the-cab sickness and the heat.
Even the heat on my body I must bring with me as I go, melting my rubber boots and searing my polyester clothes. My hair steamed. Even the heat I brought with me, heat the old father, the giver of life, maybe. I kept running.
I passed my truck and crossed the road and ran across the yard towards the side of the little gnomish home. I rounded the corner and passed under the clothesline. Up and over my head there was the sky and the burning garments made out of seemingly the same stuff. Here was the bright clean smell, and the touch, the dainty air-like touch of a dress above an ocean.
And my anger did not abate but no longer thrust forward slavering about the world. I was alone and it became an anger against that. The next things seemed to happen more chronologically than our antithetical lives often do.
I saw a porch extending behind the house. It was an old squat, mud-like thing with no railing and but one-foot naked clearance above the dark earth and what’s beneath.
Then, a woman exited the plain back door of the house and stepped upon the porch slowly, quizzical, beautiful. She was a Mennonite I’m sure now. It was plain through her face. Like a fresh face off a city bus. And she looked at me first strangely in my fury and had something like pity and duty all wrapped up together and betrayed by her solid eyes and colonial face. She had quick steps and determinably made her way towards me, somehow grossly large in my anger and desperation. It was like going through puberty. She looked to be about a decade older than me. But before I could meet the woman resolutely descending the two porch steps, staring alarmingly at me, I saw Benjy, in an instant, like arithmetic.
Her tail, wagging madly in the thin recess under the porch, about four feet in. The squatting figure of her short-haired fervor. Her haunches up and the back of her small head plunging into the earth and the dark beneath the porch, her whole body crammed and rustling and writhing, sounds emitting.
So, getting all confused in my head about anger and sadness, I ran now towards the porch because I had to see her and her villain face, to see how she’d answer now that I had her, I really had her. I leapt over my own self and went running across the back of the house beneath the gleaming windows and stopped just beneath the last step where the woman now stood and I dropped to my hands and knees beside her and commenced soldier-crawling in the terrible dark of the day and the old secret cool rank of enclosed earthen spaces. In the weak light I saw her and she made no attempt to escape just digging her head into something in the earth with her back to me and her tail wagging. Her body like grey bread in the darkness.
The thing that always occurs to me did then. That she has absolutely no idea what she is doing and is happy for the opportunity. That she has no capacity for evil. That even in her cruelty she is enthusiastic and social and forgiven. That there were no secrets in her heart only the drive and the light and that is why she is adored. But by this point I was already on my belly again facing the other way, crawling towards the thin silver horizon of the day and the heat again which I had not even realized was no longer there, pulling Benjy out not by her collar which she still wore but by the loose skin around her neck, plucking her like from heaven. Dragging her wriggling but mechanical as if her resistance was a blood machine and not the will.
Come on I said. Go ahead and come on now. Come on. Benjy said nothing. Come on.
When I came up out from under the porch, I would not let go of her but had no leash so I held her scruff up like men might a briefcase fifty years ago, her head bowed and panting. Wild. Two things I saw upon rising. First, I saw that the woman, who had not left her post beside the porch stairs, had hands supremely laden with dirt. Deep set dirt in the creases. It surprised me, what with the clean laundry and the clean face and her smell, the full odor of the evening earth freshly summered, a whole perfumed forest where you understand some of the ancient things. But they, her hands, were filthy. I realized I was one to talk, with the invisible vectors of cobwebs showering my head and the whole front of my body smeared in moist earth and sweat burning my eyes, and the state of my dog too, filthy, which got me looking at her and onto the second thing.
She’d been eating something under that porch. Maybe a rabbit. She looked up at me through my tight grip on her scruff, her muzzle matted with ugly unglinting flat blood, her eyes native and inscrutable and I already knew this, but I knew then too that I could not hate her for it I could not hate her for anything. She seemed in good spirits. From destruction pleasure.
I looked up at the woman then and I felt ashamed of my impoliteness more than anything. I had not spoken to her yet. I had acted brash and crudely. Where had I gotten my manners from? Decency is the only thing that carries people along in this world. So, filthy, holding Benjy tightly, her eyes darting across the yard again looking for the little creatures as they would until she died, I first said I’m sorry, and then the other words came.