Big Dead White Dogs

 

Kim Shable

 

            Right before he did it, he dragged me outside to see his car, all smashed in around the bumper. Tufts of white fur stuck out of the plastic, and some blood, not too much. Enough.

            “A deer?” I asked, kicking a brown bottle under the tires of the car next to his.

            “A dog, man. A motherfucking dog.”

            “Must have been a big dog.”

            He squatted in front of the bumper and stroked the fur. I looked around—I remember this, because it was the night of the Phi Psi party. What if the Phi Psis see you petting this car, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Good thing, I guess, although it didn’t really matter in the end. “It just came. Out of nowhere,” he said. “I got out and checked it for tags or whatever. I kind of hoped it wouldn’t have any. But it did.”

            “What did you do?” The parking lot was empty, just full of cans and discarded brown bags, garbage, everywhere, garbage. The power station across the street hummed. I remember all this.

            “About what?”

            “The dog. The tags.”

            He shook his head. “I got back in the car and drove away.”

            “You didn’t take it to the owner?” I imagined him putting the dog in the back of his Civic, carrying it like an offering to the front door of its owner’s house. There would be kids in that house, I thought.

            “Fuck, no, man. I didn’t know what to do. I pushed it onto the side of the road. Into a ditch. And I drove away.”

            “Forget it,” I said. “Can we go inside?”

            “I should go back,” he said.

            “Jerry, forget it. It was just a stupid dog, right? Forget it.”

            So we went back to my room. Everyone else was in the lobby, watching Bobby drink. Bobby could drink like no one I’d ever seen, full fifths in twenty minutes, sometimes less, depending on his mood, depending on the RA on duty. I remember Bobby, but I doubt he remembers me.

            “What kind of dog was it?” I asked.

            “I don’t know. A white one. A big, motherfucking dog.” He laid on my futon with his hands over his eyes, rubbing, trying to erase his face. “I just couldn’t fucking believe it, you know? After everything else, this big white dog.”

            Jerry Montenero’s life was a string of travesties. The girls he liked didn’t like him. The girls that liked him were too ugly, too fat, too something. He had just broken up with this one girl, Audrey Hill, like two weeks before. She wasn’t half bad, I guess. Kind of round. Liked clowns. She always wore this one sweatshirt, appliquéd, clowns and balloons and shit. I tried to tell him, women that like clowns are no good. But he was still mooning over it. The tragedy. The horror. The whore.

            “You make everything such a big deal,” I told him. I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at him, my hands clasped between my knees. I looked like a psychiatrist, maybe. “It was one dog. It’s not the end of the world.”

            “It’s not just the dog, Doug. It’s everything. It’s every goddamned thing in the whole fucking world. I swear to God, I could just fucking die right now and everything would be fine.”

            “Whatever. You’re such a queer, you know that?”

            He sat up. “What? I’m serious, man. Seriously. If I had a gun right now, I’d just blow myself away.”

            I laughed. “If I had a gun right now, I’d blow myself away. You are such a puss. Where did you hear that, one of your mom’s made-for-TV movies?”

            He didn’t answer.

            I remember this.

            So I went to my underwear drawer and got it, the gun, this gun my dad had given me when I was like seventeen. I snuck it on campus in a paper bag, it was easy, like it was a sixer or something. I never used it. It had never been used. I didn’t even know if it worked. But it made me feel like someone, like someone with a gun. I threw it onto the futon next to him, tilted my chin at it, cocky, cocked.

            “Fine, then. Puss. You want to do it so bad? Do it. Come on.”

            What he was supposed to say was motherfucker, you can’t have that piece of shit on campus! What if the RA finds it? You want to get suspended, you fucking queer?

            But instead he stuck it under his chin and he did it. Blew his brains right out. The bullet went through the popcorn ceiling and into this one jock’s leg. The jock cried, I heard. I didn’t cry. I had blood all over me, all over my shit, and brain and bone and it smelled and suddenly everyone was there, in the doorway, pushing and crowding, and someone pounded on my back and I told them I don’t know, he had the gun with him when he got here, I didn’t even know what was wrong, I turned my back and goddamn it, he was dead, and I left school and never went back.

 

            That was six years ago.

 

            I’m twenty-six years old, and I’ve never kissed a girl, unless you count Marissa, which I don’t. I guess it was supposed to happen in college, maybe, maybe after sophomore year, maybe at a party, or on a walk downtown, where I would stop in front of the Candy and Nut Shoppe and take her hand and say I think you’re really special, and then she would lean in and I would lean in and it would happen. Maybe. But it never did.

            Marissa did it on a dare. She was drunk and we were at the Wagon Wheel, singing karaoke. There was a man with a ponytail, a real skinny guy, I don’t get what the ladies saw in him, singing “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Like he was really the Reverend Al Green. It sounded good, but I’d seen him at Wal-Mart wearing a welder’s cap, and still he had these bitches around him, lined up, screaming like he was Elvis. If I could sing. Then they would kiss me. Maybe.

            Marissa and Jay and The Guy From Work and I were all sitting at this one table, a small table, meant for two, right in front of the request booth. A woman who looked and sang like Janis Joplin squatted back there, calling out names and riling up the crowd, drinking Jack. The Guy From Work was totally plowed.

            “Never?” he said, squinting at me, like I had said I never brushed my teeth or crapped. “You never kissed a girl?”

            “Just missed out,” I said.

            “You’re not trying.” Jay drank his beer open-mouthed, letting some spill onto his blazer. “If the Reverend over there can get a lady, so can you. So can fucking anyone.”

            “Girls don’t want me. I’m like a big bar of girl poison.”

            “I’d kiss you,” Marissa said.

            “Whatever.”

            “Do it, then,” The Guy From Work hooted, pushing her.

            “Not now,” she said. “When the time was right.”

            “No,” he said, pushing her again, harder. “Do it now. Right now. I dare you.”

            So she slung her shoulders back, her boobs rocketing forward like Cuban missiles pointed at my Bay of Pigs, and kissed me, hard, once. Her tongue was coated, flopped like a dying fish in my mouth. I grabbed her hair because it was the only thing I could think to do, and she made this noise—this bark, kind of, but she didn’t stop, and our teeth clacked together, and finally she pulled away.

            “How was it?” The Guy From Work asked.

            She looked at me. “Like kissing my brother,” she said.

 

            That was two years ago.

 

            So a chart of my love life would look like this:

0-24: Nothing                                    24: Got kissed on dare           24-26: Fucking nothing

            And this is not good enough. This is not what I deserve. It’s not like I raped babies in a former life. Not like I gave poisoned milk to school children. Not like I orchestrated genocide from an underground bunker, sipping gin while cities burned. Or maybe I did. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But still, come on.

            Everyone I knew was getting married. The Guy From Work, Jay. This Other Guy From Work. Not Marissa, but I didn’t really talk to her anymore, not since the kiss, she just avoided me like I had ball rash or something. But I knew she was getting some, I could see it on her. I tried dating, asking girls out at bars, at picnics, at weddings, at funerals. I started going to church, joining singles groups. I usually went out with girls once, or if we went out more than once, they would end the second, third, fourth date by saying “You’re just so easy to talk to, like having a big brother around all the time.”

I ironed my pants, I brought you flowers. Would your brother do that for you?

            So when I picked up the personals, I looked for the bad girls. I looked for the divorced girls, the girls who said they dug adventure, danger. If I had to resort to the personals, I thought, I might as well go for the damaged ones and skip the heartbreak.

            I remember the day I found her ad. I remember this. I was sitting at my kitchen table in my underwear, drinking black coffee because my milk was spoiled. It was cold, winter, but no snow. My arms were pimply. My chest caving in. I had a red pen in my hand. I was going to find true love like this, in my underwear at five in the morning.

            SWF, enjoys doing naughty things. Are you naughty enough?

            Yes, I thought. I am.

            So I called her box and left a message. Someone should have painted it, me, sitting there in my underwear, holding the phone between pocked shoulder and unshaven chin. I was Doug, and I was naughty. Call me, naughty woman. Call me now.

           

            She did, two days later. Her voice was low enough to be a man’s, and her name was Wanda. When she called about a date, she sounded bored, said I could take her out if I wanted to. I wanted to. So I picked her up at her office the next day after work.

            She was waiting outside, smoking a cigarette and wearing a puffy winter coat, pink with white piping. Her hair was short and kinked. I pulled along beside her and rolled down the window. She approached like a whore.

            “You Wanda?” I asked.

            “Doug?” She opened the car door and got in. There was no so pleased to meet you, no I’ve been looking forward to this. She just got in, and we drove away. It was already dark.

            “Where are we going?” I asked her, diddling with the radio.

            “The movies, first, I thought,” she said.

            “What do you want to see?”

            “Doesn’t matter.”

            “Then why don’t we just go to dinner?”

            “I’d rather go to the movies. First.” She played with the buttons on her armrest, making the window go up, down, making her seat rocket forward, back.

            I inspected her at a stop light, where the glow of a street lamp froze her in a camera flash. Her skin was dark, and her legs were thick, not fat, really, but solid, as if they contained no bones, just concrete flesh. I imagined there must have been more of the same under the piped jacket. On her face, the look of a girl who’s been kidnapped, but it just stayed there, all the time, settled in and threw down pillows under her wide eyes. This girl was not naughty. This girl was my sister.

            We pulled into the theater and parked in the back row, scrunching on salt pellets and half-digested tar black snow piles as we walked up to the front. There was a much better spot in the third row, but she told me to drive on by, to park in the back. She wanted the air, she said. She wanted the walk. I thought she might grab my arm as we picked our way to the candy-colored lights of the lobby, slip hers through mine like a woven loop, but she crammed her hands in her pockets and huffed forward, a few steps behind me.

            “What do we see?” I asked her. “Lady’s choice.”

            She stared up at the board, leered at the famous, prettier faces that leered back at her. “What is everyone else going to see?” she asked the cashier.

            “Foreign Bodies,” he told her. He was a freckled mass, his neck curling over the edges of his top-button-done collar. “It’s a love story.”

            “Then that’s what we want,” she said, and paid for the tickets before I could stop her.

            “I heard that movie was awful,” I whispered to her as we walked toward our theater. She tucked my ticket into my hand and didn’t listen.

            “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We won’t be seeing all of it.”

            When we got inside, I wanted a seat in the middle of the theater, but she insisted on one to the side, where the jelly glow of the emergency exit slathered us. She looked even less attractive now, painted red like a cow town, but for the first time all night she smiled, and put her hand on my knee, fingers splayed. I covered it.

            “Are you ready for some fun?” she asked me. The previews began and ended, and they were all about love, true love, hard-won love, doomed love. She wasn’t watching them at all, but worked her fingers in a circle around my kneecap. I tried to lace my fingers with hers, but she shook them off.

            “When does the fun start?” I asked. The movie was beginning, and the theater was silent. A woman in front of us already had a tissue out. Just in case. It was one of those kinds of movies.

            “Wait,” she said. She still wasn’t looking at the screen. “Wait.”

            Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed. Her hand had crept to the inside of my thigh, but then stopped, rested there, a world-weary traveler. I slipped my arm around her, omitted the yawn and stretch, just dropped it there against her shoulders, but she leaned forward and it slipped, and I retracted it.

            About a half hour in, she smoothed her skirt and looked around. On screen, a beautiful man and a handsome woman were standing on a dock together, their backs to the crystal sea, careening into love. The rest of the audience was enraptured.

            “Are you ready?” she said.

            “For what?”

            She looked around again. “Something naughty?”

            I imagined it for just a moment: a theater blow job, here, secluded, in a side row, yes, it was happening, yes, it was going to happen, right here, right now, yes, yes, yes. I spread my legs a little, leaned back. Yes, yes yes yes. But instead she grabbed my hand and yanked me from my seat, looked around once more, and kicked open the emergency exit. An alarm sounded. The movie stopped. And then, we were outside.

            “That was it?” I asked. “That’s your something naughty?”

            She was breathing heavily, her hands in her hair. I looked around. We were on a blacktop, abandoned. Old boxes broken down flat and moldering. Butts from no-name cigarettes. And us. She had brought us out on the other side, a place I’d never seen before.

            “We’ve got to hurry,” she said, and grabbed my hand. We ran around to the front of the theater and joined the crowd that had assembled outside, people from Foreign Bodies, grumbling and cold. Stamping their feet.

            “They wanted a love story,” she said. “Now they’ve got the real thing.”

            The people were irritated. They wanted to go home. They wanted their money back.

            The real thing.

 

            Later, at dinner, we talked through mouthfuls of calzone.

            She told me of emergency exits in libraries. Shopping malls. Museums. The museums were especially fun. Big groups of school kids, their teachers trying to corral them. Antsy shoves, one always left his bookbag inside. Restaurants. Like this one.

            “But not tonight,” she said. “Once is usually enough. In a night.”

            I tried to think back. Had I ever been in a restaurant when an alarm went off? A movie? Had I filed out the door with the rest, with a sisterdate, huffed and hoped there really was a fire? Had she been there the whole time?

            “It’s like a suicide, every time,” she said. “You take the easy way out, and there’s a panic. It’s like watching your own funeral.”

            “And that sounds fun to you?”

            “I get my kicks where I can.”

            “I had a buddy who killed himself,” I told her.

            “Yeah?” She forked hot bread, pepperoni into her mouth. “Over what?”

            “He hit a dog.”

            “Like what, with a stick?”

            “With his car.”

            “And that was all?”

            “I think there was more.”

            Under the florescent lights she glowed, ugly, like a broken neon sign. Her skin was uneven. I reached for her hand. “What do you want more than anything in the world?” she asked.

            “I want my headlights to be brighter than everyone else’s.”

            “That’s it?”

            “When I’m on the road, I feel like everyone else has got these floodlights, right? And I’ve got a candle.”
            “You want to be noticed, then,” she said.

            “No. I just want to be able to see.” She considered this, picking apart the last of her calzone. “What do you want?”

            “To be special,” she said. “Are you a virgin?”

            “Yes.”

            She nodded. “Me, too.”

            We sat in silence, then ordered more beer, then dessert. She paid.

            “You want to have sex?” I asked. I didn’t. Want to. But I did. I was tired, tired of being the only one, the only man in America who kept his dick encased in glass, with a hammer to free it in case of emergency.

            She looked at her watch. Nodded. “Let’s go.”

In the car, I thought: tonight, tonight. I imagined her bra, made of scratchy material. Her breasts underneath like the feet of panty hose, stuffed with cottage cheese. Or maybe not. Maybe solid, thick, something I could rest my head on. I would know what to do. It would come like a math problem I never thought I’d get, but then it would hit me. She would know what to do. We would. My mouth on her mouth, her throat, her breasts, her belly, and down. I would know what to do when I got there. I would remember it from that other life. She would throw her head back and moan, tell me good, yes, more, um. When she touched me, I wouldn’t flinch. It would start like magic. I thought of a mechanical bull ride, though I had never done that, either. But maybe that would be the way. Or maybe she would yawn, and I would yawn, and we would talk politics until I came, and then we’d lay in her bed, an island in a sea of cast-off clothes. We were coming in one way and going out another.

            On the road, diligent people had already discarded their bagged trash for the next day’s pick up.

            “I wish there were a better way to get rid of this shit,” she said, eyeing the white bags as we drove past. “It seems foul, leaving your trash out for everyone to see.”

            The bags wavered in my candle-thin headlights. Twitching, their ties erect and dancing in the wind, like the angular legs of a dog on its back. Big dead white dogs, stacked neatly at the end of every driveway. The last things we saw before everything changed.