Geiger Counter

A mangy dog story   Every year I try to write about a stray dog.  It was 20 years ago, in Alabama. We were staying with my girlfriend’s family for the holidays, and we saw the miserable creature trotting down the side of a lonely, gothic country road one morning, through a haze. She looked like an extra in “The Walking Dead.” Her coat was nearly gone, the skin gnarled and blotted by mange. Her xylophone ribs insisted on the edges of the body. She seemed, and I didn’t even know this was physically possible until then, to be limping on all four legs. I couldn’t tell if her coat had been brindle, or if it was simply striped by scars and dried mud.  We sped off and pulled into a nearby gas station, where I trotted in and purchased some Alpo, the kibble the same gaudy colors as children’s cereal. In those days, to live was to bob in a sea of moral and philosophical inconsistencies, too physically powerful to be children, yet too confused to be adults. We were on break from college and work, with nothing to study, no homes or children to tend to, and no careers over which to fret. We would gather, in the deep south, and spend nights sitting under pecan trees or on a giant trampoline that was a reminder that not too long ago, these bleary-eyed people, their hands clasping cold bottles of watery beer, had been little children, leaping and tumbling in the sunlight. But now, we had learned of politics, and money, and we instead swayed gingerly on the bounce mat, its black fabric cluttered with dead leaves and dotted with round burn holes, in the dark of night.  These days, I sometimes wonder if the real reason little children have early bedtimes is that these later hours are also the ones where many of the worst worries and fears dwell. But those nebulous monsters tend to stay away when you gather with friends around a fire.  One night, we lit a massive blaze, as if to recreate the illumination of childhood. We sat on the bed of a rusty white Toyota pickup truck, in the morning discovering one of the taillights had melted and dripped, then hardened again in the early morning chill, like a big red candle had been held over the back of the vehicle. Another night, our dog, a heterochromian Argentine mastiff, caught a possum and dropped its carcass at our feet as we stood in a circle. Our dog, who had been a stray and who would fight almost to the death with my girlfriend’s obese hound whenever someone forgot to shut a door or gate during the holiday season, dropped the obscene-looking mess of an animal and trotted away, proudly. As she disappeared into the nearby trees, the possum, like a modern, ugly Lazarus, slowly stood up, looked around, its face remarkably serene, and trotted under the house. I awed at how effective taking a nap could be when literally clenched in the jaws of death.  I sometimes wonder what happened to all those friends. One of my favorites stabbed someone who probably deserved it, I heard, then went to jail for a while. But who knows how reliable those accounts are, or even whether my memories of those stories can be trusted? When I used to peruse social media, I sometimes saw some of them, holding small children or vacationing with spouses, but most simply vanished.   The night before Thanksgiving, everyone from my girlfriend’s house gathered at a sprawling bar that seemed to be constructed entirely of ancient gray wood and burlap sacks. It was called Judge Roy Bean’s, a goat lived there, and it oozed lovely southern atmosphere. Atmosphere is not fire retardant, though, since you could accurately describe most of the building materials there as “kindling,” I read years later that the place burned down one morning and was not surprised. When asked if they would ever rebuild or re-open, the owner, who may or may not have been aware of his deft play on words - was quoted as saying it probably wouldn’t make sense to start again, because you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.  One vacation, my girlfriend and her parents went on vacation to Alaska. Showing what I considered a pretty disappointing lack of judgement, they left me in charge of their home and pets. In their absence, our friend Marlena and I decided, on a whim, to drive to New Orleans. Neither of us owned a car, so we borrowed one from someone else. From a friend who, it turned out, was generous in spirit but poor in the reliable car department. What the vehicle lacked in reliability, however, it more than made up for in aesthetics and the ability to conjure a more-than-standard level of excitement during what should have been a fairly normal drive.  A bad car can make a great amusement park ride.  One of the sedan’s chief attributes was the tendency to turn off its headlights whenever we went over a bump, or around a bend, or accelerated, or decelerated, or maintained any particular speed for pretty much any period of time. As we shuttled down the nocturnal road on the way home, Marlena at the wheel, we would be periodically plunged into darkness. Each time it happened, we would experience small heart attacks, then she would switch them back on, lighting up the world around us and showing how far we had gone astray, and how far we had come, in the darkness. That moment, when she flicked the lights back on, the world that revealed itself before us was alien and beautiful, racing at us in the night. It was yet another reminder that not being able to see things does not mean they have actually gone away. Smashing into a pine tree at 50-miles-an-hour hurts just as much in the dark as it does in the light of day. Halfway to New Orleans, we realized we had forgotten to bring a collar or leash for the dog. We stopped at a veterinary clinic and got a cheap one, then carried on our way. There, we sat at a café for a bit, then headed home in the dark. For some reason, I remember greatly enjoying a terrible gas station hamburger on the trip. We did not turn off the car when we went in, because we worried it would not start again. Like an elderly person who does not want to go to sleep for fear their well of mornings has run dry.  That other morning, the morning we saw the mangy dog, my girlfriend and I turned around, the Alpo in tow, and tried to find it. We creeped up a steep, winding road that led to a mobile home community, where a group of young men were barbecuing. I got out and asked them if they had seen a sick dog go by, and they said yes.  “That dog is bait,” they said, pointing to a group of big-jawed, bow-legged bullies on chains nearby. “We set our dogs on that dog for practice.  That dog is bait.” “Leave it alone,” they added. “You don’t want to mess with it. It’s got the mange.” We never found her. All we could do, which was silly, was pour a pile of Alpo on the side of the road, hoping she might find it if the possums and racoons didn’t devour it first.  We went home and ate, sitting inside a warm house, filled with love and sweet, fatty foods, while the pecan trees and the trampoline waited in the autumn air. We were happy and well fed by food and holiday ritual.  Many years later, I had another ritual. I would sit down, annually, and try to write a story about the dog. Each year, I started out hoping the narrative would lead to some kind of conclusion or lesson. Hoping the power of storytelling could unveil the meaning in that sad, lonely creature and its pathetic trot down an Alabama road. Each year, I started, then gave up. No lesson ever revealed itself.  This year, I realized Bait is long dead. Even if she had been a pampered, healthy household pet, the kind whose owners dressed her in sweaters when the wind turns cool and fed her organic diets free of various ingredients free of cereal grains and food coloring, she would still be dead. Her life, even if it had been a comfortable and long one, would be over, anyway. Fifty years from now, someone could think the same thing about me. “It doesn’t matter; he’d be dead now, anyway.” So, perhaps that is the lesson. That there is no lesson, but that our stories deserve telling, nonetheless. Because you can’t remember something sad without calling to mind a feast of rich, visceral memories, so vivid they make you ache as you recall them, of possums and trampolines and trees and voyages in the dark night through the southern darkness. That dog’s story is sad, but sad stories are often beautiful, too. And when we remember and share the moments we carry, it feels a bit like that moment, as Marlena’s hand fumbled in the dark and found the switch, turning it, flooding the road before us with light, pulling us out of the darkness as we flew through the void that always threatened to envelop us, and always gave the things we saw such urgency and meaning.