Dog Run Moon (2 page)

Sid had no clear idea where he was heading. It was a strange mode of navigation, more like divination, taking the smoothest path through a shattered nightscape of jumbled rock—watching for the wicked gleam of prickly pear and jagged cones from the piñon pines. If he turned he could still see the shafts of light from his pursuer's ATV, and he thought about circling around back toward town. The problem was the dog. Sid would have to cut a wide path around to keep the dog from straying close to the lights and if the dog was captured then what was the point? Another thought, might the dog return to its former owner willingly? Sid was unsure. He kept running. The dog spooked a small herd of mule deer out of a dry creek bed and they bounded past him, covering great lengths of ground in each leap, their forms backlit against the sky now lightening in the east. Sid had never seen the desert deer move this close before. At the apex of each jump they seemed to hang, suspended, vaguely avian, a group of prehistoric nearbirds not quite suited to life on land, not quite comfortable with their wings' ability to keep them aloft. Just then he had the thought that if he could keep going until the sun came up he might be okay.

After the encounter at the Mint, Sid had broken down and called her. She hadn't answered and he'd left a message in which he hated the sound of his voice. Tinny with the fear he'd wanted her to feel.
I'm not calling to try and get you to come back and be mine again I'm just calling to tell you that if no one ever sees me around anymore it's because I ran afoul of some bad people in a matter concerning a dog. And I never meant for you to grow against me like you did. That's it.
Sid hung up in self-loathing. He folded an old blanket on the floor at the end of his bed for the dog and when the knock on the door came—at two in the morning, three days after Montana Bob had called him out in the Mint—Sid couldn't say exactly that he hadn't been expecting it. He felt briefly the relief of the fugitive who finally feels the handcuffs encircle his wrists.

Montana Bob spoke to him on the other side of the door, his words just barely whiskey-softened around the edges.

“You, sir, are in possession of my royal French canine. Charlie Chaplin and myself come to you as missionaries. Also, as pilgrims and crusaders.”

When Montana Bob kicked in the flimsy trailer door Sid had already slammed out the back, catching Charlie Chaplin off guard. The accountant was standing on the trailer's rickety back porch and the door handle hit him in the midsection, doubling him over. Sid ran down the sloping trailer court drive and across his neighbors' weed-choked lawns, down the alley across the dead main street and through the train yard, his bare toes curling around the cold iron track as he gathered himself to hurdle over the crushed-granite railbed. It wasn't until he reached the barren lots at the base of the rimrock's upslope that he realized the dog was running beside him, occasionally stopping to lift his leg on a rock or clump of sagebrush. Back toward the road Sid could see the lights of an ATV coming fast. He waited until he could see the shape of Montana Bob's hat and the pale, bare arms of Charlie Chaplin wrapped around his midsection—and then he started scrabbling his way up the slope, the dog flowing effortlessly through the rock above him.

She was a small woman, pale, so much so that the desert hurt her in ways that Sid would never fully understand. Like Sid, she was a nude sleeper. When he found this out it became one of those happy little intersections of shared personality, the slow accumulation of which is love. With her it was years of nights spent bare back to bare chest. Sometimes, when it was hot, they woke up and had to peel themselves apart, their tangled limbs stuck together like the fleshy segments of some strange misshapen fruit.

They were alike in other ways as well, and at one time these things had seemed natural and unaffected, important even. They both liked the river. Sid got inner tubes from the tire store and when the heat got unbearable they would float, keeping their beer cool in a mesh bag trailing in the river behind them. And, if she never fully came to love the desert, Sid was pretty sure she came to understand why he did. Once, Sid took her up to see the hoodoos in Goblin Valley. It was midnight on a full moon and they were half-drunk and a little high. They played tag and hide-and-seek around the hulking sandstone formations, laughing, hooting and shrieking, the sounds careening, giving voice to the rocks themselves. For a while after this if one of them initiated an impromptu game of tag, the other would have to follow suit, no matter the location—the grocery store, the front lawn, the movie theater, at a neighborhood barbecue with half the town watching, everyone laughing and shaking their heads. Things were good this way for a long time and then one night he woke to the sound of her crying in the bathroom. And the next night she came to bed in one of his T-shirts and boxer shorts. And the next night Sid slept alone.

As he ran Sid could clearly see her, laid out on their bed, a night-blooming moonflower, her white limbs like petals unfolding finally in the absence of light. He remembered the first house they'd ever lived in, the way the door latch was broken and how the wind would blow the door open if they didn't remember to throw the bolt. They'd be sitting in that little dining room, eating dinner, a table full of mismatched cups and plates and silverware, and all of a sudden the door would swing open like someone pushed it in. She'd always flinch like someone was breaking in on them, uninvited. Sid used to tease her about it but now he found himself wondering who exactly it was she thought was coming unannounced into their home. Who was the man with his hand on the doorknob ready to push his way into their kitchen like the wind?

Sid ran and the rocks cut him; the piñon pines clutched and tore at him. Dried sweat crusted his bare torso and thighs and any moment of rest brought cramps, the muscles of his legs twitching and popping of their own accord. He found himself moving his cracked lips, making strange utterances with each painful footfall, the desert a silent observer, an expressionless juror to whom he tried to make his plea.
I ran afoul of some bad people in a matter concerning a dog.
Irana foul. Iranafoul. I ran, a foul?

It sounded melodramatic and desperate, a wild call for attention. Best to leave the dog out of it. Get right to the point.

Since we dissolved I've been a specter running blind and naked in the desert. Is that melodramatic? Well, that's what is happening to me now.

He imagined driving to their old house and stepping up onto the porch. She'd be alone and come out to meet him in one of the sundresses she always wore in the hot months, the fabric like gauze, like a soft bandage laid over healing flesh. She'd offer him a cool drink and they'd sit in the shade and the words, all the right ones, would flow from him, an upwelling, an eruption of cleansing language.

Remember when we went way up north that winter and rented the cabin and there was a hot spring not too far away? We'd go out at night and shiver down the path to the water and slip in the warmth like pulling a hot sheet around us. My feet in the sulfur-smelling mud of the pool, your legs twined around mine like white, earth-seeking roots. Remember that? The way the deer would come down when it got really cold just to stand in the steam rising up from the water? And then, the day we left for home? How cold it was? We went outside and our eyes started to freeze up at the corners and you, southern girl, had never seen anything like it and took a picture of me standing next to a thermometer that was bottomed out at forty below. In that picture I'm standing on the cabin porch and behind me there's the river frozen solid, or so it seemed.

Here Sid imagined moving in a little closer, putting his work-rough hand on her smooth one.

I've been thinking about that picture and that river on the coldest day of the year. Underneath that ice, the river was still moving. Forty below, but even then the water closest to the riverbed will be moving, cold but unfrozen. It's like a river exists in defiance, or has a secret life. Everything above is frozen and stiff but down below it moves along, liquid over the rocks, like nothing happening on the surface matters. On a day like this you could walk across the river like crossing the street. But you can't forget that just below that shell there is current. That is my love for you.

And that would be it. She'd come with him, push up next to him on the bench seat of his pickup, and he'd drive with the windows down, her hair tossing into his face and mouth and eyes. Dust and the scent of her shampoo in his nose. They'd pick up right where they'd left off.

He was moving up a dry creek bed, shuffling through the soft red sand deposited by spring floods in years past, when he had had the feeling that the creek wasn't dry after all, that he was splashing through the ankle-deep current of muddy red water. He was thirsty. Christ was he thirsty, but when he scooped a great double handful of water up to his cracked lips it turned back to sand and flowed through his fingers. This seemed like a particularly cruel joke and he had thoughts of finding a dark place to curl up inside, a rock for a pillow and a soft blanket of sand. But there was the matter of the dog, the matter of Charlie Chaplin's vacuous eyes and pistol, which in Sid's mind, had achieved magnificent proportions. Charlie Chaplin rode it like an evil old mare with cracked hoofs and faded brand. It was the gun itself in pursuit, half horse, half instrument of percussion and death. A spavined nag whose blued flanks were singed and smoking.

At first, running on the sand was deliriously comfortable, the soft ground like an answered prayer for the raw soles of Sid's feet. But then, the farther he went the harder it became, the sand shifting and giving way under his feet so that each stride required more effort from his already screaming calves.

When the twisting and turning of the creek bed became unbearable Sid clambered out onto the exposed rock. From this vantage point he watched the now greatly diminished moon drift down toward the far black horizon like a pale phosphorus match head broken off in the striking. If Montana Bob and Charlie Chaplin were still in pursuit he had no evidence. In fact, some small, dislodged part of him was unsure that they had ever existed. Sid couldn't see the dog most of the time. Sometimes he forgot about it all together. It ran ahead silent and unperturbed as the earth itself.

It was a loud dawn. Sid had never seen or heard anything quite like it, the sun breaking the horizon line with a sound like a dull knife ripping a sheet. He was walking stiffly now, moving his arms in great circles, slapping his thighs and torso to fend off the cold. He looked down and for the first time could see himself clearly, the angry red whip welts on his calves from branches, the purple cracked toenails and raised blue lines of engorged veins and capillaries, over everything a grimy patina of sweat crust and desert dust and leaking blood.

He crested a small hill where, on the backside of the slope, there was a rusted stock tank fed by a leaning windmill that rose out of a clump of acacia. He didn't believe in the stock tank. It was like a river of muddy water, a thing that would dry up and slip through his fingers. He sat on a flat rock and looked. The windmill was missing some slats and he knew there was no water in the tank. This was a definite truth and Sid felt it like gravity. After a while the dog emerged from a tangle of sagebrush and with no fanfare proceeded to lap from the tank, its tail fanning slightly in a breeze that did not reach Sid.

Down the slope in jerks, his muscles and ligaments tightened like catgut tennis racket cord. Sid submerged his entire head, eyes wide open, into the water, metallic-tasting, gelid with the flavor of the past night. The bottom of the tank was lined with a slick layer of electric green algae over which a single orange carp hovered blimplike. Sid wanted to get in, to live with this carp alone in this desert within a desert. But the water was cold and he knew the carp did not want him. He drank for so long that points of black began to form at the edges of his vision, small, black-legged forms like water striders skating the clear pool of his periphery. He broke for air and collapsed with his back against the tank, the rivets pressing his flesh. From this position he could see into the twisted inner workings of the windmill, the busted-sprung parts, the pieces held together by coils of baling wire. The dog was moving around the base of the acacia trees, its snout plowing last year's dead grass, the fur ends around its paws just slightly reddened by the touch of the desert rock. Above the dog, in the twisting acacia branches, Sid could make out two sparrows, dead and skewered on thorns.

When Sid woke he found Charlie Chaplin squatting next to him, his Oxford shirt stained desert red, his corduroys dusty. His pale cheeks were streaked with twin rivulets of what looked like tears and his eyes were leaking and red. He had his knife out and was poking Sid's bare thigh, raising bright little beads of blood, a ragged collection of blood drops like pissants gathering on his skin. From the number of them it looked like he'd been at it awhile. Seeing that Sid was awake, Charlie Chaplin swiped at his cheeks with his sleeve. He gave Sid one more poke and then sheathed his knife and went to stand beside Montana Bob, who held a length of chain he'd hooked to the dog's collar. The dog lay at Montana Bob's boots with its muzzle resting on its paws.

“What the hell. Why?” Montana Bob tilted his hat brim down against the sun.

Sid considered this for a moment and then put up his hands and shrugged his shoulders.

“I've always liked running.” Realizing as he said it that it was true.

“You look like something from another planet. More dead than alive. Also, Charlie Chaplin isn't happy with you. He wears contact lenses and, seeing how you kept us out here all night in the dust, his eyes are in poor shape. He wants you to know that that's why he's tearing up. He's not actually crying. He suffers from the dust. Also, he lost his pistol. Fell out of his waistband on the ride. I know he feels badly about that.”