<back> My Dog, The Meat Eater
Chapter One ENRIDGIO woke with a start and drove to Stanislaw’s, the last farm in Benson, without even having a cup of coffee. He arrived in the lot behind the farm store and stood there waiting for Yanni to pull in. Enridgio’s reddish hair clashed with his dark, brown skin, and the bags under his eyes revealed how tired he was. Only half awake, he mindlessly drew circles in the dirt with the toes of his black, leather boots. No grass grew behind the store because of all the cars that parked there, covering the ground with shadow throughout the day.
Sandy, the farm’s calico cat, walked over to nudge Enridgio’s leg with her fat, hangy stomach. She delicately presented him with a dead mouse as though she were a little old lady presenting a tray of tiny cakes and delicious cookies. The grey mouse’s left eye had been chewed out and the other one was closed tightly. Enridgio took the dead mouse out from between Sandy’s needle-sharp teeth and threw it underhanded into a patch of young maple trees next to the lot. He tickled the cat’s stomach with his foot, and she walked off to lie in the shade of a table covered with potted plants, a little perturbed that her kill hadn’t been greeted with more enthusiasm.Yanni’s station wagon pulled into the lot and Enridgio walked over to it before Yanni had a chance to get completely out. His left leg hung out of the car but the rest of him was still sitting in it. His head drooped on his neck like a wilting flower.
“Yanni, I had another dream last night,” Enridgio said urgently.
Yanni swung his right leg out of the car, stood up, yawned, and closed the door of his parents’ car. He tugged at his old khaki pants and dirty, grey t-shirt in an attempt to get the wrinkles out of them. While scratching at his short, brown hair and blinking sleepily, Yanni said, “Hold on, man. It’s early. Must have been a good dream if you’re in this much of a rush to tell me. You usually don’t even talk for the first whole hour of work; you just stare ahead like you’re still sleeping.” Yanni looked down and noticed Enridgio’s hands were empty. “Where’s your coffee?”
“The dream was about Snoopy.”
Enridgio’s dog Snoopy was dying of stomach cancer that had spread to other parts of his body. He had been suffering a lot the last few weeks.
“Oh,” Yanni said. “Now I understand why you’re so awake. You can tell me about it on the way out to the fields. Louie’s probably waiting for us. I think he’s hoeing the scallions this morning.”
The two boys each grabbed a hoe from beside Louie’s little, yellow house and started down the worn dirt road that led out to all of the Stanislaw’s vegetable fields, away from the street and the store. The two boys passed all sorts of vegetables and plants on their way out to the scallions. The field of potatoes came first. It was a pretty large plot considering the smallish size of Stanislaw’s farm. On the opposite side of the road was a field of red, yellow and purple flowers. After this came the first of four fields of tomatoes. The plantings were staggered so tomatoes could be sold throughout the summer. This field was one of the younger ones. Its tomatoes wouldn’t be ready for picking until after Yanni, Enridgio and the other boys were back at school in September.
The road the two boys walked along was the main road of the farm, but not the only one. Other less worn roads branched off every once in a while and weaved through the fields all over the farm to allow for easy access by tractor to the far sides of the crops. Yanni and Enridgio were walking through the woods that separated the front and rear fields when Yanni finally allowed Enridgio to tell about his dream.
“Okay, I’m awake. So what was the dream like this time?” Enridgio’s nightly dreams were the subject of many morning talks on Stanislaw’s. When Enridgio spoke about them, he was no longer on the farm. His eyes narrowed and stood in their sockets, fixed on a random point up ahead. The images he saw existed only in his mind. Bright pictures of the events he had experienced during the night flashed in front of him as he walked down the road, pictures as real – more real – than his surroundings. He was a person transformed. Although Enridgio always spoke with fire and emotion, his dreams evoked passion in him as almost nothing real ever had or could. His lips curled as he spoke, almost as if he were on the verge of snarling at something frightening and mysterious to him. His sentences flowed together and crashed into one another, producing torrents of flowing imagery.
“I’m sitting in my neighbor’s side lawn – the neighbors with the black driveway and basketball hoop. They’re having a barbecue and my whole family is there. I’m not really having a good time and I’m staring out at the street and all of a sudden my dog runs across it. But he’s not running normal; it’s like he has rabies or something, and his legs are all twisted and he runs onto some ragged lawn across the street that I’ve never seen before and I run to follow and catch him circling through the weeds and grass like he’s searching for something. There’s thick, yellow pollen floating through the air all around, almost choking us. I pick him up out of the green mess and look closely at his little face and the hair’s almost all gone and I can see straight through to his tender, pink skin. In his eyes there’s something crazy and wild looking and he doesn’t want to be held, but I grip him tightly anyway. His face is a twisted rope of pain, but all of the sudden he realizes it’s me holding him and his face loosens up with recognition and he looks straight at me and kind of smiles, just like people do. Then he opens his mouth to breathe in slowly. It’s a breath full of strain and his lungs are gummed up with fluid and junk. In a hushed dog voice he asks me a question that I can see is so frightening and urgent to him.
“‘Enridgio, tell me something.’
“I’m looking at him there in my arms and he’s almost too big to be held, and then I say what I know I’m supposed to say, like lines in a play, but I really mean it.
“‘I love you, Barley-dog.’ And I just repeat it over and over to him. I can’t help it. It feels like throwing up; the words stream out of me and hurt my throat. His eyes close and his pink skin wrinkles around them in such a contented way, and he’s got the face of a person, of an old man, but still a dog and he looks so tired and I press his face up close to mine. I can feel his skin and it’s so thin and tender now. His wet, rotting eye rubs against my cheek and I’m crying and I can’t stop and the smell of his rotten-teeth breath makes me nauseous. I look past my dog’s face and see the street has gotten wider, much wider. It’s like a river, and the cars passing us are faraway sailboats and I can’t even see my family anymore.
“I tell him I love him and I always will. I know nobody will ever understand me the way that damn dog does, and I won’t love anybody else as much because nobody else needs it that much. He never talks to anybody until now, and he picks me to talk to.” Enridgio’s speaking slowed. Shame showed on his face as he looked up at Yanni as if to ask forgiveness in advance for the next part of his dream.
“Then I start to eat him. He’s my friend and he loves me, but I also need him for food. I need to eat him so that I’ll be able to keep going after he dies. He doesn’t mind. We both understand. He just lays there in my arms with that contented look on his face while I chew him all up and swallow him. I can feel him being digested there in my stomach, dead, but still alive in a way. I begin to understand what it is to be an old, dying dog. I can hear his thoughts in my head. He worries no one will remember him, and he wonders if he lived the life of a good dog. There’s dark, dog blood on my teeth and hands.”
Enridgio stopped talking for a moment and thought about his dog. He’d been thinking about him a lot, ever since the cancer was discovered. As Enridgio came out of the dream his eyes opened wide as though he were a person just waking up. The whites of his eyes glowed in contrast with the dark eyelids that were pulling back to expose them. He blinked in the sunlight as he took notice of where he was.
“Snoopy sits in our yard all day and never complains or anything. He’s just a good dog. And that’s why he needed to hear me say something so much. So that he’d know how important a dog’s life is, and how much he gives to the people around him just by letting them pet him and love him. Sometimes I worry that he’s so bored just doing the same thing every day and never hunting in the woods with other dogs or having puppies. Sometimes I don’t envy the way dogs have to live. But he never seems unhappy, just quiet. I wonder what goes on in that dog’s head.
“The only thing that’s weird is, I don’t know why I called him Barley-dog. Snoopy is the name of my dog.”
“Barley-dog is the name of Bear’s dog.” At this moment Yanni and Enridgio paused for a moment to think about the Bear’s dog. Their minds rotated around the same thought as though their combined efforts could better help them to envision a dog neither of them had met. Both of them imagined a big, loyal, quiet dog. A dog who enjoyed nice food and conversation.
“Really? That’s weird. I don’t remember him ever telling me his dog’s name. But I guess he must’ve. What do you think about the dream?”
“I think you’re fucked up, kid.”
“Yeah, I guess it was pretty fucked up.”
“So how is Snoopy anyway? Is he still dying?”
“His whole belly’s full of tumors now. He lays down all day and his eyes water. It’s pretty hard for him to breathe or stand. When people come over there’s no barking like there used to be. I don’t like to touch his stomach. The skin around it is tight like a bag full of water that could burst at any second. It’s gross.”
Yanni dragged his feet as he walked, listening to the sound of the little pebbles being scraped over the dry, packed dirt of the road. “Well, he’s a good old dog, man.”
Enridgio nodded his head in agreement. “All dogs are good. You know, I don’t even feel bad when a person dies, but when a dog dies that’s just about the most terrible kind of tragedy. One time, when I was in junior high I was walking to school and I saw a puppy laying on the side of the road. It was less than zero degrees out that morning. I went over real close to him and saw he was frozen stiff. His eyes were still open and all glassy. When I poked him with a stick the stick broke. His legs were stuck out straight, like he died standing up and then just plopped over in a slight breeze. I thought about him over and over that day, freezing to death and then just plopping over under the weight of the ice in his veins. I bet he was so happy to be a puppy the day before. That’s the difference between people and dogs. People are miserable anyway, that’s why it doesn’t bother me when they bite the dust.”
Yanni and Enridgio were so involved in their conversation that they hardly even noticed the beauty of the land they walked through. They took no notice of the eggplants they passed, both white and purple varieties, both with painfully spiny caps. Neither of the boys paid much attention to the way the rays of sunshine bounced off the millions of petals in the flower field and exploded into tiny pieces in their eyes. Stanislaw’s was the backdrop for their talks. They spent every morning there and knew its parts well. It was alive and breathing – a silent observer whose every plant and rock had memories, stories and hope. A great, pulsing beast who spewed forth life and absorbed it back into its soily depths. Its chest heaved and fell at a pace all its own, too slow to be measured with any devices other than the clocks of expanding galaxies, unobservable to all but those privileged enough to spend every day there. The farm grew around them and in them. Without their having to look up, its morning light started their day.<back>
Copyright © 2003, Daniel J. Trask, All Rights Reserved