A Hard Dog

A Hard Dog

When I lived up in East Nash there was a pack of abandoned dogs that ran that part of town each night. My street dead ended against the highway and they would gather together and listen to the sound of tires on the asphalt and AM radios all trying to get someplace else.

The guy that lived next door worked as a lineman for the electric company upgrading wires and boxes and repairing down cable when the wind blew hard. That spring the wind kept pulling it all down.

He was the kind of guy that did his 8 and 40 and 365 then came home and tried to find some happiness and love in the overtime between shifts. 

Then each dawn he would climb into his rusty truck and go out trying to repair whatever got torn down in the darkness. 

That year he had met this girl, a kind of stray, and she eventually moved in. 

I guess he was trying to save her or maybe just himself or both.

He asked her a couple times to marry him. But she always said she needed more time…which is Woman for No. 

But he didn’t speak Woman, so he never really understood.

I guess he thought he could wear her down with kindness and support. He hoped like many that the glide of living would make the decision for her and that one day the vows would have already been made without words. 

Each night from the porch she watched the dogs run the street and eventually coaxed one into the yard.

It was one of those rescue dogs that someone had stopped feeding when they had to choose between milk for the kids or dog food. A pitbull mix, the kind with the jaws that can lock on and never let go. 

There are packs of abandoned strays all over that part of town if you know how to look. 

All kinds. Four legged…two legged. 

They run the streets late at night. They curl up in dead ends down by the highway, in old barns and alleyways and neat townhouses with fresh paint. All kinds.

She fed and cleaned and loved it and eventually convinced the man to adopt it.

She cooked and cleaned and loved the man too but it was the kind of love where the line was drawn in herself. And she stayed well inside its margin.

That never works. That boundary kind of love.

But for a time it seemed, like it always does, that it might.

He got full up with that Might. I guess we all do. It helps with all the Won’t you have to look at each day. 

With him it was the Might be happy, the Might be loved, that old Might be Right that wrong tries endlessly to wring out of itself.

Each day the man would get up and go out and in his way try to fix the world. Then he would come home to the stray girl and the abandoned dog and pray to God that he could fix her and that she could fix him.

The wind blows hard every Spring and that April a storm blew in. A bad one. 

And the wind sounded just like the cars on the highway beyond the dead end. 

They called him in the middle of one dark night. Power was out all over and they wanted him once more to fix the world.

That night, in the dark, she stood at the door and watched his headlights drive off.  Then she listened hard to sound of the storm and the sound of the highway.

And later that morning at dawn she packed up her minivan, left a note and drove God knows where up 65. Headed for Might, Texas or Hope Springs, Arkansas…didn’t matter really. 

All she wanted was any other place or any other someone to make her stray heart feel deeper than the margin she was tiptoeing around with him. 

Some kind of Might be loved and Might be place that always seems to be at the other end of 1000 miles.

She left the furniture. But she took everything else...everything except some kind of empty. She left a lot of that.

And she left the dog.

He came home and found the note and the dog and the empty and the quiet.  And for a few weeks all you could hear was that quiet clanging around inside the empty of his house. 

That kind of quiet empty makes. You’ve heard it.

That’s really the way it is. You sit in the dark and listen as hard as you can to everything you ever said and wonder which word was wrong. And which silence was the kind that got in the door and grew inside the sheet rock until it choked down everything you ever wanted to say.

You listen to the cars passing on the highway until each one is full of the Might be her. And you watch the abandoned strays run the streets at night listening for that sound of tires and asphalt and hope until it chases you down into sleep.

When he went to work he couldn’t leave the dog in the house so he put it out in the yard on a spike and two foot of chain.

And all day long the dog would jump against that chain, just like a heartbeat, trying to free itself. 

And at night sometimes in the dark I would hear howl.

 

After a month he decided that she was good and gone. And why would he keep a dog that wasn’t his. 

It was hers. Some highways only run one way and she wasn’t circling back. Not in any place but his dreams.

One day instead of chaining it up he cut it loose. And when the dog would come back into the yard he would throw cold water on it. Sometimes kick it…like he was trying to drive a memory away.

And the neighbors shook their heads and looked the other way.

Pain always tries to find a way out and cruelty is almost always the first route.

After a week the dog stopped coming back. The howling stopped for a time. And the quiet drifted back over the house like a fog.

It became, once again, one of those dogs you see on the street sometimes. Abandoned strays, ribs sticking out…lonesome hungry look in their eyes, trying with all their might to understand what they did so wrong. How everything they ever knew of love and happiness had come to this.

And I would see the man sometimes out in the bars on the weekend. He had that same lonesome look, that same hunger and confusion at the bottom of himself. Wandering through the streets like some part of him had been abandoned too.

An old woman on the corner took pity on the dog and used to feed it table scraps. So each evening it would turn up on the street, wolf down whatever she gave it and sit shivering at the edge of her yard looking down at its old porch and all it ever knew of love.

Dogs must have their own kind of Might cause late at night when it was sure the man was asleep it would rise to its feet and slowly creep toward the house.

There was a deck on the back where it used to play. A porch really…and then above the porch a stoop that led up to the back door.

Late each night that dog would creep up onto the deck and then slowly…tenderly... crawl up those last few steps onto the stoop and lean against the door, like it was trying to get into What Was. 

That door is always locked though.

What Was is rusted shut. It’ll never open again.

So alone each night, just outside the house it would howl. A kind of low moan that could wake you and fill you with pity.

There is a kind of door that can never open. There is a kind of wound that only deepens in time.

And there is a kind of Might that can't ever find its way down onto the highway so it keeps circling around and around …howling like a wind trying to reach what used to be.

The man tried to chase it off. But every night dog came back.

Some of the neighbors complained but when they knocked on his door and looked into his eyes they could hear that howling there too. 

And moved to pity they lowered their eyes and said nothing. So they rolled over at night and tried to forget there was that kind of howl and that kind of quiet in the world spinning around each other so close to them.

And they tried to pretend there was never anything on the streets that could lock its jaws on their hearts too...and never let go.

Walking by one evening I stopped. The man was raking the yard by the stake in and the chain. 

I asked him about the dog and the howling at night. 

He looked down and said 

"…..That’s a hard dog."

Then looking up into my eyes he whispered, 

“Tried everything to run it off. Just keeps coming back…..every night."

"A hard dog,"  I said.

"Yes" he answered.

 “It's a hard dog to keep off your stoop.” 

And I could see he wasn’t talking just about that old hound anymore. 

There are other things in this world that keep circling round, that climb up onto your porch in the middle of the night, trying to get into What Was.

Need howls. So does doubt. 

And there’s a kind of love that howls too.

That abandoned stray kind of love. Like a pitbull it locks its jaws down tight on some part of you….and won’t ever let go.

Just then, across the street, a pack of strays slipped by. Among them was her dog.

It paused for a moment and stared at the house then turned and ran with the others back into the shadows.

The man set the rake down and stared at the house too. And that old empty filled the quiet once more.

“A hard dog” I said again.

He nodded and stepped away toward the shadow and the house.

And that night, once more, the wind blew hard. It made a sound like it was trying to blow away everything a heart is forced to feel. And once more the lines came down.

And beneath it the hum of the highway in the distance rose until they seemed to sing to each other. 

So much Might forever trying to forget What Was.

Some nights it sounds like an old engine with too many miles on it to ever get where it’s going. But can’t help but try.

And some nights it sounds like an old AM radio, the kind that only plays love songs. 

Through the static you’re sure you knew all the words, but you can’t quite remember…or believe them anymore.

Still...you can’t help but wanting to sing along.

And very late I heard the wind and the highway, the Might and What Was begin to whisper at the edge of my sleep. 

And together they rose into a howl, like an old dog…on the porch of my dreams.