A Hard Dog

When I lived up in East Nashville 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 all trying to get someplace else. I 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. I was the kind of guy that did my 8 and 40 and 365, then came home and tried to find some relief in the overtime between shifts. Then each dawn I would climb into my rusty truck and go out trying to repair whatever got torn down in the darkness. That year I met this girl, a kind of stray, and eventually she moved in. I guess I was trying to save her or maybe just myself. I asked her a couple times to marry me. But she always said she needed more time, which is Woman for No. But I didn’t speak Woman, so I never really understood. I guess I thought I could wear her down with kindness and support. I hoped 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 lock on and never let go. There are packs of abandoned strays all over that part of town if you know how to look. 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. Four legged. Even two legged. She fed and cleaned and loved it and eventually convinced me to adopt it. She cooked and cleaned and loved me 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. I was full up with that Might. It helps with all the Won’t that you have to look at each day. With me 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 I would get up and go out and, in my own way, try to fix the world. Then I would come home to the stray girl and the abandoned dog and pray to God that I could fix her and that she could fix me. The wind blows hard in the 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 me in the middle of one dark night. Power was out all over and they wanted me once more to fix the world. That night she stood at the door and watched my tail-lights vanish into the dark. I guess she started listening hard to sound of the storm and the sound of the highway like they were the same thing. Later that morning she packed up her minivan, left a note and drove God knows where up I-65, headed for Might, Texas, or Hope Springs, Arkansas. I suppose 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 me. Some kind of Might Be Loved or Might Be Place that always waits at the other end of a thousand 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. I came home and found the note and the dog and the empty. And for a few weeks all I could hear was that quiet clanging around inside the empty of that house. The kind of quiet that empty makes. You’ve heard it. 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 sheetrock 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 that chorus chases you down into sleep. When I went to work I couldn’t leave the dog in the house so I put it out in the yard on a spike and two-foot of chain. The neighbors said all day long the dog would jump against that chain, just like a heartbeat, sure that the next leap or the next, or the next, would be the one that would finally free it. And at night sometimes in the dark I would hear it howl. After a month I decided that she was good and gone. Some highways only run one way. Why would I keep this abandoned dog? It wasn’t mine. It was hers and she wasn’t circling back. Not in any place but my dreams. One day instead of chaining it up, I cut it loose, and every time the dog came back into the yard I would throw cold water on it. Sometimes kick it, like I was trying to drive memory away. 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 quit coming back. The howling stopped for a time. And the quiet drifted back over the house like a fog. He became, once again, one of those dogs you see on the streets 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. Sometimes on the weekend I would go out to the bars. Staring at my face in a men’s room mirror I saw that same lonesome look, that same hunger and confusion at the bottom of myself. Wandering through the dark like some part of me had been abandoned, too. An old woman on the corner took pity on the dog and fed 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. Then late at night when it was sure I was asleep it would rise to its feet and slowly creep toward the house. There is a deck on the back where it used to wait for her. A porch really, and then above the porch a stoop that led up to the back door. Dogs must have their own kind of Might because late each night he would creep up onto the deck and tenderly crawl up those last few steps onto the stoop and lean against the door. Like he was trying to get into What Was. That door is always locked though. What Was is rusted shut. It’ll never open again. And alone each night, just outside the house, that dog would howl. A kind of low moan that would wake me and fill me 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. I tried to chase it off. But that dog always came back. Some of the neighbors complained but when they knocked on my door and looked into my eyes they could hear that howling there, too. And moved to pity, they lowered their eyes and said nothing. I suppose 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, a neighbor stopped. I was raking the yard by the stake. He asked about the dog and the howling at night. “That’s a hard dog.” I said. “Tried everything I could to run it off. Keeps coming back. Every night.” “A hard dog,” the man murmured. “Yes,” I answered, “a hard dog to keep off your stoop.” But I 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. Doubt howls. So does need. 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 scurried by. Among them was her dog. He paused for a moment and stared at the house, then turned and ran with the others back into the shadows. I set the rake down and stared at the house, too. And that old empty filled the quiet once more. “A hard dog,” I whispered. The neighbor nodded and turned away. That night, once more, the wind blew hard and the lines came down. When I got the call, I saw that the abandoned stray had deserted the stoop. Probably drawn to the hum of the tires going anywhere else, made his way down by the highway. And I hoped once again that maybe the old hound Might Be Gone for good. Down near the on ramp he must have closed his eyes and thought once more of the girl and what was gone and tried to believe, just like me, that what was taken might someday return. A tractor trailer, gassed up, the driver dog tired and still a couple hours behind schedule, saw the dog too late. When he heard the cry like a child in pain, he cursed and spun the wheel and the wounded animal limped away before collapsing on the shoulder. I was headed to work when I saw them and pulled over. “Didn’t see him," the driver said. "Clipped him good." One leg was broken. “There’s plenty of them strays to take its place,” he said, glancing at it, then staring at the interstate. Then looking at its ribs showing, said, “Hell I’m probably doing it a favor anyway.” He muttered a prayer that sounded just like a curse and started to drag it back away into the weeds. The hard dog cried and pleaded with his eyes, then, resigned, let out a howl that sent a shiver through us both. The driver stopped what he was doing. “I’m late as it is. Can’t do nothing for him anyway. Not like I meant it. Just one of them things.” He spat on the ground. “I can’t wait around and lose the day, Mister. I need this job. It’ll be my ass.” Then, ashamed, he looked up into my face “I love dogs,” he said. “I do.” I stepped closer. “You know who this belongs to?” the driver asked. “Owner’s long gone,” I said. “She put him out.” Mercy is hard to figure. I’d have done anything to be rid of that dog. But looking at him there, all I could feel was the hurt and the howl down at the bottom of us both. Like we were nearly somehow the same. Like something got broke in us both and was trying to pull us back into the weeds. Both busted up from getting near to what we needed. From wanting and losing. Both of us howling in the only way we knew how. As I reached down and touched the leg he whimpered. And I thought maybe if I could heal him up the howling might finally stop in me. “Don’t belong to nobody anymore,” I said. “But I’ll take him.” The driver looked relieved and pretended that he had done all he could, and he helped lift him into my truck. Back home, the front door was too narrow so I swung around back.The dog looked up at me and then at the porch, afraid. Like wanting something for so long got too near. I went around to the front and tried to unlock the back door. That old What Was door that he leaned up against each night. It had been so long that the hinges were rusted shut. So I put a shoulder into it and banged on it till it opened. Then I carried that hard dog up onto the porch. I gently set him down. He stared at the open door, turned and looked at me, then struggled toward the stoop but fell on the second step. I caught and lifted him. And together we went in. The dog slept by the bed, eyes closed and whimpering in its sleep. Chasing something in its dreams, I suppose. That night, once again, the memory of her started in howling at me. The doubt and the need and the love, too, all howling together some place in me that, alone, I could never reach. That hard dog listened in the dark, like he knew what it was to remember and to feel. Like he knew what love felt like and the space it leaves when it’s cut out of you. He struggled, dragged himself up on the bed, and lay down on her side.Sometime in the dark of that night, he laid a paw on my arm. Then, whimpering, put his head on my chest like he was hearing the howl in there, too. Like there was a hard dog on some stoop in me that only he could understand. That only he could reach. That only he could heal. WLM