In the night, in her bedroom that was as black dark as alien space—darker, because out there at least there were stars—he’d held tight to her and her big tits and soft lips and done it twice without seeing anything or being seen and that was anonymous and it calmed him till he blacked out and slept and woke up clear and with the wheel quiet inside him. Now he was eating and she wanted him to stay, and the dog was crunching kibble over a blue plastic bowl set in the corner, the sun shining and something that wasn’t much more than static playing on the radio on the counter by the sink, and he cut her off in the middle of her straw man speech to say, “I have to go. You know why?”
She was pushing things around on the stove. She shifted her head to look at him over one shoulder. “Why?”
“Because they’re going to be coming for you.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“How do they know it was me? Nobody saw us. For all they know I could sue them for letting somebody steal my dog out of the pound—”
He had to laugh, but it was a noiseless laugh and his lips never moved. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said.
She gave him a puzzled look.
“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes. It’s your dog. Who else would steal it?”
Her hair was a mess where he’d run his fingers through it in the dark and the pillow had flattened it on one side and for an instant it seemed to catch fire in the sun coming in through the window, every wild wisp of it burning like a halo of jumping flames. He could see the smallest things, the fine leather creases at the corners of her eyes, a single translucent hair stabbing out beneath her left ear, and finer still, till he could see the microscopic mites living and fucking and shitting in her eyebrows, in everybody’s eyebrows, every minute of every day. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought of that, but there’s nobody to take him for me, to hold him, I mean, till the thirty days are up—he doesn’t have rabies, I swear it . . .”
He said nothing. Just sat there watching her mites wave their segmented legs even as he felt his own mites stirring in the valleys between his eyes, and then the mites were gone and he was clear again. Mornings. In the mornings he was clear, or mostly so, and he knew what was happening to him and knew that dope and alcohol made it worse—or better, definitely better—and that all his plans, the plans he talked up in his own head and out loud too, with his own lips and tongue and mouth, were going to come to nothing, that the poppies would die and the hostiles would come for him and he’d lead them on a merry chase, but that in the end everything in this life was just shit and more shit.
“Could you take him? Hide him, I mean—just for a few days?”
“I can’t have a dog.”
“You’ve got your own place, didn’t you tell me? Near Northspur? On the river there? That’s only like fifteen miles or something and there’s nobody around out there, right? Like even if Kutya barks, nobody’s going to hear. Or complain. Or even know.” She was looking at him as if she could see right through him, two naked eyes hooked up to her brain and taking in information like the feed on a video camera. “I could drive you there now and you could just—he’s no trouble. Really.”
“My grandma wouldn’t like it.”
“Talk to her, will you? Or we both could. I’m sure if she understood the circumstances—it’s just temporary, that’s all—she’d want to help out.”
He couldn’t picture that. Couldn’t picture the dreadlock dog in the house that was his private universe behind the eight-foot cement-block wall he’d built around it to keep them out, all of them, because the fact he kept trying to bury was that his father was selling the place to some alien and had already told him he had so many days from that day whatever day that was to clean up your crap and get out and I’m not going to tell you twice, which was why he’d set up the camp in the woods in the first place.
“No,” he said, “no,” and he was shaking his head. “She wouldn’t like it.”
10.