Beware of Dog
by Ryan White
He found Doug dead beside a tree on the gravel roadside, as the kind neighbor had said he would. Fur dirty, tongue dry. He’d never seen a dead thing except Miss Ash’s goldfish when it’d croaked in the classroom overnight and the filter had sucked out its big egg-yolk eyeball.
The sky was murking into night. The only thing he could think to do was get Doug back to Grandma’s house. His house too now, really. Doug hadn’t learned the neighborhood yet. He never would.
He didn’t want to walk along the shoulder past the broad-lawned houses, fearing someone would notice him and ask what he was doing carrying that dog. And he’d taken the shortcut once before. It started at a dead end and passed through a big undeveloped parcel with a low point that got swampy. That’d been last summer when he thought he was visiting but it was spring now and the brush was overgrown—greens vivid like poison labels.
He carried Doug slung between his arms––heavier than he’d been in life. The colors faded with the light and so did any indication of a path. And though he believed he’d passed through the low place, and while he tried to keep moving straight, there were more rises and ravines than he’d remembered and soon he wondered if he’d circled back. It was full dark. Doug had stiffened.
He stumbled hard on a mound of soft dirt, landing on his knees. Paused, listening. All but a few birds had quieted. The undergrowth rustled with skitters and flits. Then he felt burning on his legs. Biting and needling. He dropped Doug, swatting at his pants. Slapping wildly. Stomping. He started to run, branches sharp like cracked bones reaching and pulling. He stopped again and sat, smacking his shins, shaking, crying. Without feeling its onset, he slept.
He woke and the sky was smoke blue shading into gum pink. He looked down at his pants. A million ant bodies were mashed and bent against the drape of his corduroys and in the ribbing of his socks.
He looked for Doug. For the remains of the hill he’d destroyed in his blind panic. But he found nothing.
To his left up a rise he could see a fence with a hand-painted plywood board stating “BeWare of DoG,” a Reagan-Bush ’80 sign and, atop a slat, the wigless head of a mannequin. He climbed in that direction. Grandma would be worried (but you couldn’t report someone for twenty-four hours, that’s what the officer said when his mom was first gone). He wasn’t sure about leaving Doug. Unfairness was in the nature of things but abandoning him to the forest like that seemed a rotten betrayal. He supposed Doug wouldn’t know the difference.
* * *
Syd couldn’t believe his luck. It was finally happening and with goddamn Mary Melnyk no less and what better place for it to go down than in his freshly waxed Arcadian Blue 1964½ Mustang? Sure, he knew it wasn’t Mary’s first, but how could he complain? That’s why she was here alright.
Easy as motor-oil, down she went into his merry, aching lap. Zip, pop, tug, rustle of jean flaps, flipping mousy hair from her cheek. Sweet Mary. Sweet paradise.
Eyes on the road, trying to keep his speed steady, he was close already—OOOHWEEE. And then the damn Holstein-colored bolt of lightning came out of nowhere and—TUNK—off the bumper.
In the rearview it kept running (or had it been thrown, spinning?) into the trees, a little crooked maybe.
“What was that?” Mary had paused her efforts but—out of modesty he supposed—was hovering her head below the wheel.
“Ah, it was just a branch.” And sure, that was likely enough, hooning around in this yawn-inducing Seattle suburb with its houses set back under cedar shadows and its big empty woody places still checkerboarded around. He looked for a turnout, someplace he could pull off and focus.
He checked the mirror once more. Nothing except the empty street receding in the musky dimming summer dusk. No trouble today. Not with Mary Melnyk nuzzled in denim depths in his palace of Arcadian Blue. He felt he held the key to life dangling right there off the steering column. Felt like whistling.
Ryan White is a writer and attorney living in Seattle with his cat, Django. He's currently revising his first novel, The Retreat. His work has appeared in J Journal and Litro and is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain Review. He’s been briefly jailed and hospitalized (separate incidents) while chasing waves in Mexico. He can be found on Twitter @The_CharmedLife.