Fiction/Poetry Sampler

Current Issue

Submission Guidelines

Annual Prizes
 - Boatwright Prize
 - Carter Prize
 - Goodheart Prize

The Glasgow Prize
for Emerging Writers

Subscribe
FREE T-SHIRT!
Order a single copy

Advertising

Classroom Text

FAQs

Links

Staff

Shenandoah Home

 DOG SONG

  by Ann Pancake

HIS DOGS STARTED disappearing around the fifteenth of July, near as he could pinpoint it looking back, because it wasn’t until a week after that and he recognized it as a pattern that he started marking when they went. Parchy vanished first. The ugliest dog he ever owned, coated in this close-napped pink-brown hair, his outsides colored like the insides of his mouth, and at first, Matley just figured he’d run off. Matley always had a few who’d run off because he couldn’t bear to keep them tied, but then Buck followed Parchy a week later. But he’d only had Buck a few months, so he figured maybe he’d headed back to where he’d come from, at times they did that, too. Until Missy went because Matley knew Missy would never stray. She was one of the six dogs he camper-kept, lovely mutt Missy, beautiful patches of twenty different dogs, no, Missy’d been with him seven years and was not one to travel. So on July 22nd, when Missy didn’t show up for supper, Matley saw a pattern and started keeping track on his funeral-home calendar. Randolph went on August one. Yeah, Matley’d always lost a few dogs. But this was different.

HE’D HEARD WHAT they said down in town, how he had seventy-five dogs back in there, but they did not know. Dog Man, they called him. Beagle Boy. Muttie. Mr. Hound. A few called him Cat. Stayed in a Winnebago camper beside a househole that had been his family homeplace before it was carried off in the ’85 flood, an identical Winnebago behind the lived-in one so he could take from the second one parts and pieces as they broke in the first, him economical, savvy, keen, no, Matley was not dumb. He lived off a check he got for something nobody knew what, the youngest of four boys fathered by an old landowner back in farm times, and the other three left out and sold off their inheritance in nibbles and crumbs, acre, lot, gate and tree, leaving only Matley anchored in there with the dogs and the househole along the tracks. Where a tourist train passed four times a day on summer weekends, and even more days a week during leaf colors in fall, the cars bellied full of outsiders come to see the mountain sights — "farm children playing in the fields," the brochure said, "A land that time forgot" — and there sits Matley on a lawn chair between Winnebagos and househole. He knew what they said in town, the only person they talked about near as often as Muttie was ole Johnby, and Johnby they discussed only half as much. They said Mr. Hound had seventy-five dogs back in there, nobody had ever seen anything like it, half of them living outside in barrels, the other half right there in the camper with him. It was surely a health hazard, but what could you do about it? that’s what they said.
     But Matley never had seventy-five dogs. Before they started disappearing, he had twenty-two, and only six he kept in the camper, and one of those six was Guinea who fit in his sweatshirt pocket, so didn’t hardly count. And he looked after them well, wasn’t like that one woman kept six Pomeranians in a Jayco Pop-up while she stayed in her house and they all got burned up in a camper fire. Space heater. The outside dogs he built shelters for, terraced the houses up the side of the hill, and, yes, some of them were barrels on their sides braced with two-by-four struts, but others he fashioned out of scrap lumber, plenty of that on the place, and depending on what mood took him, sometimes he’d build them square and sometimes he’d build them like those lean-to teepees where people keep fighting cocks. Some dogs, like Parchy, slept in cable spools, a cable spool was the only structure in which Parchy would sleep. Matley could find cable spools and other almost doghouses along the river after the spring floods. And he never had seventy-five dogs.
     Parchy, Buck, Missy, Randolph, Ghostdog, Blackie, Ed. Those went first. That left Tick, Hickory, Cese, Muddy Gut, Carmel, Big Girl, Leesburg, Honey, Smartie, Ray Junior, Junior Junior, Louise, Fella, Meredith and Guinea. Junior Junior was only a pup at the time, Smartie was just a part-time dog, stayed two or three nights a week across the river with his Rottweiler girlfriend, and Meredith was pregnant. Guinea was at the end of the list because Guinea was barely dog at all.

THEY COULD TELL you in town that Matley was born old, born with the past squeezing on him, and he was supposed to grow up in that? How? There was no place to go but backwards. His parents were old by the time he came, his brothers gone by the time he could remember, his father dead by the time he was eight. Then the flood, on his twenty-third birthday. In town they might spot Matley in his ’86Chevette loaded from floorboards to dome light with twenty-five pound bags of Joy Dog food, and one ole boy would say, "Well, there he goes. That ruint runt of Revie’s four boys. End piece didn’t come right."
     Another: "I heard he was kinda retarded."
     "No, not retarded exactly . . . but he wasn’t born until Revie was close to fifty. And that explains a few things. Far as I’m concerned. Old egg, old sperm, old baby."
     "Hell, weren’t none of them right," observed a third.
     "There’s something about those hills back in there. You know Johnby’s from up there, too."
     "Well." Said the last. "People are different."
     Matley. His ageless, colorless, changeless self. Dressed always in baggy river-colored pants and a selection of pocketed sweatshirts he collected at yard sales. His bill-busted sweat-mapped river-colored cap, and the face between sweatshirt and cap as common and unmemorable as the pattern on a sofa. Matley had to have such a face, given what went on under and behind it. The bland face, the constant clothes, they had to balance out what rode behind them or Matley might be so loose as to fall. Because Matley had inherited from his parents not just the oldness, and not just the past (that gaping loss) and not just the irrational stick to the land — even land that you hated — and not just scraps of the land itself, and the collapsed buildings, and the househole, but also the loose part, he knew. Worst of all, he’d inherited the loose part inside (you got to hold on tight).

NOW IT WAS a couple years before the dogs started disappearing that things had gotten interesting from the point of view of them in town. They told. Matley’s brother Charles sold off yet another plat on the ridge above the househole, there on what had always been called High Boy until the developers got to it, renamed it Oaken Acre Estates, and the out-of-staters who moved in there started complaining about the barking and the odor, and then the story got even better. One of Dog Man’s Beagle Boy’s Cat’s mixed breed who-knows-what got up in there and impregnated some purebred something-or-other one of the imports owned, "and I heard they had ever last one of them pups put to sleep. That’s the kind of people they are, now," taking Matley’s side for once. Insider vs. outsider, even Muttie didn’t look too bad that way.
     Matley knew. At first those pureblood dog old people at Oaken Acre Estates on High Boy appeared only on an occasional weekend, but then they returned to live there all the time, which was when the trouble started. They sent down a delegation of two women one summer, and when that didn’t work, they sent two men. Matley could tell they were away from here from a distance, could tell from how they carried themselves before they even got close and confirmed it with their clothes. "This county has no leash ordinance," he told that second bunch, because by that time he had checked, learned the lingo, but they went on to tell him how they’d paid money to mate this pureblood dog of some type Matley’d never heard of to another of its kind, but a mongrel got to her before the stud, and they were blaming it on one of his. Said it wasn’t the first time, either. "How many unneutered dogs do you have down here?" they asked, and, well, Matley never could stand to have them cut. So. But it wasn’t until a whole year after that encounter that his dogs started disappearing, and Matley, of course, had been raised to respect the old.
     The calendar was a free one from Berger’s Funeral Home, kind of calendar has just one picture to cover all the months, usually a picture of a blonde child in a nightgown praying beside a bed, and this calendar had that picture, too. Blonde curls praying over lost dog marks, Matley almost made them crosses, but he changed them to question marks, and he kept every calendar page he tore off. He kept track, and for each one, he carried a half eulogy/half epitaph in his head:
     Ed. Kind of dog you looked at and knew he was a boy, didn’t have to glimpse his privates. You knew from the jog-prance of those stumpy legs, cock-of-the-walk strut, all the time swinging his head from side to side so as not to miss anything, tongue flopping out and a big grin in his eyes. Essence of little boy, he was, core, heart, whatever you want to call it. There it sat in a dog. Ed would try anything once and had to get hurt pretty bad before he’d give up, and he’d eat anything twice. That one time, cold night, Matley let him in the camper, and Ed gagged and puked up a deer liver on Matley’s carpet remnant, the liver intact, though a little rotty. There it came. Out. Ed’s equipment was hung too close to the ground, that’s how Mr. Mitchell explained it, "his dick’s hung too close to the ground, way it almost scrapes stuff, would make you crazy or stupid, and he’s stupid," Mr. Mitchell’d say. Ed went on August tenth.
     Ghostdog. The most mysterious of the lot, even more so than Guinea, Ghostdog never made a sound — not a whimper, not a grunt, not a snore. A whitish ripple, Ghostdog was steam moving in skin, the way she’d ghost-coast around the place, a glow-in-the-dark angel cast to her, so that to sit by the househole of a summer night and watch that dog move across the field, a luminous padding, it was to learn how a nocturnal animal sees. Ghostdog’d give Matley that vision, she would make him understand, raccoon eyes, cat eyes, deer. And not only did Ghostdog show Matley night sight, through Ghostdog he could also see smells. He learned to see the shape of a smell, watching her with her head tilted, an odor entering nostrils on breeze, he could see the smell shape, "shape" being the only word he had for how the odors were, but "shape" not it at all. Still. She showed him. Ghostdog went on August nineteen.
     Blackie was the only one who ever came home. He returned a strange and horrid sick, raspy purr to his breath like a locust. Kept crawling places to die, but Matley, for a while, just couldn’t let him go, even though he knew it was terribly selfish. Blackie’d crawl in a place, and Matley’d pull him back out, gentle, until Matley finally fell asleep despite himself, which gave Blackie time to get under the bed and pass on. September second. But Blackie was the only one who came home like that. The others just went away.

BEFORE MOM REVIE died, he could only keep one dog at a time. She was too cheap to feed more, and she wouldn’t let a dog inside the house until the late 1970’s; she was country people and that was how they did their dogs, left them outside like pigs or sheep. For many years, Matley made do with his collection, dogs of ceramic and pewter, plastic and fake fur, and when he was little, Revie’s rules didn’t matter so much, because if he shone on the little dogs his heart and mind, Matley made them live. Then he grew up and couldn’t do that anymore.
     When he first started collecting live dogs after Mom Revie was gone, he got them out of the paper, and if pickings there were slim, he drove around and scooped up strays. Pretty soon, people caught on, and he didn’t have to go anywhere for them, folks just started dumping unwanteds along the road above his place. Not usually pups, no, they were mostly dogs who’d hit that ornery stage between cooey-cute puppyhood and mellow you-don’t-have-to-pay-them-much-mind adult. That in-between stage was the dumping stage. The only humans Matley talked to much were the Mitchells, and more than once, before the dogs started disappearing, Mrs. Mitchell would gentle say to Matley, "Now, you know, Matley, I like dogs myself. But I never did want to have more than two or three at a time." And Matley, maybe him sitting across the table from her with a cup of instant coffee, maybe them in the yard down at his place with a couple of dogs nosing her legs, a couple peeing on her tires, Matley’d nod, he’d hear the question in what she said, but he does not, could not, never out loud say . . . .
     How he was always a little loose inside, but looser always in the nights. The daylight makes it scurry down, but come darkness, nothing tamps it, you never know (hold on tight). So even before Matley lost a single dog, many nights he’d wake, not out of nightmare, but worse. Out of nothing. Matley would wake, a hard sock in his chest, his lungs a-flutter, his body not knowing where it was, it not knowing, and Matley’s eyes’d ball open in the dark, and behind the eyes: a galaxy of empty. Matley would gasp. Why be alive? This was what it told him. Why be alive?
     There Matley would lie in peril. The loose part in him. Matley opened to emptiness, that bottomless gasp. Matley falling, Matley down-swirling (you got to hold), Matley understanding how the loose part had give, and if he wasn’t to drop all the way out, he’d have to find something to hold on tight (Yeah, boy. Tight. Tight. Tighty tight tight). Matley on the all-out plummet, Matley tumbling head over butt down, Matley going almost gone, his arms outspread, him reaching, flailing, whopping . . . . Until, finally. Matley hits dog. Matley’s arms drop over the bunk side and hit dog. And right there Matley stops, he grabs holt and Matley . . . stroke. Stroke, stroke. There, Matley. There.
     Yeah, the loose part Matley held with dog. He packed the emptiness with pup. Took comfort in their scents, nose-buried in their coats, he inhaled their different smells, corn chips, chicken stock, meekish skunk. He’d listen to their breathing, march his breath in step with theirs, he’d hear them live, alive, their sleeping songs, them lapping themselves and recurling themselves, snoring and dreaming, settle and sigh. The dogs a soft putty, the loose part, sticking. There, Matley. There. He’d stroke their stomachs, fingercomb their flanks, knead their chests, Matley would hold on, and finally he’d get to the only true pleasure he’d ever known that wasn’t also a sin. Rubbing the deep velvet of a dog’s underthroat.

BY LATE AUGUST, Matley had broke down and paid for ads in the paper, and he got calls, most of the calls from people trying to give him dogs they wanted to get rid of, but some from people thinking they’d found dogs he’d lost. Matley’d get in his car and run out to wherever the caller said the dog was, but it was never his dog. And, yeah, he had his local suspicions, but soft old people like the ones on the ridge, it was hard to believe they’d do such a thing. So first he just ran the road. Matley beetling his rain-colored Chevette up and down the twelve-mile-long road that connected the highway and his once-was farm. Holding the wheels to the road entirely through habit, wasn’t no sight to it, sight he couldn’t spare, Matley squinting into trees, fields, brush, until he’d enter the realm of dog mirage. Every rock, dirt mound, deer, piece of trash, he’d see it at first and think "Dog!" his heart bulging big with the hope. Crushed like an egg when he recognized the mistake. And all the while, the little dog haunts scampered the corners of his eyes, dissolving as soon as he turned to see. Every now and then he’d slam out and yell, try Revie’s different calling songs, call, "Here, Ghostdog, here! Come, girl, come!" Call "Yah, Ed, yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!" Whistle and clap, cluck and whoop. But the only live thing he’d see besides groundhogs and deer, was that ole boy Johnby, hulking along.
     Matley didn’t usually pay Johnby much mind, he was used to him, had gone to school with him even though Johnby was a good bit older. Johnby was one of those kids who comes every year but don’t graduate until they’re so old the board gives them a certificate and throws them out. But today he watched ole Johnby lurching along, pretend-hunting, the gun, everyone had to assume, unloaded, and why the family let him out with guns, knives, Matley wasn’t sure, but figured it was just nobody wanted to watch him. Throughout late summer, Mrs. Mitchell’d bring Matley deer parts from the ones they’d shot with crop-damage permits; oh, how the dogs loved those deer legs, and the ribcages, and the hearts. One day she’d brought Johnby along — Johnby’d catch a ride anywhere you’d take him — and Matley’d looked at Johnby, how his face’d gone old while the mind behind it never would, Johnby flipping through his wallet scraps, what he did when he got nervous. He flipped through the wallet while he stared gape-jawed at the dogs, gnawing those deer legs from hipbone to hoof. "I’m just as sorry as I can be," Mrs. Mitchell was saying, talking about the loss of the dogs. "Just as sorry as I can be." "If there’s anything," Mrs. Mitchell would say, "Anything we can do. And you know I always keep an eye out."
     Matley fondled Guinea in his pocket, felt her quiver and live. You got to keep everything else in you soldered tight to make stay in place the loose part that wasn’t. You got to grip. Matley looked at Johnby, shuffling through his wallet scraps, and Matley said to him, "You got a dog, Johnby?" and Johnby said, "I got a dog," he said. "I got a dog with a white eye turns red when you shine a flashlight in it," Johnby said. "You ever hearda that kinda dog?"

WHAT MADE IT so awful, if awfuller it could be, was Matley never got a chance to heal. Dogs just kept going, so right about the time the wound scabbed a little, he’d get another slash. He’d scab a little, then it would get knocked off, the deep gash deeper, while the eulogies piled higher in his head:
     Cese. Something got hold his head when he was wee little, Matley never knew if it was a big dog or a bear or a panther or what it was, but it happened. Didn’t kill him, but left him forever after wobbling around like a stroke victim with a stiff right front leg and the eye on the same side wouldn’t open all the way, matter always crusted in that eye, although he didn’t drool. Cese’d only eat soft food, canned, favored Luck’s pinto beans when he could get them, yeah, Matley gave him the deluxe treatment, fed him on top of an old chest of drawers against the propane tank so nobody could steal his supper. Cese went on September ninth.
     Leesburg. Called so because Matley found him dumped on a Virginia map that must have fallen out of the car by accident. Two pups on a map of Virginia and a crushed McDonald’s bag, one pup dead, the other live, still teeny enough to suck Matley’s little finger, and he decided on the name Leesburg over Big Mac, more dignity there. When that train first started running, Leesburg would storm the wheels, never fooled with the chickenfeed freight train, he knew where the trouble was. Fire himself at the wheels, snarling and barking, chasing and snap, and he scared some of the sightseers, who slammed their windows shut. Although a few threw food at him from the dining coach. Then one afternoon Matley was coming down the tracks after scavenging spikes, and he spotted a big wad of fur between two ties and thought, "That Missy’s really shedding," because Missy was the longest-haired dog he had at the time, and this was a sizeable hair hunk. But when he got home, here came Leesburg wagging a piece of bloody bone sheathed in a shredded tail. Train’d took it, bone sticking out that bloody hair like a half-shucked ear of corn, and Matley had to haul him off to Dr. Simmons, who’d docked it down like a Doberman. Leesburg went on the thirtieth of September.
     That sweet, sweet Carmel. Bless her heart. Sure, most of them, you tender them and they’ll tender you back, but Carmel, she’d not just reciprocate, she’d soak up the littlest love piece you gave her and return it tenfold power. She would. Swan her neck back and around, reach to Matley’s ear with her tiny front teeth and air-nibble as for fleas. Love solidified in a dog suit. Sometimes Matley’d break down and buy her a little bacon, feed it to her with one hand while he rump-scratched with his other, oh, Carmel curling into U-shaped bliss. That was what happiness looked like, purity, good. Matley knew. Carmel disappeared five days after Cese.
     Guinea he held even closer, that Guinea a solder, a plug, a glue. Guinea he could not lose. Now Guinea wasn’t one he found, she came from up at Mitchell’s, he got her as a pup. Her mother was a slick-skinned beaglish creature, a real nervous little dog, Matley saw the whole litter. Two pups came out normal, two did not, seemed the genes leaked around in the mother’s belly and swapped birthbags, ended up making one enormous lumbery retarded pup, twice the size the normal ones, and then, like an afterbirth with fur and feet, came Guinea. A scrap of leftover animal material, looked more like a possum than a dog, and more like a guinea pig than either one, the scrap as bright as the big pup was dumb, yes, she was a genius if you factored in her being a dog, but Matley was the only one who’d take her. "Nobody else even believes what she is!" Mrs. Mitchell said. From the start, Guinea craved pockets, and that was when Matley started going about in sweatshirts with big muff-like pockets in front, cut-off sleeves for the heat, and little Guinea with him always, in the pocket sling, like a baby possum or a baby ‘roo or, hell, like a baby baby. Guinea luxuring in those pockets. Pretending it was back before she was born and came out to realize wasn’t another creature like her on earth. Matley understood. Guinea he kept close.

COLUMBUS DAY WEEKEND. Nine dogs down. Matley collapsed in his lawn chair by the househole. Matley spent quite a bit of time in his lawn chair by the househole, didn’t own a TV and didn’t read much besides Coonhound Bloodlines and Better Beagling magazines; Matley would sit there and knuckle little Guinea’s head. Fifteen years it had been since the house swam off, the househole now slow-filling with the hardy plants, locust and cockleburs and briar, the old coal furnace a-crawl with poison ivy. Fifteen years, and across the tracks, what had been the most fertile piece of bottom in the valley, now smothered with the every-year-denser ragweed and stickweed and mock orange and puny too-many sycamore saplings. Matley could feel the loose part slipping, the emptiness pitting, he held Guinea close in his pocket. Way up the tracks, the tourist train, mumbling. Matley shifted a little and gritted his teeth.
     The Mitchells had ridden the train once when they had a special price for locals, they said the train people told a story for every sight. Seemed if there wasn’t something real to tell, they made something up, and if there was something to tell, but it wasn’t good enough, they stretched it. Said they told that the goats that had run off from Revie decades ago and gone feral up in the Trough were wild mountain goats, like you’d see out West. Said they told how George Washington’s brother had stayed at the Puffinburger place and choked to death on a country-ham sandwich. Said they pointed to this tree in Malcolms’ yard and told how a Confederate spy had been hanged from it, and Mr. Mitchell said, "That oak tree’s old, but even if it was around a hundred and forty years ago, wasn’t big enough to hang a spy. Not to mention around here they’d be more likely to hang a Yankee." Matley couldn’t help wondering what they told on him, but he didn’t ask. He’d never thought much about how his place looked until he had these train people looking at him all the time. He was afraid to ask. And he considered those mutt puppies, sleeping forever.
     By that time, he’d made more than a few trips to Oaken Acre Estates despite himself (how old soft people could do such a thing). He’d sneak up in there and spy around, never following the new road on top of the ridge, but by another way he knew. A path you picked up behind where the sheep barn used to be, the barn now collapsed into a quarter-acre sprawl of buckled rusty tin, but if you skirted it careful, leery of the snakes, there was a game path above the kudzu patch. He usually took four or five dogs, Hickory and Tick — they liked to travel — and Guinea in his pocket, of course Guinea went. They’d scramble up into the stand of woods between househole and subdivision, Matley scuttling the path on the edges of his feet, steep in there, his one leg higher than the other, steadying Guinea with one hand. Matley tended towards clumsy and worried about falling and squashing Guinea dead. This little piece of woods was still Matley’s piece of woods, had been deeded to him, and Matley, when he moved on that little land, could feel beyond him, on his bare shoulders and arms, how far the land went before. Matley angled along, keen for any dog sign, dog sound, dog sight, yeah, even dead-dog odor. But there was nothing to see, hear, stink.
     Then they’d come out of the woods to the bottoms of the slopey backyards, shaley and dry with the struggling grass where the outsiders played at recreating those Washington suburbs they’d so desperately fled. Gated-off, security-systemed, empty yard after empty yard after empty, everything stripped down past stump, no sign of a living thing up in there, nor even a once live thing dead. Hickory and Tick and whoever else had come would sniff, then piss, the lawns, been here, yeah, me, while Matley kept to the woods edge, kept to shelter, kept to shade. Guinea breathing under his chest. He had no idea where the pureblood-dog people lived, and they left no sign — no dogs, no pens, no fences — and although the ridge was full of look-alike houses, garages, gazebos, utility sheds, a swimming pool, it was the emptiest place he’d ever felt. How you could kill a piece of ground without moving it anywhere. And Matley’d watch, he’d listen, he’d sniff best he could. But no dog sights, no dog sounds, no smells, and nothing to feel but his own sticky sweat. Matley’d never discover a thing.
     Matley tensed in his lawn chair, nine dogs gone, Guinea in his pocket, Junior Junior cranky in his lap. He listened to that train creak and come, the train was coming and coming — it was always coming and you would never get away. The train slunk around the turn and into sight, its bad music an earbeat, a gutbeat, ta TA ta TA ta TA, locomotive slow-pulling for the sightseers to better see the sights, and how did they explain Matley? Plopped between Winnebagos and househole with some eighteen doghouses up his yard. How did he fit into this land that time forgot? ta TA ta TA ta TA, the beat when it passed the joints in the rails, and the screee sound over the rail beat, and even over top that, a squealing, that ear-twisting song, a sorry mean ear-paining song. Starers shouldered up in open cars with cameras bouncing off golf-shirted bellies, and from the enclosed cars, some would wave. They would only wave if they were behind glass. And Matley would never wave back.

HE COMES TO know. In the dream, he is a younger man than young he ever was, younger than he was born, and the hillside he hell-heaves, it’s hill without end. The leaves loud under snow crust, his boots busting, ground cracking, the whole earth moanering, and him, him helling. Snow lying in dapples, mottles, over hillside, ridgeside, dog-marked like that, saddles, white snow saddles, see, his side seizing, breath in a blade, and the dog. Who he dream-knows is a girl dog, he knows that, the dog haunch-sat waiting pant, pant, pant. His hill pant, her dog pant, the blade in his ribs, who pants? say good dog "good dog" good, him helling and the dog roped leashed tethered to a cat-faced red oak black against the snow blank, dog a darker white than the snow white and. He cannot ever reach her.

EVENTUALLY IT TRICKLED down to them in town. A few had seen. The fuel oil man. The UPS. Gilbert who drove the school bus to the turnaround where the road went from gravel to dirt. Dog Man blundering in bushes, whistling and yodeling some chint-chant dog-call, when few people besides the Mitchells had ever heard Muttie speak beyond shopping grunts. Of course, there were the lost ads, too, and although Matley wouldn’t spend the extra dollar to print his name, just put a phone number there, well, the swifter ones put it together for those who were slow. Then somebody cornered Mr. Mitchell in the Super Fresh, and he confirmed it, yeah, they were vanishing off, and right away the story went around that Muttie was down twenty-seven dogs to a lean forty-eight. The UPS driver said he didn’t think those old people out in Oaken Acre Estates were hard enough for such a slaughter, but then somebody pointed out the possibilities of poison, "people like that, scared of guns, they’ll just use poison," a quiet violence you didn’t have to see or touch. Yeah. A few speculated that the dogs just wised up, figured out Cat was crazy and left, and others blamed it on out-of-work chicken catchers from Hardy County. One (it was Mr. Puffinburger, he didn’t appreciate the ham sandwich story) suspected the train people. Who knew to what lengths they’d go, Mr. Puffinburger said, the househole, the campers, the doghouses and Mr. Hound, that scenery so out of line with the presentation, so far from the scheme of decoration. Who knew how they might fix ole Beagle Boy and his colony of dog. He’d heard they tried to organize the 4-H’ers for a big trash clean-up. Then a sizeable and committed contingent swore Matley had done it himself and ate ‘em, and afterwards either forgot about it or was trying to trick people into pity, "I wouldn’t put anything past that boy."
     "I wouldn’t, either, now. He’s right, buddy. Buddy, he. is. right."
     "Hell, they were all of them crazy, you could see it in their eyes."
     "And I heard Charles lives out in Washington State now, but he won’t work. Say he sits around all day in a toolshed reading up on the Indians."
     "Well," the last one said. "People are different."

MATLEY STANDING AT his little sink washing up supper dish-es, skillet-sized pancakes and gravy from a can. His dogs have took up a dusktime song. An I’m gonna bark because I just want to song, a song different from an I’m barking at something I wanna catch song or I’m barking at somebody trying to sneak up song or I’m howling because I catch a contagion of the volunteer fire department siren-wailing different from I’m barking at a trainfull of gawkers song. A sad sad song. The loose parts in him. Daylight puts a little hold down on it, but with the dark, nothing tamps it, you never know. You got to hold tight. He’d seen Johnby again that morning, humping along through the ditch by the road, and now, behind his eyes, crept Johnby, hulking and hunching to the time of the song. Dogs sought Johnby because Johnby wasn’t one to bathe much and dogs liked to pull in his scents, Johnby could no doubt bait dogs to him, Matley is thinking. The way Johnby’s lip would lift and twitch. Muscles in a dead snake moving. Tic.
     Matley stepped out, pulled Guinea from his pocket and took a look. As sometimes happened, for a second he was surprised to see her tail. The dog song made a fog around them, from sad to eerie, Matley heard the music go, while Matley counted those dog voices, one two three to twelve. Matley hollowing under his heart (the part slipping), the fear pimpling his skin, and then he called, moany, a whisper in his head: come out come out come out come out.
     He breathed the odor the place made of an evening, a brew of dropping temperature, darkness and househole seep. A familiar odor. The odor of how things fail. Odor of ruin in progress, of must and stale hay, spoiling silage, familiar, and mildew and rotting wood and flaked paint; twenty-year-old manure, stagnant water, decaying animal hides, odor of the househole and what falls in it, the loss smell, familiar, the odor of the inside of his head. And Matley stroked little Guinea, in full dark now, the dog song dimming, and he heard Mrs. Mitchell again ("but I never did want to have more than two or three"), the not-question she used to ask, him not thinking directly on it, but thinking under thinking’s place, and he knows if you get a good one, you can feel their spirits in them from several feet away, right under their fur, glassy and clear and dew-grass smelling. If you get a good one. You can feel it. No blurriness to the spirit of a dog, no haze, they’re unpolluted by the thinking, by memories, by motives, you can feel that spirit raw, naked bare against your own. And dogs are themselves and aren’t nothing else, just there they are, full in their skins and moving on the world. Like they came right out of it, which they did, which people did, too, but then people forget, while dogs never do. And when Matley was very young he used to think, if you love them hard enough, they might turn into people, but then he grew up a little and knew, what good would that be? So then he started wishing, if you loved one hard enough, it might speak to you. But then he grew up even more and knew that wasn’t good, either, unless they spoke dog, and not just dog language, but dog ideas, things people’d never thought before in sounds people’d never heard, Matley knew. And Matley had studied the way a dog loved, the ones that had it in them to love right, it was true, not every one did, but the ones that loved right, Matley stroking, cup, cradle and hold, gaze in dog eyes, the gentle passing. Back and forth, enter and return, the gentle passing, passing between them, and Matley saw that love surpass what they preached at church, surpass any romance he’d heard of or seen, surpass motherlove loverlove babylove, he saw that doglove simple. Solid. And absolutely clear. Good dog. Good dog, now. Good. Good.

MEREDITH. WAS JUST a couple weeks shy of dropping her pups, no mystery there, she was puffed out like a nail keg, and who in their right mind would steal a pregnant Lab/Dalmatian mix? it could only be because they were killing them, if Matley’d ever doubted that, which he had. Which he’d had to. Meredith’d been a little on the unbrightish side, it was true, had fallen into the househole more than once in broad day, the spots on her head had soaked through and affected her brain, but still. And it was her first litter, might have made some nice pups, further you got from the purebloods, Matley had learned, better off you’ll be. Meredith went on October seventeenth.
     Muddy Gut. A black boy with a soft gold belly, and gold hair sprouting around his ears like broom sedge, soft grasses like that, he had the heaviest and most beautiful coat on the place, but the coat’s beauty the world constantly marred, in envy or spite. Muddy Gut drew burrs, beggar’s lice, devil’s pitchforks, ticks, and Matley’d work tirelessly at the clobbed-up fur, using an old currycomb, his own hairbrush, a fork. Muddy Gut patient and sad, aware of his glory he could not keep, while Matley held a match to a tick’s behind until it pulled out its head to see what was wrong. A constant grooming Matley lavished over Muddy Gut, Matley forever untangling that lovely spoiled fur, oh sad sullied Muddy, dog tears bright in his deep gold eyes. Muddy Gut went on October twenty-first.
     Junior Junior. Matley’d known it was bound to happen, Ray Junior or Junior Junior one. Although they were both a bit ill-tempered, they were different from the rest, they were Raymond descendants several generations down. Junior Junior was Ray Junior’s son, and Ray Junior was mothered by a dog across the river called Ray Ray, and Ray Ray, Mr. Mitchell swore, was fathered by the original Raymond. In Junior Junior there was Raymond resemblance, well, a little anyway, in temperament for sure, and Matley didn’t stop to think too hard about how a dog as inert as Raymond might swim the river to sow his oats. Raymond was the dog who came when Matley could no longer make the toy dogs live and who stayed until after the flood, and for a long time, he was the only dog Matley had to love. They’d found Raymond during a Sunday dinner at Mrs. Fox’s Homestead Restaurant when Matley had stretched out his leg and hit something soft under the table, which surprised him. Was a big black dog, bloodied around his head, and come to find out it was a stray Mrs. Fox had been keeping for a few weeks, he’d been hit out on 50 that very morning and had holed up under the table to heal himself. Later, Revie liked to tell, "Well, you started begging and carrying on about this hit dog, and Mrs. Fox gave him up fast — I don’t believe she much wanted to fool with him anyway — and here he’s laid ever since, hateful and stubborn and foul-smelling. Then after we got done eating, Mrs. Fox came out of the kitchen, and she looked at our plates, and she said, ‘You would of thought finding that hit dog under your table would of put a damper on your appetites. But I see it didn’t!’ It was a compliment to her cooking, you see." Junior Junior was Raymond’s great-great grandson, and he disappeared on Halloween.
     Matley in the bunk at night. He’d wake without the knowledge. He’d lose the loss in his sleep, and the moments right after waking were the worst he’d ever have: finding the loss again and freshly knowing. The black surge over his head, hot wash of saw-sided pain, then the bottom’d drop out. Raw socket. Through the weeks, the loss rolling, compounding, just when he’d think it couldn’t get worse, think a body couldn’t hold more hurt, another dog would go, the loss an infinity inside him. Like how many times you can bisect a line. They call it heartbreak, but not Matley, Matley learned it was not that clean, nowhere near that quick, he learned it was a heartgrating, this forever loss in slow-motion, forever loss without diminishment of loss, without recession, without ease, the grating. And Matley having had in him always the love, it pulsing, his whole life, reaching, for a big enough object to hold this love, back long before this crippling mess, he reached, and, now, the only end for that love he’d ever found being taken from him, too, and what to do with this love? Pummelling at air. Reaching, where to put this throat-stobbing surge, where, what? the beloved grating away. His spirit in his chest a single wing that opens and folds, opens and folds. Closing on nothing. Nothing there. And no, he says, no, he says, no, he says, no.

COME NOVEMBER, MATLEY was still running his ads, and he got a call from a woman out at Shanks, and though he doubted a dog of his would travel that far, he went anyway. The month was overly warm, seasons misplaced like they’d got in recent years, and coming home right around dusk, he crested High Boy with his windows half-down. At first, he wasn’t paying much mind to anything except rattling the Chevette over that rutty road, only certain ways you could take the road without tearing off the muffler. But suddenly it came to him he didn’t see no dogs. No dogs lounging around their houses, and no dogs prancing out to meet him. No dogs squirting out the far corners of the clearings at the sound of the car, even though it was dog-feeding time. No Guinea under the camper, no Hickory and Tick fighting over stripped-down deer legs, no welcome-home dog bustle. Not a dog on the place. None.
     A panic began in the back of Matley’s belly. Fizzing. He pushed it down by holding his breath. He parked the car, swung out slow, and when he stood up (hold on tight) there between the car seat and door, he felt his parts loosen. A rush of opening inside. He panic-scanned Winnebago and househole, sunken barns and swaying sheds, his head cocked to listen. Doghouses, tracks, bottom and trees, his eyes spinning, a vacuum coring his chest, and then he heard himself holler. He hollered "Here!" and he hollered "Come!" and he hollered "Yah! Yah! Yah!" still swivelling his head to take in every place. Him hollering "Here, Fella! Tick, C’mon now! Yah, Big Girl, Yah," his voice squawling higher while the loose part slipped. Matley hollered, and then he screamed, he clapped and hooed, he whistled until his mouth dried up. And then, from the direction of the sheep barn, way up the hill, he spied the shape of Guinea.
     Little Guinea, gusting over the ground like a blown plastic bag. Matley ran to meet her. Guinea, talking and crying in her little Guinea voice, shuttling hysterical around his shins and trying to jump, and Matley scooped her up and into his pocket, stroking and trembling, and there, Guinea. There. And once she stilled, and he stilled, Matley heard the other.
     Dog cries at a distance. Not steady, not belling or chopping, not like something trailed or treed. No, this song was a dissonant song. Off beat and out of tune. A snarling brutal song.
     Matley wheeled. He charged up the pasture to the sheep barn there, grass tearing under his boots. He leaned into the path towards the subdivision, despite dark was fast dropping, and he hadn’t any light. He pounded that game path crazy, land tilted under his feet, his sight swinging in the unfocus of darkened trees, and the one hand held Guinea while the dead leaves roared. He was slipping and catching his balance, he was leaping logs when he had to, his legs bendy and the pinwheel of his head, and the parts inside him, unsoldering fast, he could feel his insides spilling out of him, Matley could no longer grip, he was falling. This land, this land under him, you got to grip, tight, Guinea crying, and now, over top the dry leaves’ shout, he heard not only yelping, but nipping and growling and brush cracking, and Matley was close.
     It was then that it came to him. He dreamed the dream end awake. Him helling up that endless hillslope, but the slope finally ends, and he sees the white dog tree-tied ear-cocked patient waiting, but still, Matley knows, something not right he can’t tell. Black trees unplummetting out of white snow skiff, and Matley helling. Him helling. Him. Helling. He reaches, at last he reaches her, a nightmare rainbow’s end, and he’s known all along what he has to do, he thrusts his hand behind her to unleash her, free her, and then he understands, sees: behind the live dog front, she is bone. Her front part, her skin and face, a dog mask, body mask, and behind that, the not right he’s always sensed but could not see, bone, and not even skeleton bone, but chunky bone, crumbled and granular and fragrant, the blood globbed up in chunks and clots, dry like snow cold day skiff and Matley moaning, he’d broke free of the woods and into a little clearing below the subdivision, ground rampant with sumac and dormant honeysuckle and grape and briar. It truly darkening now, and the way it’s harder to see in near dark than it is in full dark, how your eyes don’t know what to do with it, and Matley was stopped, trembling, loose, but he could hear. A house-sized mass of brush, a huge tangle of it making like a hill itself, dense looped and layered, crowned with the burgundy sumac spears. That whole clump asound with dog, and Matley felt himself tore raw inside, the flesh strips in him, and Matley started to yell.
     He stood at a short distance and yelled at them to come out, come out of there, he knew inside himself not to dare go in, he knew before seeing what he couldn’t bear to see. But nary a dog so much as poked its head out and looked at Matley, he could hear them snarling, hear bones cracking, see the brush rattle and sway, but to the dogs Matley wasn’t there, and then he smelled it. Now the smell of it curled to him on that weird warm wind, as it had no doubt curled down to the househole and lured the dogs up, and he was screaming now, his voice scraping skin off his throat, ripping, and Matley, with the single ounce of gentle still left in his hand, pulled out Guinea and set her down. Then he stooped and plunged in.
     Now he was with them, blundering through this confusion of plant, and he could see his dogs, saw them down through vine branch and briar. Louise, the biggest, hunkered over and tearing at it, growling if another dog got close, she held her ground, and Ray Junior writhing in it on her back, and Honey lavering his neck in dried guts. Big Girl drawn off to the side crunching spine, while Hickory and Tick battled over a big chunk, rared up on their hind legs and wrestling with their fronts, and Matley pitched deeper, thorns tearing his hands. Matley tangled in vine and slim trunk, the sumac tips, that odor gusting all over his head, and he reached for Tick’s tail to break up the fight. But when he touched Tick, Tick turned on him. Tick spun around gone in his eyes, and he drew back his lips on Matley and he bared his teeth to bite, and Matley, his heart cleaved in half, dropped the tail and sprung back. And the moment he did, he saw what he’d been terrified he’d see all along. Or did he see? A sodden collar still buckled around a rotting neck, did he? The live dogs eating the dead dogs there, what he’d suspected horrified all along, did he? And then Matley was whacking, flailing, windmilling looney, beating with his hands and arms and feet and legs the live dogs off the dead things because he had nothing else to beat with, he was not even screaming any longer, he was beyond sound, Matley beyond himself, Matley reeling, dropping dropped down until Guinea was there. Against him. Hurtling up to be held. And Matley took her, did hold her. He stroked her long guinea hair, whispering, good girl, Guinea. Good.
     Matley stood in the midst of the slaughter, shaking and panting, palming little Guinea’s head. Most of the beat dogs had slunk off a ways to wait, but the bolder ones were already sneaking back. And finally Matley slowed enough, he was spent enough, to squint again through the dim and gradual understand.
     There were no collars there.
     Slowly.
     These colors of fur, these shapes and sizes of bones. Were not dogs. No.
     Groundhogs, squirrels, possums, deer.
     Then he felt something and turned and saw: Johnby crouched in the dead grass, rifle stock stabbed in the ground and the barrel grooving his cheek. Johnby was watching.

SOMEHOW IT GOT going around in town that it had been a pile of dead dogs, and some said it served Muttie right, that many dogs should be illegal anyway. But others felt sad. Still other people had heard it was just a bunch of dead animals that ole Johnby had collected, Lord knows if he’d even shot them, was the gun loaded? his family said not; could have been roadkill. Then there were the poison believers, claimed it was wild animals and dogs both, poisoned by the retirees in Oaken Acre Estates, and Bill Bates swore his brother-in-law’d been hired by the imports to gather a mess of carcasses and burn ‘em up in a brush pile, he just hadn’t got to the fire yet. Mr. Puffinburger held his ground, he felt vindicated, at least to himself, because this here was the lengths to which those train people would go, this here was how far they’d alter the landscape to suit themselves. What no one was ever certain about was just how many’d been lost. Were they all gone? had any come back? was he finding new ones? how many were out there now? Fred at the feed store reported that Muttie wasn’t buying any dog food, but the UPS truck driver had spied him along a creek bed with a dog galloping to him in some hillbilly Lassie-come-home.
     Despite all the rumors, it must be said that after that, they didn’t talk about Dog Man much anymore. Even for the skeptics and the critics, the subject of Matley lost its fun. And they still saw Muttie, although he came into town less often now, and when they did see him, they looked more closely, and a few even sidled up to him in the store in case he would speak. But the dogless Matley, to all appearances, was exactly like the dogful one.
 

THESE DAYS, SOME mornings, in the lost-dog aftermath, Matley wakes in his camper having forgot the place, the year, his age. He’s always had such spells occasionally, losses of space and time, but now it’s more than ever. Even though when he was a kid, Mom Revie’d only allow one live dog at a time and never inside, they did have for some years a real dog named Blanchey, some kind of wiener-beagle mix. And now, these mornings, when Matley wakes, believing himself eight in the flood-gone house, he hears Mom Revie’s dog-calling song.
     Oh, the way that woman could call a dog, it was bluegrass operatic. "Heeeeeere, Blanchey! Heeeeeeere, Blanchey, Blanchey, Blanchey," she’d yodel off the back porch, the "here" pulled taut to eight solid seconds, the "Blanchey" a squeaky two-beat yip. Then "You, Blanchey! C’mere, girl! ’mon!" fall from high-octave "here’s" to a businesslike burr, and when Blanchey’d still not come, Revie’d switch from cajole to command. "Yah, Blanchey, Yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!" a bellydeep bass; while the "Here’s" seduced, the "Yah’s" insist, oh, it plunged down your ear and shivered your blood, ole Mom Revie’s dog-calling song. And for some minutes, Matley lets himself hover in that time, he just lies abed and pleasures in the tones. Until she cuts loose in frustration with a two-string riff — "comeoutcomeout-comeoutcomeout"— rapid banjo plinkplunk wild, and Matley wakes enough to know ain’t no dogs coming. To remember all the dogs are gone but one.
     He crawls out of the bunk and hobbles outside. Guinea pokes her head from his pocket, doesn’t like what she sniffs, pulls back in. It is March, the train season is long over, but Matley hears it anyway. Hears it coming closer, moaning and sagging like it’s about to split. Hears the haunty music that train plays, haunty like a tawdry carnival ride. Train moving slow and overfull, passing the joints in the rails, beat beat, and the screee sound over the railbeat, he hears it shriek-squeal over steel. And Matley stands there between househole and Winnebago, the morning without fog and the air like glass, and he understands he is blighted landscape now. He is disruption of scenery. Understands he is the last one left, and nothing but a sight. A sight. Sight, wheel on rail click it on home, Sight. Sight. Sight. Then Matley does not hear a thing.