DOGGONE
    
by
“Phil Shoes”
(Thomas Clarkson and Dale Houstman)
 

 

1.
 
      Black Shuck was unhappy.
      The tiny garden made Black Shuck unhappy.  The new twelve foot chain link fence was too high and too strong, and that made Black Shuck unhappy. The dog’s black blood coating the fence said a lot about his ambition. But he was still unhappy. He bulled against the barrier, then raised his huge wet  snout, and squeezed off a sound somewhere between a lion’s growl and a woman’s whimper.  These failures had rung out every three minutes through a very long night. The adults chased sleep while the kids fell into evil dreams.  And Black Shuck chased them there too.  When Black Shuck was unhappy everyone was unhappy. And all night Black Shuck had been peculiarly unhappy.
     The sun rose upon another day in the mines...
…
        “Stupid games and stupider players,”  the man thought stupidly. He would bite off the head of any man that threw old dirt in his face, and kiss the mug of any canary who could help him forget the Hole. Helping him forget it was a woman’s job, and he’d only fire her when she started creating memories.  It had been a special party for not—so—special friends,  piled up in the Jacuzzi banging back Walking Vodkas and Whiskey with Whiskers.  He remembered lady lips naming the last game “bobbing for apples” and it looked like she had great breath control from the outside.  Maybe she just wearied as the evening wore down to its nap, maybe one of the fellas got the Big Avarice, and forked too much cake.  There was a large man holding a small woman’s head underwater as he tried to bring it home one more time:  this popped into his mind like a wet firecracker.  Mr. Kobold snuffed it with his tiny hands and tried to pretend it came from one of those Japanese kid's books he'd read too many of back in Korea. 
      Yeah, well, they’d talked too loud and drank too proud.  And pride….does something he couldn’t recall.  But the result was all too easy to see:  a brunette with Chinese eyes and a New Jersey tongue,  very dead.
     Like a sterile vein.
     And his hangover?  Somehow deserved, he ventured. But he was no Old School moralist. More of an Old Brown Shoe.
…
     Norita nibbled nuts noiselessly.  She held down the lone bench in the afterthought of a city park so close to the cop shop that both their entrances were lit by the same yellow light.  No one could sit as still as she could still sit. Not a telegenic talent, but it helped hide her from Handsome. Now, oddly, it worked to attract attention.  She dreamed of a short stack of waffles that gave off two or three lines of cartoon steam. A hungry dream,  but it drifted off into the ash trees and the glow of the rising sun burnished her mind empty as a condemned diner.  She didn’t much have memories anymore,  but these little scraps of animation served in place of the medications she could no longer afford,  since that man had cheated her of everything she had.  Ah well, he left her an abiding taste for nuts.  So Norita nibbled nuts noiselessly.
 
2.
 
     The yard hound had been thorough in his weeding,  and what his paws hadn’t destroyed,  his piss had.  In August heat the reek carried for three blocks,  killing appetites and igniting angers all along its waft.  The tiny garden was a wasteland of dirt and broken bottles, three dying saplings and four dead bushes. There were strange bones scattered here and there that didn’t bear thinking about, and numerous dark mounds which memorialized the toys he stole and immediately buried. The person who used him as a drunkard’s ottoman had not returned,  and the hole scored under the fence was too constricted for his bulky form.  The dog whimpered and went back to tunneling.  Heigh ho. Heigh ho, it’s off to the mines we go…
…
     She lay on the carpet like an unwrapped cheese-and—pear basket that he wanted to sample.  He uncrossed her chilled hams and tickled himself with tenderness in rhythm to the industrial beat of a minor radio hit.  This wasn’t getting easier.  Even at this stage she looked good enough to eat,  but—he sighed—that wedge of pumpkin pie wouldn’t stay fresh forever.  Probably wouldn’t last the night.  He backed off,  tried thinking with the other end of his abused nervous system,  but it didn’t want to hold up its end either.  Not that it ever had to:  he trusted his well-thumbed anthology of tics and bankrupt notions to guide him through any monkey business the others got him into.  Yeah, that was it, the performing  street monkey in his head was ready with a dozen tricks and itching for the spotlight.  Hell,  it was one of them winged chimps from the Wizard of Oz.  Let’s call him Beppo.  Let’s get familiar with our familiar.
     Right now he needed a rest.  He dragged the still bright body to the bed and crawled in after it, fully clothed.  Though he had a chaste on,  he still liked company:  every once in a while he surprised himself with the depth of his tenderness.  But not too often.  And less and less.                                                          
…
Once the waffles were gone,  Norita started thinking of how she had met Mr. Cold Balls;  She had been working in a place called the Gold Rush, with her nom de sex Yellow Fever. It was a hell of a hut, everything painted black with old metal lanterns the only illumination. The big draw was that the clientele got to wear miners’ hats and shine their beams on the girls as they “did the Hora.” He’d sat like a lump of blue coal in the corner and she was aware of him only because the orange light of the hat lanterns had reflected off his eyes… two tired eyes that didn’t blink.  He bought her drinks and drinks and (just to top it all off) drinks. Already a rut. The other girls had been excited for her; he was rumored to be a real lode. At last he asked for a  kiss in a way that assumed she’d give in, but she said she’d be wanting a bucket of champagne before she could stomach that, and laughed. After the “champagne” and a shitty kiss, he grabbed her like a fishmarket trout, and started grinding away as if he’d already paid the twenty dollars extra.  Was there ever so much sweat in any one human before?  By the time she actually got her asking price,  he had negotiated some sordid business in his pants,  so they spent the night’s remainder drinking his idea of whiskey and talking about the sort of trivia his kind picked up like laundry lint.  You wouldn’t guess from the lout puss he had on, but he sure could yap,  and since she knew more about Atlantis than even Plato,  they managed to kill the hours without killing one another.  And then he’d left,  and she had felt that someone was sure to die if they couldn’t keep his little clock-mind unwound.  He had something to forget already,  and he was looking for something else to forget.  New memories beating up old memories, and leaving them to suffer in an alley,  she guessed.  Probably a bit like professional wrestling. Without the peanuts.
 
3.
 
     Black Shuck wormed down and up out of the diggings and sniffed the air for the girl with Chinese eyes and a New Jersey tongue.  He would later pause in his search to steamroll a small girl and steal her white princess doll.  He worried it to shreds as he ran across the city.
…
     Three hours deep in afternoon, no dreams, and already awake, everything still waiting for him:  Hell and his lousy job waiting down the street for him,  a series of deep plans followed by shallow excuses waiting at the corner,  and the dead brunette,  now slightly ripe,  still waiting for him, there at the corner of the bed.  Quiet and insistent, that one.  Not so strangely,  his nightclub buddies weren’t waiting;. They all had good women paid for with better jobs,  and frightening autos filled with cautious children.  One by one,  he’d drag them down anonymous streets in precincts they drifted to for the quick good and dirty. And he’d mess them up in ways they wouldn’t want to pay for,  but would anyway. And they would all be bargains.  He’d wash their blood off the bills,  and sterilize them in liquor.  He smiled that smile he’d purchased for a dollar in Mexico City,  and waited for the sun to do its one good trick,  and blow.  He’d bag her up in her tacky bossanova skirt and pack her out to his Olds,  drive to the river, and set her free. One more Ophelia who’d sung her last sweet song.  At the last moment,  he would take off her underpants and place them in his pocket.  Almost clean and almost new;  the perfect “I’m sorry” gift for Norita.
…
      Black Shuck had the scent and he held it.  Families leaned out their windows to watch him pass by
and then ran directly to their phones to beg the cops for assistance. White city trash usually knew not to call for city help. The cops would be busy abusing their “friends & “neighbors” on the North side,  or getting pinned by Mayor Brakett for killing a teenager while chasing a petty criminal.
 …
     In his trouser change pocket he had found a short note from Norita,  but now it was a strange pink lint.  He’d barely had enough time to forget it,  and the alcohol from last night made the note run. He wrote an even shorter reply on a hundred dollar bill (nothing much to be lost now, and their communication had been cheap enough without skimping on the paper),  and furled it back into his crusty black pants.  Pure charity to a child:  come Saturday night, she’d be seventeen “if you know what I mean,”  but she’d be a mean seventeen., if you know what I mean.  He whistled for wonder and stole another look at his oddly tiny hands.
     He lapped at what he jokingly called a Tequila Sunset until his brains floated into his black hair and then drifted free into the room’s thick air like smoke from a cigarette.  He glanced once more at the still doll;  Chinese eyes and a New Jersey tongue.  Last night,  he’d jumped like a terrier for the first three drinks,  as her own brunette name sat on her own pink tongue and stayed there.  Her forgotten name seemed to be all the mystery she was about to muster,  her precious rosebud.  Very soon he’d be watering that blossom with a river.  What a shaggy wildflower!  He clumped to the dresser and fingered the remaining knob.  Suddenly Dad bellied up to the bar of his mind.  Have to be about 90 by now.  He could kick Dad’s ass into a hatbox.  And seal it with a kiss.
     The sticky drawer squealed like a punished baby and spat out a clean shirt and a dirty pistol.  He lit out for a thick steak sandwich at Bardo’s,  that dim spot near the police station.  He liked to give the stay—at—home cops the business now and then,  joking about the new bodies they’d fished outta the soup.  But.. .maybe not tonight.  One  sandwich, two beers, and three belches,  and everything was straight in the crooked world.  He remembered where Norita worked,  so he set out to work her a little more.
…
     Norita was in the Islands again: one part travel commercials and one part Gilligans Island, and one part soothing ocean sounds from her sleeping tape. She wore a yellow bikini bottom and a lei of tropical flowers. Little brown boys brought her bright fruit drinks, and her lover of the moment (a large cast of celebrities whose rotation depended on the movie she had seen most recently) fed her lobster that he had caught with his own hands. The movie stud muttered sweet nadas to Mama, and strangely called her “his golden girl, his buried treasure, or his precious jewel.” It was just like Mother had imagined it, this secret vein of desire, and it was usually the one thing that kept her going… But there was always the shaft.
 
4.
     Black Shuck had only one big thought in the pink nut of its brain; PROTECT. PROTECT the sky goddess, she who must be obeyed, she from whose hand all goodness rained down; food, warmth, praise. She touched his snout, and kissed it.  PROTECT a brunette with Chinese eyes and a  New Jersey tongue. Over 15years he’d chewed a hundred links out of a long chain of bad sausages. Some were just boyfriends, some bill collectors, some both: the usual meat shop. Black Shuck was Lassie loyal, and Rin- -Tin-Tin brave, and dangerous as a teflon bullet fired point blank from a Glock 10 mm semiautomatic. He had been running for 40 minutes straight. He still hadn’t attained maximum speed. 
…
     He stood behind a lilac bush,  giving her the eye.  The bush’s fat stink reminded him of the urinal cakes at Bardo’s,  but he enjoyed watching Norita unawares.  If she saw him now,  she’d get hot,  but not in that good way.  She didn’t like to be disturbed while she worked the park.  Or at all lately.  Soon he’d have plenty of what she liked being bothered with.  His knee hit a purple biscuit tin,  a Victorian cupid on the lid.  Cute kid with a weapon.  Made him uneasy.  He’d put some nuts in it for Norita,  cover it with a panty shroud.  The gun bulged beneath his coat,  and Dad came to mind,  but didn’t stick around long enough to get his ass kicked into a hatbox.  He thought of her Chinese eyes and her New Jersey tongue; the dead brunette’s that is:  Norita was a probation blonde with a weakness for nuts...in both senses of the word he thought.  In all three,  Dad answered.  Profound old bastard.
…
     A red cab rounded the corner just as Black Shuck barreled into the street.  The tires and the dog both squealed,  but it cost the cabbie $1000 to remove the dent and didn’t cost the dog one second of his headlong run. Dog’s luck.
…
     Norita knew that Mr. Go Bald was crouched behind the bush,  taking his tiny pleasure in his tiny hand;  she didn’t dwell on the picture.  But then again,  she didn’t dwell on much.  He brought Peter Lorre to mind,  but lacking the Euro-charm and Euro-class.  That suck had the mind of a child;  he’d been locked in a coal cellar the first eighteen years of his life,  and that smudge never came out right,  even with vigorous alcohol flushes. The wind darted up,  and she was feeling a bit hurt none of the businessmen who constituted her usual clientele had dropped by;  her edginess of late had made her put a bit too much tooth into the mix. Since Mr. Gobbled was on the prowl,  she thought she’d swing by his trash hole and see if he’d left some  cash about.  If nothing else, she could pawn his TV set.  Again.
                 …
     God! He loved that girl. He didn’t even clean off his pants, the warm mess remindcd him so much of her. He went to make the necessary calls from a booth in Bardo’s. The gift that would keep on giving. Finally things were going his way; the hidden camera that recorded that damned party last night would convince every single one of them suckers to fork over big and bountiful, and forever. Else he’d feed the dirty dope to the wives and then to the cops. With all the seed money sucked from them he could retire solid with Norita. Somewhere in the mountains? Maybe a cottage on a deserted moor where it would rain a lot and keep the roof clean. Just the two of them, his little dancer and him, miles from anyone. Hell! If he had his way he would take his golden girl into a deserted mine and treasure her there forever. He whistled something from Grieg, tunelessly.
 
5.
 
     Norita unlocked Mr. Gold Pole’s pit,  at the oily end of Torrance.  “Here’s the key to my home.  You already have the key to my heart”  he’d said one of those tequila ruined nights.  God, what a fat sap. When she stepped into the bedroom upstairs,  she stopped to take in the sights.  Puffy little brunette on the bad side of a good night.  She’d worked a few Rotarian gigs with her,  but couldn’t cough up her name.  Her nipples two early bloom roses in a snow mound.  The package was real too,  Norita recalled with respect.  Well, here was the spot marked X;  Mr. Goofus was going to have to shit out a couple of ingots for her now.  She danced around the body,  humming Happy Birthday to herself.  She took the hundred dollar bill from his pants and read  the love note scrawled on it “Come down to Bardo’s for some laughs.”  On the way out,  she unplugged his new color  set and skipped outside.  Some days are just worth getting up for.
…
     The lump’s “targets” however had gathered their nuts fast, on a tear, short of patience;  Kobold had underestimated these spoiled chips off old money who played at business like it was Lincoln Logs. Their Daddies were the real pros. But you didn’t bring down large fortunes in this country without cutting corners and knowing when to cut the line free. They had ran to their Papas right away, and one of them knew “people” who could clean up Kobold and take care of the mess at the apartment. The boys were nothing if not sporting; they toasted to the memory of the soon-to-be-departed Kobold, their highschool Hopfrog.. “Rest in pieces!” they roared over their brandy. Then they all laughed. An easily asmused crowd. 
…
     After his cash calls, Kobold capered all the way to his castle, his face twisted into a near notion of a grin, as he even stumble-bummed through a few steps he recalled from childhood tap dance lessons. This strange sight sent two little girls screaming home to tell Mom that they’d seen a goblin. But this fun didn’t hang on once he hit home. It departed quick as a dump after five coffees and a breakfast burrito: smashed window, torn drapes,  blood everywhere.  And the source of this trouble? A black monster with golden eyes standing guard over a naked, white body. Glass embedded in Black Shuck’s neck formed what looked like a red collar, and flowed in a steady stream into his mistress’ outstretched hand, a leash that would soon join them together in death. Yet, they looked good together,  he thought.  In calmer times he’d want a photograph.  He had his sentimental side. But he demurely combed over the thought that the calm times were over.  Downstairs one of the helpful neighbors hysterically told him that she’d called the police.  Oh good;  the sirens would harmonize neatly with the dog’s whimpers. Dad had opened his fat yap again,  but this time the words weren’t quite as clear. Too bad,  a bit of fatherly guidance would have come in handy just about… Here.  He suddenly felt the need for a big nap,  but Beppo was chittering away like a machine gun,  and then the monkey started to boogaloo.
 
6.
 
      Funny:  suddenly his feet were tiny too.
 
 
 
 
THE END