A Stranger in This World Read Free

then lost in the darkness, to form again as another pair of headlights passed. Ihad money in my pocket and a suitcase full of clothes. One of the trucks would stop for me, sooner or later. I thought of all the places I could be by the next day: Key West or New York City or Chicago, heading west.
    It wasn’t so much that I wanted somebody to kill him, I didn’t care if he was dead or not. I just wanted that weight off of me. I stood there watching my shadow circling around in the headlights and thinking about Wyoming, a place where I had only been to once, the summer before. I was hitching out to Seattle and I got a ride all the way to Wyoming from a girl named Karen. I still had her address in my wallet, frayed and faded to almost nothing. It wasn’t boyfriend-girlfriend or anything, we just got along. I always thought I had a friend in Wyoming, a place I could go to. All I had to do was step up onto the embankment and stick my thumb out. If I wanted to I could go back to the car first and get my clothes, maybe leave my father some gas money in his jacket pocket. He didn’t have a license but he’d be OK to drive, once he slept through the night—unless the kid in the store decided to call the cops after all, or unless he decided to drive while he was still drunk, the way he did sometimes. Unless, unless, unless. There were all kinds of things that might happen.
    I was just going to walk away. I was just going to let his life be his own. The next month, September, I would turn eighteen, which was old enough for anything.
    In Wyoming, after the rain, the smell of the sagebrush is ten times as strong as before, like sagebrush perfume. I tried to imagine a sky full of Western stars, cold and distinct, instead of this mottled, milky Southern sky. Where I could be the next day: Kansas City, Cedar Rapids, New Orleans or Minneapolis,on the way to South Dakota, on the way to Wyoming. I looked at the trucks passing by on the highway again and I watched my shadow circle around me in the headlights, the thin man torn to nothing in the dark, again and again. After a few minutes of watching I turned back toward the car, where my father was sleeping.

DOGS
    LET ’ S SAY THINGS STOP WORKING OUT FOR YOU. LET ’ S SAY YOU run out of money in a city that doesn’t know you, and the only job they find for you is killing dogs on the night shift. Your car dies. Your apartment is not quite far enough from the shelter.That distant sound of barking dogs is amplified by your memory, by dreams, so that it fills your grainy, sleepless mornings, the way that barking fills the shelter like water, a thick, swirling weight of sound that makes it hard to move, that spills out of the shelter, that ebbs and subsides and then, one dog at a time, starts again. Every kind of sound, yipping shih tzus, baying coonhounds, Pomeranians and Dobermans and vocalizing mutts. Some of the dogs bark so long and loud that they lose their voices before you can kill them, they go out with puny squeaks, shaking their heads, wondering what’s wrong. You give them a shot, pile them in the chamber, pump the air out. Then the incinerator.
    The trees that you remember every morning in your dreams, midwestern oaks and elms and leafy poplars, are shrunk to bitter twigs here. The only green in this city carpets the cemeteries. The remaining life is draining down into the roots: half-empty old women wander the supermarkets, the libraries, pardon me, pardon me. The knuckles of old men. While the bodies of the dogs you kill are beautiful, especially the greyhounds: piled in the cart on their way to the incinerator, they look like sleeping ballerinas, waiting for Cinderella. They belong onstage. The racing dogs arrive on your shift, dozens of them, on the night that racing season is over for the year. You picture them under the lights, straining toward the artificial rabbit while the tourists scream their names.
    You report at eleven, you kill the night’s dogs at twelve, from two