A Stranger in This World Read Free Page A

till four you hose down the cages, after four the shelter doesn’t care what you do. Once a month the phone rings but it’s a wrong number. Each dog has a little card posted on the outside of the cage, a card filled out by the owners:
    Name, Breed, Sex, Weight, Spayed/Neutered, Shots, Reason. You read the Reasons and wonder who could ever pass this test: Not good w/ kids; Needs company; Moving to new apt. does not allow pets; Barks. You fill out cards on the owners and slip them into the card file at night, knowing that no one will ever look, tens of thousands of Names, of Reasons: Not good w/ animals.
    The shelter uses these multiplying library cabinets as proof of its efficiency, but the names don’t matter, just the number, the bulk of them. These empty hours before dawn, the shelter bursting with the voices of the reprieved, you review the accidents that brought you here, and the intentions. Let’s say that your mother died young. You lost a picture of yourself. Some nights you bring a half-pint of Jim Beam to doctor the coffee.
    There’s a procedure for leaving a dog to be killed, you try to tell the girl, but she is just gone, tires smoking gravel out of the parking lot. The dog looks through you, frantic—a pretty little bitch, some sort of Border collie cross or Australian shepherd. Who will do the paperwork? You take out a card and begin to make things up: her name is Ginger, the girl that Gilligan never got. The bitch is two, more or less—you guess it from her teeth—and her owner was a college girl, so she’s had her first shots but not the recent ones. Ginger’s claws skitter on the linoleum floor, trying to follow the long-gone car. It’s just light, quarter to five. When you get to the line for Reason you see the apparition of the college girl: bottle-blond, a little heavy, she drove some little American shitbox like a Chevette. Not one of the beautiful ones, the ones who couldn’t lose. Her makeup was smeared in black profusion across her cheeks, as if she had been crying.
    Think of a dog’s loyalty, the weight of that uncomplicated love. You remember minutes after you first made love, staring out the window of a girl’s suburban bedroom at the dirty snow in her yard, the dark bones of the trees, and wondering how you would stand up under the weight of love that had been entrusted to you, the promises you meant to keep—promises that meant everything to you, though not as much to her. Later this gets mixed up with the barking, but the idea of snow, of virginity, starts tears in your chest. You reach down, unclip the leash from Ginger’s collar and hold the door for her to go, running, racing toward the college girl with all the grace of her beautiful dog’s body.
    Even if she finds her owner, she’ll be back. And there are other futures: delivery trucks and dogcatchers, kids with .22s down in the wash, shooting rusty appliances, anything that moves. But still. The dogs in the cages behind you bark furiously, angry and begging, wanting only the chance that Ginger got: to be released into the wide and loveless world to find their owners. Let’s say you retreat into the chain-link pens, where tomorrow’s dead dogs race and whimper, frantic for love, barking and barking. And you have the keys to every lock, the means to open the cages, open the doors and send them racing. You’ll be a hero, king of the dogs. Strangers will know your name in the world of dogs.
    But in the world of men, the dogs will continue to be killed. You can be replaced, easily. You can be replaced. The morning traffic has started, the morning cars on their way to work, the big machine awakening, moving forward, spitting out junk, broken parts, dead dogs, junk. The nonstop barkingdrives the last thought from your mind. Quite suddenly you hate the dogs, all of them. You put the keys back in your pocket. Their barking is injuring you. You stand in the sunlight, feeling the yellow warmth of morning on your useless