Last Days of the Dog-Men Read Free

and dewlap outlined in flickering flame.”
    â€œPhelan,” Harold said, “meet Otis.”
    â€œCerberus, you mean,” Phelan said, “my twelfth labor.” He raised his arms and spread his fingers before his eyes. “I have only my hands.”
    H OW H AROLD CAME TO BE ALONE IS THIS: S OPHIA, A SURVEYOR for the highway department, fixed her sights on Harold and took advantage of his ways by drinking with him till two a.m. and then offering to drive him home, where she would put him to bed and ride him like a cowgirl. She told me this herself one night, and asked me to feel of her thighs, which were hard andbulging as an ice skater’s under her jeans. “I’m strong,” she whispered in my ear, cocking an eyebrow.
    One evening, after she’d left, Harold stumbled out onto the porch where I sat smoking, bummed a cigarette, braced an arm against a porch post, and stood there taking a long piss out into the yard. He didn’t say anything. He was naked. His hair was like a sheaf of windblown wheat against the moonlight coming down on the field and cutting a clean line of light along the edge of the porch. His pale body blue in that light. He kept standing there, his stream arcing out into the yard, sprayed to the east in the wind, breathing through his nose and smoking the cigarette with the smoke whipping away. There was a storm trying to blow in. I didn’t have to say anything. You always know when you’re close to out of control.
    Sophia left paraphernalia around for Harold’s fiancée Westley to find. Pairs of panties under the bed, a silky camisole slumped like a prostitute between two starched dress shirts in Harold’s closet, a vial of fingernail polish in the silverware tray. It wasn’t long before Westley walked out of the bathroom one day with a black brassiere, saying, “What’s this thing doing hanging on the commode handle?” And it was pretty much over between Westley and Harold after that.
    I must say that Sophia, who resembled a greyhound with her long nose and close-set eyes and her tremendous thighs, is the bridge between Harold’s story and mine.
    Because at first I wasn’t cheating on Lois. Thingshad become distant in the way they do after a marriage struggles through passionate possessive love and into the heartbreak of languishing love, before the vague incestuous love of the long-together. I got home one night when Lois and I were still together, heard something scramble on the living-room floor, and looked over to see this trembling thing shaped like a drawn bow, long needle-nose face looking at me as if over reading glasses, nose down, eyes up, cowed. He was aging. I eased over to him and pulled back ever so softly when as I reached my hand over he showed just a speck of white tooth along his black lip.
    â€œI read that story in the Journal about them, and what happens to them when they can’t race anymore,” she said. She’d simply called up the dog track, gone out to a kennel, and taken her pick.
    She said since he was getting old, maybe he wouldn’t be hard to control, and besides, she thought maybe I missed having a dog. It was an attempt, I guess, to make a connection. Or it was the administration of an opiate. I don’t really know.
    To exercise Spike, the retired greyhound, and to encourage a friendship between him and me, Lois had the two of us, man and dog, take up jogging. We’d go to the high school track, and Spike loved it. He’d trot about on the football field, snuffling here and there. Once he surprised and caught a real rabbit, and tore it to pieces. It must have brought back memories of his training days. You wouldn’t think a racing dog could be like a pet dog, foolish and simple and friendly. But Spike was okay. We were pals. And then, after all theweeks it took Spike and me to get back into shape, and after the incidental way in which my affair with Imelda down the