Dog Run Moon (21 page)

At some point Lauren decided that she wasn't going to cut her hair ever again. It had been white for a long time now. Although occasionally she discovered a dark one in there, and it came as a surprise. She remembered finding her first white hair somewhere near her thirtieth birthday and it had sent her on a tailspin for half a day. It's starting, she'd thought then. The follicle that produced that hair is dying. I've reached the tipping point and from now on it's nothing but slow decline.

Now, she regarded the random brown strand as offensive. A vital hair on the head of a seventy-year-old woman was like the kind of optimist that no one can stand. The person who will sit there on parade day under torrential skies and say
I think it's going to clear any minute now
. The kind of person who will cheerfully fight to the death for a crumbling government, lacking the good sense to surrender. Lauren supposed that, on a cellular level, we never surrender. That was part of the problem. These days, when she saw a brown hair, she pulled it out immediately.

It was hard to believe, but, somehow, in old age, she'd gotten vain. She loved her hair. It was long, pure white. She kept it in a thick braid, tucked into the back of her overalls when she was out doing her chores, so it didn't get in her way. She brushed it out every night. She only washed it once a week because she'd read in her magazines that too much shampoo could destroy the natural oils that make hair healthy. A seventy-year-old woman reading
Cosmopolitan
. That was something that would probably give some folks pause.

As it was, people didn't quite know how to take an old woman with long hair. In town, she got looks. She'd be pushing her cart through the County Market and kids, shopping with their mother, would stare. She wore her overalls and muck boots most days and her braid hung down near to her waist. She figured that some of these folks in town, newcomers most of them, thought she was some kind of crazy witch, living way out where she did with all the animals. Her old truck pieced together with baling wire, still running forty-some years after it rolled off an assembly line in Detroit.

She had aches and pains. Sometimes on winter days, her hands just didn't want to work, and she went about her chores like she had flippers on the ends of her arms. Her finger joints were gnarled and swollen and she took fish oil and glucosamine and vitamin C daily without too much noticeable improvement. She chewed ibuprofen like candy, and worked off the rest of the pain petting her dogs.

Since retiring, she'd volunteered at the animal shelter three days a week. She'd adopted dogs, of course, one or two a year, and she currently had nine, mostly mutts, except one purebred Dalmatian that showcased all of the magnificent idiocy inherent in its pedigree. He was a car chaser. Any vehicle that came down her road, he'd be after it, eyes rolled back in ecstasy, barking, slobber flying, trying to bite the tires. He was going to get his empty head crushed. She kept him inside with her most of the time, and he sat on the back of the couch, looking out the picture window to the road, eyeing each passing car wistfully.

She still had goats. She had chickens. She had one Red left. It stood solitary out in the pasture, and sometimes, while tossing hay, she thought she saw something in its eyes, a mean stubbornness. “You're not going to outlast me,” she'd say. “Keep looking at me that way, and see where it gets you. I'll take care of you once and for all. I'll have you parceled up in my freezer, wrapped in butcher paper. And I swear to god I won't go to the grave until I've eaten every last piece of your scrawny ass.”

Lauren was seventy-three years old, older now than her mother ever had been. It seemed impossible. Probably the only people who aren't surprised to find themselves arriving suddenly at old age are the ones who didn't make it that far.

Jason's trailer had been empty now for years, five or six, she couldn't remember. He'd been there with his dog, same as always, and then one night his truck hadn't returned. It stayed gone. The trailer had a broken window, and she'd seen pigeons flying in and out. Sometimes, she sat on her back porch in the evening and devoted a few moments of her pondering to imagining fates for him. Occasionally, she was feeling generous and she let him win the lottery and move to California. Most of the time he got killed in a drunk-driving accident or addicted to methamphetamine and shot in a drug deal gone bad.

One Saturday, after she was returning from a morning of walking dogs at the shelter, she came down her road and there was a silver minivan in the driveway of Jason's trailer. It had a flat tire and it somehow seemed exhausted, as if it had pushed itself to the limit to get its owner to this point, and now, upon arrival it was giving up the ghost, a trusty steed used up in service.

Lauren slowed. There was a girl standing on the sagging porch. She had a blond ponytail and wore pink shorts. She waved at Lauren and then Jason emerged from inside. He'd gained weight. Lauren noticed immediately. Even from a distance, he looked heavy. He was leaning on crutches, his foot encased in a dirty white bandage. He saw Lauren and made no sign of recognition. He motioned for the girl to get inside and they both went in and shut the door behind them.

It was a beautiful day in mid-June—the sky a smear of bright blue, the sun warming the grass. Lauren could only guess what the inside of that trailer looked like, pigeons and all. She'd had pigeons set up a nest in the rafters of her storage shed once. At first, she'd let them be, out of respect for their eggs. They'd turned her whole workbench white with their shit in a matter of days. Eventually, she had to knock the nest down with a broom and she felt bad about it. The eggs splattered on the concrete and one of them broke open and she could see the alien shape of a hatchling in there.

She had her binoculars, and she often stood at the kitchen window with them trained on Jason's trailer. She felt slightly bad for spying, but so what? She was an old woman with little to do and she hadn't done anything worth apologizing over in a long time.

Jason rarely came outside. But the girl was often in the yard. Doing what, Lauren could not always tell. She walked around the trailer with a stick, hitting the walls randomly until Jason came out and Lauren could see his mouth open wide as he yelled at her to stop. When Jason went back inside, the girl hunkered down in the weeds and her back was to Lauren so she couldn't tell what she was doing, until she saw a thin trickle of smoke rising over her head. Was she smoking? No. She'd started a fire. She squatted next to it, pink shorts and tank top, holding her hands out as if she were warming them. Lauren's porch thermometer read seventy-three degrees, not a breath of wind or a cloud in the sky. Where in god's name was this child's mother? Why was she not in school? The van hadn't moved since they'd arrived. The tire still flat all the way down to the rim, resting on the gravel. What were they eating? Were they living in there with pigeon shit and feathers and who knows what all else? Jason had at least taped a piece of cardboard over the broken window. Through the binoculars, Lauren had observed the birds returning, flying around the roof in vain, their distress seemingly visible in their erratic passes. Maybe they had eggs in there. A nest in the cheap glass chandelier over the dining room table. The young ones chirping hungrily. The adults unable to reach them. An old woman's meandering. Of course, if there had been a nest, Jason would have cleared it out first thing, like she had the one in her shed. There was nothing else to do. If one was sentimental enough to see tragedy in the plight of pigeons, even the happiest human life would be unbearably sad.

She continued to keep her eye out for the mother. Maybe she was inside. There had to be a woman—Jason's wife, or girlfriend, or something. There was no way a girl would be living with him for any other reason. Occasionally, Jason would come out on the porch, always on the crutches. He'd smoke a cigarette, looking off at the mountains. Sometimes he would piss simultaneously and Lauren would be able to see the yellow arc of it, glistening in the sun. When he'd finished, he would flick the butt of his cigarette into the weeds, zip up, and go back inside, the thin walls of the trailer rattling as the door slammed behind him.

Lauren had never been much of a cook. There was no magic to it though, she knew that. Some people wanted to make out that being a good cook was some sort of artistry and maybe at some level it was, but mostly all it entailed was a basic ability to follow directions. She'd cooked for her mother, whose brain had probably been too scrambled to taste the difference between carrots and chocolate cake. She'd cooked for Manny. He'd never said much either way about it. He never had an appetite for anything other than Lauder's scotch whiskey. She'd cooked for Sandy—well, they had often cooked together, and that was a different thing entirely. Less about the actual food and more about the act of preparation, the whole meal like one big flirt.

These days, Lauren scrambled a couple eggs in the morning and spooned them on buttered toast. She often skipped lunch completely, sometimes had just an apple and a wedge of cheese. For dinner she ate a bowl of canned soup with a handful of saltine crackers crushed up in it. Her doctor told her she needed to watch her sodium levels, so she had been getting the Healthy Choice soup lately. It cost twice as much and tasted half as good.

Lauren thawed some chicken breasts she'd had in the freezer. She dug out one of her good, seldom-used Pyrex baking dishes. She put the breasts in there on top of a bed of instant rice and poured over a couple cans of chicken mushroom soup. She scattered some croutons on the top and put it in the oven. Her Dalmatian—named Rocks, after the contents of his head—watched her move about the kitchen, the expression on his face, if possible, more quizzical than usual. Usually, he got to lick out a soup bowl at some point during kitchen operations, but thus far none had been offered, and he was obviously concerned. He whined.

“Oh, shut up,” Lauren said. “This isn't for us. You have nothing to complain about. Be happy you're in here and not outside with all your siblings. Be happy you found the one place where it is to your advantage to be too stupid to remain at large with the general population.”

She worked at the shelter the next day and on her way past Jason's trailer she put the chicken and rice on the porch railing. She'd written
Just heat and serve!
on a blue Post-it note and stuck it to the top of the foil.

She worked a full six-hour shift at the shelter. She walked fifteen different dogs, one at a time, in a complete loop around the property. She figured that, over the course of the day, she'd done at least five miles and she felt pretty good. Although her hands were arthritic, her knees and ankles were fine. She was still a damn good walker. Lately she'd been thinking about making one last trip up to Livingston Peak. She hadn't done it in years. While she was strong enough to do five mostly flat miles, she wasn't sure if she was capable of a steep scramble at high altitude. She could fairly easily imagine falling and breaking her hip. Crawling around in agony, waiting for the magpies to peck her eyes out while she was still breathing. There was still snow up that high right now anyway. She had all summer to decide if she was up for it. Maybe in the meantime she would pick up the pace. She'd take the dogs for two loops around, they'd love that. The girls who worked at the shelter would no doubt notice and make remarks. I'm in training, she'd say. They already thought she was crazy, the way she walked, fast, head down, sometimes practically dragging dawdling spaniels behind her. Tara, the sweet, chubby little thing at the front desk, was always complaining about being tired. “I wish I had your energy,” she said to Lauren. “I don't know about that,” Lauren replied. “I'm just worried that if I stop I might not get started again.”

That evening, the chicken and rice dish was gone from the porch railing. There was no sign of life and she watched for a long time after dinner, drinking tea with her binoculars by her side, but no one came out.

A few days later she pulled out one of her remaining baking dishes and put together a tuna casserole. Rocks watched her work and she talked to him. “That's the way it goes,” she said. “You cook for other people, better than what you make for yourself. That's some human foolishness right there. A dog wouldn't understand. Church ladies are always doing stuff like this. Any crisis or sad turn in a person's life and they're right there with a nice casserole. Their husband is at home, eating a microwave dinner, smelling all day what they got cooking in the Crock-Pot.
It's not for us, Harold. It's for the Johnsons. Mrs. Johnson's nerves are acting up again and I'm going to bring them this nice roast.
Harold is grumbling, eating his slop, wishing that
her
nerves would act up occasionally so someone would make
him
a roast.

“Why do they do it, Rocks?” The dog, recognizing his name, tilted his head and thumped his tail on the floor. “Are all these casseroles delivered out of pure Christian compassion? Or, is it just an excuse for them to weasel themselves into the situation? A chance for them to stand on the doorstep and hand over some food, say a few condolences, all the while scanning the inside of the house, noting the state of the things so that they might have some juicy details to throw around when they get on the phone to the other old biddies on the church directory.

“I'm telling you, Thelma, it's complete chaos over there. That poor Mr. Johnson. There were dishes piled up in the sink. I mean, a tower of dirty dishes. I hear they've got her over at Pine Rest. A whole handful of sleeping pills is what I heard. I made him a nice roast. I could see how happy he was to have it. I think I might make him some Swedish meatballs this weekend. Maybe you could make him a Jell-O salad and we could go over there together.

“Rocks, I'm telling you, all the charity in the world, I'm suspicious of it. And yet, here I am, a church lady that never got around to going to church.”