David Ohle: The Devil in Kansas

Daddy’d been working for Animal Control a long time. He didn’t make a lot, but we got by on it. Plus Uncle Ray chipped in his Social Security check every month. His legs went bad and he had to retire from bricklaying. Vickie, she spent all her time taking care of Wendy, so we wouldn’t have to hire a nurse. Junior and me, we sat around all day watching TV. Mostly we mooched off Daddy, till he had some kind of a flashback or a recovered memory or something mental. Everything got very bizarre really, really fast.

What happened was, when Daddy was seven, he was skipping down the street in his cute little cowboy boots and his two little plastic six-guns and there was this pack of stray dogs eating garbage out of a turned over can. One of them was a white German Shepherd that, without any warning at all, bit him a bunch of times on his little ass. He was so scared he pissed in his pants. It was a bad thing to remember, so he forgot it, or he thought he did anyway.

Pale with fear, hyperventilating, Mickey jumps into the truck and slams the door. The frothing shepherd snaps again and again at the window. He jams the truck into gear and peels rubber, drives rapidly around the corner and stops, pulls into a driveway and gets out. He nearly comes to tears when he looks down at the spreading piss stain in his khakis. He gets back into the truck and drives slowly away.

An hour later, he arrives at the animal shelter. The barking of dogs, the mewing of cats and the howl of parrots is almost deafening as Mickey walks dejectedly into an office labeled Director .

At a cluttered desk sits Lorraine, forties, sexually ambiguous, combing a fat cat in her lap and chomping on a cigar. She has what appears to be a patch of mange on her throat.

“What’s up, Zuke?”

He drops the truck keys on her desk. “It’s Zook, remember? Rhymes with hook.”

Lorraine notices the piss stain. “Oh yeah. You got a problem, Zook?” She points her cigar at his crotch.

“I’m gonna give notice and move on. Some other kind of work.”

“Why?”

“I’m not good at this.” A bead of perspiration rolls into his eye.

“That’s true.”

“And I had a recovered memory. A dog bit me when I was a kid, a white shepherd. Another one came after me this morning.”

“Big fucking whoop. How much notice you giving?”

“I’m outta here right now.”

“Thanks a lot, asshole. Now I gotta beat the bushes for somebody else.”

“I’m sorry, Lorraine.”

“You do know there’s no jobs out there, right?”

“Yeah, I know. I gotta chance it.”

Lorraine leans back in her chair, puffs on the cigar. “Maybe I’ll hire an ex-mailperson. There’s gotta be a get-even-with-dogs mentality there.”

“Yeah, maybe so.” Mickey reaches out to pet the cat, which hisses, then viciously scratches his hand. Lorraine has to chew on the cigar to contain her laughter.

Mickey leaves, patting his bleeding hand with a handkerchief.

The Zook home, later. Lorna watches a cooking show on TV. Junior reads the Weekly World News . Mickey enters, his shirttails out to hide the piss stain. Neither Lorna nor Junior notices him.

In the bathroom Mickey dumps his pissed-on khakis into a laundry hamper and steps into the shower. His eyes well up, but no tears are shed as he turns on the shower and water cascades down his face.

In a bedroom, Vickie sleeps off a hangover, drooling, snoring oafishly. A big bottle of generic Ibuprofen sits on a bedside table next to a half-finished glass of wine. People’s Court is on the small TV.

It’s lunch hour at the Squat ‘n’ Gobble. The parking lot is almost full. Behind the diner, a poorly dressed but industrious Asian man, sixties, pedals his basket-equipped bicycle up to a dumpster and picks through the trash with a stick. He finds a portable radio with a cracked case, wipes it off, turns it on. The batteries are weak, but a station comes in. He listens as he continues picking through the trash. It’s another academic voice on NPR: “By the end of the Civil War, Northern industrialism had triumphed over Southern agrarianism, and from that victory came a society based on mass labor and mass consumption. Mechanization displaced hand work on farms and in factories. Americans left the farms to seek jobs in urban factories. In the cities, swollen with growing numbers of the poor and the unskilled, angry forces were stirring that would profoundly alter the nation’s politics and its social ideals.”

Inside the Squat, Mickey lunches with friends: Wayne, a postman with a runny left eye, Walter, a butcher in a bloody smock, and Myra, forties, a thin, writerly-looking woman who bears a strong resemblance to Joyce Carol Oates. She drinks coffee and reads a paperback book. Wayne and Walter eat huge, fat-laden lunches, grunting with pleasure.

Wayne is miffed. “Mick. Animal Control? Where’s the control? My neighbor had some kind of yap dog, a pink-yer-nees.”

Myra corrects: “That’s Pekingese, Wayne. They’re named after Peking, China.”

“Thank you Myra, the walking dictionary. So the neighbor’s walking her Peek-a-nees. It’s in heat. Here comes this great big huge Rottweiler, loose as a goose, and it impales that little bitch on its dick and drags it six blocks before it drops off dead.”

“Don’t blame it on me. I quit today.”

Myra seems more alarmed than anyone else at the table. “Why, Mickey?”

“I’m afraid of German Shepherds. It was a repressed memory. One bit me when I was a kid. It almost happened again today. The whole thing came back. What’s up with a dog catcher that’s afraid of dogs?”

Walter chuckles. “One of my repressed memories came back one time to haunt me. It was my first wife…. Hey, I gotta get goin’. July Fourth’s coming. Huge push. Biggest meat-eating day of the year, you know.”

Wayne eats the last bite of his meat loaf. “Yeah, I gotta go schlep some mail.”

Wayne and Walter leave.

Mickey moves closer to Myra. “What’re you reading?”

She holds out the book. “ Abracadaver . I love it.”

“You read a lot of mysteries.”

“Guess what? I started writing one yesterday. It’s about a magician. He makes his wife disappear. Permanently.”

Mickey whistles and makes the sound of wind. “It was a dark and stormy night…and a cold wind howled over the moor. What’s a moor anyhow?”

“A big open plain with peat bogs. The wind blows all the time.”

Under the table, Mickey clasps her hand. “You gonna be home this afternoon? I gotta talk to somebody. I don’t want to go home.”

“Sure. Please do come over.”

“I gotta find work, but there’s nothing out there. I don’t qualify for anything, either. I got, what, two or three months and that’s it. I’m in bankruptcy court.”

Myra glances sideward. “Here they come. Two of your loved ones.”

“Don’t tell them I quit. I’ll tell ‘em all later when I get home.”

In the parking lot, Junior and Lorna get out of the Monte. Their clothing styles have evolved from Gothic to militaristic. They wear cammy jackets and heavy boots. Junior has on a black ball cap that says: Eventually, Why Not Now ? Lorna smokes a red Sherman.

They enter the diner as an elderly couple exit. The woman does her best to guide her stroke-victim husband toward their car. He is in pajamas, his slippers on the wrong feet. Junior and Lorna are annoyed at having to wait for the couple to get oriented and out of the way. Lorna steps on her cigarette. “Promise me one thing, Junior. If we ever get like them, shoot me in my sleep.”

“You got it. Then what? I whack my own ass?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass, fool. I’m dead at that point.” She gives Junior’s bun a good squeeze as they enter the squat.