Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

August tapped the door a few times with the wrench and went inside. The old house was built by folks interested in efficiency, not landscape, and the windows were few and small. The kitchen was dimly lit by a single shaft of light coming through the window over the sink. The room smelled like frying bacon, and the radio was on. Paul Harvey was extolling the virtues of a Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed. At my age there are few things I appreciate more than a night of restful sleep. Get this mattress. It was dreamed up by a team of scientists. It’s infinitely adjustable. Your dreams will thank you.

“Augie, my fair son, how does the day find you?”

His mother was at the kitchen table playing solitaire. A pan of thinly sliced potatoes fried with pieces of bacon and onion sat next to her ashtray. She smoked Swisher Sweets cigarillos, and a thin layer of smoke was undulating above her head like a smooth, gray flying carpet waiting for a charge to transport.

“I made lunch and it smelled so good while it was cooking, but then found myself suddenly not hungry. I don’t know, I may have finally broken through.”

August pulled out a chair and sat across from his mother at the small table. “Broken through to what?” he said.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you? I’ve been devoting myself to a new teaching.” She stubbed out her cigarillo, and shook another from the pack sitting on the table. She lit it, a fine network of lines appearing around her mouth as she pursed her lips. Her nails were long and gray, her fingertips jaundiced with tobacco stain. “Yeah,” she continued, “I’ve become an inediate.”

“A what?”

“An inediate, you know, a breatharian?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Air eaters? Sky swallowers? Ether ingesters?”

“Nope.”

“You can attune your mind and your body, Augie. Perfectly attune them by healthy living and meditation so that you completely lose the food requirement. I mean, not just that you’re no longer hungry — that’s not too hard. I’m talking about all you have to do is breathe the air, and you’re satisfied. You get full and you never have to eat. And you can survive that way, happy as a clam.” She took a sip of coffee, smoke dribbling from her nose as she swallowed. “That’s what I’ve been working on.”

She pushed the pan of potatoes and bacon toward him, and August ate some even though Lisa had told him she would make him a sandwich when she got up from the barn. The potatoes were greasy and good. The bacon in it was little pieces of semi-charred saltiness. The onions were soft, translucent, and sweet. August ate, and wiped his hands on his jeans, and put his wrench on the table for his mother to see.

“Dad gave me a job,” he said. “For money.”

“Oh, well I’m proud to hear it. Did you negotiate a contract? Set a salary review option pending exemplary performance?”

“No, I’m just killing some cats.”

“I see. And this is your Excalibur?” She tinked the chrome-handled wrench with her fingernail.

“Yeah. It’s a spanner wrench.”

She made a low whistle and coughed softly into the back of her hand. “It’s a big job, Augie. Is he paying you upon completion or piecemeal?”

“I’m taking the tails. We’re going to settle up at the end of the week.”

“Grisly work, son. That’s the kind of work you stand a chance of bringing home with you, if you know what I mean.”

“The haymow smells like piss. It’s getting real bad.”

“Your father. This is gruesome, even for him. Jesus.” She looked down blankly at the cards in front of her. “I keep forgetting where I’m at with this.” She gathered up her game, her nails scrabbling to pick the cards up off the Formica. “I can get only so far with solitaire before I get stumped. You ever win?”

“I never play.”

“I suppose it’s a game for old women.”

“You’re not old.”

“If I’m not, then I don’t want to feel what old is like.”

“Are you ever going to come back to the new house?”

“You can tell him no, if you want. About the cats. You don’t have to do it.”

“She’s been staying over.”

“I found all Grandma’s old quilts. They were in a trunk in the back closet. Beautiful things. She made them all. Some of them took her months. All of them hand stitched. I never had the patience. She used to make me sit there for hours with her learning the stitches. I’ll show them to you if you want.”

“Sure. I should get to work now, though.”

“Next time, then.”

August ate a few more potatoes and then stood up.

“I wish you Godspeed,” his mother said, coaxing another cigarillo from the pack with her lips. “May your arrows fly true.”

“I don’t have any arrows.”

“I know. It’s just an old Indian saying.”

She blew smoke at him. “I don’t care about the cats,” she said, smiling at him in such a way that her mouth didn’t move and it was all in her eyes. “I look at you, and it’s clear as day to me that he hasn’t won.”

—

The barn was empty. His dad and Lisa were out rounding up the cows for milking. August put on his gloves and wedged the wrench down under his belt. He climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow.

Half-blind in the murk, holding his nose against the burning ammonia stench of cat piss, August crushed the skull of the first pale form that came sidling up to him. He got two more in quick succession — and then there was nothing but hissing from the rafters, green-gold eyes glowing and shifting among the hulking stacks of baled hay. August tried to give chase. He clambered over the bales, scratching his bare arms and filling his eyes and ears and nose with the dusty chaff of old hay. But the cats were always out of reach, darting and leaping from one stack to the next, climbing the joists to the rafters where they faded into the gloom. August imagined them up there, a seething furry mass, a foul clan of fanged wingless bats clinging to a cave roof. This was going to be harder than he had thought.

August inspected his kills. A full-sized calico and two skinny grays, thin and in bad shape, patches of bare skin showing through their matted fur. He pitched them down the hay chute and climbed after them. On ground level, he breathed deeply of the comparatively sweet manure-scented air, and fished his knife from his pocket. He picked up the first cat by the tail and severed it at the base, dropping the carcass on the cement with a wet thud. He dealt similarly with the other two cats, pitched them all in the conveyor trough, and went looking for a hammer. By the time he returned to the barn his father and Lisa had the cows driven in and stanchioned in their stalls. The radio was on, loud enough so Paul Harvey’s disembodied voice could be heard over the muttering of the cows and the drone of the compressor. I don’t know about you all, but I have never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.

August nailed his three tails to a long pine board, and propped it up in the corner of the barn where it wouldn’t get knocked over by cows milling in and out. He could hear his father doing something in the milk room. He passed Lisa on his way out of the barn. She was leaning on a shovel and spitting sunflower seeds into the dirt. She had on blue overalls and muck boots, and her frizzy blond hair was tamed into a ponytail that burst through the hole in the rear of her Seedco cap.

“Hi, August,” she said, scooping seeds out of her lower lip and thwacking them into the dirt at her feet. “You didn’t come up to the house for lunch.”

“Yeah. I ate at the old house with my mom.”

“Oh, okay. I’m going to stick around tonight. I think I’ll make some tacos for you guys for dinner. Sound good?”