Callan Wink: Dog Run Moon

At first, running on the sand was deliriously comfortable, the soft ground like an answered prayer for the raw soles of Sid’s feet. But then, the farther he went the harder it became, the sand shifting and giving way under his feet so that each stride required more effort from his already screaming calves.

When the twisting and turning of the creek bed became unbearable Sid clambered out onto the exposed rock. From this vantage point he watched the now greatly diminished moon drift down toward the far black horizon like a pale phosphorus match head broken off in the striking. If Montana Bob and Charlie Chaplin were still in pursuit he had no evidence. In fact, some small, dislodged part of him was unsure that they had ever existed. Sid couldn’t see the dog most of the time. Sometimes he forgot about it all together. It ran ahead silent and unperturbed as the earth itself.

—

It was a loud dawn. Sid had never seen or heard anything quite like it, the sun breaking the horizon line with a sound like a dull knife ripping a sheet. He was walking stiffly now, moving his arms in great circles, slapping his thighs and torso to fend off the cold. He looked down and for the first time could see himself clearly, the angry red whip welts on his calves from branches, the purple cracked toenails and raised blue lines of engorged veins and capillaries, over everything a grimy patina of sweat crust and desert dust and leaking blood.

He crested a small hill where, on the backside of the slope, there was a rusted stock tank fed by a leaning windmill that rose out of a clump of acacia. He didn’t believe in the stock tank. It was like a river of muddy water, a thing that would dry up and slip through his fingers. He sat on a flat rock and looked. The windmill was missing some slats and he knew there was no water in the tank. This was a definite truth and Sid felt it like gravity. After a while the dog emerged from a tangle of sagebrush and with no fanfare proceeded to lap from the tank, its tail fanning slightly in a breeze that did not reach Sid.

Down the slope in jerks, his muscles and ligaments tightened like catgut tennis racket cord. Sid submerged his entire head, eyes wide open, into the water, metallic-tasting, gelid with the flavor of the past night. The bottom of the tank was lined with a slick layer of electric green algae over which a single orange carp hovered blimplike. Sid wanted to get in, to live with this carp alone in this desert within a desert. But the water was cold and he knew the carp did not want him. He drank for so long that points of black began to form at the edges of his vision, small, black-legged forms like water striders skating the clear pool of his periphery. He broke for air and collapsed with his back against the tank, the rivets pressing his flesh. From this position he could see into the twisted inner workings of the windmill, the busted-sprung parts, the pieces held together by coils of baling wire. The dog was moving around the base of the acacia trees, its snout plowing last year’s dead grass, the fur ends around its paws just slightly reddened by the touch of the desert rock. Above the dog, in the twisting acacia branches, Sid could make out two sparrows, dead and skewered on thorns.

—

When Sid woke he found Charlie Chaplin squatting next to him, his Oxford shirt stained desert red, his corduroys dusty. His pale cheeks were streaked with twin rivulets of what looked like tears and his eyes were leaking and red. He had his knife out and was poking Sid’s bare thigh, raising bright little beads of blood, a ragged collection of blood drops like pissants gathering on his skin. From the number of them it looked like he’d been at it awhile. Seeing that Sid was awake, Charlie Chaplin swiped at his cheeks with his sleeve. He gave Sid one more poke and then sheathed his knife and went to stand beside Montana Bob, who held a length of chain he’d hooked to the dog’s collar. The dog lay at Montana Bob’s boots with its muzzle resting on its paws.

“What the hell. Why?” Montana Bob tilted his hat brim down against the sun.

Sid considered this for a moment and then put up his hands and shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve always liked running.” Realizing as he said it that it was true.

“You look like something from another planet. More dead than alive. Also, Charlie Chaplin isn’t happy with you. He wears contact lenses and, seeing how you kept us out here all night in the dust, his eyes are in poor shape. He wants you to know that that’s why he’s tearing up. He’s not actually crying. He suffers from the dust. Also, he lost his pistol. Fell out of his waistband on the ride. I know he feels badly about that.”

Sid found himself nodding in agreement with Montana Bob. It was a nearly involuntary movement and he had to force himself to stop.

“You dumb bastard. I don’t even know what to do to you. But, also, I guess you done it plenty to yourself. What do you think, Charlie Chaplin?”

Sid looked up into the pale, dirt-and-tear-streaked face of the accountant. He tried to read what was there but came up blank. Charlie Chaplin knelt creakily and untied his Top-Siders. He kicked them off his feet toward Sid and then turned to climb on the ATV, his socks startlingly white from the ankle down. Silently, Montana Bob took his seat in front of Charlie Chaplin and drove away, his accountant clinging to his waist from behind, his dog padding along at the end of the chain.

It was a long time before Sid could get to his feet and walk, slowly retracing his bloody tracks. It was even longer before the pain made him slip the Top-Siders over his ruined soles, feeling when he did, at once something like balm and betrayal. With the shoes he was somehow more naked than before, and he faced the reality of shuffling back to town, no longer unfettered, just exposed. He thought then about going for it, turning east and just continuing on till he either evaporated or made it, collapsing in a heap on her porch. Begging her to wash his feet.

It was June 21, the longest day of the year, and the snow on Beartooth pass was still eight feet high on either side of the road. Dale drove Jeannette and her two boys up there. It was seventy degrees when they left town, at least twenty degrees cooler when they got to the top. They glissaded down the soft edges of the glacier and had a snowball fight. The sun at that altitude was close and they all got a little burned. Later that evening, back at her house, Dale grilled hamburgers, and they ate on the porch. The creek that normally trickled through her backyard was on the rise, noisy, the color of watery chocolate milk.

After dinner Jeannette rubbed aloe on the boys’ red cheeks and put them, complaining, to bed. “Its not even dark yet,” he heard the oldest one say. “I can’t go to sleep when it’s light.”

“You’ve had a big day,” Jeannette said. “You just don’t know you’re tired yet.”

She came back out on the porch with a beer for him and a glass of wine for herself. She had the bottle of aloe too and she sat on his lap. She rubbed in the lotion, working it into the skin on his neck, his ear lobes, his cheekbones. Jeannette had small hands, strong fingers, blunt nails. Before she’d met her husband she’d been a massage therapist. She told Dale that when they got married her husband hadn’t quite demanded that she stop working. “He was always good at that, making demands seem like something less. I was a good massage therapist. And I enjoyed it. He said it was too sensual. He didn’t like me doing that with other men.”

“Too sensual?” Dale said.

“It wasn’t like I was giving happy endings. I’m thinking about getting back into it. It’s been ten years but I’ve still got my table and everything. I could use the money.”