Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

“Your dad was a miserable asshole, most of the time. You yourself hated him, probably for good reason. I married him because I’d loved someone and made a mess of it, and I wanted something to take my mind off it. To punish myself for being stupid. Maybe I needed to be needed. I don’t know. It was a long time ago and things get muddled. I never wanted his shitty land. Is the girl your daughter?”

Jason was going to say something but a voice piped up from inside the trailer. She had obviously been close and listening. “He’s not my dad,” she said.

“Mind your own business, Jo. I’m talking to this lady.”

“My dad’s in the army. He’s overseas.”

“Maybe he is, maybe he ain’t. Go watch TV.”

“He’s a sniper.”

“If you say so.”

“First thing he’s going to do when he comes back is shoot you.”

“Hey. That’s about enough from you. Go watch your show.” There was grumbling, and then the sound of the TV being turned up loud, some sort of violent cartoon. Animated shrieks and laughs and car tires screeching.

“I was in Florida,” Jason said. “I was with that girl’s mother and then she left to see her sister in Tampa and never came back. I looked for two weeks but her sister don’t even exist in Tampa as far as I can tell. I thought about just taking off, but I didn’t. I could have, but I didn’t.” He raised his chin and widened his eyes, as if this were still a surprise — the discovery of a small nobleness existent within him. “And now, I’m here. They took three of my toes and I got a half-wild girl child that’s not even my own. All of that, and I’m on disability.”

And then, Lauren, surprising herself, started laughing. She felt it coming up from deep within her, a release of something pent up for a long time. She laughed until she coughed. “Those damn red cattle,” she said. “Truth be told, there’s been times over the years when I would have paid someone to come out and do for all of them what you did for that one. They could be the most frustrating animals I ever had.”

She started to turn away and then she remembered. “If you want me to keep making you dinners you’re going to have to give me my damn dishes back,” she said.

“Hey, I didn’t ask you for anything,” he said, raising his hands as if to ward her off. “I got your dishes right here.” He retreated into the trailer and Lauren tried to look in, but he’d partially shut the door behind him. He came back, balancing her dishes on one arm, crutch under the other. They hadn’t been washed. The corner of one pan had something stuck to it, furred with gray mold.

“I’m out of dish soap,” Jason said. “Otherwise I’d have got these clean.”

“That’s okay,” Lauren said. Then she thought of something. “What happened to your dog?”

“Huh?”

“That big black shepherd you had.”

“Got dysplasia, and I had to put it down. Years ago. Got so it couldn’t walk, and it turned mean. Understandable, I guess. I was trying to feed it one day and it bit me and that was that.”

“Well, that’s too bad.”

“Was just a dog.”

“I’ve always liked dogs. That’s why I asked. I remember watching that one walk across the field in the snow. A beautiful animal.”

“The day you get a dog is the day you sign up to bury it. It’s a package deal. No sense getting too attached.”

“You could say that about anything. Everything in your life — either you bury it or it buries you. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get attached.”

Jason scratched his head and nodded, obviously unconvinced. He pointed at the dishes she was holding. “I got a freezer full of burritos,” he said. “But it’s been nice to have some variety.”

The girl’s voice came from inside. “I hate tuna!”

“You’ll eat it, and you’ll be happy to have it,” Jason shouted. He looked at Lauren and raised his eyebrows as if to say, See what I’m dealing with. He cleared his throat. “We appreciate it,” he said.

—

She’d planned on putting it off until later in the summer, but then she knew she’d have to contend with the storms that tended to come up suddenly that time of year, violent, with lightning and strong wind. And, she felt good, now . Who knew what the coming months held? When she’d worked at the assisted-living facility one of the residents — a funny old guy who dressed in a ratty coat and tie for dinner every evening — used to say, “When you get to my age, dear, you’ll think twice about buying green bananas at the grocery store.” Lauren always laughed then; now she knew what he meant.

She drove to the trailhead at dawn. She had a small backpack with a few granola bars and water and a light jacket in case of rain. She had a walking stick with a loop of leather that she could put around her wrist. She brought Rocks, too. If she left him alone for long in the house, he had a tendency to upend the garbage or go into the bathroom and shred the toilet paper roll.

It was a cool morning, and as she started up the trail, the peak above her was obscured by skeins of fog. She’d done this hike many times, and she didn’t allow herself to frame this one in terms of finality. She wanted to enjoy it for what it was, not some sad, elegiac trek up the mountain of her own mortality. Rocks was running ahead of her like a thing possessed. Sprinting down the trail, stopping suddenly, ears cocked, then turning to run back toward her, crashing into her legs with enthusiasm. “Go on in front and keep an eye out for moose,” she said. “I once saw three different moose on this trail. A big old cow moose would stomp the vacuum right out of your skull so fast, and then I’d finally be rid of you.”

The sun had come out, and as she started to gain elevation, the fog burned away. She stopped frequently to rest. Rocks chased the little red pine squirrels, growling and yipping in frustration.

She reached the top in early afternoon. The valley was splayed out below her, green, with the river winding silver down its middle. From where she stood, she could look down on a pair of ravens coasting along on a thermal. Anytime you were up high enough to see the back of a raven in flight, you knew you’d done a good bit of climbing.

She shared a granola bar with Rocks, and then she searched around until she’d found the tin that she’d left all those years ago. The notebook was still in there, swelled a bit with moisture but otherwise in good shape. It was over halfway filled with notes now. Hikers of all kinds had written their messages, and she spent a long time reading them, all the way back to the first one, the one she’d written on the day she’d scattered her mother out over the precipice.

She hadn’t thought about it much until right that minute and it came to her now as a slight embarrassment — her mother had never climbed this, or any other mountain in her life. She liked working in her garden. She liked walking by the river. Hiking her ashes up here and tossing them over the edge hadn’t been for her mother at all, that had been Lauren all the way. But maybe that’s how it should have been. The treatment of ashes and bodies and remnants of all kinds was the duty of the living. The dead have no say, and it was silly to think they’d care either way. That was the rational line of thought. However, it was still something to consider. It was true that in her life Lauren had loved mountaintops. But if you wanted her to be comfortable in eternity, work her in with the cow manure, scatter her ashes for the chickens to dust in, dump her in the slop bucket for the pigs.

—

The sun was just starting to set by the time she made it down. She was dead tired. She’d twisted her knee on a loose rock and had to hobble to her truck, leaning heavily on her walking stick. On the drive home, Rocks slept on the seat next to her, instead of standing and smudging the window with his nose like he usually did.