Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

  I bought her a drink.

  “Your dog is really big,” she said, scratching Burnham’s back. His tail swished between us. “Little men with big dogs make me feel bad for the dogs. I’m glad you’re not a little man.”

  “I didn’t even tell those assholes that they were assholes,” she said.

  She bought me a drink.

  I bought her another drink.

  “I’m leaving too,” she said, when I got up to go.

  She waved down the long-bearded bartender. Her friends, laughing at a nearby table, didn’t have whatever she had that made her seem older. They smiled at me in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time. Burnham tugged towards them. I let him say hello.

  “Awwwww,” they said, and the drunkest one, whose drunkenness I didn’t like at all, took pictures of him with her phone.

  I walked the young woman to the Red Line stop at Jarvis, past ATMs and shuttered liquor stores and plowed troughs of old snow. The wind was big. We kept bumping into each other, our coat-sleeves scritching. Powdery flakes stung our faces. As we came to the station, a train left for the Loop, ding-donging its doors closed. The rumbling track chipped off blue sparks into darkness. Burnham licked the lower rim of a trash can.

  She bent to pet him. Her grin was warm and wide and patient. It wasn’t that I knew her from somewhere, I realized. It was that I wanted to.

  “What a lucky dog,” she said, fluffing Burnham’s sides. “What a lucky dog to have. I didn’t ask you, how long have you had him?”

  I watched her, waiting, and when she looked up over the dog at me I said that my fiancée had had him for two years. I tried to act like it wasn’t lousy and low-down to fail to mention my fiancée until right then. She tried too.

  “Later,” she said.

  “We’re walking late,” said the dreadlocked middle-aged man, “and this other brother he’s walking towards us, and my dog, his hair raises and he bares his teeth and he starts snarling something nasty. My dog was a monster, a hundred and twenty pounds all the way to the grave, made somebody shake every day. This brother, he stops a safe distance away, he goes, ‘Man, what’s wrong with your dog?’ I go, ‘Man, what’s wrong with you? My dog here’s saying you’re the one with the problem, so unless you want him to specify, you better get on over to the other side of the street.’”

  I bought him a drink.

  He tapped the bar and said, “You’re the one always buys everybody drinks in here.”

  I said I was sometimes.

  He lowered his voice in a comic way. “You know that doesn’t make you generous.”

  I said I knew what he meant. But I didn’t.

  “You’re not even thirty, are you.”

  I said I would be soon.

  He clapped as if I’d made a joke, and with pretend-gravity ordered me and the pink-haired bartender shots. “To Mr. Soon being ‘soon’!” he shouted. We downed them. He motioned for the pink-haired bartender to refill our glasses. When we raised them again he said, “Your turn to toast, Mr. Soon.”

  I don’t remember what I said, but whatever it was, it wrecked the moment.

  That night Burnham didn’t eat his dinner. I’d been feeding him whenever we got back from the Tab, filling his bowl at seven or ten or two, and he’d been gobbling it up right away. This time he just stood there. I just stood there too, tottering, more drunk than usual. He sniffed at the bowl’s lip, lay down beside it, and put his head on his paws. He looked bored. This irritated me. It seemed ungrateful. I changed into pajamas and got into bed and opened my laptop. Burnham followed me into the bedroom and flopped out on the rug with a pouty sigh.

  In bed I read emails from my then-fiancée. The emails were dense with details about the famous people in her field she’d been meeting, how they were personable or insufferable, how she and her ex-boyfriend were having a fine time as friends, how her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend (who’d taken quite a lot of time off to travel with him, she noted) was polite and smart if not a little bland, how good the food, beer, wine, and spirits were, how so much of what she’d eaten and drunk had given her ideas for the wedding, and speaking of that had I looked into those caterers because if we didn’t move on one soon it’d cost us, was I being money-smart with her not around, was I cooking my own meals or was I eating out every night, and how was it having our loving wonder-dog all to myself? I wrote her back saying having Burnham on my own was nice but because of him I’d been hearing a lot of dead dog stories. I wanted to know: were dead dog stories news to you, or was that normal, to be a dog owner and to be always hearing the dead dog stories of other dog owners? If you didn’t know me and you met me at a bar and Burnham was with me, would you tell me a dead dog story, and if so, what dead dog story? I needed to know. I shut my laptop. A second wind of drunkenness blew into me with a do-something sort of heat. All I did was lay down. The bedsheets smelled like beer farts.

  I imagined marriage: dim and glassy. I imagined the wedding: sharp and dark. I imagined dating. Dating had no traits.

  Burnham’s stomach started making hunger-sounds. “Growl” is not the word for these sounds. These sounds snagged up on themselves or tied off into terrible squeaks or rippled wetly or tore open into tight splurching pops, and every one of them could be heard through the comforter I’d pulled over my head. I jumped up in irritation. Burnham sat motionless.

  I stomped over him and into the kitchen and slapped his bowl of food. He didn’t come until I called three times, his ears flat and his head low. I shook the bowl and told him to eat. He lay with his back to it. “You’re hungry,” I said, moving the bowl to his face.

  His stomach whinnied and squelched.

  “Stay,” I shouted when he tried to follow me into the kitchen. He cowered. I’d only seen him cower once before. It enraged me. I grabbed a bag of treats and forced him to sit and shake for one. He ate it, crunching slowly. “You like that?” I said, and the fact that I sounded drunk to myself only thickened my anger. I made him sit and shake for a handful of his food, as if it was treats. He took the pellets in his mouth only to let them fall to the floor. They scattered.

  I palmed his muzzle and pushed his face into his bowl. I told him to eat. Eat! I pushed harder, jamming him. The food ground under his jaw. He trembled all over like he was sick. I seized him by the scruff, twisted my grip into a fist, and jerked him up and out of the bowl. I thrashed him around. I yelled questions like Now you know to eat? now? now? now? and when I let go to fling him his legs skittered as if he was going to run away. He didn’t. He quivered where he was. Looking down at him like that, I saw that I had an erection. It was poking out of my pajamas. It was near-coming.

  I sat on the floor and put my dick away. Burnham licked the back of my hand. I was crying, and then I was apologizing, and then I was asleep.

  “The day he couldn’t shit without falling in it we had him put down,” said the steady old man, nodding.

  I bought him a drink.

  “Fat and blind, with tumors,” said the fat young man. “One time she barked blood right into my wife’s face.”

  I bought him a drink.

  “Man, that dog could turn on the TV,” said the bridesmaid. She was so drunk her eyes blinked independently. “He could change the channels. And he knew how to answer a phone! Smart dog. Spoiled. Slept on the bed. Too big to sleep on the bed.”

  I bought her a drink.

  “He pooped around the Christmas tree. White carpeting. Pooped a circle.”

  She touched me when she laughed, pressing my shoulder, my elbow, my forearm. She smelled like nail polish. By the time she patted my wrist I saw her wedding band: wide and bright.

  “Everybody listened like you listened,” she said. “I mean, how about that.”

  A second bridesmaid yanked her away from me and the bar—I caught the abandoned barstool before it toppled. She didn’t come back for the drink I’d bought her that she hadn’t touched. I drank it, a leathery scotch.

  At home I set the bowl full of food on
Burnham’s mat. When I called him he began to tremble. He approached with a slow and guilty shuffle. It hurt to see it. I imagined telling my then-fiancée what had happened. It would be hard. We would argue ourselves into a deep silence. And then she’d turn to the work she was always bringing home and stay inside it, and we’d eat and tidy up and sleep, and in a day it would be as if nothing had been said or felt because she’d bury my confession, just as I had buried her confessions, the two of us taking turns, her confessing that she’d at first only looked for a job in the city after graduate school because that’s when she met me, but now she liked it, she liked it better than the rural and semi-rural places in Wyoming where she’d grown up, and on account of that she’d be here, with me, forever, and me confessing that I’d only ever lived in different neighborhoods in the same city and sometimes wanted to live in other places where people lived and thought and felt and dreamed differently so that I could through comparison better understand myself. I wanted to miss the city, I confessed.

  I am not in anything you just said, she confessed.

  These confessions, like the others, went into the ground with the feelings we’d had about hearing them.

  Thinking about this made me angry again.

  Burnham noticed: he stopped where he was. My anger dropped out of me and I felt awful instead. I gave him a treat, which he ate, then broke up a few more and sprinkled them in his food. “Good boy,” I said, and walked to the bedroom. He ignored his bowl and followed me, his stomach whang-gargling. I closed the door before he could get in. He clunked down right outside it.

  It was sad, emailed my then-fiancée, that I called these stories “dead dog stories” when everyone else in the world called them “dog stories.” Was I okay? Did I need to hang out with my friends in Logan Square? Could I check out the fucking caterer?

  I googled, What if your dog won’t eat.

  I walked him right before mealtimes. I put the bowl in different places in the apartment. I put the food on the floor in front of the bowl. I put fancier food in the bowl. I added olive oil, vegetable oil, raw eggs, cooked eggs, kiszka. Nothing worked. That week he ate only treats. His stomach stopped noise-making and I let him sleep beside the bed. On walks he seemed more excited than usual but more readily exhausted. I brought bags of treats to the Tab and let anyone who wanted to give him one give him one.

  At work my friend stopped by my desk. He turned off my monitor. He said I had no choice in the matter, we’d be hitting up the beer-whiskey-pizza special at the Boiler Room, it’d been too long, tough shit. The Boiler Room was five blocks from the Logan Square apartment building where me and my then-fiancée had lived right before we moved to Rogers Park, where my friend, this friend, still lived. We’d shared a wall for three years. Through it, from our respective sides, we’d shouted inane things to each other.

  My friend had liked to yell, THIS IS ME TALKING TO MYSELF.

  I said I wanted to hit up the Boiler Room but couldn’t, the dog had been home alone all day. My friend asked when my then-fiancée was coming back. I said another week.

  “That’s right,” he said, remembering. “I don’t know how you two do it. Wait,” he said, frowning. He farted. He waved it up in my direction.

  Later we stood in the elevator lobby, putting on our scarves and gloves. Through the window grainy snow whirled.

  He said, “You look run-over.”

  I didn’t say anything. We’d known each other since high school.

  He said he’d seen me like this before, and when I asked him when he said the name of an ex-girlfriend, the woman two women before my then-fiancée, a woman I’d had big trouble getting over. The source of the big trouble had been me thinking about her all the time. But that isn’t exactly right. It’s more that I was feeling things about her all the time, and this frequency of feeling was shoveling up images, images that weren’t so much memories as they were dreams, I think, and whatever they were they were heavy and on me and I was under them. I didn’t like to think of that woman or that time. I hadn’t in years. But when my friend said her name it was as if I’d been feeling things about her all winter, only what was being shoveled up instead of images or memories or dreams about her were images or memories or dreams about dead dogs.

  I didn’t look at my friend. I didn’t want him to know that I was angry at him for showing me this about myself, and more than that, afraid, and more than that, grateful.

  He changed the subject while we walked to the Blue Line through the after-work foot traffic, the white collars and the blue collars and the students. He complained about the Bulls, made fun of the mayor, and talked up some new neighborhood brewpub he thought I’d be into. We pushed into the station and through the turnstiles. Our train came. We sat at the back, facing the bobbing door to the car that lurched along behind us. In this other car stood and sat just as many wiped-out men and women, staring and reading and toying with phones. When the train stopped at Jackson I got up to transfer to the Red Line.

  My friend whacked my arm. “I’ll rustle up the posse. We’ll slam it on at your place this Friday.”

  I said I’d have to spend Friday night working on wedding caterers.

  My friend pretended three things: that he believed me, that with enough of his good-natured pressure I’d give in to inviting people over, and that the invited people would readily make the trip to Rogers Park. We bumped fists.

  “We hopped in the car and went looking,” said the big old woman. “We looked everywhere we could think to look, and then some. It got dark. We went home. I didn’t want to go to bed, I wanted to keep looking, so I stayed right by the window and before long I was shouting, ‘Mother, it’s our dog.’ Well, Mother, she was such a sad woman, she said, ‘Sweetie, that’s the neighbor-dog.’ But it wasn’t—it was our dog, covered in burrs and mud. How he got there all the way from my aunt’s I’ll never know.”

  I bought her a drink.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said, stopping the spiky-haired bartender. “Don’t you go buying old ladies drinks. It seems kind to do but it is not.”

  “Maybe a month after my mom died,” said the amateur stand-up comic, a young woman about my age, “me and my dad were in the pool playing a game where you see who can hold their breath the longest. We were both under, staring each other down, making screwy faces to get each other to laugh, when SPLOOSH!—in jumped the dog. He thought we were drowning. But he was the shittiest swimmer, his hair was clumping up, his hair was sinking him, he was splashing everywhere and making wimpy wet barks, so we had to save him. So sweet and so pathetic at the same time. Is it animal abuse that we were laughing?”

  I bought her a drink. I hadn’t seen her perform—at the bar my back faced the mini-stage—but she spoke like a performer, with a bouncy lightness that set her just a little outside of what she was saying. She wore a tight t-shirt over a long-sleeved shirt. On her t-shirt a smiling cartoon lemon mounted a squeezer like it was a saddle. The text read something like, WHEN LIFE GIVES ME ME, MAKE MEMONADE.

  “I’d like a dog again,” she said. “My fiancé’s allergic.”

  She’d been trying to get me to notice her ring: not a diamond, some other colored stone, one that lapped up light discreetly. I told her I didn’t really want a dog but I didn’t have a choice, this was my fiancée’s dog and my fiancée was in Europe for another week.

  “How could you not want this dog?” she said to Burnham in a silly dog-voice. “You’re so sweet and fluffy! You’d drown too, wouldn’t you? Yes! You’d drown!”

  Burnham loved her as much as he loved anyone. He pawed at her arms and made goofy frustrated growls when she blew in his ears. I told her how he wouldn’t eat his food no matter what I’d tried.

  The more I told her about it the more stupid I sounded to myself. At first I thought that how stupid I was sounding had something to do with what I was leaving out, but it was just that I was blushing and trying to hide it by talking. She kissed Burnham between the eyes a bunch of times. The dog she�
�d grown up with didn’t eat sometimes too, she said, and to deal with it she’d started hand-feeding him despite her dad’s warning that from then on he’d demand the same treatment at every meal, which he did. She didn’t mind. Hand-feeding gave her a funny feeling that she liked. “It’s kind of goosebumpy, but on the inside,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it should feel good but it does. Vague! Okay: I guess I mean it’s sexual, sexual in a way that has nothing to do with the dog.”