Strays and Lovers

by John Inman

  As Eddie knew quite well, without his discounts and write-offs, the Desert Sky Pet Refuge would not exist at all. And then what would the poor animals do?

  The refuge was situated four miles out of the tiny mountain town of Spangle, California, a sort of backcountry suburb of San Diego. Two high school kids from the nearby town helped Eddie after school two or three days a week, mucking out the sandboxes and keeping the dog runs and kennels clean, and sometimes bathing the dogs as well. They painted and spiffed the joint up on occasion when Eddie couldn’t find the time to do it himself, and they helped leash up the dogs now and then to walk them outside their kennels and runs, letting them stretch their legs along the gravel road out front or up and down the mountain foot trails surrounding the compound.

  To Eddie’s amusement, each of his two helpers had already adopted dogs of their own from the refuge, and sometimes those dogs came with them to visit old friends.

  All in all, Eddie was content with the way the business was going. It was full-time work, but he loved it. He would never be rich, but Eddie felt fulfilled doing what he did.

  Plus, his work with the refuge plugged a lot of holes in his life.

  Sometimes, if he stayed busy enough, he could even convince himself they were holes he didn’t know he had.

  “HE WAS under the house. I was afraid he’d die and stink up the place, so I scooped him out and brought him here.”

  “How old is he? How long was he under the house?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. Just wanted him out of there.”

  The speaker was an old man with a splotch of bloody toilet paper stuck to his chin to help clot a shaving cut. Eddie had seen him slouching around town upon occasion. The battered straw hat he usually wore was conspicuously absent today, leaving his forehead fish-belly white and everything below the bridge of his nose baked brown by the desert sun. He had the parboiled look of someone who had recently bathed for the first time in months and whose skin was unaccustomed to the inroads of soap. There were a lot of people like the old man around—loners who lived out in the desert hills and didn’t interact much with civilization. You could always tell who they were by the way they tried to clean themselves up before making contact with another human being, even if it meant breaking their own cardinal rule by jumping into a bathtub for the first time in months.

  He and Eddie were staring down into an old tin bucket where a tiny white puppy lay weak and trembling with hunger.

  “Have you tried to feed him?” Eddie asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Where’s his mother?” Eddie asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t have a dog?”

  The old man shuffled his feet and looked uncomfortable. “Nope.”

  “I’ll bet,” Eddie wanted to say but didn’t. What he did say was “All right. I’ll take him.” Eddie lowered his sunglasses to look over the frames at the man. “And unless you have your dog spayed, you’ll have more pups to contend with sooner or later. What happened to the rest of the pups in this litter?”

  “Weren’t none,” the man said, looking even more uncomfortable. “And I done told you I ain’t got no dog. Leastways no female.”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Eddie almost said, but once again he held his tongue. What he did say was “Thank you for bringing him in. Hopefully it’s not too late to save the little guy’s life. He looks horribly malnourished.”

  “Well, I did the best I could. I brought him to you, didn’t I? Went out of my way to do it too.”

  Eddie tried to smile, but it was like bending linoleum. “Yes, I’m sure you did. And like I said, thank you. We’ll do everything we can to make the little guy healthy again and find him a good home.”

  Just to be mean, Eddie cast a pointed glance at the donations jar sitting on the counter at the old man’s elbow.

  And as Eddie knew he would, the old man stubbornly ignored the donations jar with every ounce of determination he possessed.

  With a sigh, Eddie gently scooped the puppy out of the tin bucket and headed out of the reception area to his homespun version of an ICU. He left the old man standing there, still looking rebellious if not a wee bit guilty. Finally the old guy grunted some sort of halfhearted “Thanks, then,” and grabbing up his bucket, he headed back through the front door before climbing into his rusty pickup truck and driving off down the gravel road, trailing a plume of dust.

  Eddie didn’t bother watching him go. He was too busy cradling the puppy to his chest while with the other hand, he nuked a cup of evaporated milk in the microwave long enough to take the chill off. Eddie mixed in a little egg yolk, then poured some of the milk into one of the tiny baby bottles he kept around for just such an occasion. He went out the back door, plopped down in a lawn chair in a nice spot of sunshine, and coaxed the tiny nipple on the baby bottle into the puppy’s mouth. The pup’s eyes shot open as if he’d hit the motherlode, and he went to work on the milk immediately.

  Eddie figured the puppy was about a month old. Coaxing it gently onto its back, he saw it was male. It was snow-white from head to tail—or would be after a bath. Eddie smiled down at it as the tiny creature, still on its back, grunted and gurgled and slurped at the milk. While it nursed, it stared up into his face with two of the clearest, most guileless hazel eyes Eddie had ever seen.

  Barely large enough to fill the palm of Eddie’s hand, the pup wiggled hungrily against Eddie’s chest, nudging the bottle of milk with its little pink mouth, so fixated on the job at hand it was shaking like a leaf. The pup looked old enough that tomorrow, after it had been properly nourished, Eddie would begin weaning it from milk with some soaked kibble. Obviously the pup had been nursed until recently by its mother. Like as not, the old man had simply not wanted another mouth to feed, so he had taken the puppy away from its mother a day or two ago and left it to live or die on its own. Perhaps a brief bout of guilt had made him bring the pup to the refuge. Whatever had happened, the puppy was safe now. That was the important thing.

  Slowly, as the bottle emptied, the tiny hazel eyes began to close, the trembling body stilled. In a matter of moments, sleep overcame the pup. The nipple popped free from his mouth. Turning his tiny head, he buried his face in the palm of Eddie’s hand, his snout cool and damp to the touch. Two seconds later the puppy was sound asleep, his little belly bulging like a tennis ball.

  “Oh God,” Eddie groaned, twiddling the pup’s delicate white ear. “You’re wangling an invitation into the house, aren’t you?”

  The puppy burped but didn’t wake. He emitted a teeny snore, and Eddie smiled.

  “You think you’re worming your way into my inner circle, don’t you?” Eddie cooed, his voice a breathless whisper. Then he added, unbidden, unplanned, and just as softly, “Don’t you, Louie?”

  And just like that the puppy had a name and a place to live. He wouldn’t be put up for adoption at all, and Eddie damn well knew it.

  This one belonged to him.

  This one was family.

  SINCE IT was a school day, Eddie’s two teenage helpers, Josh and Blaize, were at the high school, presumably learning things and prepping for adulthood. They would be by later, after classes ended. If he was lucky. Being teenagers, they weren’t exactly the most reliable of employees.

  Josh was a clean-cut blond surfer type with a body Eddie was forever trying not to stare at so he wouldn’t be perceived as an aging pervert. Blaize was a self-proclaimed goth. Her hair was dyed blue-black, her makeup ran to rice powder, kohl eyeshadow, and black lipstick, and her clothes encompassed all shades of midnight (of which there is really only one). Eddie always thought she looked like she’d crawled out of a coal mine, pallid from not seeing the sun for ten or twelve years. Josh, on the other hand, thought Blaize was the hottest thing on two feet and followed her around as they worked, panting in lust, his young tongue dragging along the ground behind him. Figuratively speaking.

  It was painful to watch, but secretly Eddie was rooting for
Josh. Anybody that smitten deserved a little compensation in the love department.

  Of course, young Josh wasn’t the only person at the refuge who could use a little help with romance. Eddie wasn’t doing so well in that department himself. And lately, the dearth of man-on-man action was beginning to bug him. He had his animals, of course, but sometimes a guy needed more than a cat—or himself—to stroke.

  He sighed and refocused on the task at hand. Hefting a fifty-pound bag of dry dog food onto his shoulders, he set off for the biggest of the three dog runs in the back. Twenty hounds of various sizes and breeds—everything from a Saint Bernard to a couple of Weimaraners, an Irish Setter, and several other hunting dogs of undistinguished lineage—were all howling out a welcome to him, as they did every morning. A few of the quieter, shyer dogs hung back, but Eddie always made sure to single them out for a little one-on-one attention after the food bowls were filled. It was those dogs, the quiet ones, who usually had the most troubled past. Abuse, neglect, or injury had left them emotionally damaged, and Eddie treated them with a gentleness that in their simple minds they must have found astonishing.

  Sometimes a first tail wag, or the first tentative lick of friendship, was all it took to make Eddie’s day. He was good with animals, and he knew it. Usually it didn’t take long for even the wariest of the beasts in his care to begin to realize it too. And once they did, once they began to trust him, Eddie knew they had taken the first step toward adoption—the first step to finding a home of their own with people who would love and care for them for the rest of their lives. Some of the animals had never experienced trust or affection at all, had never felt a gentle hand or heard a kind word. Those were the ones Eddie truly wanted to help. Those were the ones he sometimes lay awake nights worrying about.

  On a typical day, Eddie would work nonstop from morning to night. On this day, however, he stopped what he was doing every two hours to sit in the sun in his backyard and cradle the new pup, letting his own scent and the comforting sound of his quiet voice reassure the little heartbreaker while Eddie hummed softly and fed him another bottle of warm milk.

  By the time the last two-hour feeding came along that day, there were no longer any trust issues between the two; that much was clear. The white pup lay snug and relaxed against Eddie’s chest, slowly draining the bottle, staring up into Eddie’s face. Eddie swore he could hear the little wheels turning behind those hazel eyes while Louie gnawed and sucked at the rubber nipple and slowly filled the never-ending void in his tiny belly for the fourth time that day. Eddie suspected Louie had already accepted Eddie as the alpha dog—his pack leader. Had already placed Eddie in the hierarchy of this new pack he suddenly found himself residing in. These would not be conscious thoughts on Louie’s part of course. They would be imprinted on him through the experiences of past generations and genetic memory. This little twelve-ounce ball of white fur resting in Eddie’s hand was actually a wolf, or the boiled-down remnants of one. Wolves lived in packs. And from this day forth, Eddie would be the head wolf. At least in Louie’s eyes.

  The only thing imprinted on Eddie was the love he already felt for the helpless pup. When Louie yawned, letting the nipple on the empty bottle fall from his mouth, Eddie smiled. Twiddling a gentle fingertip across the pup’s bulging tummy, Eddie closed his eyes and tilted his face up to the sun.

  When he opened his eyes almost twenty minutes later, he found Louie burrowed under his shirt, snoring softly, the pup’s little face pressed close to Eddie’s armpit.

  Eddie laid a gentle hand over the tiny creature and, smiling, sat quietly watching the sun set over the mountains to the west. Three of the cats were chasing butterflies in the dusk. Old Chester was sprawled out on the upstairs window windowsill as usual. Eddie could see him over the lip of the back porch roof. The two dogs, Lucretia and Fred, lay snoring at Eddie’s feet.

  Content that everyone he loved was safe and accounted for, Eddie went back to sleep as well. Mosquitoes chased him into the house an hour later.

  With Louie lying sound asleep on the sofa, tucked safely between two cushions, and with Lucretia sprawled out next to him, clearly in protective mode, Eddie set about fixing them all dinner.

  Later he sat in his favorite chair as the house darkened around him. He laughed when Louie woke up and crawled under Lucretia’s chin on wobbly little legs. The old dog looked startled at first, then worried, then she gave a contented tail thump and began giving the pup a bath with her long pink tongue.

  Eddie sat grinning at them, while the clock on the mantle chimed eight.

  Tired of waiting, perhaps, for his evening dose of companionship, Chester wended a careful path down the stairs on his old arthritic legs and leaped with a grunt into Eddie’s lap. Lazily, Eddie stroked his rippling back, and together, the two dozed their way toward bedtime.

  EDDIE COULDN’T sleep. He sat at the edge of the bed and fiddled with the lamp on the nightstand—switching it on, off, on again, off again, dim, bright, brighter—finally backtracking to full-blown off since he was more in the mood for shadow than light.

  He rose from the bed, leaving Fred and Chester sprawled among the blankets sound asleep, not even noticing he was gone.

  Eddie felt decadent descending the stairs as naked as the day he was born, although he was fairly sure he didn’t have an erection bouncing around in front of him back then like he did now. Weaving a path through the shadows in the living room, he peeked over the back of the sofa and saw Lucretia peering up at him with one rheumy eye while still cuddling tiny Louie between her front paws. Louie was flat on his back, sound asleep. Eddie considered warming a bottle of milk, but decided not to disturb either one of them. Lucretia was looking motherly, and Louie was sawing logs like a tiny four-legged drunk sleeping off a toot.

  Eddie left them to it and stepped quietly into the kitchen. A ray of moonlight stabbing through the kitchen window helped him avoid stubbing his toe or banging into furniture. He tugged open the refrigerator, the light from the little bulb inside spilling over him. His boner was looking a little less perky, he noticed, as he hefted a gallon of milk and guzzled about a quart of it straight from the jug.

  After returning the milk to the fridge, he crossed the kitchen, exited through the unlocked back door, and stepped out into the warm autumn night. The delicious sensation of wind moving over his bare skin opened the floodgates again, and his cock swelled. The head of it, growing bulbous and getting bigger by the second, now glistened with a drop of moisture on its tip.

  With a resigned sigh, Eddie pushed away his sexual hunger and dropped into one of the webbed lawn chairs, gasping at its coldness on his naked backside. Stretching his long legs out in front of him, he tilted his head back and concentrated on the moon hanging overhead. The moon was so bright, he had to squint looking into it. Eddie could probably have read in its light if he had thought to carry a book out here with him.

  He heard a splash and tore his eyes from the moon to gaze across the sandy backyard to the birdbath standing alongside a boulder next to the fence. It was a turtle dove who apparently couldn’t sleep any better than Eddie. Somehow knowing he was safe from the mob of cats staring at him through a wall of chicken wire, he had decided to take a midnight bath. He splashed, drank, groomed himself with meticulous care, then shook himself dry and flew off, leaving ripples and one pale feather floating in the water.

  Eddie closed his eyes and breathed deep, trying to sort out the explosion of scents wafting over him. First and foremost was the sweet aroma of the honeysuckle vines that all but buried the fence at the back edge of the property. More than once he had seen a snake sunning itself on the matted foliage, only slithering away when Eddie drew too close to bear.

  The second, more noticeable, scent on the air was the smell of the refuge itself. Scores of creatures, mostly dogs and cats, rested in their enclosures. They were quiet now, but let a coyote wander onto the premises and Eddie knew the dogs would go crazy, smelling the wildness on the creature, barking up a sto
rm, howling their fury as the interloper sauntered past with haughty disregard.

  Eddie smiled. Of course, once the penned dogs began to howl, both Lucretia and Fred would come barreling through the back door to chase the intruder off and protect their domain. Sometimes they would remain outside for the rest of the night, lying at the kennel fence, preparing to do battle yet again if the enemy should return. Protecting the creatures in their care, and Eddie as well.

  That thought made Eddie smile.

  He slid a hand along the hair on his thighs. With his other hand he bristled through the hair on his belly with his fingertips. His skin felt warm and soft in the night air. For a brief moment, he imagined that his skin actually belonged to someone else. How it would feel beneath his touch. How it would taste if he bent to kiss it, to press his face into it.

  Giving his head a sardonic shake, he pulled his hands away from himself and rose up from the lawn chair. He again tilted back his head to study that big fat silver moon up above. Etched into the shadows on its surface he imagined he could see the lady sitting in front of her dressing table, brushing her hair. That thought brought memories of his father and all the other tales he used to tell Eddie. The Lady on the Moon. The Wampuscat that ate misbehaving little boys, of which young Eddie would be the top entree on the menu. The giant fish that lived in a lake up in the mountains and flopped out of the water at night to steal food from campers, sometimes stealing a camper or two while he was at it. Eddie’s father liked scary stories. Eddie liked them too. He supposed that’s why his father told them to him.

  Eddie blinked away further memories of his dad before they took hold, and memories of his mom too. His folks were gone now. There was no point getting all melancholy over the fact. After all, they had been gone a long time. Eddie was on his own now. Had been on his own for a good many years, in fact.