Grassdogs

by Mark O'Flynn

  He turned to two of the packers who had stopped stacking shelves to watch the spectacle.

  ‘Go and fetch some dog food.’

  The two young lads jumped into action, before one of them stopped:

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I don’t know. Fill a trolley. Quick smart.’

  ‘And a chook,’ said Edgar.

  ‘And a chicken,’ Mr Ashcroft called out. Then turning to Edgar, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming. Please don’t let them loose.’ Then turning to his staff, ‘Get back to work, you lot.’

  One by one the registers began to ping.

  When the trolley was brought to Edgar, replete with assorted cans of dog food of no particular brand, and a chicken wrapped in an alfoil bag, he tried to hand the keycard Kate Shoebridge had given him to Mr Ashcroft. Mr Ashcroft waved him away, casting terrified glances at the dogs.

  ‘Go, just go.’

  He ushered Edgar and the dogs beyond the perimeter of the sliding doors. Edgar wheeled the trolley out into the sunshine. The dogs, sensing they had accomplished some common goal, hauled Edgar and the trolley up the footpath, feeling entirely happy with their morning’s work, and the unexpected kindness of men in suits.

  He hacked open the cans with his hatchet. The dogs scoffed the contents behind some canna lilies in a park. Everyone ate their fill. There were still a few tins left for later. He packed them into his knapsack, left the trolley behind the bushes. Thought it better not to draw attention to himself by wheeling it through the streets. After all, it was not his.

  They headed north out of town, crossing the rickety bridge over the flowing current of the mighty Murrumbidgee River—that sucking mama: he thought that was what the father had called it. Edgar loved the river. He had fished in it, slept on its banks, bathed and played in it. Somewhere along the way today they had picked up another dog, a boxer. Edgar liked the boxer. He felt some affinity with its squashed, repugnant face. Where possible they avoided busy roads, crossing fallow paddocks without sign of industry. There were more of those in recent times. In the long grass the dogs were hidden from view. Wind caught the top of the grass, washing currents through it. They moved like fish, scattering smaller fry ahead of them.

  Edgar’s attention was caught by a derelict shearing shed sitting in long, neglected weeds. A row of wildly swaying sugar gums lined the rotten fences around it. Wind muscling its way across the plains. The sorting pens rotting. So, too, some of the stumps. Edgar tested the steps up to a wooden door which, with the help of a hip, creaked open. Within the dimness the wings of an alarmed owl rowed overhead, its silhouette disappearing through a hole in the roof cavity, as easy as you like. The dogs whined with pleasure at the rich smells within, the polished woodwork of the railings worn smooth and dark with lanolin. The previous occupants had departed so suddenly that they had left whole fleeces in the stalls. Unfinished bales lay all over the place. The electricity was still connected. He tested the lights, then switched them off. He had lived so long without electricity, no point in starting now. The dogs sniffed orgiastically amongst the tufts of wool and old droppings. There was enough in the loose bales to make a bed for everyone. Protected from the elements. Shelter. The bustling wind swept up under the wide slats between the floorboards. The rafters were alive with a traffic of rats. The dogs twitched in their sleep. The tin walls and tin roof ticked throughout the night.

  When the storm struck, thunder rolling across the sky, some of the pups came to him whimpering for protection. They buried their heads under his legs, in his armpits, at each crack of thunder. He sat there and comforted them as best he could, thinking about all that he had.

  Of course in the deceptive heat of the early morning sun, the corrugated iron heated up quickly, ticking now like crickets. There were no windows. Already humid, Edgar imagined what it might be like in summer as they went outside and rested in the shade beneath the shed. The long-haired dogs pulled skeins of wool from their fur, like wisps of cloud. Edgar found an old handset of rusty clippers and trimmed the mangy tufts of hair on the Afghan. He clipped the hair out of the eyes of the spaniel. Edgar-the-gun-shearer. In the evening when the grass turned the colour of rum the dogs chased down a young kangaroo. By the time Edgar had caught up with the pack there was little left of it. Cartilage and bone. Every tail wagging. He divided what gobbets remained to make sure that the smaller dogs got some, and the three-legged Labrador, which he called Tripod, because the old father had once described for him a drover’s dog…it was too rude to repeat. When the sun went down, the evening cooled quickly. Edgar knocked a few possums from the rafters overhead, but by morning there was no more food, and the dogs were hungry again. That was the trouble with dogs.

  They spent several days foundering in this fashion before they made their way back to town and to the supermarket. Not quite a conscious decision, more an instinct. Like moose, or birds migrating. All sorts of rubbish was caught in the tangle of roots along the riverbank. Anything might be hidden there, he thought. The treasures of scavenging. They swam across the freezing water, which came from somewhere in the Snowies. Only one of the dogs, a schnauzer, was taken away by the current. It yapped frantically, its head high above the water, as it disappeared like a paddleboat around a bend, hidden by willows. Edgar did not fret. Easy come. And he was right, for as they walked on it caught up with them eventually, wagging its docked stump of a tail.

  ‘Good dorg. Down now.’

  He patted its head, and several of the dogs rubbed noses with it. Welcome back, old friend.

  They stood by the cash register, listening to the tinny music from the local radio station. Customers all staring. He liked waiting.

  ‘Mr Ashcroft, could you come to the front please,’ said the PA system. ‘Mr Ashcroft, he’s here again.’

  The round man in the suit came to the front, walking slowly, as if in a church. One of the dogs tried to jump up on him. Edgar could not read the expression on his face. Mr Ashcroft snatched Edgar’s plastic card—a dog growled—and took it to a cash register, where they did some monkey-business with it. A trolley was filled. His card returned. There was even a chicken he had not asked for. They were so kind.

  ‘Don’t come back here again,’ said Mr Ashcroft, ‘or I’ll call the police.’

  Edgar took the dogs away. Everyone was happy. They ate at a popular picnic spot by the river. Wagga beach. After their tin-food frenzy they tore up and down the bank which was now eroding, washing downstream in the current. They splashed in and out of the cold water.

  Innocent anglers, kayakers, people out for a stroll, were forced to walk briskly away, terrorised by the dogs which took anarchic control of the beach. Dogs barked at everyone. On the far side of the river, horses gazed anxiously with ears erect at all this activity, their reflections distorted in the steadily moving water. The dogs barked at them playfully. A car pulled into the car park, which the dogs surrounded. When no one emerged to satisfy their curiosity, they ran off. Edgar fancied he saw someone pointing either binoculars or a camera at him through the sun-bright refractions of the windscreen. What did he care? It was a public space. Once they had eaten and washed and swum, Edgar and his pack moved off along the river, following a well-worn track along the levee bank, through the twisted willows.

  Over the following weeks and months Edgar discovered there were seven or eight supermarkets in the greater metropolitan region of Wagga. The staff—all of them cooperative and generous. Their managers, men in suits all, though some with their coats off and sleeves rolled up, studied him with shocked, fishy looks on their faces. The inland town had much to pride itself on, apart from being the biggest inland town. Edgar could see why. It was this universal spirit of cooperation and altruism. They gave him all he wanted. Usually he just stood there. They would take his card and shunt him away with trolleys piled high with tins of dog food. So friendly. Most of the time. Only once, when someone swore at him and threatened to call the police, did he have to release the rope of one of his dogs, o
r was it an accident? A German short-haired pointer, which bounded off the length of an aisle, barking at its momentary freedom, skidded on the lino, then bounded back. It was as if a puma had been released in the store. People screamed. They must have thought the whole rabid pack was about to be loosed.

  Once he arrived to find a police car sitting out the front. Something must be going on, he thought, so, given his memories of police, he went elsewhere. Spreading his visits between the seven or eight supermarkets, Edgar was able to keep all his dogs (he’d lost count of them now) well fed and happy. He never failed to be thankful for the generosity of men in suits who managed the supermarkets. And they never failed to take advantage of his card. He did not want for anything. If he felt like a bag of oranges, or a sack of spuds, or anything else, for that matter, they would give it to him, even if they did seem a bit grumpy. It was never short of amazing, the things he found in tins.

  One day he was stopped by the police while pushing his trolley towards the river. It was the copper who had taken him to the council pound to fetch the silky when the mother had snuffed it. The staffy snarled and the policeman drew his gun. Edgar stepped in front of the dog.

  ‘They’s all my dorgs,’ he said.

  ‘Where did you get the food, Ed? You got a receipt for all this?’

  How did he remember Edgar’s name? Edgar nodded in the direction of the supermarket.

  ‘Just move over there a bit.’

  Edgar hauled the dogs away from the trolley. The cop rummaged through it and found a receipt for purchase. He told Edgar the law required him to keep his dogs leashed at all times. Edgar showed his rope ends.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to keep ‘em off the streets. If one of them bites someone—I dunno—Ed, we’ve got our eye on you.’

  ‘I ain’t done nothing wrong.’

  ‘If I see them in town again I’ll impound them. I don’t know how you can afford to keep feeding them.’

  ‘You want me ter let ‘em go?’

  The policeman shrugged and drove away, followed by a woof from the silky.

  Keep ‘em off the streets, eh? So Edgar took them to a nearby park to feed, where a family of picnickers was forced to flee.

  The Afghan’s coat grew thick and glossy, though with occasional bald patches, if one cared to search. Sometimes they slept in one or other of the various parks about the city. Or in the showgrounds. Or in the abandoned shed which they had made their own. Their hidey-hole. Or, when the weather grew warmer, along the riverbank behind the windbreak of the levee. This need for shelter was satisfied by various means so that they did not have to think about it. By and large they lived moment by moment. Usually they were left in peace. Sometimes, marching across vast paddocks, to keep the flies out of his mouth, Edgar tied an old handkerchief over his face. Sometimes he thought of returning to the parents’ farmhouse, but the hike was too far. No supermarkets down that way. They would have to come back straightaway for food.

  One day as they returned over the grass-covered camber of the hills towards the shearing shed, the lead dog, Rex, stopped in his tracks and flared his hackles. One by one the others followed suit. Creeping through the grass they burst into their shed and in an instant the dogs had cornered a bedraggled-looking man in one of the stalls. The stranger cowered beneath an old fleece, bleeding from the scratches he caused himself in cowering.

  ‘Call ‘em off, call ‘em off. I give up,’ the man cried.

  Edgar, hatchet in hand, appeared behind them and called the dogs off.

  ‘They ain’t dangerous.’

  The man lowered his hands and examined Edgar. Edgar saw that two of the man’s fingers were missing.

  ‘You aren’t a cop.’ The man removed his hat and twirled it in his hands.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘These aren’t police dogs?’

  Edgar gestured to the three-legged Labrador, the silky, the spaniel, the schnauzer.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. I hate those dogs.’

  The man calmed down. He sponged some blood off his thumb with a tuft of wool.

  Seeing he was harmless, Edgar fed the remaining tins from his knapsack to the dogs. The man watched Edgar at his work, chopping the tins apart, then scooping the contents out into some plough disks he had found.

  ‘Are these all your dogs?’

  Edgar ignored him. Feeling safer, the man came out of his stall.

  ‘Mate, are these all your dogs?’

  Edgar nodded.

  ‘Haven’t you got a can opener?’

  ‘I got a axe,’ said Edgar, wiping the blade of the hatchet clean, then licking his finger.

  ‘Isn’t there a law against owning so many dogs?’

  ‘Dorgs is dorgs. They foller me. Nobody wants ‘em.’

  ‘How do you know nobody wants them?’

  ‘’Cause they here. They’s grass dorgs.’

  ‘What’s your name, mate?’

  ‘Me name?’ said Edgar. ‘Ed.’

  ‘Well, I’m Meacham,’ said the man.

  They shook hands and Edgar felt the absence of the fingers, like a girl’s hand. Meacham retrieved a bottle of rum from beneath his fleece on the floor: ‘Have a snort.’

  They sat in the open doorway, their legs hanging over the smooth edge of the shed floor.

  ‘I thought you was a cop.’

  ‘I ain’t a cop.’ Then remembering his father’s lesson, ‘I’d hit meself on the bloody noggin with a spanner if I was a cop.’

  ‘That’s the ticket,’ said Meacham. ‘Never tell ‘em anything.’

  ‘You was about to spill the ketchup when I come in here,’ Edgar pointed out.

  ‘That’s ‘cause I thought you had all these police dogs. I hate those dogs. These dogs are all right.’

  The three-legged Labrador sidled up to Edgar, leaning against him. Edgar scratched its breastbone, in the small place where dogs cannot reach. The Labrador gazed, transfixed, into the far-off blindness of its body. With great tenderness Edgar stroked the stump, the blunt shoulder bone beneath the skin.

  After a while Meacham asked, ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘What happened to yer fingers?’

  ‘Fair point,’ said Meacham. ‘Look at us. What a trio: me fingers; your teeth; his poor leg.’

  Edgar wondered which was his nose-picking finger.

  ‘We’s all missing something,’ said Edgar. ‘I got a monolith for a head.’

  ‘They can whittle you down but they can’t take your fuckin’ dignity. Not if you never tell ‘em nothing.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The jacks, of course.’

  ‘Oh. Did the jacks lop off yer fingers then?’

  ‘Nah, it was a chain saw.’

  Meacham sucked his thumb where he had torn it on a nail.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a Band-Aid?’

  ‘Nope.’

  They watched the moon come up over the paddocks stained with dusk. One or two stars appeared. They passed the rum back and forth. Edgar noted its similarity to the colour of the grass. The man, Meacham, after wiping the mouth of the bottle with his sleeve, guzzled long. Ahh. He passed it over. The alcohol burned Edgar’s gums. He heard the father in his exhalation. Some of the rum spilled through the scraps of his beard. He felt somehow grown-up, but sensed that this wasn’t enough. Crickets clicked in the grass. Single spats of rain like footsteps on the roof. A few of the pups pricked up their ears, or woofed where they lay, but were not curious enough to get up and investigate. Perhaps they could hear distant thunder. There was an array of fleascratching and dicklicking. The sky sat over them like a conjurer’s cloak.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any tucker?’

  ‘I already et.’

  ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘I got a bag of oranges.’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  It did not strike Edgar to ask why the stranger had come to be in the shearing shed, in a neglected paddock in the middle of—whe
re was it?—nowhere. He was ready to accept Meacham’s presence, as the dogs did, listening instead to the sound of the man’s words, which were hypnotic and soothing. The sound of his voice sending bubbles up Edgar’s spine. The peaceful sedation of company.

  As the bottle emptied, and they sucked their orange pith, the man told Edgar how strange he thought it was, the influence the stars and magnetic poles of the earth had on the lives of people. Strange also the influence and repercussions a simple act in one life could have upon the outcome of another. (‘D’ya know what I mean, Ed?’) Edgar nodded, looking out the door, up at the guilty stars, though he had not an inkling what Meacham was talking about. The guilty stars twinkled. Meacham was a gambler. He had ruined not only his own life but also the lives of all those who were dearest to him. Gambling had destroyed his happiness. If truth be told he would rather gamble than eat. Horses, dogs, pokies, roulette, two-up, blackjack, anything. Two flies up the proverbial wall. He once had a nice house in a nice suburb in Sydney. A nice wife called Aileen. A good job. Aileen had no idea as to the extent of his problem. He spent his wages on card machines in city hotels. He was very protective of the machines he was playing, and if anyone pulled a jackpot out of a machine he had walked away from in disgust, then yes, he would be prepared to do an injury to that person. Not that he ever did, of course, but he knew the price of a broken limb. He bet on horses he did not know the names of. He had stolen money from his employer. He took savings from his children’s education account. He knew it was a cliché but he loved his wife more than all the sand on all the shores, even—the family home had been mortgaged and lost—after she had left him. Debt collectors beat him up. He knew that all he had to do was make one big killing and all his problems would be solved. Every debt repaid. His house reclaimed. Family returned. But Aileen would not return. His debtors wanted their money, like yesterday. (He held up his remaining fingers.) They would settle for his appendages. The last thing he had of value in the world was his father’s watch. See. Horsham High School, 1932. In desperation he had taken a samurai sword and held up the cashier in a petrol station in Five Dock. He was drunk and knew he should not have done it, but by Christ it was fun, even though he’d only managed to get fourteen hundred dollars. Not much in the face of the stars’ malevolence towards him. The cashier had laughed. Refused to open the register. So Meacham had whacked her with the sword. Not the edge of it, which was blunt anyway—he’d been careful to turn it aside so only the flat of it caught her on the upper arm. A tiny scratch, a shaving nick. Silly bitch had screamed the shop down, and Meacham had been forced to hit her with his fist, smack smack smack, until she shut up. She shouldn’t have laughed at him. Didn’t she realise that armed robbery was a serious business? So it was obvious for all to see, in his case at least, how in the painful trajectories of the stars, people’s fates were decided. Chance was rigged. How had he been reduced to this? That woman, for instance, would probably have nightmares, it was true, as a result of the course of his actions. In this way people were like billiard balls, forever clashing and glancing off each other, conspiring to evolve. Think of the others, the hundreds of others whose lives were maybe changed for the better by entering the realm of his influence, and he himself whose course had been altered, for better or worse, by the impact of others in his past.