Junk Shop: A Dog Memoir

by Jennifer Erickson

  2. Therefore, I must return Home.

  3. Home was in Denver.

  4. Denver was far away

  I sat in the ditch and thought, and sniffed all the cars that blasted past, and when one passed that smelled right, I jumped up and gave chase. Before I had staggered more than a few steps, the car hopped over a rise and vanished, leaving a trail of exhaust with undertones of sunny days and road trips and Heart. My bad leg gave way and I tumbled off the shoulder back into the ditch, yelping.

  The Flying Mattress

  For a day, I limped along the highway ditch, trying to follow the car that smelled of Home. The scent faded, faded, and I started to realize what a hopeless task I had.

  I could have walked on the shoulder, but that was such an exposed place. How could I trust those cars not to veer to the side and thump-thump right over me?

  The ditch was full of Stuff: furniture and cigarette butts and rotting food that I pogoed past.

  Later I would become an expert on Stuff, but at the time, it was an obstacle, a distraction.

  Then, a different kind of roar made me pause and look up.

  A car blew past me with something strapped to its roof. A mattress. It smelled of sleep and dead skin and faintly of urine. It reared up in the wind. Arms angled out of both car windows, gripping the thing as it bucked and fought. The car got smaller and smaller, and then, off in the distance, the mattress flipped into the air above the car, and like a giant bird, it soared to the center of the highway, where it skidded into the concrete barrier.

  The car swerved, then righted itself. Then it swooped to the shoulder as a series of vehicles swarmed past. Two tiny figures emerged.

  A horn blared. One of the figures dashed toward the mattress. He vanished beyond a car hood, then reappeared, still upright, on the other side.

  I stopped, heart in my throat, and stood, trembling, as a second figure ran to the median.

  A semi-truck barreled down on them. It swerved, first the cab, then the trailer, and silently, in the distance, it punted the mattress into the air.

  The tiny figures cowered. The mattress scudded to the tarmac. The figures dashed back to the shoulder as the semi rocked back and forth across the lanes, then righted itself.

  Then, half a minute later, a long horn blast, like an afterthought, from the big truck.

  I collapsed onto my good haunch, suddenly feeling my pain and fatigue, my weakness and hunger.

  The car drove away, leaving the misshapen mattress for other cars to swerve around.

  As I caught my breath, the scent of decay bloomed in my nostrils.

  Decay is a scent so heady, so alluring in its connotations that it is irresistible. It is the smell of a good meal, of conquest, of the cycle of life. There is always a story behind the smell of decay: a story of struggle and release. It is the scent left behind when the spirit crosses through the veil to that other side.

  A place of death is hot spot, a boon, where all creatures from maggots to coyotes gather to partake, to divvy up the vestiges of life: the blood, the bones, the intestines. A death is a banquet, a celebration!

  Naturally, I was invited.

  I veered out of the ditch and into a field, following my nose until I reached a spot where the grass was flattened and bits of fur floated in the breeze. I sniffed delicately at the sunken cavern of the belly and the bared teeth where the dried lips had pulled away. There were undertones of shampoo and kibble and the stale smell of indoors. Suddenly, it didn't smell so enticing any more. Perhaps it had walked onto the road and been punted into the air by a large truck. It was a dog. Perhaps a dog like me.

  With just the tips of my front teeth, I nibbled at the desiccated flesh of a foreleg. But I couldn't do it.

  I looked around at the sky and the flat horizon and sniffed at the spines of a cactus nestled in the grass at my feet. I sampled the breeze. Something was wrong. I drew in the scent of that banquet that would never be eaten, and let the knowing part of my brain work things out behind the scenes, and gradually, like a dream, the thought came upon me: I was going the wrong way.

  And then another, less mysterious knowledge came upon me: I must not cross highways.

  On the Road

  Did you know that car time is different from walk time? When I set out, I thought it would only take a couple of days to get Home. But I was wrong.

  On the road, sometimes, I met people who had Heart. I could feel their Heart coming from bus windows and parking lots. Sometimes, they would appear in front of me with Milk Bones or sticky-faced children. And they would try to pet me or invite me into their cars. But I could smell where they came from, and none of them smelled like Home. So I would eat their Milk Bones cautiously and duck away from their grasp.

  People always think they know what's best for me. But what they're really thinking of is what's best for them, which is different.

  In a parking lot outside Flagstaff, two young women gave me ice cream and barbequed beef, and I let my guard down, and I ended up stuck in the back of a station wagon for a whole day with explosive diarrhea, going toward Their Big Break in L.A.

  Note to self: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

  I also learned that even people with Heart can't always hear me. There I was, crammed in with all their luggage, whining, "Please, I really, really have to Do My Thing, and plus, Home is the other way."

  And they just kept cooing to me like I was being unreasonable.

  So when my bowels finally exploded all over their brand-new imitation Louis Vuitton luggage, they looked at each other and went, "Oooh. Eeew."

  Then we stopped, and when one of them opened her door to get out, I scrambled over the top of all that luggage and across her lap, and I pogoed away, squirting a train of diarrhea.

  Another thing that I learned on the road is that even when it seemed like people were doing something for me, it was actually the opposite.

  People wanted to pet me. And even though they thought that petting me was doing me a kindness, I could feel their need, radiating out from them. Their clingy, anxious need. What they really wanted was a tiny bit of peace, a moment of calm, the ability to forget their troubles for just a moment. And they sensed that they could get it from me.

  Needy people would lunge for me in the most random way. Leaping from cars, running out of convenience stores, looming up on the sidewalk. They scared me, those people. But every once in a while, I would allow one to run their fingers through my fur, to kiss my dirty head, to hug me as though we knew each other.

  And for children, I always paused. Children are different.

  That is how I learned about charity. I learned that when people offered me Milk Bones or potato chips or beef jerky, they were hurt if I didn't accept.

  By accepting their scraps, I was, in turn, giving. Giving something much fuller, much richer than the scraps they offered me. Deep down they knew it, and they were grateful.

  The days ran into each other. All day long I pogo, pogo, pogoed down the ditch with the cars zooming past and the clouds of exhaust. In a trance, I kept moving, kept my eyes down.

  On the ground, there were landmarks: the aforementioned Stuff. Looking up was a kick in the gut. The road narrowed to a needle point on the horizon. The horizon never changed.

  Sometimes I crawled through culverts to avoid crossing highways.

  I visited the parking lots of Zoom Burger and The Golden Corral, and developed a taste for the finer foods. By that I mean hamburgers.

  Then, gradually, something happened.

  First, the garbage increased. Then, the number of gas stations. A city was somewhere nearby, stalking me by day, even as I stubbornly stumbled toward it.

  It came at me in the form of cars with blaring horns and concrete barriers. It assaulted me with noise and stink.

  By day, I cowered in culverts or under bushes caked with road grime and draped with garbage. At night, while the city rested, I slunk closer.

  Houses spattered the landsc
ape, their lights shining out across the acres. When I passed nearby, fingers of shadow and light reached for me. The contrast of that in-between place: half light, half darkness, made everything more threatening. The darkness felt darker and more foreign. But the light, although its glow was deceptively warm, was my nemesis. Lights were for keeping the wilderness at bay, and I had somehow become the wilderness.

  Short-cutting a curve in the road one night, I made the mistake of crossing a patch of thick lawn. Just as I registered the fluffiness, the bounciness underfoot, a shot rang out. The wind of a bullet ruffled my ear fur.

  Panicked shouting chased me down a driveway and nearly into the path of a train, a squealing, churning wall, pounding toward infinity.

  Just in time, I bucked to a halt. My quivering legs gave way. The wall of sound drowned out my screams. I collapsed onto the rocks and accepted my fate, but death never came. The train throbbed into the distance, leaving only a smell of creosote and a deep, peaceful silence. Pain washed up from my rear end, but I welcomed it. It meant that I was alive.

  As I snuck up on the city, the night sky turned to pink and the whole world roared like a vacuum.

  The roar is a funny thing, because when you're in it, you don't even know it's there. It has many parts: the crackle of electrical lines and the thrum of engines, beeps and clicks and voices. Wind whistling between buildings, footsteps, airplanes. Barking and banging, breathing and shouting. Squeals, hums, whispers, clicks and beeps. But mostly, it's the machines. The city is a place of machines.

  Every once in a while, a lone sound stood out from the rest: a bark or a honk, and it would sound so lonely. Because there is no place so lonely as a place where everyone belongs to the great machine except for you.

  The smells increased, too. Not just car exhaust and antifreeze and asbestos (there are always those along the road), but more sinister smells: fear and hatred and rage and bitterness. Addiction and delusion. Nervous sweat and desperation and greed. Of course, you smell those anywhere there are people, but with so many people in one place, the odor becomes overwhelming. It can make you doubt yourself, all of that insanity.

  The Cannibal

  I slinked through the ditch, picking my way among discarded hypodermics and shattered glass and other sharp and dangerous things, until I came to a place where several highways met in a tangle, and I was baffled as to how to get through. Up to this point I had kept my resolution not to cross highways, although of course I had crossed many minor roads. That was an unavoidable hazard of travelling.

  I hunkered behind a giant tumble weed and inspected the knot of roads, tracing the paths of the cars with my nose, and I started to get dizzy. It was a logic problem like I'd never attempted, so I was concentrating really hard. With that, and the roar of the city and the vroom of the cars and the exhaust thick in my throat, I didn't notice the man sneaking up behind me with a blanket and a roll of duct tape.

  I didn't notice, that is, until everything went black. At first, I didn't even realize it was a problem, but then someone scooped me up, squeezing tightly. I yelped in fear and pain and struggled as hard as I could, biting and biting. Mostly, I bit mouthfuls of blanket, but I also bit my own tail, by accident.

  The trap got tighter and tighter, until I could only twitch and whimper. Pain stabbed through me from my leg. I gave up and waited for what would happen next as the man carried me, jostling and swaying. Several times, he set me down.

  Pain hurts worse when you fight it, and so does fear, so I tried to relax, and I filled my mind with thoughts of Him and Her and road trips and sunshine. "Good Girl," I said to myself, and that made everything a little bit better.

  Inside the blanket, it was warm, and it was stuffy with scalp and urine and sweat and wood smoke. In my struggles, I had lost control of my bowels, and I could smell that, too, but this was no time to worry about incontinence.

  I distracted myself so well that I lost track of time, but finally, I heard voices. He set me down for the last time. He jostled me from side to side, and then the blanket peeled aside. He gripped my muzzle with a hand. I cast my top eye over my surroundings, rolling it up into my head to try to see more.

  A campfire cast shifting orange light on concrete, and shadow forms emerged from crevices and behind pillars and gathered to gaze down at me. I could hear the cars above us going whoosh...thump, thump. I stayed very still.

  I tried to project an aura of cuteness, because overlaying the smell of scalp and urine and so on, was the unmistakable smell of terror. Terror, not of me specifically, but of the world and the future and of each other. Terror that could tip into rage. Savaging me would be a way for them to take control of their terror, but I really didn't want to make that sacrifice.

  No one spoke. They shifted uneasily, scratched and grunted. One guy trembled. The fire snapped and dimmed.

  "We need a knife."

  I could feel his voice vibrate through the hand on my snout. My neck fur stood up in alarm and I whimpered softly.

  On the edge of the group, a woman swayed uneasily, cleared her throat, and said, "I can't eat dog, Buddy."

  My captor drew in his breath. "I bring you fresh meat and that's all you have to say? You think anyone else would go to all this trouble? Fuck you! The rest of us will eat and you can go to hell. Butch, bring me a knife!"

  The whole group seemed to be holding their breath. The woman sniffed.

  Butch said, "No."

  Buddy straightened and stepped away from me. "Anybody else have something to say?"

  The trembling guy mumbled something unintelligible.

  "Speak up!" barked Buddy.

  "I said it's wrong to eat dogs, Buddy." The words tumbled out. "I'm sorry, but I won't do it."

  Buddy whipped around. The air whistled out of my lungs as he punted me like a football. I used the momentum to roll to my feet, then cowered backward into someone's shins. That person squatted and put protective arms around me. His matted hair tickled my face. "Shh," he whispered in my ear. "Be still."

  I clamped down on a moan.

  All hell broke loose. There was yelling and feet trampling all around me, and while Buddy was distracted, the man with the matted hair whisked me away from the firelight.

  Panting, he set me down in a clump of bushes and told me to stay there, he'd be right back. When he returned, he had a backpack and a piece of cardboard and a rolled up sleeping bag. He sat beside me and we looked out over the lights of the city with its spires of skyscrapers and roads like rivers, and for the first time it seemed beautiful. He told me we were a team now, and I could trust him.

  For the rest of the night we walked, as he coaxed and praised me. We crossed many roads, but that is something you have to do in the city. It was okay, though, because he was a Car Whisperer.

  He would hold out his hand as though it alone would stop the cars, and he would glare into the headlights, and I would hobble at his side from one curb to the other. The cars never disobeyed him. He had magical control.

  His name was Nelson, and he took care of me. When the sky bled with the first light of day, and we were all the way on the other side of Downtown, he curled up with me in a frozen flower bed, and we went to sleep, our breath mixing in clouds in the slanted morning sunshine.

  For a day, we rested, but the next morning we started work. Nelson stood on the median holding up his piece of cardboard. I sat beside him. My job was to look hungry. With what we earned, we bought burgers, mostly, but sometimes Taco Bell, and sometimes we bought beer.

  When Nelson drank the beer, my job was to watch over him until he woke up and make sure nobody stole his backpack or his sleeping bag or his piece of cardboard. For this job, I practiced the same glare that Nelson used on cars. I would also rumble secretly in my throat. People couldn't hear it but they felt the vibration in the air, and they would stop and turn away without knowing exactly why.

  As we travelled, we camped in parks and on ventilation grates and behind dumpsters. Once, we slept in a car that s
omeone had left unlocked. Nelson picked the change from the ash tray and we shared a Snickers bar from the glove compartment. There was a T-shirt in the back seat. It was too small for Nelson, so he decided that I should wear it to keep me warm.

  The next day, after I tripped on one of the sleeves and tumbled down the steps of the Immaculate Conception Church during Free Cocoa Friday, he took it off.

  All that while, we had been moving in a wide arc that didn't get us much closer to Home, but didn't take us too far away. Nelson was good company, and he took care of me, just like he had promised, so I stayed with him. When we hitch hiked out of the city, we caught some Deluxe Rides. Once, we rode in a 1963 Ford Falcon with red leather upholstery. Nelson said I was his Good Luck Charm.

  Nelson's Sister

  Winter was approaching, and one bone-achingly frozen morning at the KT Travel Plaza, Nelson hatched a plan to drop in on his sister for a couple of months. He called his sister from the pay phone by the Redbox. Then he took a shower and combed his hair so that he would smell trustworthy.

  I shrank into the brick wall beside the ice machine and waited.

  Large trucks came and went. Their running lights and flashers reminded me of the car crash with He and She. I drew in the scent of diesel and cigarette smoke and fantasized about trotting in and snatching a foot-long hotdog from the rotating rack on the counter.

  A dusty pickup pulled off the highway and turned into the lot, and instead of driving directly to a gas pump, it cruised the parking lot slowly and pulled to a stop at the ice machine. After a moment, a woman with fluffy hair and a puffy jacket climbed out. She gave me a nod. I stood to peer after her as she entered the building.

  A minute later, she came out with a Nelson who was transformed. His hair was slicked back and he'd dug some less-dirty clothes out of his backpack for this important reunion.

  "This is Sophie," he gestured to me. I wagged once.

  "I figured," said his sister. She smiled gently. I could feel her heart, warm but noncommittal. I liked her.

  I rode in the bed of the pickup and listened through the gap in the sliding window as we drove on many similar dirt roads at right angles, past horses and cows in fields. I drew in the aroma of fresh manure and dry hay. We drove for a very long way, down into creases in the earth and across creeks and up over rolling ridges, and the land looked the same in every direction.