Just The Dogs

JUST THE DOGS          by     Jerry Janiec                                                                  

Looking out the kitchen window, across the vast darkness of his yard, shadows caught his attention as they moved in rhythm, running and hiding between the trees. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and shapes emerged; the neighborhood dogs, he recognized their sizes and movements. These were dogs that had befriended him. All he did was reach out and offer a friendly hand and a soft, soothing voice; they loved him. He spoke to them when they visited; he gave them cool water in the summer. They came around almost daily, leaving him to wonder if the true owners ever suspected their dog of seeing someone else.   

Were his dog friends chasing something or running from something? Looking to the right and looking to the left, not a single answer was provided. The moonless night wasn’t revealing anything.   

“Hey, you should look at this”, he said to her. She was right next to the sofa. It was one of her favorite places in the house. There was an end table holding the lamp they had purchased at the Cherry Festival in Traverse City, Michigan. Being one of the nation’s largest producers of cherries gave the locals good enough reason to celebrate. She would sit there to read and sip her herbal tea. It was a good spot.     

“Do you see this? All our dog friends are running through the yard”.     

She did not answer, and it was just as well; there may have been nothing to see. He felt that the dogs were being chased. He heard nothing, but maybe there was a noise. A dog’s hearing is 3 or 4 times more powerful than a human. He knew that. He also knew that loud sharp noises sent shock waves of pain through his skull, it had been that way ever since his most recent bout with Bell’s Palsy. The nerves all along the right side of his face and head were affected, that included the nerves associated with hearing. His right ear was always ready to run from the pain of a loud noise. Maybe that’s why the dogs were all moving fast in one direction, painful and scary noises.   

“Hey, did you hear a noise? Maybe the dogs are running from a noise. It could have been firecrackers, a crack of thunder, is it supposed to rain? Do you hear anything”?    

No. She did not hear anything or else she would be asking the question. She was at the fireplace now, looking directly at him. Her expression was one of frozen apprehension. “I don’t understand”, he said. “Why won’t you answer me”? He didn’t hear anything from outside and she was not responding.   

“There has to be a reason for a stampede of dogs, maybe they smelled something”. He knew a dog’s sense of smell was more than 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's. Did the dogs smell something that frightened them? What kind of smell would scare every dog on the block? Fire? 

“Hey, do you smell something? Do you think there’s a fire in the neighborhood”?      

She doesn’t smell anything. Why isn’t she answering? She had moved back to her previous position next to the sofa and he resumed his scrutiny of the trees. The tall wild grasses waved at a passing breeze and flowering bushes of unknown varieties transformed into black lace dancing with the night. Was there something there? He saw Jesus in the trees once, but that was out the window of a fast-moving car. By the time he thought to tell her - she was driving - they were well beyond the clearing and a quarter mile closer to home. Maybe it was only a poem being formed in his mind; what rhymes with Jesus?   

“Hello. I’m talking to you. Why won’t you answer”? An unyielding silence was his answer.   

There was a smell he thought; strong enough to stir up a taste to be feared, a taste that reminded him of powerful coffee. Exactly the taste of prison coffee where he worked as a bureaucrat; shuffling papers all day in a never-ending effort to organize inmate lives. The old Mr. Drip-Drip coffee maker wore its build-quality well; stained by the thousand pots of heavy, black coffee it had produced over the years. He almost got used to it; almost. Unlike the hot coffee with milk and sugar that Grandma Nellie served him when he was 5 years old; she called him wnuk; grandson. She spoke no English, but words were unnecessary between them. Her coffee was an exceptionally adult-like treat, it always included a slice of rye bread with butter. A treat that would travel all through his future life.  

His mouth began to flood with saliva, causing him to constantly swallow, consume, and ingest what felt like gallons of wet, thickly slippery dribble. Spitting was an option, but where to spit, where to spit? He was about to drown, and the only thing required was one more mouthful of saliva. His stomach was beginning to churn from the torrent of liquid pouring in. He felt a violent vomit approaching; like the time he drank too much rum and soda and found himself eyeing the large potted plant in the living room corner of his first apartment. 

“I feel sick. Don’t you feel sick? Can you speak? Do you hear me? I need you. Please help”.  

He needed water now, a cool dark room, and sleep. He needed to touch his face to his favorite pillow, close his eyes, and allow his body a release from its current confinement of conscious pain. Most of all, he needed the loving, caring treatments that could only be administered by his Sweet Angel.   

“That’s good,” he said. Is it good for you too”?

He could feel her wiping the sweat from his forehead, the bridge of his nose, and around his mouth, mopping away all traces of the vile vomit. The cool, clean cloth dispensed by loving hands would quickly quiet his restless and agitated state.  

“My sweet angel,” he said. “You are my sweet angel”.  

He began calling her his sweet angel back in 2016. The sound of her voice awakened him from a deep, deep, anesthetic-induced coma of sleep. Nothing else had worked and the doctors and nurses were getting worried. She was called into the recovery room. She listened to their story. She called his name. He woke up immediately, completely unaware of the power she had just displayed.  

“Did you see the dogs”? he asked, kneeling before the porcelain bowl. He could feel her stroking his long, thick chestnut-colored hair back across his head, damp with sweat from the violent heaving forth of the evening’s temptations. The end failed to justify the method employed. He couldn’t drink alcohol, shouldn’t drink alcohol, and would undoubtedly tell himself once again how he would never drink alcohol again. Undoubtedly.

I’m throwing up he thought; believing he would feel better afterward. He wondered if he had been drinking, or if he was getting sick, maybe the flu. He remembered delirious comatose fevers and chills from the past. He did not care to revisit those bedridden illnesses.    

“Are you okay”? she asked. “I just got home and found you stumbling around talking to yourself, gibberish”.   

It sounded to him as if she was in the basement, the garage, or halfway down the street. He could hear her speaking but couldn’t understand what she was saying.   At least she was talking now. She gestured to him a cryptic instruction. It all occurred in a slow motion much too fast for him. He wondered what she wanted as his altitude soared.  

“Let’s get you to bed, she said. Let’s get you to bed.”    

He felt himself being pulled along by his sweet angel as if he were a Thanksgiving Day float on 34^th Street. All along the route, her image appeared, on the end table next to the sofa, on the mantel next to some gifted, scented candles, and even wall-hanging in the hall. Everything was familiar, it looked like home, but oddly unfamiliar.     

He recognized the bed, but only as generic anywhere, any place bed; warm and comfortable, but a stranger. He knew she was helping him, but only in a distant, confusing sense. As she pulled the blankets over him, he felt not comfort, but the suffocating weight of a hundred prison cells occupied by convicts and corn-fed prison guards. His breath was slowly being pushed aside and replaced with an urgency to run with the dogs. To run from the fears that were most formidable in his mind. He was suspicious, afraid, and in need.   

She reached out a friendly hand, and with a soothing voice coaxed him to quiet. Whatever this was could not be stopped and he decided to let it come. The darkness now held the answers to his entrapment. After his sleep of the dead, he would awaken to the pain of a thousand barking dogs and wonder whatever became of the night.    

THE END