A Silent Answer in the Mud

      The colorful rooftops of the downtown houses were best viewed from the alleyways behind them. I noticed that each one had its own distinguishing features: gables here; latticework there; fire escapes never before used and rusting against all regulations; fold-out chairs and portable grills too close to slanted decks, begging to prompt the use of the fire escapes; ivy running from the old hard ground all the way up to antennae, cockeyed against an overcast sky. The windows, too, seemed to develop personalities: one high up at the height of an attic, a perfect circle just big enough to catch a glimpse of a Cheshire cat cleaning itself; another one of a series of elongated rectangles like the archer sniper’s perch; most old, paned glass that skyrocketed heating costs and disregarded 20/20 vision; and more than a few broken or boarded from those throwing rocks or bottles from below. Some of the houses, divided decades ago into apartments for the poor and now for the poor and learning, had levels like blocks stacked on top of each other, a millionaire’s trust-fund child having spent too many mornings ignoring cartoons to play with additions and renovations.

The windows would open out on to shabbily-assembled decks or rooftops to tenants below, the ceilings buckling under the weight of frat boys belting ballads, or a third-shifter smoking one more cigarette before trundling down the stairs and off into the shift. And the levels above the street all interconnected, so that an assassin or a squirrel could run from one to the other between the trees without ever worrying about the wet concrete. Some stood out as having been remodeled once or a thousand times since the original construction over a hundred years ago, like anachronistic white elephants with gilded terraces and chandeliers behind laced curtains, swimming pools behind newly erected wooden fences with latches and locks, private garages with doors that never closed fast enough for the owners waiting in their locked cars. Front doors may have been Tolkien’s Shire ports or wrought iron protecting mahogany, but back doors were hardly plywood and busted screens. Back porches slumping into mud and mid-yard lakes led to gravel lots littered with dog shit and needles.

I stopped taking Blue on walks through the alleyways the third time a drug-user stumbled in front of us from a hidden archway and fell onto a mattress marked “bed bugs,” and opted instead for the opulence of the street-lit sidewalks where others might nod running by or stop to pet him without asking. He’d been more afraid of the middle-class runners than the vagabonds out back. He seemed somehow to know these types of things; call it an animal’s intuition. We lived in the small apartment between the alleys and the front doors, a 700 square foot studio with too much untended trash in the bin to put the empty bottles from the night before.

We’d just got back from one of our rarer and rarer walks, since I’d noticed that it wasn’t only him that was getting a little plump in undesired parts. And as I put him on the run chain in the yard, I sat down on the three brick stairs that led to the apartment door, in the back of the house. I observed as far as I could beyond the rooftops and ancient Oak branches the turret roof of the Red Castle liquor store, what was once a trolley stop that had now been converted into a promised land for most in the inner city.

I knew there was laundry in the basement washer from at least two days before, forgotten about like so many things on drunken evenings, now cold, damp, and in need of running again. But for the time being I relaxed a bit, Blue’s sniffing each corner of the yard like it was brand new the soundtrack to another lazy and gray afternoon. He trotted from one side of the broken-boarded fence to the other, found a new lead from a squirrel that’d been there hours before and sprinted back to where he started. The squirrels chirped from power lines intersecting the yard, mocking him for not being there sooner and yelling to one another about how the cardinals had been too loud that morning. A gray soft mist hung a hundred yards above them, too low to be called clouds but too high to be a fog, right in the spot that muffled the echoes of landing planes and blurred the sightline of God.

I whistled a recognizable high-pitched quick tone once for Otis to come inside, but he seemed to have found something behind the Christmas tree rotting on the side of the yard beside the stairs leading to the basement. I remembered months before when the halfway house on the other side had a barbecue, and the recently released convicts disregarded the rules (again) by throwing their chicken bones on to our side. I ran to Blue fully expecting to have to dig a finger into his mouth (again) to save his life, but found instead that he was sniffing and scratching at a hole, halfway covered by a blue tarp and dead branches, on the side of the house. Being a renter, I had never fully explored every inch of the foundation, trusting that the outrageous price of rent would suffice and that the apartment was absolutely perfect. But knowing the neighborhood and how many properties the manager had, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a family of baby opossums or an actual baby left in a grocery basket, the modern day wicker woven equivalent. The hole was behind broken red bricks in the foundation of the house, just above a mound of mud.

Blue was a fiend for whatever lay beyond the tarp, scratching furiously so that the mud flew, and I grabbed the run chain to pull him back. A beagle born and bred to hunt, I almost fell back into the mud when I pulled him, and finally got him away from the immediate vicinity of the hole so I could try to see. I could feel a draft coming from the darkness, a musty earthen scent that cooled my nostrils as I inhaled like smelling the wine of the foundation: petrichor and grass, notes of black mold. I felt my thighs for the artificial light that wasn’t there and squinted into the abyss. I needed to know what was under there, I was drawn to it. So I ducked down on cracking knees and waddled further towards it. Blue needed even more than me to know what there was, and his persistence manifested itself in a hound dog’s familiar whine. He kept pulling on the chain in my hand and whining until eventually I let go. As I inched closer and closer to the hole in the brick, I could feel the air getting even cooler, so that it felt like the inside of a refrigerator. The fog from above the power lines seemed to drift now around my ankles. I ducked further down on to my hands and knees disregarding the mud and mildew as my eyes began very slowly to adjust to the near pitch black. Blue’s excitement had abated by now so that he went back into his sniffing fit, scurrying back and forth in a small space that I couldn’t make out, about the same size as the apartment between the floorboards above us.

I continued crawling further into the dark, my knees absolutely soaked now and Blue getting closer and closer to me as the space grew smaller, sniffing incessantly all the while. The walls of the foundation bottlenecked eventually and I saw in front of us another hole. But this hole wasn’t physical. It seemed ethereal somehow, like something that both was and wasn’t there. Through it was nothing, pure and absolute void framed by spider webs. And yet, I continued towards it, towards the thing that led to somewhere I wasn’t. Towards what could only be the answers to our problems, a place far away from the alleyways behind us in space and time. Blue stopped sniffing when we arrived at the existential opening and sat upright like he’d finally found the rabbit he was hunting. It seemed to be the answer to his problems, too. He turned to me expectantly as if awaiting his dinner, and so we crawled into it.