Good Momma

The night descends into an eerily light of a full moon. I am not calm anymore, perhaps restraining myself of biting someone. I want to finish digging around the gate and fence. It’s a day after the town’s Freedom Festival and people are still blowing up fireworks, which sting my ears, raising the hackles along my spine. 

It’s Friday. Momma appears in a good mood, as I can hear her singing a Blink-182 song with her fourteen-year-old daughter Paisley. I smell Papa John’s pizza from the kitchen window a few feet from the backyard. I should rush in and steal a slice off the table, but I have other plans for the evening. Besides, it’s “movie night” for Momma and daughter and they will be distracted.  

Neighbor kids yell at each other, voices carrying over the fence, where I have begun the drudgery of digging around the gate. After last night’s rain, my paws sink into the damp ground. It’s messy work but prefer the damp dirt rather than dry grass caused by summer’s drought. I’ll cut earthworms and centipedes in half. Not far from the gate, under the shed, baby possums live. Ugly as a goat’s belly. I don’t mess with them. Their momma’s mean as all get out and she’ll hiss and bite you hard. You never want to tangle with them.

I know Momma has seen me digging, but she’s told her neighbor Carrie-Ann that she isn’t worried that I might escape. And she shouldn’t be so worried because after my escape, I will return home. I know my way back. I have an incredible doggy memory. 

I have about a 45-minute window before Paisley comes to the yard to let me inside, her eyes a dark shadow of makeup.

As I slip through the hole under the gate, my dumb tail gets stuck.

I move slower, so that I don’t tear my tail. Slowing down calms me. Rushing oneself through anything, even reckless humans should know, can cause big mistakes. 

For most dogs, we amble around aimlessly, appearing lost, confused where we are, but I’ve taken to memory riding in the car with Momma. I know the neighborhood well and places to go. There’s Dunk’n Donuts on 4^th and Main. Supercuts, where Momma and daughter go for trims, is in the strip mall beside the Dollar Tree. Starbucks is tucked on the corner of Vineyard and 2^nd Street, near Batson’s Billiards Tavern—a popular hangout on Friday evenings. Tony Batson and his sister, Caroline, have owned the bar for two decades. It’s about a quarter mile from Momma’s house. 

I wiggle my tail out of the gate. It hurts like hell, but I suck in the pain. Dog pain is probably a lot sharper than human pain. I see that humans endure an enormous amount of pain and suffering from many things but keep going about their days. 

When I get to Batson’s Tavern, I smell barbecue on the grill in the parking lot, of what appears to be an extended summer celebration. Men and women hold wet cans of beer; I see them pouring whiskey into Styrofoam cups, humming to alt-rock ‘90s music that Momma grew up listening to: Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Nirvana…

A red-haired dude glances down and pats my head. “Look at you. Cute pup!” he says with his slurry mouth. “Hey, check this dog out!” 

Oh no!

His bottle has a little beer left. He angles it for me to sip, and it’s good, and I’m feeling lucid after a few licks from the bottle. I gulp down the remaining brew.  

“You a Maltese? Is that what you are?” said red-haired dude.

 Of course, I am.

I listen to the people around the grill yap about politics, the economy. 

Red-haired guy in skinny jeans stands beside the woman with dirty blonde hair and her eyes swoon, and she says, “I think we’re all doomed. This is hell. We are living in hell now.”

“People are going to vote for the guy who has four indictments. He’s a felon. Good luck with that.”

“I ain’t voting. I’m done.”

“With all the chaos around the world, this guy’s gonna make it a lot worse.”

If humans die, we white Maltese poodle mixes are left on our own, and we’re not the best fighters; we envy Doberman pinschers, mastiffs, Great Danes… 

I don’t know what I’d do if they are no longer around. 

I might have five years left before my health starts to fade. The kidneys go first, then the heart. Dogs’ lives are flashes in the pan compared to human life. We sleep a lot over the years. Sleep is death’s cousin. 

Dirty blonde-haired woman is giving me evil eyes: Squinting, stooping down to pet me and I see that her eyes are glassy, bloodshot.  

I’ll bite her. May as well. I want to bite someone because I’ve never done it (restrained nips at Momma when she teases me with her Chipotle taco bowl while sitting on the couch binge-watching Netflix). But what do I know? I’m just a shaggy furball creature on this muggy summer night.

Momma wants to take me to the groomers. It’s expensive, but I need it, the trimmers shaving me as if I’m a wooly lamb and it feels so damn good against my belly. Momma stares at me and is befuddled, as if I could be a human or someone to acknowledge her mistakes over the years: her divorce from Danny Felston, a guy ten years her senior, had a fling with a waitress from Hooter’s, and Momma’s insistent urge to be a helicopter parent for Paisley. I heard her one time say to Carrie-Ann: “I wonder what’s going on inside that tiny doggy skull of his?” 

If I were a human, I’d dress spiffy, nurse a cold IPA, lounging in my Hawaiian shirt around the bar at Batson’s. As I hear some men say, “Need to find me a good woman to love.” 

If I had money I’d gamble it on lotto tickets and pull tabs. 

I’m full of pent-up energy. I’m about to do it, going to bite this crazy lady with dirty blonde hair cackling at me. She has painted fingernails the color of electric light that zaps skeeters in the dark. 

“Shoo! Scat, you damn mutt!” Dirty blonde girl yells. 

Going for her ankles.

She’s wearing brown open-toed sandals. Her drunken boozy breath drifts all the way down to my nose. Her skin is hard and crusty like frozen pizza. I taste a tiny scrape of blood, rusty, metallic, as it irritates my nose; I let out a big sneeze and she kicks me away; I bark back at bitch lady. It would be on the news a few nights later that this woman, age thirty-one, known as Capri Littleton—found unresponsive at the Days Inn across the street—deceased in a hotel bed. Heroin overdose. A news reporter informed the public that the medical examiner ruled it an accidental suicide. It’s sad that another young adult has descended into their own discord of addictions.

And I wonder if I had contributed to her demise at the Days Inn (indirectly)? If I hadn’t bitten her, would have it altered her time and place, her decision to take too much? One thing leads to another, scenarios reimagined in one’s mind—guilt inside your heart, uncoiling like a snake under a rock.

I make it back to the yard, slipping under the fence, wagging my tail behind the gate to appear happy and innocent. Paisley calls for me, opening the back door to run inside the house. “LeRoy!” she yells, her bleach-blondish hair illuminating under the porch light. It looks as if she’s gotten the courage to buzz the sides of her hair all the way to the scalp; she’s added zig-zags of lines, trendy things teenagers are doing to these days.   

Momma is holding a glass of wine on the couch, mellow, curled under her go-to brown quilt that her mother had made while Momma was pregnant with Paisley, and she darts her eyes at me and pipes: “LeRoy, your paws are filthy. What have you been doing? I’d better not see a new hole near the fence again.”

I look at her ankles as she stands up from the couch and reaches for a cloth. If I could bite a stranger, then I could nip Momma. Playful, of course. For fun. My teeth never breaking skin. I would never do that to Momma. I love her, and I know she loves me.