August 12, 2003
Strained
The place has filled up. There’s a table of young girls who probably work in an office together downtown, a few men standing at the bar watching them, and a silent couple in back.
He’s listening to the rain outside through the beats of the music when he catches the sound of tires squealing and the heart stopping thud of metal from a crash. The sound is like a box of change dropped on a gym floor. He gets up from the stool, walks to the window, and peers outside. In the dark at the end of the block a car is backing up from the crushed rear-end of a parked delivery van. A dog is barking. The car backs up and rights itself on the road and quickly pulls away.
As a boy he was an expert on the physiognomy of cars. He would sit at the edge of the road watching them, and from a distance they would remind him of faces, the grills and headlamps like old people he knew. He would play with a stick in the oil and rotted leaves in the gutter, enjoying the dark smell of it, waiting for the faces to come by, as silent and inscrutable as mourners. But he can't tell anything about this car from behind, except that it is new.
Back at the bar he finishes his drink and the bartender comes over and asks if he wants another. “Yup.”
“Did you get the plates on that bus?” she asks.
“Nope. But they messed up the van down there pretty good.”
The music has changed to the gypsy kings, and he says “You guys play this CD every night,” but she doesn’t hear him.
The girl next to him and says, “Excuse me?”
“Nothing, sorry, just remembered something I had to finish at work.”
“That’s the worst isn’t it?”
“Sure is.”
He takes another sip and says, “That and the copy machine.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
Ten minutes later the bartender checks in on him and he says, “That dog is still barking out there. Hear him?”
“Hadn’t noticed. They’re all over this neighborhood.”
The music is louder than he would like. He readjusts himself in his seat and listens to the dog barking. He wonders what it would be like to be a dog out in the rain. You’ve got the wet fur, sure, but it might be comforting. It would close everything down, clean up the smells of the neighborhood, make a cardboard box of the world. It’s probably relaxing for a dog to be out there in the rain like that, alone. He had a conversation about rain once with his ex-girlfriend. They decided together that rain must fall at about the same speed, no matter how big the drops were, like Newton’s apple. If the clouds were higher they might come down a little harder, but for the most part it was the size of the raindrops that made a difference. Big raindrops felt like they were coming down harder, even though they came at the same speed as the little ones.
The bartender comes over and asks if he wants another yet and he says “no, I’ll be right back.”
The dog was at the end of the block where he expected it to be. It had dragged itself to the side of the road, but its crumpled hips prevented it from getting onto the curb. It barked quickly a few times as he approached, then stopped and pawed at the cement before barking again. He knelt down next to it and said “hey boy.” Its head was turned on the side, one eye looking up at the rain, and its stomach was pinched where the wheel had run. The tail and hind legs were motionless, like pipes in a bag.
“Hey buddy,” he said, trying to pet the dog. It started barking. He looked closer and saw that he was standing in a pool of blood mingled with rainwater. The dog turned its head around and yelped at him. He stood up and backed away, “easy boy” but the dog kept its head twisted where it was, mouth and eye agape.
He could see the bar down the block and the people inside and he considered running over and calling someone but instead he put his foot on the dog’s neck and pressed down, gently at first, then with force.
Rain was also an equalizer, he thought. It rains the same on everyone, like in that old song. Down the block the crowd in the bar swayed back and forth like underwater reeds in a fish tank.
The dog snarled and arched its ruined back, the rain began to come down harder, and he stood with one foot its neck and bounced up and down until he felt the muscles go slack.
He picked up the dog in both arms and took it to the corner. There was an empty trashcan there, and he dropped the dog inside and covered it; then thought better and uncovered it. He tapped the metal twice as he left, and returned to the bar.
