Alan Sincic

         “… Sal. But Sal – that building’s got nothing in it, and you don’t got any customers – what the hell you need a guard dog for?”

         Sal explains it to me. If you ever want to get bigger – even have a chance of getting bigger – you got to pretend to be bigger than you actually are. It’s not Two Guys Gluing Together Roof Windows in an Empty Room. That’s not the name of the company. It’s not Don and Billy’s Roof Windows or even Don and Billy’s Skylights or even Sunny Sun-Shiney Skylights or even Sun-Tek Skylights, no. It’s Sun-Tek Industries. It’s an industry, see. You gotta be the butterfly with the spot on the wing that looks like the eye of the giant screech-owl. Scare off the predators. That’s the idea behind the guard at the gate, see, but guard dogs one and two are a narcoleptic Doberman puppy and an Irish Setter with ADD, Dyslexia, Tourette’s Syndrome and an inexplicable fear of pancakes. So that’d make Sugar -- see? -- Sugar the go-to dog.

         “Sugar... Sugar....”  Sal backpedals up the drive, the hose tucked under her armpit as she shouts, claps her hands to her thighs, jiggles the hips to make herself a more appetizing prey.

         I’m already en route to my morning nap, three beers into breakfast, two ticks shy of horizontal on my reclino-matic lawn-chair. “You got to get closer, Sal. Try the other ear.”

         “Sugar!”

         Say you were going to build a dog. Say you had a dog factory, end of the week you had a bunch of left-over doggy parts laying around, you bang together your own little home-made dog, home-style, amateur dog, not a professional dog with GPS and cruise control and a plush leather seat, but a dog that don’t got no papers -- not even to poop on: a Kmart collapsible no-deposit no-return polyester-furred port-a-dog just big enough to fit in the overhead compartment. That’d be the kind of dog I’m talking about when I talk about this dog, this dog Sugar. My sister named her – scooped her up off the street, she was a hobo dog – named her Sugar for the finger-licking sweetness of her disposition. Big mistake. Big mistake. Sweet and sour’s more like it. Smells like mold, sheds like a chunk of burnt toast but, it’s all of it, it’s a calculation, see?  That ani-mule, that grifter, that Tinker-Toy tower of animated table-scraps. Dog deserves an Academy Award if you ask me, that limp of hers, no not on one leg, no, that’d be too easy, but all over at the same time, like a shopping cart with a snagged wheel. Wobble-wobble-hiccup, wobble-wobble-hiccup. And oh poor baby she don’t bark, the bark got broken back there somehow, so she raspitt... raspitt... raspitt... coughs instead. That’s her happy cough. Chuff-chuff-chuff... that’s her excited cough. Hwope-hwope-hwope... that’s her mournful cough.

         Don’t you be fooled by that. Do not let her seduce you. Do not let her look you in the eye with that one good eye of hers, do not let her force you to –

         Love is a torment. Love is a torture. Take this girl I been seeing – Angie. Not dating, no, she’s married but, you know... seeing. Gets on the phone, see?  Cooking up this rendezvous.  Strange what a big deal you can make outta just a spoonful of air. I love you she says. I breath it right back at her, that same exhalation of nothingness. “I love you too.”  Goddam ridiculous, I know, but what can you say?  Every which way you turn you got somebody chipping, chipping away, wanting a piece out of you.

         And now this. So-called Sugar?  Hwope-hwope-hwope. Christ on a cracker. Second she comes bubbling up out of the compost I can see it, I can see it coming. Hwope-hwope. Sugar The Wonderdog I call her for her skill, tick-tick-tick of the tail, at orchestrating every damn event to her advantage. Even her ears sticking out every which way – mark my words – they’re some kind of finely-tuned piece of secret machinery: one ear up, one ear down, like tinfoil flags on a TV antenna teetering, in a blizzard of static, to freeze on that one clear channel home.

         “Sal. Sweet Jesus, Sal. Look at her. Mutt... hey, Mutt.”

         “Sugar...”

         “Sugar?  You might as well call me Elvis.”

         “If you had the soul of an Elvis I would call you Elvis.”

         “Smells like a chum bucket.”

         “Maybe that’s just the smell that God gave her. Exuberant. That would be the word for it.”

         Absolutely. A veritable dynamo of decay. Burbles like a busted keg. Exfoliates out across the landscape like a goddamn holy object, smoke on a rope the preacher swings, up and down the aisle, so as to asphyxiate the each of us equally.

         “Stupid dog,” I say. I grab the hose, rainbow that water up to within a step or two to where she stands. “Look. Lookie-here. I’m right here. Here look.”

         The dumb mutt, she can’t see where she’s going, but still manages to steer up into the spray, to stick out her tongue to touch the wetness, to home in on the sound of the my voice.

         Sal steps up with the brush. “Come on, girl.”

         “That dog’s gotta learn how to walk in a straight line,” I say.

         “Like you’re the one to teach her?” says Sal.

         As if pushed by an invisible wind, Sugar shoulders her way up flush against the cinderblock. Catches her balance. There. That’s better. Props herself up as she chugs along now, scratches her starboard side up and down as she goes, kind of circular motion like a block of sandpaper, like a blind whale back-scratching up against the barnacle-encrusted Queen Mary.

            “So I’m the one’s gotta baby-sit this damn – ”

         “Good Lord, no. No no. I love you to pieces but you know as well as I do the League of Nations not about to crown you Ambassador to Doglandia. All you gotta do is run her up to the plant and then pick her up in the morning. Boom-boom: done.”

         Up the drive, Sugar, she waddles, sack of skin all bulgy and bristly at the same time, like she been shake ‘n baked in a bag of iron filings, like she got a magnet slowly somersaulting its way up into her guts, pressing up under the surface, quivering all that fur up into collapsible little crescents and ellipticals, you know, like a bath towel twisted underfoot. She stumbles right into a tangle of hedge clippings.

         “Do I look like a zoo-keeper to you?”  I jettison the hose. It slithers down the steps, gurgles off into the weeds.

         “Now correct me if I’m wrong,” says Sal, “but don’t that sound a bit posh coming from somebody sleeping on a mattress in the garage?”

         “But who’s gonna want to sit in that car after – ”

         “Last time I looked, that car’s a company car, you are a company man, and that dog, that dog is a company dog.”

         “Company mascot you mean.”

         “Company mascot.”

         “But I’m the company mascot.”

         “I am so sorry. What was I thinking?  I beg your most magestical pardon. If you would be so kind as to deputize that valet of yours to go fetch up the company.... Unless a little puppy’s too much for you to handle. You know, what with you being, well, you being you and all.”

         “Puppy. You call that mutt a puppy?”

         “Eyes like a – ” 

         “One eye.”

         “But like a puppy. Got the heart of a puppy.”

         When I reach down to tug Sugar loose, she jams her face up into my fingers, stipples me with the tip of her nose, slathers me with the flat of her tongue, cold and then hot and then cold again. Some kind of ectoplasm come oozing up out of the depths, that’s what slobber is – marinate and baconaisse and saliva alfredo -- over and over as if, by the sheer eagerness of her affection, she will somehow, in the end, render me edible.

         “Jackson. Listen. Think about it. It’s the least you can do.”

         “The least?”

            “And think about the companionship.”

            “I prefer my friends don’t sit around licking their privates.”

            “Oh that’s rich. Mr. Congeniality. You and all them dozens of friends of yours.”

         I can feel the thump-thump of that melon head of Sugar’s up against my kneecap as she maneuvers round to lick the salt from my ankle.

         “A dog would be perfect for you. You got none of the complications you get with people.”

            “Complications?”

            “Involvements.”

            “Involvements.”

            “You know what I mean.”

            “Dogs don’t get thirsty if that’s what you mean.”

            “That’s not what I said.”

         “I didn’t say that you did.”  I got what you might call a drinking problem. Hardly seems fair, does it?  The one thing I’m really good at. You don’t hear people saying Einstein had a physics problem, do you? 

         “Sal. Why would you shuttle her back and forth like that when you could – ”

         Sal explains. See, on the one side you got Billy (the brother-in-law), second he gets a hamster with even so much as the sniffles – boom -- it’s off to the taxidermist. On the other side of the formaldehyde divide you got Sal, Mahatma Gandhi of the panty-hose set, leaping up with them eyebrow tweezers to splint the wing on a flailing mosquito.

         Now the only way to save Sugar from Billy is to maneuver Sugar into whatever location that Billy is not, meaning home by day, the factory by night.

         “Bad idea,” I say.

         “Says who?”

         “Six thousand pound oven and a spoonful of dog. What could possibly go wrong?”

         “No dog, no car,” says Sal. “That’s the deal.”

         “But – ”

         “Here.”  She hands me a box of Natura-Grain – shot of this Golden Labrador leaping up out of a wheat field and into the blue of the breeze.

         “Cereal?”

         “Organics.”

         “What?  Vegi-ham?  Rice Crispies?  What?”

         “Organs. It’s the organs got all the protein – like liver. Ever heard of liver?  That’s why they call it organics.”

         “Who the hell is they?”

         “Doctor’s orders.”  She gives the box a shake. Sounds like a gravel soufflé. Doctor’s not a doctor, not a vet, not even a taxidermist, no. Neighbor’s got a buddy knows a guy breeds birddogs, swears by it, shreds all this crap up into their regular food.

         Gotta be a word to capture the flavor of this whole enterprise – and by that I mean not Sugar alone, but every last one of us here strapped onto this whirligig of a planet. Rusted?  Busted?  Not broken irreparably – that would be too easy, no, but stuck. Stuck with a promise of perfection that’s always and forever just short of the means to fulfill it -- the bow without the string, the crippled wing, the rowboat stuck out there in the middle of the meadow. It’s like we all been permanently epoxied into a shape that bears no resemblance to the dashing photo on the front of the box, to the set of instructions – Japanese, English, Hottentot, Urdu – slid up under the lid with (like a Gideon’s Bible at a stripper’s retreat) such a touching naiveté. A kludge, that’s what we are, every damn one of us.

         Sal slips a muzzle down onto Sugar’s snout and fusses with the straps. “There you go, Baby. Mama’s got a treat for you.”  Up under the muzzle she maneuvers this little bullet of something sorta green, you know -- pond scum or alginate, some kind of rabbit aperitif, but Sugar, she’s too busy chewing on the leather strap. Got all the personality of a pot roast, that dog, but dammed if she don’t possess like what they say in them commercials for Le Cordon Bleau – an exquisite sense of taste.

                            *       *       *       *       *       *

         I lean over the car with the bait in hand. Behind me the red neon Sleepy Shack sign clicks on, fizzes up against the gray sky, starts to hum. I shake off the wrapper, strip the Whopper down to a shingle of beef, dangle it out over the floorboards. Sugar she’s sniffing – I’m up over her blind side and she knows, she can tell there’s something tasty out there, but spatula-ed into the back seat like that, all folded up onto herself like an omelet, she can’t seem to manage much more than bobble-de-bobble, forward and back, forward and back, like a rocking horse with nothing but the belly left to gallop on.

         “Okay dog. Here. Here girl. Stupid. Stupid. Here, stupid, here. No I know – you don’t speak English. Of course not, no, that’d be too easy.”

         Okay. So I gotta crawl back in to fetch her. Carpe Deum. By the time I get her squeegied up over the steering wheel I’m about ready to melt. Not from that blubbery embrace – the skin to skin, the beat of her heart against the beat of my own -- no, but from the smell. Distilled essence of dogginess.

            “No, no. Bad girl. Get that tongue... no. No, no – stop it, stop, stop. Stop breathing...”

         You always hear about the smell of the great outdoors, but the thing about the great outdoors is that it’s spread out all over the great outdoors – salt air through a stand of pines, cut grass and burnt ember, potpourri of cat-tails and topsoil and leaf mold in the morning mist. You cram all them spices down into one square foot, it’s like taking a bite out of a bouillon cube -- and that’s just your over-the-counter doggy broth. Haven’t even stirred in yet that particular stew of ingredients labeled Cachet de Sugar. Fish oil and slime mold and Pterodactyl breath. Trilobite dung and Mastodon cud and pulverized essence of crocodile glands, all sautéed up into a tasty little fur-covered croquet.

         I squeeze up out the door, samba-style, Sugar in my arms. Strange how lonely I been that even this qualifies as an embrace, cozy kind of violence, like boxers in a clench at the bell, all rubbery and huggable and sweet. Sugar slides down over my rib-cage, blooms out into a split, butters her way down the whole length of my leg.

         “Get up,” I hiss. “Get up, stupid...” I brush the hamburger up over her snout and then frisbee it off into the woods. “Go girl. Go!”

         She licks my shoelaces. Only part of her that moves is the tongue. “Sugar!”  I give her a little nudge in the butt.

         There now. That’s it. Sugar, she don’t start that tail of hers by wagging it. Damn starter is broken, so first thing you see is kind of a, more of a tremor than a wag.

         “Go, Sugar, go!  Go girl!”

         Little quiver in the hips set off by… God knows. Maybe there’s some invisible transference of energy going on, some cocktail waitress in Topeka orgasms and the seismic vibrations buzz down the Winnebago springs to lodge in the gas pipes beneath the truck stop parking lot till that last gasp and shimmy sends them shooting through the aquifer, down I-Four, South Orange Blossom Trail exit 42, up and down the undulating Booties Drive-In turf, a-rattling under the chain link, and out past the Suntek loading dock and onward through the woods, buzzing the bark, crackling up under the carpet of pine needles and running right up onto the backlot of Sleepy Shack and into the tender loins of Sugar, the Wonder Dog.

         “That’s it, girl!  You got it!” 

         There’s that little kick to get her started, stick of licorice tick-tick-tick of the tail, pendulum that sets the whole machine into motion.

                            *       *       *       *       *       *

         Back at the room I got just enough time to hit the shower and baptize myself with the condiments of love -- Lavoris and Arid and Hai-Karate in the commando aerosol pack.

         Damn that dog. How the hell should I know, Sal? is what I’ll say,  Scout’s honor. Damn dog just up and ran away.Thrill-seeker – that’s what she is. Shoots out there into the wild -- the slurp and the lick and the poke-poke-poke of the road kill, all that doggy crap. Doggie crap, people crap – it’s all the same. Sal’s got her movie mags and her -- whatever you call that chamomile sauce she butters herself with. Me?  I got a bottle, sure, but I also got a woman. Interlocking puzzle piece of a woman. All of that soft geometry on it’s way to meet me, bumper me, belly me up into a brand new universe where the wind sings, the water dances, the mosquito greets the newborn with a sugary kiss.

         You can just feel it, can’t you?  The whole world -- like it’s just vibrating underfoot?  And after all, ain’t that what got us all here in the first place?  People orgasming (is that the word?) all over the place, over the city, overseas, Jews and Arabs, Mennonite Babes in hand-knit bonnets and Argentinean dictators with their epaulettes quivering. Four billion people in the world and we got what, how many hundreds of millions strapped onto that roller coaster right now, right this very second, zooming up to achieve escape velocity -- that flash in the brain, that tsunami in the cerebral cortex – see?  Simple like a dog is simple, right?  Right?  That’s why marriage is such a crock. Gotta be tethered to something, sure, but the trick is to play the comet, blaze in there every now and again, sure, spin round the sun, sure, but never so close you lose your momentum. Gotta remember, see, a comet’s a ball of ice. What looks like a blaze – an obliteration’s what that is.

         The appointed hour passes. When I hear the knocking – light, as if the door were made of paper – I stash the bottle, whisper out over the carpet barefoot. That’s the way to woo a woman. You gotta glide up into range, you know, like on the radio in the dark when you turn the dial, sift your way up through the static to find the perfect tune. My girl, talking ‘bout my girl, ba-doopa-doopa – I crack the door open, greet the moon, tip out over the threshold to drink in the night.

         Raspitt-raspitt-raspitt.

         Jesus H. Hubert Humphrey Christ.

                            *       *       *       *       *       *

         Sal’s got a smoke in one hand, stubble of half-smokes in the pie-tin on her desk, bubble of smoke up under the ceiling tiles like a soufflé.

         I step into the office, fingers all fuzzed up as I rub and I rub, try to unspackle the fur from off of the belly of my shirt. Hail all hail the Wonder Dog. Got her nested down into that old tractor tire out front, that ginormous rubber turd of a decorative planter Sal never got around to actually plantifying. Trust me, my friends, and hearken unto my word: damn sight easier to bed down a woman than to bed down a dog.

         Sal, she’s trying to wedge one of those pogo-stick curtain rods up into the cinderblock frame of the window, but it keeps popping loose.

         “It’s a goddamn factory, Sal. Not The Little House On The Prairie.”

         She turns. The rod springs out of her hand, disappears into the clutter. “Oh. Some girl on the line for you. She won’t say her name.”

         “Not to you she won’t.”

         “If it’s who I think it is...”

         “Go kiss the damn dog, Sal.”

         Sal lingers as I make my way to the phone. Tilts into the doorframe with her purple clipboard up into that 10-2 position favored by safe drivers everywhere, pretending to read as she spot-checks the polish on her Lee Press-On Nails and reconnoiters down to the pedicure protruding from the bow of them Gucci pumps. Exchequer to the Throne, Duchess of the Provinces of Aquitaine and Double-Insulated Therma-formered Lexan Single-Unit Flange Couplings, officiating in absentia over even the dust motes in their little pas de deux through the empty air. “Don’t be tying up the lines now with personal calls,” she says. “That’s the company phone.”

         I pick up the receiver, give Sal the heave-ho.

         I can tell by the silence it’s Angie.

         “I’m sorry,” she says at last.

         “Don’t tell me why you didn’t come,” I say. “I know why you didn’t come. You’re thinking he needs you more than I do, right?”

         “You realize how fff-ed up that sounds?” she says.

         Fff-ed. That’s the way she says it. But that takes all the uck out of it I’d say, I’d always tell her. That’s the best part, the uck. “I know how it sounds,” I say, “but am I right?”

         “If it’s a contest as to who is the most pathetic...”

         “Then I’d win,” I say. “I’m the winner.”

         Now she’s laughing. “You are so pathetic.”

         “No. No, I am the most pathetic. Top dog. I guarantee, I promise, I swear that I am more fffed-up than he will ever be.”

         Now, the whole point of a jest is not to dislodge the truth from its sacred perch, but like a pole-vaulter who clears the bar, to brush it with the hem of the sleeve, ping it with a shoelace, pluck it so it quivers. That’s what you do with the truth. Zip-zop off a molecule or two as you snowflake over to land in the pit. The last thing you want is to smack up onto it, crotch-first.

         She starts to cry. Jesus Christ. Cry?

         “I can’t keep doing this,” she says.

         “Then leave him,” I say.

         “If I had something to go to...”

         “You telling me that I’m not something?”

         “You could be something.”

         “Could be. But right now, no, right?  Right now not enough of a something?”

         “That’s not what I mean.”

         “Okay then. What do you mean?”

         I tug on the curly black cord bobbing up out of the avalanche of beauty mags that cover the desk. Seeker-outer of the mysteries of the cosmos, that’d be Sal. Cosmotologist at heart.

         “I mean,” she says, “just where are you?  Where’re you at right now, anyway?”

         “At?”

         “You gotta have a direction. I need some kind of direction.”

         What am I, Magellan?  It’s all I can do to just navigate myself into the upright and locked position. I tug the cord – careful, so as not to jar this pile of booty Sal’s been scraping together. Mags all broken open to the rigid inserts where the secret itch resides, the scent – Tabu and Chanel and  Seduction – scratched up off of the page by the scarlet tip of her nail, stirred up over the incinerated air of a dozen ashtrays -- the mug and the vase and the empty bandaid tin, the screw-top lid to the peanut butter and the clam-shell lid to the diaphram (all melty and uterish and pink), even the foil from a Hershey bar molded now, squashed down to a bowl no deeper than the dent of a thumb.

         “My heart’s in the right place,” I say.

         “Your heart is a hand grenade.”

         Then everything happens at once. Sal’s voice from down the hall (Sugar!  Sugar!), out the front door shouting (Sugar!  Sugar!), then back in again. Sugar!  Sugar!

         “You don’t have a clue,” says Angie, “do you?”

         “I gotta go,” I say.

         “Where the hell that heart of yours – ”

         “Gotta go, I gotta go...”

         “Don’t you hang up on me.”

         “But it’s not a hang up if I tell you I’m hanging up. I’m hanging up. I gotta hang up.”

         “I – ”

         I hang up.

         The whole plant echoes with the sound of Sal. Cursing. Calling out in that dipsy-doodle voice, you know – you conjure children with?  Clatter of boxes. Clack of the heels. Then – somewhere back of the therma-former, paint-booth, breaker box – the Voice of God, Sal calling down the heavens: “You!  This is all your fault!”

         She found the leash. Me, that’s who the you is. I break for the door of the loading dock, open just enough of a sliver to where I can stop, drop, and roll up under the steel guillotine, onto the ramp, and into the glare of the headlights of Billy’s car. Now when you’re stuck between the anvil and the hammer, the last thing you want to do is advertise your position, so you squat, see, like you’re just now easing into a smoke break, you know, like normal. The normal routine being Billy plus Don the partner (D&B I call them) come tooling up the drive in Billy’s dead grandma’s Chevy Impala (the whole inheritance by the way, the only part she couldn’t drink) having just hooked a potential client, potential the operative word, potential being, in Billy’s Bible, the single most important ingredient for success. Yes sir, Billy. Potential, like the single most important ingredient for an inflatable life raft is air. Thank God we’re blessed with air. Warehouse overflowing with air. Air stacked up on top of air, right up to the ceiling. Say Billy I’d say, say didn’t you just post a guard dog out here to keep an eye on all that air?  Big mistake I’d say, Big -- 

         But not now, no, now that we all been sugarized. Now the very second D&B come busting up the ramp, buzzing with possibilities – spit and polish suits and Sunday cowboy boots, showered and shaved and stinking of Listerine and Old Spice, Square-dance tie tacks and brand-new attaché cases (two for one at Kmart) -- who meets them at the door but Sal, keeper of lost causes and Jesus Christ Junior to any random lump of fur. Sal, who demands they turn around and go back out and find Sugar. Sugar’s gone. Wandered off or somebody stole her.

         “Stole her?” says Billy as we march out into the parking lot.

         “Stole the guard dog?” says Don. “How do you steal a guard dog?

         Billy plants his feet, stares out at the dark horizon. “That thing got a, what?  Got a leash, or what?”

         “Look what I found,” says Sal, stepping up behind me. Thwack. I spin away, my left ear blazing, like I been clipped by a flame-thrower. “Look familiar?” She shakes it under my nose like it was me should be the one to wear it, then clamors up onto the big tire to reconnoiter the territory. Snap goes the heel of the shoe. She pitches backwards into Billy’s arms, but he’s so big it’s like nothing, like she was a doll you gotta just stand her back up again.

         “Too dark to see a damn thing,” says Don. “You gotta follow your nose.”

         It don’t take but a breath. The smell of fried chicken comes rolling in through the chain link fence that borders the drive-in, the far screen of which we can just glimpse from here.

         Sal runs – hobbles really -- back to fetch a pair of flats. Tip-toe, click, Tip-toe, click. Shish-ka-bobbed up onto the stiletto of the good heel, flap-flapping along for the ride, is a magazine ad, one of them inserts. Everygreen’s what it says, glint of green like a bed of clover. Evergreen. Evergreen. Whatever Evergreen’s peddling – the clean, the pristine, that notion of Sal’s to remodel the cosmos into a slab of perfume you slide through the leaves of a Vogue or a Glamour– the exact opposite of all that’d have to be Bootie’s.

         Boom-chicka, boom-chicka, boom-chicka, Sheba-Baby, Blackula, Shaft and Mandingo. Bootie’s Drive-In. Superfly and Cleopatra Jones. Two bucks a car but not everybody’s got a car, so the neighbors toss their lawn-chairs over the fence and squeeze in through the broken links to reassemble amoeba-like in the gaps between the cars. The maximum comfort crowd spill out into our parking lot, the crème de la crème who gather round the dumpster we share with Red’s Auto Body. Jam a broke sofa up against the chain link, tuck a bucket of chicken under your arm, kick back to enjoy the show. Tetanus shot and a good rope, you can rappel up to the luxury box on the dumpster roof, theater of the stars, study spectrographic emissions from Alpha Centari as filtered through an empty bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine. Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine, now that’s a wine in a hurry, wine on the cutting edge. You don’t age a Boone’s Farm wine. Hell, it takes nine minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth, who the hell’s got the time for that, and for what?  A grape?

         “Spread out,” says Billy.

         “Don’t make a scene,” says Don as we approach the fence. Billy stops to fetch a beach towel out the back seat of his car and then, stiff as a store mannequin, Sal and Don behind him, unbuttons his cardboardy suit coat to wriggle through the break in the fence.

         “I got your back,” says me, thinking, even as I say it, that’s what they say in the movies.

         Sal heads out along the perimeter, where the drunks and the rag-pickers gather. The three of us fan out among the rows, start working our way toward the screen. Already I’m calibrating just how fast I can run with these boots on. Take “white” and “square” and fold them up together, that’s what you get in D&B, whiteness cubed, brittle as a biscuit, couple of clacketty sugar cubes swallowed up into that pot of hot black Bootie’s Drive-In Movie Theater brew.

         How many billion places to hide out here?  Sugar... Sugar.... Off in the distance the pines they brush up against the stars, swing out in a solid wall round the curve of the fence-line, seems like a mile away but it’s a trick of the moon is what it is, simplifies it all down to a silhouette that screens out the rest of the world -- the fractured skull of the silo out back of the Rinker Plant, the busted steeple of the Blessed Cathedral of Truth, the corrugated tin roof of the abandoned lumberyard.

         There she is – Sal. I can just catch the glint of a flashlight bobbing up over the ridges, down, up, further and further away. A valley of shadows is what it is, open at one end to Sun-Tek and to Red’s, where the junkers rust and the tires pillar up over the fence, open at the other to the gravel track that zig-zags out through the pines and then behind the screen to the marquee that fronts the road, (... ooties) with the missing B, the plexi-red letters Cleo Jones + 2clapped up onto the lightbox like a ransom note, the tollbooth where – I can just picture it now -- the pimply kid sleeps with his cheeks puttied up onto the cash box, and the fat-as-a-roll-of-film tickets spiral out, like the peel of an apple, down the slope of his Levi’s.

         Sugar... Sugar... I stop to breathe. Off in the distance, tucked up under the projection booth at the heart of it all is this little island of light, cinderblock bunker where they shave the ice and peddle the treats and the steam of the oven powders out the slats in back to paint the air white. A doggy heaven of popcorn blossoms and griddle grease, cinnamon and pepper and the burnt cheese at the rim of the pizza. I follow the trail, follow my nose till the earth turns just enough to jostle the air again, to send it reaping out across the furrows now left, then right, to scatter the smells of all the contraband in all the cars -- the reefer, the beer, the sausage and the cornbread crimped in the foil and then crackled open, broken, and then again the wind again, crossways now, the glaze of the Krispy Kreme stuck to the sleeve, the jalapeño tacquito snapped at the spine, the short ribs and the peach pits and the chicken all swaddled in butcher-block. And then back again, like it was the earth itself breathing in and breathing out. The smell of shit, of earthworms and mushrooms, pine sap and turtle turds, cat piss and burnt rubber, and even something maybe just barely tangible there, couple three molecules of road-kill (vintage stuff, turn of the century), steamed up out of the cracked asphalt a mile away. Damn dog could be anywhere.

         Sal’s out beyond the snack bar, flit-flit-flit of red between the cars. Don’s up ahead, a half-dozen cars away. Stops at the foot of the sign. Row Six. Billy steps into the pool of light. Got the beach towel looped over his shoulders, scrolled up into kind of a cable, kind of a makeshift leash. He says something to Don. Don nods his head, launches back out into the darkness. Billy motions me over. Not a boss thing – this more like a family affair – but I obey. Billy, he grew up on a farm, see, all them creatures coming and going, gives him a kind of authority here.

         “This is between us, right?” he says.

         I nod my head. Whatever the this is, it’s a man thing, and I’m a man, right?

         He peels back the towel at one end to reveal a rope as thick as my wrist. “She won’t feel a thing,” he says. Wraps the towel back around the rope, gives it a gentle squeeze. “Won’t leave a mark.”

         I nod to show I understand, keep nodding, nodding, the way men do when they come to an understanding, like it’s something apart from me, this nod, public signal of a secret intent, buoy in a bay bobbing with the tide. Billy disappears back into the rows.

         It’s not a betrayal, is it?  How can it be a betrayal when there’s nothing that – she’s a creature like any other creature, right?  Not but a blip in the billion upon billion of blips that ever lived, that ever peppered the crust of the earth, that ever bubbled around and around the rotisserie sun.

         I strike out in the opposite direction, headlong in pursuit of a place where not a dog would ever dare to stray, some kind of Sugar-free zone.

         “Sugar...”  I mouth it without breathing, as if to breath would be to conjure her up. Maybe they won’t find her. Maybe no one’ll find her. Maybe Gina Lollobrigida will float up out the back seat of a convertible with her arms reaching out to reel me into the bosomy softness of her soul. That’s what the dark is for, right?  To dream?  And after all, that’s what, that’s where – from out of the darkness – we all of us, we came from, right? 

         I sweep around the back row, curb the light up off the windows where the couples curl just out of sight, pretzel down into the upholsterish folds of a Coupe Deville or a Buick Centura, bail out over the bucket seats and into the cavernous hold of a Grande Torino hatchback to buckle in the heat, couple in the dark, bake in the moonlight up under the slick-as-a-casket dome of the glass. Pussy-mobile, that’s what Billy calls it: the soft on the inside of these cars, the leather like butter that yields to the shape of the body, the seat that unbends to a bed, the white piping that traces the curves and the valleys like a trail for the finger to follow, like lace on a pastry. The fertile crescent is what Dad used to call this place, all of them girls, year after year, knocked up in all of them portable boudoirs, baby no bigger than the head of a pin just waiting to burst into bloom: the soon-to-be senators and astronauts and Miss Vidalia Onion Queens pop-gunned into existence halfway through a triple-feature bull-dozed out the back forty of somebody’s orange grove.

         I’m down on one knee, kind of a half-squat, half-shuffle as I paint the flanks of the cars with my little circle of light, the tricked-out buggies with the white-walls and the woven spokes, the wind-scoops and the fins and the hood-pieces all chromified up into trophies. Rams-head. Swordfish. The hammer of Thor and the beak of the hawk and the snap of the tiny bronze banner, stiff as a triscuit, like the flag on the face of the moon.

         I listen for a sound in the distance, out over the creak of the cars, the wind in the trees, the bluesy music buzzing out of every window. Sal maybe. Or Billy, that whistle of his. Is there such a thing as a good death?  Look at all of these cars here half again as old as I am, and all crusted with... what do you call it?  Them little black ampersands?  Love-bugs. That’s it. Sucked up into the backwash of a passing semi, tangoed out over the steamy blacktop, squashed in the moment of bliss.

         A voice at my ear, kinda low to the ground, like a road-grater. “You looking for somebody?”

         I start, drop the flashlight, look up at the back door of the Caddie, the open window, the black of a rectangle rimmed with silver. “I – ”

         “Don’t touch the car.”

         I pull my hand away, frog-walk back a step.

         “You little shit. You looking at my car?”

         “No, I’m just -- ”

         “You looking at my girl?”

         “Just looking for my dog is all. I gotta look -- ”

          “Look like you taking a shit. You taking a shit?”

         “I can’t...”

         “You can’t what?  Can’t take a shit?  Can’t get the shit out?”  The door-lock pops up. “Maybe I could beat the shit out of you?  How would that be?”  

         Somehow I’m back onto my feet, don’t even know how it happens, but I’m walking, clunky like a puppet, tripping out over the stubble. Crunch of gravel behind me. I break into a run. Dumb like a dog I run. Running – that’s a kind of falling, right?  Through the dark, yes, and even when, behind me, the foot-falls drop away, I run, simple like a dog is simple, to the center, to the island of light. Back of the snack-bar – I can just make it out – there’s a patch of tall grass that rises up into the empty just under the beam of the projector.

         “Sugar!”  I call out in earnest now. “Sugar!”  I close in on the beacon till it comes to a point, a... not a cone, no, too tame, but a – what do you call it?  Vortex. More like the mouth of a twister than a hunk of geometry, what with the swirl of the colors and the shadows in a scramble and the rhythmical din of the sprocketry. Take the tick of a clock and kick it up into a spin, that’s the sound of a reel of film trilling out into the hot air, kid with a card in the spokes of his bike, Jack of diamonds clipped onto the tines, pick of a banjo ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka.

         I look out along the beam to that single spot the cars they all take   aim at, the screen that booms up into the black like a slice of a slab of the moon itself, crackling with light. Sal’s closing in on the snack bar from the one side, D&B from the other, they all them converging. Fifty-foot high Cleopatra Jones flashes up against the sky, her coffee-colored cleavage big as a Macy’s Day parade float broken loose and bounding down the white suburban streets, crushing all resistance beneath her enormously delicious embrace.  Sugar… Sugar… Here, Sugar… Come here, girl… 

         Then I hear something. Back behind this big old four-door Buick, color of a dirty piano key, cookies-and-cream colored rolling raft of a love-mobile rocking from stem to stern, shaken by the earth into wakefulness, stirred within by the chafe-chafe-chafing of skin upon skin. You don’t dream about a car, no. A car’s the thing you climb into to dream about everything else.

         Raspitt... raspitt... raspitt...

         “Sugar... Sugar?”

         Everybody dies, right?  You get just so many snapshots before the reel runs dry, the spool it flutters – the son of a bitch – flutters out empty. The question: which one these, out of that whole damn avalanche of billions upon billions, do I decide to keep?  You do whatever the hell you want, but for me, I take a snapshot and hold it right here, right at the top of the coaster where the guardrails drop and the gravity evaporates and everybody onboard keen to get some one thing they can only get right here, right this second: Sal keen to get Sugar, D&B keen to get the hell out of there, Cleopatra Jones keen to shoot the double-dealing Honkie-Ass D.A., the Bootie cliental keen to cheer Cleopatra shoot the double-dealing Honkie-Ass D.A., the Boone’s Farm contingent keen to shoot slow-motion star-ward on a geyser of strawberry wine, and not but a shout away, Sal, as she threshes out through the crowd at the snack bar, Billy not but a handful of cars between us as he doubles back on the lookout for me, me, keen in the dark here to signal the choice I make here, where she is right now, Sugar the Wonder Dog, keeled up on her back, legs kicking in the air, quivering from nose to tail like a new-born pup dropped head-first into a bowl of warm milk, keen to be swallowed up in that delicious Drive-In dirt, a dog no more but more than a dog, buried in a bliss of chicken bones and slickery ribs and tick-tick-ticking tail counting out a music only she can hear. Damn that dog. Damn that dog. I don’t know what it means, what the hell it’s supposed to mean, that picture, half the people in it dead and gone now, Billy gone, Sugar gone, outside that circle of light me standing in the darkness but still looking, looking on, taking it all in, but that picture, I close my eyes – don’t ask me again because I’ll never tell you – but why is it that that picture is the picture I picture when I picture love?