When I go outside I run. I run from the cement past the places and then to where the places end and then to the woods. In the woods are the other dogs.
I am the fastest. Since Thomas left I am the fastest. I jump the farthest too. I don’t have to yell anymore. I can go past the buildings where the people complain and then to the woods where I can’t hear them and just run with these dogs. Hoooooooooooooooo! I feel good here, feel strong. Sometimes I am a machine, moving so fast, a machine with everything working perfectly, my claws grabbing at the earth like I’m the one making it turn. Damn, yeah.
Every day on the street I pass the same people. There are the men, two of them, selling burritos from the steel van. They are happy men; their music is loud and jangles like a bracelet. There are the women from the drugstore outside on their break, smoking and laughing, shoulders shaking. There is the man who sleeps on the ground with the hole in his pants where his ass shows raw and barnacled and brown-blue. One arm extended, reaching toward the door of the building. He sleeps so much.
Every night I walk from the neighborhood and head to the woods and meet the others. It’s shadowy out, the clouds low. I see the blues jumping inside the windows. I want all these people gone from the buildings and moved to the desert so we can fill the buildings with water. It’s an idea I have. The buildings would be good if filled with water, or under water. Something to clean them, anything. How long would it take to clean those buildings? Lord, no one knows any of this. So many of the sounds I hear I just can’t stand. These people.
The only ones I like are the kids. I come to the kids and lick the kids. I run to them and push my nose into their stomachs. I don’t want them to work. I want them to stay as they are and run with me, even though they’re slow, so so slow. I run around them and around again as they run forward. They’re slow but they are perfect things, almost perfect.
I pass the buildings. Inside, the women are putting strands of hair behind their ears, and their older children are standing before the mirror for hours, moving tentatively to their music. Their fathers are playing chess with their uncles who are staying with them for a month or so. They are happy that they are with each other, and I pass, my claws ticking on the sandpaper cement, past the man laying down with his arm reaching, and past the steel van with the music, and I see the light behind the rooftops.
I haven’t been on a rooftop but was once in a plane and wondered why no one had told me. That clouds were more ravishing from above.
Where the buildings clear I sometimes see the train slip through the sharp black trees, all the green windows and the people inside in white shirts. I watch from the woods, the dirt in my nails so soft. I just cannot tell you how much I love all this, this train, these woods, the dirt, the smell of dogs nearby waiting to run.
In the woods we have races and we jump. We run from the entrance to the woods, where the trail starts, through the black-dark interior and out to the meadow and across the meadow and into the next woods, over the creek and then along the creek until the highway.
Tonight is cool, almost cold. There are no stars or clouds. We’re all impotent but there is running. I jog down the trail and see the others. Six of them tonight — Edward, Franklin, Susan, Mary, Robert, and Victoria. When I see them I want to be in love with all of them at once. I want us all to be together; I feel so good to be near them. Some sort of marriage. We talk about it getting cooler. We talk about it being warm in these woods when we’re close together. I know all these dogs but a few.
Tonight I race Edward. Edward is a bull terrier and he is fast and strong but his eyes want to win too much; he scares us. We don’t know him well and he laughs too loud and only at his own jokes. He doesn’t listen; he waits.
The course is a simple one. We run from the entrance through the black-dark interior and out to the meadow and across the meadow and into the next woods, along the creek, then the over the gap over the drainpipe and then along the creek until the highway.
The jump over the drainpipe is the hard part. We run along the creek and then the riverbank above it rises so we’re ten, fifteen feet above the creek and then almost twenty. Then the bank is interrupted by a drainpipe, about four feet high, so the bank at eighteen feet has a twelve-foot gap and we have to run and jump to clear it. We have to feel strong to make it.
On the banks of the creek, near the drainpipe, on the dirt and in the weeds and on the branches of the rough gray trees are the squirrels. The squirrels have things to say; they talk before and after we jump. Sometimes while we’re jumping they talk.
“He is running funny.”
“She will not make it across.”
When we land they say things.
“He did not land as well as I wanted him to.”
“She made a bad landing. Because her landing was bad I am angry.”
When we do not make it across the gap, and instead fall into the sandy bank, the squirrels say other things, their eyes full of glee.
“It makes me laugh that she did not make it across the gap.”
“I am very happy that he fell and seems to be in pain.”
I don’t know why the squirrels watch us, or why they talk to us. They do not try to jump the gap. The running and jumping feels so good — even when we don’t win or fall into the gap it feels so good when we run and jump — and when we are done the squirrels are talking to us, to each other in their small jittery voices.
We look at the squirrels and we wonder why they are there. We want them to run and jump with us but they do not. They sit and talk about the things we do. Sometimes one of the dogs, annoyed past tolerance, catches a squirrel in his mouth and crushes him. But then the next night they are back, all the squirrels, more of them. Always more. Tonight I am to race Edward and I feel good. My eyes feel good, like I will see everything before I have to. I see colors like you hear jetplanes.
When we run on the side of the creek I feel strong and feel fast. There is room for both of us to run and I want to run along the creek, want to run alongside Edward and then jump. That’s all I can see, the jump, the distance below us, the momentum taking me over the gap. Goddamn sometimes I only want this feeling to stay and last.
Tonight I run and Edward runs, and I see him pushing hard, and his claws grabbing, and it seems like we’re both grabbing at the same thing, that we’re both grabbing for the same thing. But we keep grabbing and grabbing and there is enough for both of us to grab, and after us there will be others who grab from this dirt on the creek bed and it will always be here.
Edward is nudging me as I run. Edward is pushing me, bumping into me. All I want is to run but he is yelling and bumping me, trying to bite me. All I want is to run and then jump. I am telling him that if we both just run and jump without bumping or biting we will run faster and jump farther. We will be stronger and do more beautiful things. He bites me and bumps me and yells things at me as we run. When we come to the bend he tries to bump me into the tree. I skid and then find my footing and keep running. I catch up to him quickly and because I am faster I catch him and overtake him and we are on the straightaway and I gain my speed, I muster it from everywhere, I attract the energy of everything living around me, it conducts through the soil through my claws while I grab and grab and I gain all the speed and then I see the gap. Two more strides and I jump.
You should do this sometime. I am a rocket. My time over the gap is a life. I am a cloud, so slow, for an instant I am a slow-moving cloud whose movement is elegant, cavalier, like sleep.
Then it speeds up and the leaves and black dirt come to me and I land and skid, my claws filling with soil and sand. I clear the gap by two feet and turn to see Edward jumping, and Edward’s face looking across the gap, looking at my side of the gap, and his eyes still on the grass, exploding for it, and then he is falling, and only his front paws, claws, land above the bank. He yells something as he grabs, his eyes trying to pull the rest of him up, but he slides down the bank.