The men at the station like to think they are the first in town to see the pictures in the magazines. One will turn the pages when the other two have said they are through. Their free hands are wrapped around the steaming coffee cups, as their heads float from one cluster of pictures to the other. I’m stuck with the cover girl. I look for the hidden rabbit’s head. This time a tattoo. It could be the run in her stocking. The inky smell of the aftershave ads leaks into the room. Business return cards collect on the floor by their feet. They’ll forget after a while that I am watching them. Forget to whoop and point. They’ll forget to turn the magazine my way, holding it like grade school teachers do when they read to the class. They’ll forget, and their eyes will skip and flutter over the pages, the beams crossing and focusing. At last their eyes will be the only movement.
The dogs who don’t guide, the pets, the ones too friendly, who can’t refrain from jumping up and licking your face, the surly ones broken when they were puppies. We all have our routes. The dogs shuffling through each stop read the streets and hedges and utility poles. These dogs know when something is new. The trash can, the parked car, breaks up the picture in their heads. River pilots and the river. Their noses scour out a new channel, revise the map they carry in their bones. They pull their owners along the cluttered streets. These dogs see through their memory.
I hate to surprise an unleashed dog while he’s intent on his rounds. I turn down an alley. A mutt is snapping at a pair of cabbage butterflies. His muzzle draws little circles in the air, tracking the flitting white wings. His eyes are crossed. I can hear his teeth snip. The butterflies are like a whirlwind, scraps of alley paper. Now they tumble around the dog’s body, and the dog begins to turn back on his tail, his wagging, until he dives into his own fur on his flanks, collapses and rolls, barks and paws at the insects hovering above his belly. Then, upside down, he sees me watching him. Instantly he is on his feet, pivoting on his nose. His eyes never leave mine. He is growling but backing up. His embarrassment is human, shuffling his feet, clearing his throat. He shrugs his shoulders, scratches his ear, then changes the subject, woofing right at me. I have the repellent out of its case. My arm is straight out, and I am aiming for the eyes. The dog circles, barking, trying to convince the backyards that he knew all along I was there. He takes a few steps closer, the skin on his face tight and his body rigid. It frightens me that I can read him so easily, how the gestures of people inform his every move. But still, I don’t know dogs. There is no way for me to enter into his thinking, foolish of me for even thinking, at this moment, that there is a way to explain everything, a way to connect. I think of the spritz of chemical, its sting. I think of the one cord of muscle in my forearm used only when I squeeze the trigger or beat an egg. And just then the dog’s eyebrows arch and his jaw relaxes and he starts to pant, a kind of laugh.
Now that the mural in the lobby of the office has been restored, it is much harder to see the dogs, the blind workers. It’s as if they bleached the images away. The phantom working dogs have disappeared into the background of sky and clouds now all blended into a hazy yellow soup. Perhaps the paints were cheap during the Depression, unstable out of the tube. Or maybe the restorers didn’t know when to quit stripping off age and went under into the rough sketch, the outlines, the patches of mixed paint. The workers seem less uniform but more tubercular. They find their own way. The dogs they hold on to now look hairless. I think it’s a shame, but that’s just because I knew the mural before. If I’m here long enough, I’ll have to get used to it the way it is. I’ll forget the old painting, the gray dust the marching kicked up in the picture and the dust itself layered on the painting like shellac.
I almost tell Mabel about the new painting, but I think better of it. Her booth was built in the fifties. It looks like a wrecked spaceship in the marble lobby. Blond wood, goose-necked metal lamps, streamlined steel cash register. The aluminum dashboard candy rack is enamel-plated with the names of extinct brands. I hear the physical plant people talk on break about her concession. What to do with Mabel is the problem. She sits behind the counter touching piles of different things, tightening stacks of bubble gum, riffling town maps. After a while she’ll reach down and touch her dog on the floor.
During the Depression drifters would scrawl messages on light poles indicating what houses to touch for lunch. There would be arrows on the sidewalks, a soaped Xon the brick by the mailbox. So I’ve heard. Now I just see the kids’ games boxed out in colored chalk or maybe a name scraped on the sidewalk with a quartz rock from a gravel drive. I never walk on them and they last.
It’s a sad town. The kids are always giving up their dogs. Their mothers give them Popsicles, and they sit quietly together on the porch gliders, pick at the unraveling strands of the wicker furniture.
“Hey, Mailman Lady,” one of them says. “My dog left.” What can you say?
I say, “I don’t know too much about dogs.”
The kid says almost at the same time, “He went to help a blind person.”
“Well, you’ve got to be happy about that, right?”
“I guess.”
It goes on this way, a cycle of mourning visiting most houses on my route. In the summer, the child, collapsed on the lawn, stares up at the sky. In the winter, he is chewing snow. The kids get new dogs soon, but it is a chronic ache like a stone in my shoes.
On the corner I take out the one key to open a relay box. Inside, the bundles of mail have been delivered to me for the last leg of my route. I try not to think about the messages I am delivering. I file the mail into my cart, stand in a forest of telephone poles, streetlights, fire alarms, police call boxes. The square is crawling with dogs.
The dogs find ways through the crowded streets. They don’t stop when children pet them. They ignore each other. They don’t see me. They don’t bark. They keep going.
Outside Peru
I was cutting the alfalfa with the H when two A-IOS skimmed over my head low enough for me to feel the heat from the exhaust.
The H is a tractor. It’s red and the first one McCormick streamlined so that the radiator hood looks like a melting ice cube, a charging locomotive, a bullet. The A-10 is an attack aircraft with stubby square wings, a forked tail, and two huge fan-jets stuck on the rear of the fuselage. That day, they were painted five shades of green, a northern European camouflage of pine and lichens. Over the years I’ve watched the patterns and the colors on the planes mutate — the iridescent splashes of tropic jungles to Near Eastern sand studded with yellow rock, a white tundra splotched with brown. The designs advertise the way trouble grazes around the globe. My cows are always spooked by the flybys. I saw them scatter off the rise in the clover field next to the one I was cutting, angling for the electric fence it took me that morning to string.
The jets are pretty quiet to begin with, and the H chugs a bit when I use the power takeoff. The breeze I was heading into stripped the sound away. The jets cracked over my head at the same time the air they pushed in front of them slammed against my back. And then the fans whined. The engines reared back like they were hawking spit. I had been a target. The planes are weapons platforms built to kill tanks. They are slow, haul a huge payload of ordnance, can hang over a battlefield like a kite. The pilots wobbled their wings. I could see the control surfaces, the rudders flex, the flaps and the leading edges extended on the blunt wings. They were on the threshold of stalling. Then they broke apart from each other, one going left, the other right, and banked around the cornfield in front of me, meeting up again at the grove of trees near the section road. Without climbing, they tucked in together, the wing of one notched into the waist of the other, nosed over the horizon heading back to Grissom. I let the clutch out again on the tractor, and the sickle mower, a long wing sweeping off to my right, bit into the alfalfa collapsing it into windrows. I nudged the throttle. The engine gulped and caught up with itself. The first cutting, rich, green, and leafy. I settled back to work. Soon, I felt like I was flying myself, sailing at treetop level.