Dog River

by Oliver Nash

Round the moonlight shinings, you hear and tell all kinds of stories. A rhythm to them: funny, sad, scary, tall, funny. Funny makes Enoch’s shine go down easiest. Cleanses the palate. And most funnies fall into a genre you’d call: Outsider Finds Out. 

Amos kicks the coals and howls through his rust-red beard. Puffs his chest out, grins wide. He’s just gotten to the best part. Lean forward. Show him your nasty interest. “Now, I dunno if the smog smokes em blind or the tap drowns em dumb, but I heard from pop, back fore the shakes set in, y’all remember, bout how a man by name of Hare came from up river—down by the beach, darn fool—knocking in the small hours with city-wide eyes and thigh bleeding. It was high summer, dog days, and pop hadn’t left his hutch without the shotgun in nigh-near a week.” 

“No shit,” you say. 

“Hush up. Pop takes one look at this man named after a goddamn spring supper and he just says, he says ‘Old boy I am truly sorry.’ The man winces, tilts his head, asks what does he mean? It’s just a dog bite. Just a dog bite. Psh! Just need to clean it out, says he, maybe have some water if you’d oblige. And pops asks: what’d you think they call this Dog River for?” 

Everybody laughs; no need to ask why he didn’t send the man to Enoch. Nobody’d besmirch the river like that, sending some fool who thought he could tramp down her lilies and spit chaw on her trails to ask a favor. Some people deserve their wallops, and anyways, you always laugh at Amos’ stories. 

“It’s gettin airish out,” Enoch says, as he always does round the time the moon crosses the meridian and the dogs catch its glare, lift their hairy snouts, howl and put Amos to shame and send shivers on the breeze to cut to a man’s bones. Time to leave the holler; only Enoch’s brave enough to sleep down slope. Take one last sip. There you go, that’ll set you right. You’re drunk enough that on the way home you hardly picture Hare’s leg sprouting full of sores, veins gone black with that poison spit, brain ate up inside out and the shambling owlish howl turning to a whine and a moan and then a body, dead, human-ish neath the leaves but you won’t check, just hike on by, hold your fishing pole a touch tighter and try not to smell the maggots. 

Sweet heat smell of summer could be swamp verbena or some fool outsider, acid-lemon reek of pollen or maybe stomach acid pressurized and then burst, blown like dandelions on the breeze. Back when you and Amos was naught but kits in big shirts you two used to pester momma constantly. Why can’t we go down by the beach? How’s the river dogs any different from daddy’s dog or Enoch’s dog or—and it was always hush up and when you’re older but kids learn by pressing luck and Amos always loved every critter in these woods so, naturally, you went down by the beach and collected dog teeth like moon-white doubloons and momma found them in your pillow and whooped you both, and Amos didn’t even complain cause he knew his momma would’ve done the same. Afterwards, he held your hand to keep you from crying. Afterwards, she told you then and there what the river dogs was. Spirits. Angels, made flesh; don’t let your eyes fool you. 

“You tell daddy what I’m bout to show you boys and we’ll all regret it, you hear?”

She took you behind the locked door in the cellar and introduced you to the river Herself. To the jar of silver jewelry in water. To the candles and coins and cups of shine. All her offerings. She kneeled you both down and introduced you to the momma of all that moves in the holler.

“And best you mind Her,” momma said, “Like you mind me. No sass and no questions, cause momma’s always right, by God.”

For an old dog don’t bite till she does, and the river provides, and the river takes away. With the banks low, she’s got watercress and silverweed on offer—puffballs and oyster plants if you’re lucky. Trout bear their bellies to the dusk and damn near beg for your cast, your bag already full up on sumac, ramps, and reindeer moss. When the storms come, you crack open the larder and keep your God-fearing distance cause Buck, God, poor Buck—floodwaters don’t give a damn bout who’s smart, only who’s there. From up on the Virginia creeper cliffs you saw a lump bobbing past and you still wonder if that was him. If he was looking up when you was looking down. If he saw the light in your window. Saw through to your eyes. Called out a silent screaming help me that you couldn’t and wouldn’t answer. Enoch’s girls say it could’ve been a log, probably was a log. That after a taking we all feel connections that weren’t there in the moment, cause we want to make sense of it even when there’s no sense to make. But you catch Enoch’s eye and you don’t need words; better it be the man than a log. Better we all remember takings like that. 

You settle down most days on the boulder. You know the one, lichen speckled, your name stained in fish blood under its eastward overhang, set into a bend in the river abreast a deep pool just past the rapids. Downtown Holler USA, mountains your skyscrapers and crickets like a crowd in your ear. Mark the morning hours by successive waves of creature noise. Owls and frogs and crickets and katydids, a whole city of empty bellies and greet-the-sun. Light your cookstove from the cabin’s coals, brew your sassafras tea. Feel the sharp of it. The colors going bright and a fire in your belly. The sass music of Dog River gurgling never gets old. You know the river lifts trout to the hook like momma set supper on the table, so you toss all the little’ns back like you always echoed daddy’s amens, even though you kneel for a different sort of God.

Lately, them airboats full of strange folk been passing by too often. Getting brave. Big cameras and dark sunglasses and that sweet heat smell, coming with a regularity. And the dogs, you see, nowhere near high summer, barely spring and the packs are a swarm upon the holler. You find their scat on hallowed ground. Tufts of fur in iron palings. Carcasses in the muck. 

A whole convoy of them boats come by in late spring and spoil the trout with beer can shrapnel. You decide to move up river, past the deep pools and rock coast to the shallow riffles, with the false sand beach trucked in a half-century back by a logging magnate long dead and laughed at now for what he failed to do. 

The beach is all fire ant hills and torpedo grass, red on green on yellow. Wade out to your navel. Give it your best two-stroke cast, twitch the line, let your lure be the insect even as cast after cast brings back squat. Green-blind afterimage when the sun cuts the clouds, flects from ripple to eye. Hours and hours. By the stars this morn it’s about the 10th, 11th of May, and you’re twenty eight years old and never, not since you was a chunk of a boy have you gone a whole day without one goddamn fish. And in May no less, with the sulfur flies coming off the water in brown second waves; you ain’t bout to lizard out, though. Stay planted on your stool as the wheat-gold current turns the blue of old leather and the sun starts to pack it in. Snatch a few bullfrogs for the spit. Peel them eyes and steel that gut when the moon rises and dogs howl and Enoch’s words come knocking: fishing at night’s for folk with rivers like broke-in horses. Whistle once and bow your head; in black night, river dons a shawl of moon and star. Hold steady cause you’re already here, already tempting God, and to turn yellow now could only piss off that old girl more, for the river’s rarest jewels are waking up; in the murk, false white starlight blinks alive on the backs of moon sturgeon. Hillbilly caviar, ripe for the reaping.

Prepare your heavy slip sinker. Add enough lead to drop hook and croaking frog to the bottom. Cast. Wait. Watch the slippery whopperjaws smell the blood, the smarter ones pass on by but a big girl takes the bait and so you hold on tight, there you go, fight her with all that muscle of yours as seconds turn to minutes and she twists a strobing light show in the water and far in the distance the sound of gunshots and hollers, way up in the hills, outsider screams and you should smarty lift a rag for home but when you’re this close? You ain’t fixing to cut no line. And you pull her seizing onto the beach. And she’s right there. All her bioluminescence. And you can’t rightly help it so you stamp her head in and slice her belly wide, pull handfuls of roe like Ball jars of blackberry jam to your lips as the starlight on her back flickers and dies out. Salt burst of each egg. Heaven. 

Your too-full belly. Your greed, you think, must be what deafens you to the muffled crunch of paws on sand. You don’t even catch sight of the hound till her jaws clamp down on the sturgeon’s fin, inches from your fingers, and you don’t think cause if you thought a caw in a henhouse you would’ve shot up, stepped back, beat on home. But you lash out. Punch at thief teeth. You don’t see nothing but eye and fang by moonlight but your fist lands true. One yellow eye, one red. Yelp, growl, launch and her bite on the wrist of your right hand so shake her off and make yourself big and scare the runt away and run yourself away, finally, too late. By the light of a lantern at home you confirm what syrup-heat at your fingernails had suggested.

Her bite broke skin. 

‘ For an old dog don’t bite till she does, and the river provides, and the river takes away.’

You, sheepish as a drunk at the pulpit, show up at Enoch’s stoop at first light. He opens the door in naught but britches, eyes all crust and ugly as homemade sin past the bedraggle of his beard. Hold your rag-wrapped hand out like a tithe. Frown your sorriest frown.

He clicks through teeth sharp, yellow.

“You up and done it now, boy. What in the sam hill was you thinking?” 

“I suppose I wasn’t,” you say, and clamp your jaw tight to stem the chattering that set in some time in the previous, sleepless night. Your grimace could almost be a smile.

“Don’t you devil me. You wrought this. I reckon you ain’t came here to jaw till that poison takes you. So get inside and spit it out.” 

“Well shit, Enoch, I mean—” 

“Don’t cuss me neither. Get on inside. Now.” 

Enoch lives in an old church so far back in the woods you oughta pipe the sunshine in. Pews long gone, he lives his life round the copper-bright still, pipes reaching to the steeple above. Explain what you did and didn’t do. Tell him about the sturgeon and hear his belly rumble even as he scowls you. Untie the rag. Show him the four holes in the wrist that just missed the vital pipes and stilts, godblessit. Wince at the black roots of puss and putrefaction that you’d prayed against but prayer, you tell him, you tell him you know it ain’t worth much. 

“You know what you’d need to do. Ain’t complicated,” Enoch says, sat up on his table by the window, surrounded by pole bean and tomato seedlings in scavenged coffee cups.

“Hair of the dog that bit me,” you say, “I’m deader than dirt, Enoch. I might as well be kicking sand at the gates. I’m set to be a haint in your hair if you can’t pull this damn dog out them britches, cause how many dogs you think live in these woods? A hundred? A thousand? I—” 

“I think you might be the luckiest fool alive, boy. One red, one yellow you say?”

You, squatting. You, embarrassed to take a seat. Enoch’s ancient cat intertwined with your bent legs. Enoch hops down. Nod to his question. Let him pull your chin to one side and the other, like he spects to find your eyes gone the color of blood and beer, respectively.

Enoch looks at you like a strange bug on the porch. Like a messiah come malformed. Like green storm sky. 

“You and Amos, boy. I really reckoned you grew out of all that mooncalf mess. But I don’t pretend to understand, no. Sometimes . . . ” He scoops a handful of sand from the seedlings, lets the grains fall slow through his fingers. “Sometimes the river weaves the unlikeliest things together. And there’s no untangling fate, boy, let me tell you.”

“Me and Amos? What are you implying?” 

“That everything born’s got to die. That debts are paid, and dogs bite.” 

“Enoch!” you bark, and slam your jittering fist onto the floor. “What are you saying?”

“You know Amos’ cabin, out on the scald?” 

You’re fuming all the way back home. That damn fool Amos. God knows how long his people’s blood been browned by Dog River earth and he goes and does a thing like this. You grab momma’s revolver that you never take from under the pillow cause, frankly, you’d always reckoned it rude to carry guns in Her woods. River, you think, please don’t be riled at me, look at Amos. He’s the one messing with the rightness of things.

Trek due north from home, by the noontime sun. Wince at the sudden break in the trees, old wood cut sharply to burned stumps buried in a sea of bluestem and broom sedge, oats and switchgrass, a yellow prairie by way of Amos. Raise your numbing arms up high and wade as if through water up the hill; feel the pinprick of fleas and ticks hitching rides; keep careful watch for the massasauga snakes that settled here in the wake of Amos’ grand plan to rear goats that resulted in naught but a scald prairie and a dust-foul pen round his house. Dogs made off with them goats fast as sin.

You stop at his stoop. His snore echoes through the door that don’t even come flush with the frame—no wonder bout them bug bites on his face. A lone velvet cowkiller crawls over the sun-parched wood, a red banded flightless wasp that ain’t never killed no cows but sure could put a man seizing in the dirt if it felt so inclined. You consider relocating it to the fresh fields of Amos’ balding head. 

Decide not to knock. Instead, take a lap around the cabin. Follow your nose. Smell the smell of Dog River dog spit now lodged into your skull and come to pause fore the cellar. Take a deep breath. Ready yourself. Succumb to morbid curiosity and raise right arm to cloudless sunlight, track the black root of poison snaking up vein towards armpit like Virginia creeper looking to sprout leaves in your lymph nodes. 

Open the door a crack. 

Inside, the dog that might end your life is sleeping peaceful and takes no notice of you. She’s missing an ear. She’s small. She’s all mange and alopecia, patchless, stippled red, hairless from snout to toenail. Hairless. 

The word is a hurricane in your head so you fume and ease the door closed and tense your shuttering fingers into fists. Hairless. Hair-trigger. Horrible. Hanged. Hell. You wake Amos with a kick in the gut and a glob of spat sass on his forehead. 

Amos thrashes up in his cot, shoves himself against the wall with bloodshot eyes behind red beard like a prophet. 

“Heck-fire! You sportin for an early grave? Waking a man like that. What in—”

“Hush!”

Loom over him. Take a whiff of sweet lemon and sweat on the air. Home smell. Normal. But feel also the sag of the gun stuffed in your pants, the wet metal of it. Promise. Absolution. Show him your death knell wound. Explain everything in the unflinching of your stare. 

Amos swallows hard. “Whose boy are you, huh? Did our daddies not build your momma’s house together? What, you gon kill me?” 

Just keep on staring. Let him squirm. Try not to hear the voice inside your head that says death means never seeing Amos again. 

“You know I was just puttin on with that whole thing with us, down by the Cahaba lilies, don’tcha? You told me not to say hide nor hair and I ain’t said nothing, I swear. Honest. The whole thing was just some fooling. Not like Enoch’s girls would ever . . . and where you gon find another one in the holler, eh? How often we get a new warm mouth? What does it matter if I knelt in them cold waters and—you’re still kin, you know that? Still family? No matter what. You and I, yeah? God, what you bring that gun for?” 

Stomp your boot. “This ain’t bout that.” 

“Bout what, huh? Cause you never seem to remember.” 

“Whatever that was it don’t heal my doggone hand, Amos.” 

His hand taps around on the cot like he’s gon find something to hit you with. He won’t. “You gon kill me? You go to Enoch already? Don’t kill me fore you even talk to that old wizard.” 

“Hair of the dog. You know well as I what he was gon tell me.” 

Amos has the nerve to cross his arms. “So what you wasting time threatening me for when the pup’s in the cellar? Go pluck your hair and then we can hash this out over some shine, yeah? No need. Why don’t you put that gun—”

Kick the cot; spook him. “Have you seen your own dog you no good blind shine drinking son of a—the dog’s got no hair, Amos. Not a single hair. So I don’t rightly know what to do. I’ve half a mind to shoot them eyes of yours into holes just to see if it might make me feel better. I think all I can do is butcher the dog and start eating till I swallow something that puts this swelling down.” 

“Sometimes the river weaves the unlikeliest things together. And there’s no untangling fate, boy, let me tell you.”

The color leaves his face. “Please—c’mon now—do you have to kill Susie?”

“Susie!?” 

He winces. Sniffles. “Okay. I know I can’t—just don’t let me hear it. Oh, I couldn’t bear it. Her pack left her, y’know. Flicked her like a fat tick to die.” 

“Get me the leash.” 

He grabs your hand. Squeezes. Grit lines of palm and finger. An interweaving. A feeling old as momma’s milk. 

Resist the urge to jerk away. He is your friend, at least. You can admit that much.

“Don’t make it painful, okay?” 

Inch down slow as you can into the cellar. It’s hard to keep your arms still, your teeth unchattering. Quell your first impulse to anger; stroke Susie’s head so that she wakes up tail wagging and takes the click of the collar round her neck. Lead her out into prairie, down the slopes, through to the holler. To your boulder by the river. She’s neither skittish nor curious. She trots with the same even-eyed peace as any creature out here born with Dog River blood. She sniffs your leg. She doesn’t remember or doesn’t grudge you the fight the night before. She’s really just a pup. 

Tie her to a tree; re-tie her when she whines cause she can’t get up on the rock with you. Your whole arm is turning green, now. Gangrene. Lymph nodes are shot and a jaundice is seeping into the rest of your body. On the far bank, white-blooming dogwoods stoop over the water like impatient children. She’s just a child. Taste the copper in your throat. Pull the gun out and press the barrel against her forehead; turn away, toss the gun in the brambles when she nuzzles it with blind trusting what the hell did she bite you for, then? If she was gon be like this now. 

Admit to yourself that you don’t know nothing. Admit that you wish for some company now, then admit you don’t have the strength to go find it. Call out. Enoch! Amos! Momma! Hear no sound escape your dry, dry throat. Dry, dry is the taste on the banks of death. Sand in the cheek. Once your new fingers ran red with mulberries that you ate ants and all. Once you was a child and once maybe you loved; now, taste the clarity of the old stag who can’t stand to shed his antlers. Wonder what lives on this day in this moment with a bit of momma’s long-crumbled corpse inside. Wonder if the river remembers the faces of those She takes. 

Find it hard to focus on anything but the midday warmth of the lichen and rock at your fingertips. Smell the river, teeming and moving fast. Swallow hard and dry and turn your head; be struck awe by the geometry of magnolia roots girdling the weight of forest bulk behind you, a terrace, a treaty with the river: this here’s mine, that there’s yours. Get up, finally, knowing that hours have passed in this daze and Susie needs a sip of river. You bend down and drink alongside her. An old cat. An elder, in this moment, you are, for wisdom is the proximity to death. You can’t rightly remember your name past the tingling at the core of your skull. You feel the voice of some God or lucid mind fragment whispering to you. Telling you what to do and what you have done. What you must do. What you keep putting off, scratching behind Susie’s ears, careful not to open any scabs.

She’s sun-dozed. She’s at peace. When you halo your fingers round her neck, it’s naught but a second’s time and a featherweight to crush the windpipe—a single yelp, a deflating hiss. Don’t cry. You can cry later. You don’t cry for the trout, do you? For the million sturgeon pups turned to salt brine in your belly. For the buzzards will not cry for you. There you go. It’ll be alright. But quickly now. Before we lose the light. Before our hands stiff still. 

Build a fire upon the rocks. We’re with you. We’re waiting. Take our knife. Open the arteries of her neck and drink and drink and it doesn’t work. We can feel it, sure as the river flows. Open Susie up and lay her organs out one by one. Butcher filets of flank and rib. Hock, shoulder, short rib, slab bacon, and chops. Roast them. Eat them one by one. Eat them even as we know. Fill our nausea-struck stomach up again and again. Purge. Binge. Pray. Our world for a hair. Our sight become a pinprick and no smells anymore. And finally we can not hold ourself up to take another pointless bite. And the river provides and the river takes away. And we are sorry to Susie. To Amos. Awfully sorry. And in the morning maybe Enoch will find us, but the maggots surely will, moon-white wriggling psychopomps in angel-dog’s wake. And we will rise and walk awhile, and then no more. Blood will sink to river. River will flow on. Heaven. Hairless. Home.