His buddies from the force gave him the dog when they came over to play poker and get drunk. A retired K9, Jose’s partner for ten years. “He’s a good old dog.” Jose scratched the dog behind the ear. “I love this dog.”
His buddies had been coming over to play poker once a week since John fell off the roof of his split entry, cleaning out the gutters in the fall, something he’d done every year for seven years, no problem. He still wasn’t sure what went wrong. His boot slipped on the top rung of the aluminum ladder, and down he went. He’d jammed his leg so bad white, shiny bone stuck out the skin. At first it hadn’t hurt, then it hurt like a motherfucker, almost as bad as when he’d been shot in Vineland his second day on the job. Pain radiated up from his leg. He’d crawled into the house to get his cell, grappling up the stairs, leaving behind a slime trail of blood.
The pain was intense, and he knew it would take time to recuperate, but he hadn’t expected it to knock him off the force. Six months after the accident he could barely walk. Rarely left his house. Never went down to the basement, with the big screen TV, built-in bar, pool table, and weightset anymore.
When Jose told him he was gifting him the dog, John looked at the purebred German Shepherd, shook his head.
“Nuh-uh. I don’t even like dogs.”
“Fuck you, man. Everyone likes dogs.”
“Not me.”
“Boolshit.”
And they kept right on playing poker.
They played for small money. John had nothing to add to the conversations anymore. No stories to tell, except stories everyone had heard a thousand times already. The time he walked into an apartment after a call to find a woman trapped under a fat man who’d had a heart attack while fucking her. The way she wheezed out “hheeellp.” The school shooting he helped quash.
The injury gave him way too much time to think about Gaby, who left him after seven years of what he thought was a perfectly decent marriage.
He didn’t like to think.
He watched a lot of TV, tried to read thrillers. Sometimes the plots got away from him.
His biceps and pecs and back, which he’d spent years developing, lifting every day, were going soft.
That first night, John kept looking at the dog, and the dog kept looking back at him. It sniffed the whole upstairs of the house, trying to see if the place was up to snuff, then settled down on the couch in a tawny ball. John wanted to yell at him to get the fuck off the couch, but he looked comfortable, and what the hell.
When the men left, drunk and sloppy, the dog stood, watching Jose leave. He started whining as soon as Jose was out the door. The whining lasted about fifteen minutes before he lowered his head onto the floor and looked sad. While John watched a cop show, the dog would look up now and then.
He closed the bedroom door that night, heard the dog’s nails clicking on the Pergo floor. He really didn’t like dogs. As a kid he’d begged his parents to let him get one, but they’d refused. He figured he’d passed some threshold— after a while dog ownership stopped making sense. He got sick of seeing people walking their dogs everywhere. Gaby had wanted a dog, too, but he’d put his foot down. She’d wanted a crossbred puppy, a Cockapoo or something. No thanks. He should have let her. If he had let her maybe she’d have stayed with him. Probably not. The truth was: there was no keeping Gaby.
In the morning the dog followed him into the kitchen, watched while he got out the bowl and food Jose left. He seemed more watchful than a normal dog. John wondered what was going on behind those gigantic brown eyes. He’d probably seen some shit. Me, too, buddy, he almost said.
After eating, the dog stood barking at the back sliding doors, looking out onto the overgrown backyard and the woods beyond that. When John pulled open the sliders, the dog took off, a brown and black rocket, slithering down the stairs toward the pines. Maybe it wouldn’t come back, he half-hoped. He ate his cereal, drank his coffee, scrolled around on his phone. The dog returned an hour later.
It was a matter of accommodation. He had to accommodate himself to the dog, and the dog had to accommodate itself to him.
He turned on the TV at noon, watched the news a while, switching between Fox and CNN. Things were going nuts in the world. The pandemic was still going on. Easy to forget the pandemic was happening when he hardly left his house— he got his food delivered— but on the news there were images of people wearing masks, waiting in lines to get tested. There were cellphone videos of antivaxxers going nuts in public places.
Around three o’clock the dog started barking, and John looked out the window to see a group of neighborhood kids cutting through his backyard, the way they always did. About five of them, between eight and twelve years old. They cut through every schoolday. It gave him something to look forward to. Sometimes they wrestled each other, sometimes they threw sticks at each other. He looked out and saw one, a young dark-haired kid about ten years old, looking up at the sliders, probably noticing the dog.
By the time Jose and them came back the next poker night, John and the dog had accommodated themselves to each other. The dog slept with him every night, curled up, this warm comfortable breathing shape. A kind of relief.
His buddies ragged on him about how much he liked the dog and how much the dog liked him. He’d greeted Jose warmly, then curled beside John’s chair. They told John he seemed happier, thinner even. He didn’t believe them, but he smiled. “Whatever,” he said.
Winter turned to spring, and sometimes he’d watch the kids return from school, mud on their boots. The buds of trees popped at the ends of branches. He noticed things he’d never noticed before. He still spent a lot of time in front of the TV, but he also spent time at the kitchen table, planning the rest of his life. If he couldn’t go back to the force, he had to figure out what to do. The idea of not being a cop scared the shit out of him. He slipped into little fantasies. Maybe he’d become an elementary school teacher. The idea was so preposterous he almost spit out his coffee, but what if… He pictured himself in front of a class of thirty third graders. In the fantasy, they listened to him.
He started searching out programs at local schools. The community college was less than a mile from his house. When he’d graduated high school, he thought college was not for him, that he was too dumb for it, but he wasn’t really dumb. There were dumber motherfuckers than him with graduate degrees. He dared to dream.
He started walking out onto the deck whenever he let the dog outside. There was a spate of days in the 80’s, so warm gnats congregated everywhere. He made his way down the stairs of the back deck. Still unable to put weight on his leg, he used crutches everywhere he went. Soon, if he worked on it, he’d be able to walk without them. He’d lurch everywhere. He ruffed the dog around the neck and threw an old tennis ball for it to fetch. The dog was old but still had energy. There was life in the old boy yet.
School must have let out early. He never let Chief out when the kids were cutting through his backyard. He wasn’t stupid. But as he sat at the kitchen table about eleven o’clock, the dog outside doing his business, he heard a commotion from the yard: yelling followed by screaming. A piercing scream. He’d heard screams like that before. Screams of pain mixed with horror. When he looked out, he saw them all gathered in a clump. At first he couldn’t tell what was happening. There was a lot of brown and black, dead leaves and mud, and the kids wore black and brown and the dog was black and brown, but after a couple seconds the scene focused in for him. Chief had his teeth clamped on a little boy’s arm. It was the little boy that was screaming.
John moved as quickly as he could, clomping his bad foot like a club, throwing open the sliders. In his years on the force, he’d learned to regulate adrenaline. His eyesight sharpened. His critical faculties heightened.
“Chief!” The dog ignored him, growling deep in his throat. One of the kids picked up a branch and whacked the dog’s head with it. “Ho!” he called, to the dog, to the boy with the branch, to all of them. He already had a sense that everything in his life had changed. Again. “Ho!”
When he was close enough, he could see the growling dog’s eyes and sharp brown teeth. It was an engine of pure menace. A malevolence. The muscles of the dog’s face were pulled back. There was blood. The kid with the branch caught the dog on the head with a solid whack while another one poked it in the stomach with a second branch, and the surprised dog released the boy’s arm. The dog rocketed off into the woods, the kids ran the other way, and John Navarro was left alone in his backyard.
After waiting a while he walked back into his house. His leg throbbed. Stupid to put so much weight on it. The adrenaline had made him careless. It had been stupid to accept the dog in the first place. Should have known better. Something like this was bound to happen. The house felt empty without Chief. He waited for his neighbors to knock on his door and give him hell. He was going to get sued, for sure. A better man would have gone over and made sure the kid was alright. He could see the boy’s arm, the meat of his muscles rending. Pretty sure he’d seen bone. That kid was going to be frightened of dogs the rest of his life. And where was he? Chief was out there in the pine barrens, roaming, maybe hunting. Maybe he was biting every kid in South Jersey. Wreaking havoc.
At about eight o’clock, when he was watching Fox News, he heard scraping at the back door. Relief settled inside him like something melting. The dog looked so sweet and harmless waiting to be let in it was hard to believe what he’d done.
He let the dog curl on the couch with him. Gave him extra treats. When they went to bed, he put his arm around the dog’s breathing body. The dog was better than a wife. More loyal, less questioning. But ultimately no less risky.
In the morning he made eggs and bacon, and he set down a plate for himself and a plate for the dog. Chief looked at him with deep gratitude and tucked in with a kind of pleasure people could never experience.
He dressed, put his holster on, the service revolver he hadn’t touched since the accident. Memories flooded him when he touched it. Sometimes nothing would happen. A day could pass without incident. More often something would pop off. Domestic disturbances, often. The world was more fucked up than people realized. He’d seen kids starved almost to the point of death. Women raped and murdered. It had all done a number on him. That was why Gaby left him.
He led the dog to the truck, his leg hurting worse than ever. The dog hopped up into the cab. They both had their training. Neither of them could really change all that much.
He drove out of town, deep into the pinelands. The trunks of the trees were all bare, any foliage they had fifty feet in the air. The ground padded with pine needles. It went on forever.
He pulled the truck down the narrow dirt road only a select few knew about and drove several miles, then took an even smaller dirt road off the first dirt road. He remembered the last time he’d driven out here, the kid shaking in the cruiser beside him. The kid was a degenerate. A wastoid. Tattoos ran up and down his arms and covered his neck, two wings feathering out around his adam’s apple. A teardrop below his eye. Tall and stringy. It was the middle of summer. Almost a hundred degrees. Heatwaves in the distance.
Now it was a beautiful spring day, and the dog stuck his head out the open window, tongue waving in the wind. He looked more like a pup than a killer dog.
John pulled into the clearing beside the dirt road he’d helped clear years ago. There was new growth, but the truck slotted right in. When he opened the passengers side door, he told the dog to run. Not outloud, in his head. Run, motherfucker. But the dog got out and walked slowly right beside him.
He’d pulled the degenerate out of the cruiser. When the dude’s knees buckled, he dragged him, feeling the handcuffs dig into the dude’s wrists. He’d been in his prime then, and it was no thing to drag the guy after him. Finally the fucker found his feet, and John pushed him ahead, into the dark hot pinelands. They both started sweating almost immediately. Navarro could smell piss. The fucker had pissed himself.
Run, he thought, but the dog didn’t go more than ten feet before sauntering back. The dog sniffed the depression in the ground, where John had buried the fucker. It had been five years ago, before Gaby left him. He didn’t question his decision. The degenerate had not deserved to live. If John had let him go to trial, he probably would have got off, got out, been a waste of space, done more damage to the world. Chief sniffed the ground, and he looked up at John just as John was extending his arm, bracing himself for the recoil of the service revolver.
Jamey Gallagher lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. His noir story “Savor Life” was published in the Head Shot Press collection Bang!, and his collection, American Animism, will be published in 2025.
Twitter: @Jamey_Gallagher
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