Dog Days

THE MAN IN THE DOG SUIT whines outside the door.

“Again?” sighs my mother.

“Where’s my gun?” says my dad.

“We’ll take care of it this time,” my older brothers say.

They go outside. We hear the shouts and the scuffle, and whimpers as he crawls away up the street.

My brothers come back in. “That takes care of that,” they say, rubbing their hands together.

“Damn nutcase,” my dad growls.

But the next day he is back. His dog suit is shabby. The zipper’s gone; the front’s held together with safety pins. He looks like a mutt. His tongue is flat and pink like a slice of bologna. He pants at me.

“Mom,” I call, “he’s back.”

My mother sighs, then comes to the door and looks at him. He cocks his head at her. “Oh, look at him, he looks hungry,” my mother says. “He looks sad.”

I say, “He smells.”

“No collar,” says my mother. “He must be a stray.”

“Mother,” I say. “He’s a man in a dog suit.”

He sits up and begs.

My mother doesn’t look at me. She reaches out and strokes the man’s head. He blinks at her longingly. “Go get a plate,” she tells me. “See what you can dig out of the garbage.”

“Dad’s going to be mad,” I say.

“Just do it,” she says.

So I do it, because I have no excuses, there’s nothing left to do, no school, no nothing. No place to go. People don’t leave their houses. They sit and peer out the windows and wait. Outside it’s perfectly quiet, no crickets, no katydids.

I go back to the door and lay the plate on the stoop. My mother and I watch as he buries his face in the dirty scraps. He licks the plate clean and looks up at us.

“Good dog,” my mother says.

“He’s a man,” I say. “Some retard-weirdo.”

He leans against my mother’s leg.

My mother doesn’t even look at me. “Not a word to your father, Lisa,” she says, and she goes inside and slams the door.

I sit down on the stoop. The man sits next to me. He smells dirty and sweet, like garbage on a hot day. His eyes are big and brown. His face is lost in tangled hair. He scratches himself. I sit there and breathe his smell and wonder if he has fleas. Finally I reach out and touch his head. The fur is matted and stiff. I touch a ragged ear, then give it a yank. He doesn’t even blink. Of course. It’s not his real ear. I pat his head, and stroke it, and his eyes sort of melt and blur on me the way a dog’s eyes will when he’s happy.

Then I stop and give him a shove, then a kick, then I chase him away so my father won’t find him when he comes home from hunting.

It is so deathly quiet. I can hear him panting, his four-legged scamper scuttling on the sidewalk for a long time.

LAST FEBRUARY was when things started happening. The plant closed. That meant my dad was out of work and sulking around the house all day. He’d sit and drink in front of the TV, his face big and red and his eyes all tiny from the drinking. He’d sit all scrunched up in the chair, his big head right on his shoulders like he had no neck at all. He’d watch the morning news, the news at noon, the evening news. “Aren’t you going to look for another job?” my mother would ask. My dad would point to the TV screen and say, “What’s the use?”

Then March came. Some of the stores in town closed up, and the movie place, and two of the gas stations. No new stock coming in, they said. The government needs supplies, they said. Gasoline shortage. You understand.

April: My school closed...