Two Dogs

HE’D BEEN ALONE A LOT. NOT LONESOME IN THE SAD sense of the word... he was used to it.

There was that woman, once. She stayed for a while but, eventually, she drifted away.

There were the two dogs, of course, so he wasn’t really alone. Just no people around regularly.

He wasn’t sure if he owned the dogs or they owned him. He didn’t think about it like that, anyway.

Ownership, laws, rules. Like the soldiers and media types in the boat who came by.

They were so sure that it was necessary, mandatory, even, that he leave. They tried to convince him to join the rest of the evacuation.

They could shout and roar and threaten but they’d never catch him.

They wore gloves and masks and worried when they got a bit of water on them.

And here he was, paddling, belly down, his inner tube and plastic container, to the grocery store.

The water stank and there were turds floating by, but he’d seen the kids of Bangkok swimming in the filthy canals when he was there on R&R from Nam.

They survived. In fact, the Thais were some of the strongest. Some of the toughest.

He paddled with his right hand to turn left. Up to the park where the tops of the swings were still visible and across the submerged boulevard to the mall.

All but the hardiest and most determined had given up shopping here. It wasn’t really shopping, you didn’t pay for anything, most of the valuable stuff was gone, looted. What were they going to do with the electronic appliances and games, anyway? There was no power.

He drifted in the door of the grocery store.

There were a few pet owners still making regular trips to the store but he doubted that many, if any, had tried the dog food. He found that it didn’t taste so bad.

The cans were safe and the dried stuff, though it was hard to get down from the top shelf without wetting it, was tolerable. Full of vitamins and raw protein. Not processed to taste good for humans, like everything else. The dry stuff made up for the lack of vegetables in his diet.

He arranged the bags of dry dog food on top of the cans in the container. He pushed it up the aisle in front of his inner tube.

The Saint Bernard breeder was struggling with a large bag, trying to squash it into the bow of her canoe.

He stopped to help the woman.

They exchanged nods without words. There had been nothing to talk about after the first few days.

The latest gossip and rumours had become meaningless. Especially when they realized that they were stuck with the bodies. Some neighbours didn’t get along with each other, but to see them like that. Talk became trivial, unnecessary.

He nodded goodbye to the Saint Bernard breeder, paddled up the aisle, out the door.

The sun was hot as he headed for home. The dogs’d be waiting.

It was kind of ironic, he mused, as he paddled along. There was Eric Clapton explaining his long fascination with Robert Johnson. That had been the DVD on in the living room when the water started rising.

The hurricane caused more damage than usual. The generator he’d hooked up conscientiously after the last hurricane, was doing fine, until the flood.

An earnest guy from England, an ex junkie, probably one of the best white blues players ever, sitting in a deserted building in Dallas, fifty or sixty years after Robert Johnson recorded there.

Max wagged his tail in time with the drumbeats. Brutus perked up his ears, howled along with the song when the guy accompanying Clapton launched into the electric slide solos.

Then the generator quit because of the rising water. Darkness enclosed them until he found some candles and lit them.

The dogs knew right away. They appeared more anxious every time he looked at them.

From the moonlight reconnoitre, the water first approaching his knees, then rising to his hips, things started looking very bad.

There were the sounds of shots and shouting that night, but nothing out of the ordinary for that neighbourhood.

The storm surge had lifted his van onto the roof of his stilted house. They found it a dry place, high enough to escape the water.

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