Dog Training

Her head lowers, neck rigid, pointed toward the dark hole in the earth. There she smells the foul breezes that blow from the corners beneath the world we walk. They’re alive in the air, sentient things that move and settle into the spaces where so few find pleasure. She hears the footsteps of animals in them. She feels their scents like playthings thick enough to take into the mouth. She closes her eyes as she inches forward, nose tunneling between the bright colors of fallen leaves. She strains toward the dark.

“That’s enough,” I tell her, and with a glance of reticence she pushes up and walks away.

I suppose she might believe me, or understand that I know better than she does, but she might just as easily be annoyed. She might think of this as a missed opportunity, dreaming of worn halls of hidden treasure, and maybe she’d be right to think so. How would I know? I’ve never been under the city. I stay firmly rooted in the world above, where birds wind across the sky and men mutter at the God who keeps them wingless on the ground.

We walk toward the garden. A few drops of rain fall here and there, and though barely enough to give the impression of wetness, she’s convinced of water on her coat and shakes thoroughly to be rid of it.

We come upon a stone wall on the garden’s edge, seemingly bowed by the ivy that nests atop it, and she climbs up with her front paws, putting her snout down into the flurry of green to inhale its scent. I can see from her expression that the leaves are mystical, redolent of fairy wings and the linens of dusty priests in ancient temples. I wonder if she sees them. Her eyes are bright, reflecting the light of unsetting suns.

A block and tackle of red globes draws her nose. They’re curious berries with a bitter perfume even I can detect, a pale line in the atmosphere that invites and cautions. She slides nearer, a bit of loose stone under her lip; closer, a layer of grey dust drifting around the corner of a whisker. Her mouth opens the slightest bit.

“That’s enough,” I tell her. “Those could be poisonous, we shouldn’t eat them.”

She looks at me over her shoulder with an entreaty. She explains all the potential marvels of the berries, knowing all the time that I won’t listen; they could show us visions or give us wings to chase the birds. They could show the way to holes in the earth that would take us down to hollows for hunting gophers and befriending little men who labor over anvils and bellows.

But I shake my head, no belief in my heart.

We walk on and she digs her nose into piles of dirt, stares into pits where pipes and equipment are buried, pulls me toward the rigid bones of old buildings. We pass a house with a boarded entrance, dying light burning behind its windows. She glances at me, back to the house, then back to me again. I know what she’s thinking, and she brings her nose down to the pavement, moves it along the sidewalk cracks to the steps running between half-dead grass. She follows them onto the hieroglyphic scars adorning the walkway as it snakes its way to the front door.

“That’s enough,” I say. “We can’t go in there, baby girl, that’s someone else’s house. Let’s go home.”

Her slender legs are long, casting shadows into the world we know by porch lamp-light and sunset. Her toes are rigid. She looks back at me, eyes wide as galaxies.

Think bigger! she says. Inside those walls is more than a house like ours, another series of rooms and halls with throw rugs and ugly curtains and old ladies who smoke too many cigarettes. There’s a torchlit dwelling of graves in there, a place of tunnels that stretch yawning into the ground beneath our paws. Come with me! We can explore on and into forever, together, cartographers of the endless diving dream; and what better friends than we?

But: “That’s enough,” I tell her once more. “We have our own house to go back to. We’ve already been out a long while and it’s getting late. It will be time for bed soon.”

She comes away in deference to the lead and looks up with a sighing eye. Have it your way, it says. Give up on those ghosts in the windows, the leaf-people in their Autumn dances on the lawn. You always have your way.

And so I do.

At home, we wade through a sulfurous haze that leads from the back door, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. A round pile of landlady on the couch slumbers like a centipede curled around her hookah, gouts of smoke rising into the air, circling her, wrapping her in a mystery to which my girl attaches the sharpness of her senses. Though we go into our rooms, on to the comforts of blankets and water bowls, the mystery dances on like the leaf-people in her mind, and mystery is poetry to a dog.

I sit down to play a game while she naps, and I note her glance. My onscreen persona falls from mountains to ice fields to ancient caves, his hands steadying him by tree roots, his feet splashing in clear water. And yet her half-open eye is insistent.

I pick up a novel and begin to read, flipping through the pages of a young man’s journey across his country, and her eye reminds me that I am not there, there is no ground under my feet, no brittle somnolence to the air as I walk through a small town on my way to a distant coast. I am further away from myself even than in sleep, making no reaction as I read, not even lifting my head to roll from side to side. I look down at my girl, her chin on her crossed paws, and she asks me what good are books when they can’t bottle the air or the fragrance of showers and sunshine.

I sit in my chair, staring from the window into the yard. The grass is dry and mostly dead. Green patches roll here and there like ships tossed by yellow seas. They are as unsettled as my heart, which longs for the world and the things that sail with it, stow-aways in a ship of death bound always for the end.

She comes to my side and sits, placing her head against my thigh. Her eyes are black-pupiled and deeper than all the nights of Arabia, ringed with yellow and green that reflect the eternal summer of her heart. I wish I could live in that mystery, see the fields her spring has blossomed, climb to the heights of every crag where a vista might point the way to grand adventure.

I pat her head. “Okay, love.” Her tail wags in anticipation as I clip the leash to her collar. “Let’s go for a walk.”

The back door exhales smoky breath in a laugh. You’ll be back, it says. I ate your hearths and libraries, your keepsake boxes. I ate and alphabetized all these pieces of your heart.

“Maybe.” My voice is a whisper. I’m watching Mitzi as her ears sprout like shoots from her head. One has a small kink that makes it stick up straight.

For now, there are ghosts to chase. There are holes in the earth.

We walk out into the open sky and she wags her tail. We both smell the cooking-fires in the foothills of warrior tribes. The autumn air is alive with their winter.

Perhaps they’ll come with us, she says. Help us chase the ghosts.

And perhaps they will at that.