Butter turns his head toward me from his bed in the bike trailer and I can tell from the look in his eyes he knows I’m late. I can’t really do anything about the fact my chain fell off and it took an hour longer than it should have to get it back on. But it doesn’t matter. Since I found him behind the Jo-Ann’s Fabrics eating from a bolt of trashed blue and white cotton sear-sucker, Butter has proven to be exactly two things: angry and judgmental. But he’s my dog and sleeping bag partner, so I let him be who he is.
“Sorry man,” I offer.
He looks at me with what can only be called disappointment before turning away and falling asleep. The consistent jostle of potholes on Rosecrans lull him immediately and I pedal on toward the overpass a few miles east at the intersection on Pacific Coast Highway where Stephano waits for me to take the next shift at Cart City. At least I know he’ll be more understanding than Butter, who’s huge shepherd-mastiff head lolls over the back of the trailer, bouncing in rhythm to the pock-marked street.
Sliding past the Starbucks, I brush back my mat of sweaty gray thatch hair to watch the people sitting outside drinking coffee and try to figure out where I’ll get the money to take Butter to the vet. He’s got to be at least ten years old, which for such a big dog—118 pounds according to the Pet Smart scale—is pretty ancient. It’s not his hips, though. That’s generally what takes down older big dogs. But his are fine, not that that stops him from expecting me to lift him in and out of the trailer whenever we go somewhere. I give in because the look he gives me when I don’t reminds me of my ex.
The problem is Butter almost never gets up. I’ve had him more than a year and he’s spent, conservative estimate, ninety percent of that time lying down on the ground next to my Huffy Beach Cruiser or in the trailer behind it. For a while, I thought he might have internal injuries or a severe case of whatever the dog equivalent of PTSD is, but then I rode by Dog Beach one time and he ripped a hole in the mesh side of the trailer to charge after this guy walking two poodles and a feisty Lhasa Apso. I barely grabbed him by the collar before he could eat the little one, but the whole thing turned out alright. I even scored weed from the guy. There’ve been a few more chases, but other than that Butter almost never stands except to pee.
I realize I’m about to reach the overpass and my thoughts clatter away like my chain did earlier. Stephano is pacing just outside of Cart City and it’s only now I remember he needs to get over to the mobile free clinic down in Ocean Beach today. I feel horrible. He’s had nasty lung rattle for over a month and this is his first chance to get better medical advice than “try sleeping inside for a while.” I see him see me and then look at his watch and then back at me, his lips curled into an almost unrecognizable expression.
“C’mon Terry, seriously?” he gets out before a coughing fit honks its way up his slim frame. By the time he clamps it down there’s pink foam on his greasy palms and I feel even more terrible.
“Aw, Steph, I’m sorry. Had some issues with the bike and then—”
“—only got an hour before they leave and it takes almost that long to walk it,” he cuts in, his green eyes swinging frantically back and forth between me and the traffic on Rosecrans.
“I know, I know man, I just…” I don’t have any words to finish the thought and it dies on my tongue. I slide off my bike, drop the kickstand, and for at least a minute I stare at the ground while Stephano paces. My joints groan with 47 years of use and I bend down the six and a half feet to touch my toes. As the blood rushes into my ears, it comes to me.
“Hey, take my bike. With the trailer off, you can get over there in twenty minutes, easy.”
Stephano stops moving, which, after spending almost six months with him at Cart City, I know means he’s trying to see if he agrees with me. Steph is one of those homeless guys by choice. He’s got money and family who’d take him in if he asked. But he always has to feel like it was his idea, and so far he hasn’t convinced himself he wants out of sleeping by the river with the rest of us. Taking my bike becomes his plan much more easily.
“Yeah, you know, what if I leave B here and take your bike? I could still make it.”
“Great idea!” I don’t even try to hide my sarcasm because he won’t hear it anyway. “Lemme unhitch it for you.”
I kneel to unclip the safety strap connected to the bike’s frame and find myself eye-to-eye with Butter, who is awake and growling lightly. It seems harmless enough until I see the fur on both sides of his collar jutting out around it and I get a bad feeling. But then Steph starts coughing again and I reach for the strap’s clasp. In the span of a blink Butter lunges and bites the back of my hand hard.
“Dude!” I draw back my hand with a full-body shudder that puts me on my feet and five feet away from the dog. For a moment, all I can be is stunned, but then paralysis gives way to anger and I walk back toward Butter, raising my open hand to throw down a slap. But Butter drops his head and it freezes me, my hand still cocked back. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him look apologetic.
Then I notice Steph cowering ten feet away, his eyes dinner-plate-wide in terror. Everyone knows he can’t be around violence since he took a beating from the police awhile back.
“Stop it,” he mutters, unwilling to raise his voice and provoke me. I drop my fist and take a deep breath, trying to evaporate the anger. In a minute, I’m under control, the bite on my hand throbbing with my heartbeat. I feel a little blood coursing down my index finger before dropping off onto the ground.
“I, I, I don’t know…”
“Let me take him,” Steph says, fear and desperation mingling in his voice as he walks closer to the bike. “I gotta go. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him.”
He waits until I nod and then climbs in the saddle and peddles away. As he goes, I stare at Butter and he stares right back, and I can’t help feeling like we’ve just broken up.
*
The next couple hours are so quiet I have nothing but time to relive what happened while the ache in my hand settles into manageable pain. Usually there are people in and out of the small parking lot we use all day, dropping off and picking up shopping carts that hold their lives. But today there’ve only been two drops and one get. If the pace doesn’t pick up, I won’t feel like I’ve earned the ten dollars I get from the money all of us put into to make sure someone’s always watching our stuff while we panhandle or work day-labor. I make most of what I need with recycling and odd painting jobs. Working at Cart City is just something I do to feel like I’m taking care of someone other than me. My ex said that need’s what forced her to leave me.
To hold off the boredom, I straighten the carts into easily accessible rows. Steph’s terrible at this. He’s always into some book or another and genuinely bothered when people drop off. He takes out his frustration by jamming carts into each other at haphazard angles that leave no clear paths to anything.
Normally, it takes me an hour to organize the carts by the number we’ve assigned them and then get them into an evenly-spaced grid pattern like the circuit boards I used to design.
But Steph’s shift must have been slow as mine because it takes fifteen minutes today. It’s so quick I have time to recount how many carts are in the lot—37—and make a mental tally of how many came from which stores—21 from Target, 11 Ralphs, three Vons, one Stump’s Market, and one from the Wal-Mart about five miles away. I decide to tell people to lay off the Target for a while so they don’t call the cops.
It’s about five at this point and I’ve got about a half hour or so before I know people will start coming back for their things in any considerable numbers. Nothing else to do, I try to come up with reasons for why Butter snagged me but still can’t. I realize I’m trying to make a dog have reasons beyond the three or four basic ones that make dogs do anything, but Butter just seems more emotionally advanced than most.
Or maybe I want him to be more than lazy and moody when that’s all he’s capable of being. I’m about to give up and start reading the Western book Steph left behind when I see him pedaling toward me faster than someone recently coughing up blood should be. I barely have time to stand before he gets to me and even less to register the way the dog trailer is skipping around behind the bike.
“Terry Terry Terry” he says as he brakes to a stop and drops the bike at my feet. “I tried but he bit the guy and the officer put the rope on his neck with the stick and the cage in the truck was locked and I didn’t tell them who you are but I did say I’d tell you they took him and when I did they said they wouldn’t follow me and I don’t think they did but I rode as fast as I could and—”
Steph’s words merge into hacking fit that takes a long time to stifle. While he honks like a syphilitic goose I look into the trailer. There’s blood on Butter’s pillow.
“Did they hurt him?” I say, knowing it’s a little too frantic.
“No-no-no,” he manages between wretches. “That’s…from your…hand.”
“Oh, well…I guess that’s…what happened?”
After another minute, Stephano settles enough to tell me that while he was in line at the clinic, he started talking to a guy behind him. He calls him skeevy, but, for Steph’s description, he’d sounded like a dozen other dopers who, for the most part, coexist with us out here. He had an infection in one of his tracks he kept picking at while they talked and eventually, he broke it open and started leaking pretty bad. Involuntarily, I scratch the remains of my own use.
“I was about to go tell someone the guy needed help when Butter comes charging out of nowhere and locks himself onto the guys arm and, like, starts jerking his head back and forth while that poor dude is just screaming and bleeding and people are yelling.” Steph pauses and looks me in the eyes. “I swear, I tried to grab him Terry, but I just couldn’t.”
“‘s not your fault Steph. Been thinking lately something’s wrong with him, but he’s never bit anyone while I’ve had him. I can’t figure it out.”
Stephano’s shoulders slump visibly and then he starts pacing, finishing the story in one long, worked up string.
“So, me and this lady finally get Butter pried off the doper’s arm and soon as we do he does the same shame thing’s when he bit you and I try to get on the bike and go but the lady’s already called 911 and some other guys say they know my squat and they’ll tell the cops if I take off so I don’t because I can’t really deal with that and then Animal Control shows up and they’re asking if I’m his owner and whether or not he’s had shots and if this is the first time he’s bit someone and, you know, I can’t lie and so they lock him up and drive off and I rode back and that’s all I know.”
At the end of his ramble Steph and I realize at the same time he hasn’t taken a breath the whole way and he breaks down in another fit, gasping for air. While he spits blood, I’m left thinking about what to do, which is hard because I’m mostly just confused. Did Butter bite his previous owner? Is that why he ended up eating out of dumpsters until I found him? For a second I picture him in a suburban backyard, his jaws clamped on some four-year-old girl’s face. Then the picture shifts to a fat, middle-aged man wailing away on him with a stick until Butter bites him and runs away. But I’ve never seen any marks on him so that picture fades too.
The screen in my head stays blank for a minute or two and then fires back up with a crazy made-for-TV Butter as a drug sniffing police dog. The idea holds its shape long enough for me to remember I had heroin in my hands for the first time in a year this morning and it suddenly seems possible that the guy he bit in line had used today. It almost seems to make sense until it doesn’t and I run through possible medical problems that could be making him like this: twisted intestine, worms, rotting teeth. They all seem like possible explanations except I’ve seen less evidence for them than I have for Butter having been a police officer. I’m starting to obsess when Steph’s voice snaps me back.
“—give you the money to get him out. I mean, I was supposed to look out for him an all.”
“It’s alright man, seriously,” I say, laying my hand on his arm to stop his twitching for a second. He sighs and looks directly at me.
“So, what are you gonna do?”
All of a sudden, I’m sadder than I’ve been in a long time.
“I’m gonna leave him there.” The words dribble off my lower lip and settle like lead on my chest as soon as they’re out of my mouth.
“But, they’ll put him down.” Steph sounds desperate and I want to comfort him but can’t.
“It’s probably the best thing for him.”
All I can think to do is unclip the trailer and ride away. Over my shoulder I see Steph pacing between the neat rows of carts.
#
author bio:
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and literary nonfiction whose work has appeared in places like Pleiades, Angel City Review, The Other Journal, and Relief among others. He is also the co-editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age and Creative Writing Innovations, both from Bloomsbury Academic. Formerly an award-winning journalist, Clark now writes and teaches writing in the Los Angeles area. Follow him on Twitter at @MDeanClark and check out his blog writingaftersunsets.wordpress.com.