Okay look at the story.

I have this story and I got responses from Brad and Patrick with some really good suggestions. But I haven't actually changed it at all. I've had other shit to do! It's at the end of this post.

Teresa and I moved last week. We're way closer to the train and to her school now, and the place is nice. No more Chinese or grocery store in walking distance, though. :( Actually wait there's a long line of things up on Evans a couple blocks away, I just don't know what because I'm a shut-in. We've been unpacking and cleaning shit and I have been going back and cleaning the old place the past week. I've also been writing song lyrics and sending them to Brad. But that's another post.

Okay here's the story. I hope you like it. ???

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Stray

We noticed the scratching during dinner. David heard it first, and looked around, and lowered his fork; and Ben and I stood up and went to the back door. There was a dog there, brown and black with a stubby tail, and he was scratching insistently at the back door, and whining sometimes. Ben stopped, because he hates strangers and dogs, and this was a strange dog. I walked to the screen door and told the dog to go away. He had yellow eyes and he stared through the screen at Ben, and me, and whined.

“Get fucking lost.”

“Where did he come from?”

“Got to be a stray,” I said. “Pretty fucking skinny.”

The dog kept scratching and David appeared in the doorway, and I knew that he’d be getting fed and probably put up in the garage, or maybe at the foot of David’s bed. The garage is too cold in January, David would say.

“Fuck off,” I told the dog.

David crossed the kitchen and looked down at the dog. Ben still hovered near the doorway to the living room, and the dog wagged its short tail and scratched at the screen door.

“Well, hello,” David said to the dog. He crouched and peered through the screen. It was evening, and dark. Behind the dog the trees shifted in the wind.

“Whatcha say, buddy?” David said in a playful voice. “Huh? You hungry?” Ben quietly backed into the living room. David, still holding his fork, went to the fridge, muttering to the dog.

“You hungry, little guy? Look at your sad little face! I bet you’re really hungry, aren’t you?” David searched through the fridge and came out with a box of leftover fried chicken and potatoes.

“Here we go, my man. Here we go, buddy boy. You stay put just a second, you’ll be eating like a king.” He crossed to the cupboard and took out a bowl, and he carried it to the sink, still talking. The dog scratched and whined.

“Can’t eat something this salty without some water, amigo. You don’t have a collar, huh? You a stray? You probably don’t get—”

“David,” I said. He stopped talking. “Don’t feed that fucking thing. It’s going to come back every day and it’s fucking annoying, and probably diseased.”

David stood in the middle of the kitchen, leftovers in one hand and water in the other. His fork poked out of his shirt pocket. He looked at me.

For the past month none of us had spoken like that. Not to each other and not, to my knowledge, at all. A month ago we moved into the lake house south of the city, and since then we had been agreeable, and now I could see in David’s face the things we had thought, and hadn’t said.


David had suggested the lake house to me in a phone call a week after John and Dorothy’s funerals. I was sitting at home in Denver, and David was still at his parents’ in Littleton, near the city, where he was staying for the funerals. He called in the morning, while I was reading the newspaper.

“Hello?”

“Andy, I’m, uh, don’t think I’m going back to work. Not yet.” He was stuttering.

“David? What? Are you still in Colorado?”

“Yeah, and I missed the flight to L.A. today. It was this morning, I missed it. It’s leaving now.”

“Ah, shit. When can you leave?”

“No, well, no, I don’t know when.” His voice was faint. “I really don’t know when I will go back.”

“Did you call the sisters?” David worked at an advertising firm run by two tiny and hilarious sisters whose names were Penelope and Celeste.

“No, man. I’m just—” He took a long breath. “I can’t go yet. I might not go back.” Another pause. “Fucker,” David said, and he was crying.

“What do you think you’ll do?” I stared at my groceries, still in bags on the kitchen counter. I’d gone early that morning.

David exhaled. “I want to stay here. I rented a house down at Cold Springs, on the lake. I’m going down tomorrow afternoon.”

“Cold Springs?”

“It’s the place John and Dorothy first met.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“Give me the number there.”

He did and we hung up, and I went to the kitchen and poured myself another drink.
Two days later David and I stepped up the stairs onto the faded red porch of the house where John and Dorothy met on vacation when we were sixteen.


There’s a picture in Ben’s parents’ house that I have memorized. It’s the four of us—Ben, John, David, me—dressed and ready for our first day of kindergarten. Ben, even then so small, stares earnestly at the camera. David fiddles with his backpack; I reach over and try to make him pay attention to the picture being taken. John, hands in his pockets, looks to the side. His face is upturned, beaming. According to his mother, when the adults said “Smile!” that was John’s response. He is looking at her, at his mother, smiling in his fierce, honest way. We used to laugh at that reaction, his intense happiness.

When people ask me what John was like, I tell them about that twenty-year-old picture.


Starting the next summer, when we were seven, our parents made a tradition of the summer trip to the lake houses in Cold Springs. The faded red house, the faded yellow one to its right, and the two white houses across the street—these were our castles, our playgrounds, our dream lands. A week there every summer seemed to last an hour; we were giddy. Even as we reached adolescence, our weeks at Cold Springs were always brighter, livelier, fuller, more real.

Then a few weeks before we were going to Cold Springs, when we were all 16, Ben’s cousins came to live with his family. His aunt and uncle had some kind of problems. Those cousins—Dorothy, and her very frightening sister Susan—came to Cold Springs with the Bransons, and slept in Ben’s room. Ben slept with me.

Dorothy hated us, and she was beautiful enough to get away with it. She was probably beautiful enough to kill one or two of us, and I guess she considered it. We gave her reason to; we were as horrible as 16-year-olds get. I think she despised life on both Monday and Tuesday of that week.

In the mornings, she read, sitting on the shore of the lake. When our staring and sad attempts at conversation bothered her enough, she locked herself in Ben’s parents’ room, and talked to her friends on the phone. She ate dinner alone in her room, and all evening sat in the corner frowning. She went to bed early just to avoid us.

By Wednesday I think that Dorothy decided she was tired of being bored, and wanted something to do. She never admitted this, but I believe it. I once asked her, one night, when John wasn’t around, and she smiled and said, things certainly got more interesting after that day, didn’t they. Then she walked out of the kitchen and I watched her walk until the door closed behind her.

That Wednesday morning Ben, David, John and I were going swimming. We walked past the chair where Dorothy would sit and read her book. After twenty minutes she appeared and watched us in the water. She said her cousin’s name, and Ben went to her, then came back. “John,” he said, “your parents want to see you at the house.” So John went to Dorothy, and the two of them went to the faded red house, and we did not see them until dinner, when John pulled out a chair for her and she smiled a staggering smile at him.

By Friday John had returned to us, and Dorothy joined us. I think Ben hated the idea of it, for just a while, but soon enough we could hardly remember how it was before. In the following years there would be additions and subtractions—girlfriends, wives for Ben and me, coworkers, other friends—but none of them ever fit like Dorothy.


Now David stopped looking at me and turned back to the dog, still whining behind the back door. He tried to open the back door with his hands full, and I shook my head.

“Fine. Fine. Take it somewhere besides the back door so he doesn’t come scratching all the time. I don’t give a shit.” I put my hands in my pockets because they were shaking, and I turned and looked at the refrigerator, and I heard David pull the door open and walk back toward the woods with the dog still yipping away, and him still talking to it.

When I came back in the living room, Ben was talking to me. “Walk time,” I said.
“Want company?” He lowered his fork.

“I don’t think so. I like the time alone.”

“Where do you go?” Jesus, Ben. I was almost out the door.

“Just wander, I guess. Sometimes down to the lake. Be back in a while,” and I went out.

I crossed the street to the white house with the green shutters, where my family had stayed; the one with the shed in the back that we used to climb into through broken slats in the back corner and hide among the rusted lawn care equipment and play cards. From the shed you couldn’t even see the street.

I walked around to the back corner and pushed the slats aside. There was still about a third of the bottle left.


I had gotten a phone call from Dorothy’s mother, now divorced from her father, to tell me about the accident. It was the end of November and the third day in a row of something falling: rain, sleet, hail, snow. I was at home with the TV on; it was a Wednesday night. Dorothy’s mother, a heavy and even-tempered woman named Dawn, called, and she was sobbing and hysterical and before she finished a sentence I was on my feet, and sweating, and I knew what must have happened. She was at the hospital, she said, there was an accident. John and Dorothy had been driving home from visiting her sister and there was an accident on the highway.

“Where are they now?”

Dawn was crying hard, her breath ragged, and she didn’t say anything. I could hear some voices near her. I was looking out my window.

“Are they both in the hospital? Where is it?” My hands were clenched.

Her breath was coming in long harsh jags that tore at her lungs. She started to speak.

“No, Andy—” Her breath caught again. “It was bad. They didn’t—” Dawn went silent, and then came back. Her breath trembled but her voice was more steady. “They didn’t make it. The doctors couldn’t help them.” She started crying again, harder now, and I hung up the phone and looked out the window at my building’s parking lot and the rain-covered street that shone with reflected light.


The streetlight was blinding; I was in front of the white house my family used to rent and the light was very bright. I was on the sidewalk, and I was planning on crossing the street. “Too much,” I said. I quit crossing the street and sat down in the front yard of the white house. There was a plane overhead and its blinking lights looked like alien ships laughing.

I’d drank the open bottle and finished it, and felt good. My hands were relaxed and my mind was clear, and then I saw the second bottle of the cheapest whiskey I could find and I had opened it and drank until it was a fire inside me. Now I was not going to get across the street; it looked like a long walk and anyway Ben and David would know. I had wanted to come back from the walk calm and settled, not off balance, not loud. I looked down and found the bottle still sitting between my legs. “Oh,” I said, and I got up to take it back to the shed.

After I put the slats back in place I felt something and I looked up, and there was the dog looking at me in the darkness. I knelt down and he walked over to me, tongue dangling.

The empty bottle was still next to my foot and I picked it up and hit the dog with it. It hit the dog near his eye and he screamed out and cowered down, and I was on him. I pulled him down and we both fell, and I had the bottle and I hit him again. He made noises like crying, and I pushed him onto his side on the grass and I kept hitting him with the bottle, hit him until his eyes turned from black to black, hit him until he wouldn’t keep moving any more.

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I guess the formatting might be fucked up, I don't know. Let me know what you think of it.