Dog Road

I still have his bones you know.  Out in back, wrapped in a shopping bag, tufts of his tan hide still clinging to one of the sockets.  I think cities are for the young and winding down through the avenues trying to get out of there on a late Sunday afternoon, the sun leaves burnt residue on the construction vehicles at rest on the side of the road. The blue sedan in front of me says SKWSDM.

All I want is to go back, back and back.  I try hard not to become mesmerized in this Sunday light, this late afternoon everyone sitting down to their dinner or folding the last bit of the laundry they started Saturday morn, this aftermath of all the centuries before it Sunday light.  The streets are deserted, Craycroft, Wilmot, Kolb* and the artifacts there merely potential energy waiting to connect with hungover drivers back on the job tomorrow, improving the passage of time for the great population, the weight of their bones.  Not suits on sticks and sacks of sin, just bones, just cloth, just teeth and hair, just growth rings in the trees. Yes, cities are for the young and by the time I reach the interstate, the light has dimmed to funereal.  Not at all a sad thing and to the right is the long line of yellow train cars that have been stranded there for months now in a bit of wonderous totally empty quietude.  Air flowing through them, animals resting in their shade, coyote pups being bathed near one of the engines.  Who did this?  Have they been forgotten?

He was there that winter and I've no doubt it ruined his health.  All that misery and really, dogs have no way of knowing which one of us is asking forgiveness, which one is casting out the demons.  Yes it ruined his health.  I know it ruined mine or took the strength I had left.  But still, I have his bones although I could not find his skull. I did try. Holding onto them one feels close to it, perhaps the way we felt as children with the pink rabbit's foot keychain won at the carnival, chosen instead of a live goldfish or a poor little duck that would end up dead three days later anyway.

I pass through Davis like fingering through a file cabinet, one canyon wall after another.  This one is the two signs eight years ago, one after another on the same day. The next one is Grace's daughter's leg pinned on the median 11 miles northwest and there's five or so miles until a billboard reminds touristas to visit the mummy over in Wilcox. At last there is the gentle sloping downward ramp leading to the Amtrak stop where I got off the train with my brother's wife and waited at the Horseshoe for a ride the rest of the way home.  Each tune on the radio organizes a brazen number of memories into just two or three.

By the time I round the hill south of Tombstone, the last strip that drops down into the valley, a remainder of Mexico still visible now, the light is nearly gone and it is hard to imagine that it is still Sunday.  It's the turn of a century and I'm horseback in the post coital universe of the dead buckaroos where I am certain no one took their chances without the third dimension to adjust their rods in the wickedness of the desert at night.  It's all just words and heartbeats now, I'll be in bed soon and nearly frozen, just breathing.  All the ghosts there might just as well go home too, back to their positions on the buildings near the throaty owl atop the cedar two houses down.  I still have his bones you know and cities are for the young, the amnesiacs, the seekers of WSDM.

*Kolb from a Hebrew/Armenian tribe that settled in Germany

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