It started small, as unsettling things, things I would have ignored if they had come and gone. But while they arrived one at a time, they didn’t leave, even when I prayed.
It started with the new dog. Oh, it wasn’t her fault I suppose, but she was the first thing to change. Before then it had been routine. My husband and I lived next door to my grandfather, bought the house there so we could take care of him. It was down a country road, no sidewalks or streetlamps, barely paved, but it was nice. We were out of the way, but it was only a 40-minute drive to the city, which meant Frank didn’t have to commute far to work.
Out of the way, though, meant a long response time from emergency services. So we never wanted to leave Papi alone for too long, in case he fell or needed something, even at night when he didn’t do much but stare at the TV. So Frank bought us a telescope, something we could setup in the backyard. In that uncertain present, with its pandemics and wars and death lingering next door, watching the vault of heaven go by like beautiful clockwork was a comfort.
Standing out in that dark, away from everything else, was when we noticed there were sometimes strange headlights at night, cruising up and down our little country road, moving with unknown purpose. Moving a little too fast to be lost, a little too slow to be without a destination.
But we had our old, trusty schnauzer then, big and black and with a bark like Cerberus. That’s what we called him, kind of as a joke, but he made things easier. Whenever we let him out, he’d run next door to check on Papi, and whenever there was a strange noise around the house at night, Cerberus was always the first to investigate. Maybe a little too loudly, but that thunderous bark could make you feel safe if you weren’t sure what was on the other side of a door.
Papi lived longer than Cerberus, though, and long enough still that Frank and I missed having a dog. We adopted a mongrel that we named Cyan because of her startlingly blue eyes. She was part German Shepherd, too, so we figured she’d make a good guard dog.
She wasn’t, though. In fact, she was terrible at it. If left off leash she would go bounding into the thick, dark woods around our house, barking bloody murder at whatever squirrel or deer or God knows what else she had seen. Frank and I spent hours in those first few weeks trying to track her down every time she bolted.
That’s probably why Papi didn’t like Cyan from the start. She didn’t come over to check on him like Cerberus did, but dragged us away. After a time, he even refused to have Cyan in his house, saying that with her red coat and blue eyes she looked like some kind of skinless horse and he didn’t like the way she stared at him.
Now, Papi lived in the South, and by the time Mami died there was no getting him out of there, so that’s where we moved to take care of him. Plenty of nice things about the South, just like everywhere else, but there’s bad things too, just like everywhere else. One good thing they always say, and I think maybe a lie, is that people in the South are oh so friendly. It may be friendliness to some, and maybe it’s because I wasn’t born here, but it doesn’t feel like friendliness to me. More like watching for trouble. After all, it seems like everyone has a gun these days, particularly in the South, and if you smile and wave at someone, and they smile and wave back, it at least feels like they’re less likely to shoot you.
So when a strange man started to wander down our road, with its dusty pavement between the tall grass, I smiled and waved at him. He as tall and lanky with a rangy movement like there was an unsteady musical beat only he could hear. Whatever song he heard, he muttered to himself too loud to ignore, but quiet enough that you couldn’t make out the words. His dark skin absorbed the twilight rays of the Carolina sky and his eyes never settled on anything. It was that last part that made me think he didn’t see me wave, so I waved again when we passed each other, close enough that he couldn’t miss it. In a flagrant breach of protocol, though, not only didn’t wave, but he didn’t stop his meandering song, or look in my direction.
Cyan clearly didn’t approve of this and, when we got close, lunged at him in a barking strain at the leash. There was a viciousness to it that was surprising, even to me, and I felt like I could hear the bays of every hound that had run slaves to ground. I was mortified by that image, and I stammered out an apology. The stranger and his music, though, kept walking along with a dead-eyed stare that made me wonder if he wasn’t blind.
Which is fine, that’s OK, what’s one weirdo in a world full of them, and maybe Cyan’s barking was just a good judge of character. We’d run into the blind, black singer every few days, and to my embarrassment, Cyan’s reaction was always the same, and I wondered what fear lay at the root it. Was she reading my own discomfort at this strange, unrelatable man?
One night at dusk, I took her for a quick walk while Frank set up the telescope and I saw the tall music man mumbling to himself down the road. I stuck to the other side, didn’t even bother to wave, but just as we were getting close to passing him, those strange headlights blazed from the top of the road. They were as bright as spotlights and, when I raised a hand to shield my eyes, Cyan barked and lunged at the man. She went at him with such ferocity I was barely able to hold on. Rambling in the dark, the man didn’t notice, just kept on walking, even as the car raced down the road between us. I couldn’t see beyond its headlights even as I heard a yelp from Cyan.
When I screamed, Frank abandoned the telescope and we got Cyan to an emergency vet. She was fine, in the end, lost a few teeth and broke a paw, but I didn’t walk her anymore without making sure music man wasn’t around and it was still light enough that those headlights couldn’t be seen.
So we started to take Cyan out on leash while we watched through the telescope. It wasn’t as peaceful as before, with her barking at the dark of the woods, but it was better than waiting for those lights to come down with a driver that couldn’t be bothered to stop for any living thing. But then Frank lost his job and started to drink at the beginning of our stargazing sessions and became impatient with the turning of the firmament.
Cyan seized on that and slipped her leash every chance she got, bounding out into the trees, yipping away at whatever she saw out there. It got to a point where Frank would just sit on his lawn chair and refuse to go after her, and I was too afraid to go out into the dark of the woods alone. Cyan would come back, eventually, though, covered in dirt and brambles and panting a happy grin at the chase she had given.
Until she didn’t. One night after she had pulled her escape artist act, she didn’t come back. I waited and screamed out into the dark for her, but she didn’t return. The only thing that came back was a howling that I told myself was her chasing prey. But it didn’t sound like her. Or any other animal I’d ever heard for that matter. After awhile, I told myself that I had lost my patience with that ungrateful mongrel, and put an arm around Frank to help him up. Truth be told, though, with whatever was howling out in the woods, I didn’t want to leave Frank outside.
I got up at first light to go search for Cyan, but she was waiting at the porch door. I was relieved at her appearance, until I saw all of the blood she had trailed with her. Confusion and concern pushed me outside to find her barely moving on the deck. Whatever had happened out there in the woods that night had left a long, jagged gash the length of her ribcage, deep enough that you could see bone in places, even through the matted fur.
If we had neighbors, my scream would have woke every one of them. Frank and even Papi stumbled out and between my panic, Frank’s hangover, and Papi’s feebleness, we managed to make enough of a person to get Cyan back to the hospital. The vet was a competent woman who got Cyan stitched up, but afterward she gave me a suspicious look, like one might a parent who said their child fell down some stairs. She told me she had never seen any kind of claw mark like the one that had tore into Cyan.
After that, Cyan doesn’t leave the yard anymore, just runs around its edges and barks into the woods at things I can’t see. I’m not as young as when we first arrived and my eyesight isn’t as good as it was those years ago, but I don’t think it matters. There’s something in those woods circling our home and I can feel it just as much as Cyan can.
We don’t watch the night sky anymore, but just for prowling headlights on the road, and the darkness of the woods.
See the author’s published work here.
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