Outdoor Dog

Chylde put binoculars in his backpack before leaving home. On the front porch steps, he found Bob-Arthur Royce Kennedy, his wild-eyed escape artist of a blue heeler, covered in dirt and waiting for a scratch on the head. Chylde pulled the dog by his collar through the gate at the side of the house and locked him up in the backyard.

"Stay!" said the human.

"BARK!" said the dog, announcing his own name in defiant response. Chylde then walked away and this gave Bob-Arthur the impression he'd made a fair point.

At a hardware store twelve minutes down the sidewalk, Chylde paid twenty dollars for four rattle cans full of color. Honeycomb, Harvest Gold, Cash, and Winter Mint. He carried these in his backpack for another twenty minutes down the road, where he came to a concrete wall hiding in the shoulder of an overpass. He pulled the cap off the can of Cash Green and scrawled a long, jagged line from two feet up the left side of the wall across the eight foot stone canvas. He added toothy outcroppings rising up from this line then colored in the entire space below to create what could pass for a silhouette jungle. With the Cash can nearly gone, Chylde took up Harvest Gold and began spraying yellow pom-poms across the tops of the jagged line's shapely clusters.

* * * *

Beneath the backyard fence, Bob-Arthur Royce Kennedy was alternately shoveling loose soil out of a hole, then shoving his snout into the gap, then shoveling, then shoving, until at last, with the hyperactive thrashings of a sugar-drunk child, the dog birthed himself to the dry field that surrounded the back half of the entire neighborhood.

Bob-Arthur ran along the fence line until he was good and lost, then headed straight into the emptiness of the dirt field. There, he found a dog he considered his closest friend. This other dog—a nameless, abandoned, ugly mutt of an outdoor dog—lived well out in the field and on the city streets. He was born without a name by a smart police Malinois of a dad and a resourceful junkyard Bull Terrier of a mom, both of who passed on their deep black coats of fur that made him virtually unnoticeable wherever he wandered at night. With no name, Bob-Arthur always called to him with a bark that, in a dog’s ear, sounded equivalent to, “My B.F.F.,” as in, “My Black-Furred Friend.”

When Bob-Arthur called, B.F.F. pulled his snout away from a pile of small droppings that he’d been sniffing at all morning.

“Dog-equivalent-to-Jesus Christ!” cried the black dog. “You’re bleeding. Why’s your face all scratched up?”

“Cuz no fence can hold me,” said Bob-Arthur. “I’m a wild boy. I’m an explorer like you. And when I want to be a bad dude and hang out with bad dudes like my B.F.F., there's no way I’m letting a splintered up fence stop me.” Bob-Arthur ran circles around his friend and managed to trip over the only rock in sight.

“Okay,” said the black dog, turning his attention back to the poop pile.

“Dude, we so get bitches.” Bob-Arthur licked blood from the blue spots on his shoulder. “We get mad bitches, don’t we?”

The black dog laughed. “Sure, bud.”

Bob-Arthur turned back towards the fenced suburbs and shouted, “Hey, I get bitches! Any bitches around wanna get got? I can get ya!”

“Shut the dog-equivalent-to-hell up!” came a voice from the fences. “The only bitch your neutered stick’s ever been near is your own bitch-mother!”

“Hey, you shut up!” Bob-Arthur called back. “I’m a big wild dog and you’re a little puppy latched to your momma. So unless you’re gonna get me in touch with her, you can shut up!”

“Shut up, ya field mutt! You’re a chihuahua, probably out there mounting prairie dogs and telling yourself they’re real bitches.”

A third voice from farther off joined in to ask where the bitches were at and this sunk all three shouting dogs down into a whirlpool of insults.

“Cut that out and look at this,” said the black dog.

Bob-Arthur obeyed, leaving the two unknown dogs locked in their own shouting match.

The black dog pointed to the droppings. “Look at the size of this turd mound. I think it’s a rabbit, but it’s gotta be a huge freaking rabbit to get all of that out at once. I mean Dog-Jesus, just look at it. Do you think it was one enormously fat rabbit dropping his week’s savings all at once, or maybe two little rabbits that sat here butt to butt and just happened to relieve themself at the same time?”

“Smells real fresh.” Bob-Arthut stuck his nose into the pile and took eighteen quick sniffs to capture the full aroma. Some sensory link in his brain misconnected with another, giving him the sudden impression that what was rubbing against his lips was not rabbit droppings, but kibble food.

Bob-Arthur ate the pile then said, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“No. You shouldn’t have.” The black dog sat down. “I was still digging through that scent too. Why’d you do that, dude?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t feel so good.” Bob-Arthur walked on shaky limbs to the nearest patch of grass and started grazing.

The black dog was going to advise against this, but just then, two prairie dogs shot out of a hole beside him.

“Aye, where’s the shite gone?” one asked.

“I don’t know, Deary.” The other sniffed the ground. “I swear it was right here.”

They turned to Bob-Arthur and his B.F.F. “Oy! You dogs seen a pile of fresh scat about?”

Bob-Arthur arched his back and puked up a slimy pile of green and brown.

“Oh Fantastic!” shouted a prairie dog. “Whole lot’s ruined. Gonna haf’ta start her over from scratch!”

“I don’t know if I can do that again,” said the other, following the first back down their hole. “It’s harder than you’d think to get a synchronized drop like that with your rear end pressed up to mine.”

The black dog watched them tunnel their way into the earth, then he spent a long while staring in wonder down the empty hole. Bob-Arthur Royce Kennedy ate enough grass to puke once more, then asked, “Hey, should we go find some bitches, or what?”

“I have to see a dog about a man.” The black mutt turned away from the blue heeler and trotted towards the city streets.

* * * *

With his painting complete, Chylde turned his back to the wall, tossed the empty spray cans into the gutter, and walked down to the elderly care facility center at the end of the block. In the far corner bedroom of this ground floor facility slept Grandma Aster, who had no warning of a visitor until Chylde gently shook her awake.

After the procedural “Hello”s and “How nice of you to”s were traded, Grandma Aster’s first question for the boy was, “Did you bring Marigolds?”

“About that.” Chylde slung off his back pack and opened the zipper.

“They’re not in that bag, are they?”

“No, Grandma. The shop was out of Marigolds. Apparently, they’re out of season.” He handed her the binoculars then stepped around her bed to slide away the grey window curtain. “So I grew you some.”

Grandma Aster’s back popped as she pulled herself up in bed. Her hands shook by the weight of the spy glasses. “All I see’s a kaleidoscope,” she said, “Hold these steady for me.”

Chylde obeyed.

He aimed the binoculars through the glass, down the block, and across the street, and Grandma Aster adjusted their focus until she could see clearly what was painted on the overpass wall.

A marigold hedge depicted in four tones, the blooms larger than human heads, the leaves as sharp as can be drawn from the lid of a spray can, and with the east-facing wall caught dead in the glow of the high morning sun, the shadows portrayed by Winter Green under Cash and Honeycomb under Harvest Gold aligned just perfectly with this exact hour of sunlight and gave an illusory depth to the giant flowers as convincing as those colored by God’s own paintbrush.

Grandma Aster lowered the binoculars and sighed. “Oh, they’re lovely. But if you’d come to visit two weeks ago, they’d still be in season. That little postulant that visited Anna-Maryll brought her such a big basket of marigolds that the blind spinster was petting the flowers and calling the basket by her dead cat’s name. And she had an obcenely obese cat if that tells you how many flowers was in there.”

“What’s a postulant?”

“Hmm?”

“You said postulant, what is that?”

Grandma Aster waved her hand to the question. “It’s just a lesbian that’s scared of sex.”

“Right,” Chylde nodded. “Well you’ve got me. I never looked through the flower shops. I just thought this would be nicer.”

“I told ya, they look nice, but how about something that can wash the stank out of here? I still catch wafts of Anna-Maryll’s wrinkly ass through the two doors.”

“I really thought you’d like this more. If I got you real flowers, they would’ve sat there on that little table and rotted away in a week. Those on the wall are gonna be just as fresh come Christmas. I bet those rotting marigolds aren’t still in Anna-Meryll’s room, right?”

His grandmother laughed. “Neither is Anna-Meryll. And if you think I’m hanging on to life for another Christmas in this glue factory . . . Don’t count on it, that’s what I’ll say.” She held the binoculars to her eyes again and Chylde gave a hand to steady them.

“Looks like that dog’s admiring your flowers.”

Chylde looked through the window. He didn’t need the binoculars to make out the black outdoor dog sniffing the dripping yellow paint. He watched the dog lift a leg to the wall and add his own mark, diluting a few stalks of the green bush to let the concrete bleed through.

“Oh, bless him.” Grandma Aster giggled. “He’s watering my garden.”

Chylde felt her warm hand rest on his arm that held up the glasses, and because this was as much affection as he’d ever seen from his Grandma Aster, the boy felt whole.