Heat

Heat

Rowena is mad because the dog knows something she doesn’t. That’s how Rowena is, powering through idiocy borne of the intense denial of reality she musters every day just to get out of bed. “Come on, Lucy!” She pulls on the leash, attached to a chain, attached to the dog who has lowered her head like a bull ready to charge and adamantly does not come on. “You said you wanted to go for a walk!” And she did, the liar. The first of the three to run up when she heard the leashes jangle as they were pulled from the drawer. Lucy, a heart shaped locket hanging from her collar, (Ben loves her so much) was the most excited, the second being Flower, a congenitally scrawny terrier mix, and Barley, a perennially shedding 80 pound “rez dog,” meaning lab and shepherd and who knows what, who showed up third, head cocked a little, favoring his runny nose and while he was pretty sure he wanted to go, was worried that Rowena, again, would forget how much his left nostril hurts. It’s been running for 2 months now, one of those days with blood. His sinuses can’t handle either the dry air or the intense heat of the Sonoran desert.

She should have figured out a way to stay in California, where she fled last year during the worst summer of molten sludge the latest pandemic, covid 24, had yet coughed up. She was in bad shape when the offer came in: the crushing July heat, no libraries, book stores, job reduced to a virtual platform and only 9 hours a week with no students, who mostly, at that point, maybe, sometimes attended “virtual” classes but mostly couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. Suffice it to say that Rowena wasn’t the only depressed person. In Southern California there’s at least a little moisture in the air. But the house sharing deal turned out to be horrible, the “friend” not turning out to be at all what she thought he would be and the other guy a sleazy balding weasel who played the acoustic guitar like a 13 year old beating his meat. Terrible that someone could do that, and every damn night, to a perfectly good musical instrument. Both of these guys were “retired” which meant they didn’t do anything but sit around and get stoned all day and watch TV at least up to guitar assaulting time, which generally began at 5 pm and continued until he felt like stopping or got too drunk, whichever came first. But the worst part was the yelling. She got yelled at all the time, mostly because she didn’t want to live that way and especially because she wouldn’t sleep with the 300 pound homeowner, along with other sins yet unknown, mostly punishable by arbitrary temper tantrums for doing the dishes wrong, or vacuuming inadequately, or her dogs’ nails on the hardwood floor waking him up. It got so bad that one morning when he was yelling at her for some transgression, her legs started shaking and got all wobbly. She knew she couldn’t stay there anymore.

She discovered very quickly that housing in the Southern California area is prohibitively expensive, which is also true of Northern California, Portland Oregon, Seattle Washington and in any other place where the climate is not meltingly vicious, murderous, and generally speaking, best left to Gila monsters and scorpions. Rowena ran back to Tucson with her tail between her legs, got a whopping case of diarrhea from the heat and ruined her favorite dog’s sinus membranes.

But get on with it, woman! Your readers want to know. Why has the old pit bull stopped in the middle of the road? And she is, boy oh boy is she. Rowena is afraid that if she pulls any harder she’s going to hurt her trachea. Little does know that the angle at which Lucy has got her head is long practiced and the chain is nowhere near her trachea but lodged just behind her ears at the back of her skull. The only bad thing that could happen from excessive pulling is that her head might come off and that’s highly unlikely. Never, in the entire history of the world has a dog’s head been pulled off by a sixty-three year old woman in a fit of pique because even though it’s only 7:20 in the morning, it’s already 110 degrees outside. The predicted high later is 125. It has been this way for 5 days and will remain so for another 7.

Rowena reflects on the state of it all. She’s smart enough to do that, to understand the absurdity of longing for 105 degree days wherein the temperature was only 90 or 95 degrees at 7:20 in the morning and it was even possible to go to the dog park if you left the house by 4:30. Oh, you’d sweat, and pant and all the rest of it, glad to be back home in the air conditioning when it was all over, but you wouldn’t have a searing headache, nausea, diarrhea, and the fervent wish to be dead.

Clearly, Lucy is not going to budge. Rowena turns around and the four of them, Lucy, Barley, Flower and Rowena head back home to drop the malcontent back at the casita, and then head back out without her. That will fix her insubordinate doggie ass. She’ll be all alone in the air-conditioned casita and the rest of them will be,

out in this fucking heat. Over the coal black spanking new asphalt street they tread, beyond the faux adobe reddish/brown San Xavier façade, then along the public street. Barley keeps stopping, but whether because he wants to pee on everything or the heat is hard to say. Flower, on the other hand, doesn’t care about anything but the lizards moving fast over ground, and the dog down the street who she’d love to get in a fight with. She’s that kind of mutt; she loves to start a ruckus just because she can and she would walk until she dropped, all for the opportunity to catch some varmint, any varmint, shake it, kill it, then do it again if at all possible, which it isn’t because she’s on a leash.. Worse luck

Rowena, Rowena, what are you doing? What do you think you are, 45? You could be on the edge of dropping dead of a heart attack. When you were young you never thought about such things, but you aren’t young anymore. Just like Lucy, who is 11 and sensible enough to know she doesn’t want to drop dead of a heart attack or anything else. This is why the dog is smarter than you are, Rowena. She’s at home now with a water bowl and central air, instead of dragging all three of your asses down the street because it’s now 7:35 in the morning and at 7:35 in the morning a person should not have to worry, goddammit, about dying of heatstroke. As she rounds the Catholic school block, Barley takes a shit and dutifully, Rowena pulls a plastic bag from her pocket, picks it up, and deposits it in a trash receptacle. She wouldn’t do this if she thought she could get away with it, not just because she’s lazy, which she is, but because she imagines the many millions of festering, sealed, putrid bags of dogshit there are in the world, clogging landfills, polluting the oceans and rendering the innards of sea lions full of tiny bits of plastic. At least in places like the Sonoran desert, it makes more sense, ecologically, to just leave the shit where it’s shat, where it dries out in about 20 minutes so that if you wanted to, you could pick it up with your bare hand, throw it at your enemies and knock them stone cold dead.

Heading east into the sun, the only route to north so they can all get back home, Rowena realizes what a bad idea this was. “Face the real! Forget your delusions.” Something she says to herself way more often than most people do. Rowena considers herself a realist but

this conception, flawed and often mistaken as it is, almost never does her any good. “The Real” is existentially horrifying.

But there are pills for it: seroquel, effexor, lorazepam, and at night a big glass of red wine. Sometimes she lies to herself, tells herself the wine is good for her, Mediterranean diet and all that, but she really just does it for the buzz.

Barley’s head is down, tongue hanging out, dutifully trudging along. He’s a good dog and will go along with most things just to keep the peace. Flower searches for lizards even though there are none on this stretch of sidewalk out behind the Catholic school where it’s stark and blank, devoid of flaws or characteristics and certainly of lizards but when it ends, which can’t come soon enough, it’s only a block more before the street where they live and with a left turn, a stabbing pain behind her left eye, Rowena, Barley, and Flower head for home. The sun beats down like a shovel to the back of the head, she turns the key in the lock and the cool, purified air makes her want to cry.