42opus

is an online magazine of the literary arts.

23 June 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 2

Burying Pointer

Pointer woke me up by not waking me up.

My eyes opened before I knew I was awake, and the light came through the thin red curtains at my bedroom window bright and strong the way it always did at ten o'clock when Pointer woke me asking to go out.

Only it was 10:34 by my bedside clock, and Pointer wasn't asking to go out.

I threw off the sheet and sat up. I slept naked, so I just pulled on the T-shirt, panties, and shorts I'd dropped on the floor next to the bed the night before. I'd worn them to work, and they smelled like smoke. I felt something hard and round against my left hipbone, and I pulled the object from my pocket to look at it again. A transparent film canister, filled with dirt, with a sticky label on the front. Groundbreaking. Store #2. Breckenridge, CO. 2003. Breckenridge, CO. A place I'd never go.

Tucking the vial of dirt back into my pocket, I ran my fingers through my hair to work out some of the worst tangles and walked down my trailer's short hall.

"Pointer! You wanna go out, girl?"

Pointer lay on the couch, fifty-eight pounds of eleven-year-old black lab mix with curly hair. She lay with her chin between her paws just like when she was sleeping, but I knew right away she wasn't sleeping.

"Hey, Pointer, kiddo," I said anyway. "Too hot to get up this morning?"

Pointer weighed seventy pounds just a couple of months earlier, but pancreatic cancer pared her down pretty fast. I hadn't really thought she'd be gone this soon, though. I picked her up off the couch and she didn't feel like Pointer, just like a big heavy sack of cooked oatmeal. I laid her down on the rag rug next to the coffee table.

August south of Houston is so hot you don't think about being hot any more. You just do stuff anyway, and what I had to do that day was bury my dog. I covered her up with a fuzzy blue blanket, all except her head. Like a person sleeping. She didn't look asleep though. She looked gone.

I put on my sandals, banged out the screen door, and went down the loose wooden steps. I crossed the dirt and gravel stretch next to the road, between trailers, and up to the door at Jackie's place.

His black flatbed pickup rested crooked in the driveway because of a shallow ditch in the dirt, so the whole black metal monster sat cocked to one side like a dog's head when it's listening hard.

I could see in through the screen door, and the TV was on with the sound off but I didn't see any people.

"Jackie!" I called through the screen. No answer. "You in there?" I said.

I waited for a minute, the air thick as honey in my nostrils. I watched huge white clouds piled on top of each other, moving in slow motion, and wondered why they always looked alive to me, as if they could notice me, too.

I wiped sweat from the back of my neck.

"Yeah, I'm here." Jackie's voice came from somewhere I couldn't see, somewhere back in the bedroom I guessed.

I felt his footsteps rocking the trailer floor.

"I'm coming, Tess."

He showed up at the door in sweatpants and a grease-stained T-shirt that used to be white.

"Lemme guess," he said as he swung the screen door open for me. Without the black mesh between us, he came into focus and he stopped looking like a TV image and turned real. "Your shower quit workin' and you came over to see if you could use mine."

He grinned like a cartoon character, and I couldn't help smiling as I stepped inside. Jackie had brown hair that he hadn't cut in seventeen years. I knew how many years, because he'd told me. His hair had probably once been longer, but now it had worn away at the ends until it hung just a few inches past his shoulders. He had a red bandana rolled up and tied around his forehead. It was probably as dirty as his shirt, but I couldn't tell because it wasn't white. He had a face burned brown from working outside, and his skin shone with sweat even this early in the day.

"Nothing that complicated, Jackie. I just came to see if I could borrow your shovel."

"Why, sure, you can borrow my shovel, Tessie-baby." He stepped back and let me inside. "Wait here." He disappeared into the bedroom and I stood just inside the doorway watching a news anchor's face without the words, and I wondered whether Jackie kept his shovel under his bed or in his closet or something.

Shane, Jackie's son, appeared in the living room with his chestnut hair sleep-rumpled and his pajama top crooked. He was fourteen. He raised two fingers and one eyebrow at me in greeting, then turned away and opened up the fridge.

"Hey, Shane," I said.

"Hey," he mumbled.

Jackie came back. He'd put shoes on.

"Wait right here," he said to me. "Shovel's out in the shed." He noticed Shane. "Good morning, son."

Shane didn't answer.

"Kid's a ray of sunshine in the morning," Jackie said to me, his smile lopsided. "Ain't that right, Shane?"

"Shut up, Dad," Shane called out half-heartedly, pouring himself a mug of milk. Shane disappeared into the hallway again, and Jackie went out the front door. I wasn't interested in the news anchor's stiff hairdo, and I let my eyes wander over the bookcase. I saw the holes where a bunch of family photos used to be. An old school photo of Shane still stood on the shelf, and I saw one of Shane and Jackie next to the pickup, but all the pictures of Amy had disappeared.

Jackie hadn't said a word about his wife leaving. I'd been pretty sure for a while, but only because her car had gone and didn't come back. I hadn't been inside since then. Now I knew for sure.

I heard Jackie coming back to the porch and I stepped outside. He handed me a long-handled shovel with a rim of dried dirt around the digging blade.

"Here ya go, Tess. Keep it as long as you like, but I need it back."

I thanked him and walked from his yard back to mine.

The sky looked more like some kind of blue fabric than like pure air. It reminded me of a book I'd read as a kid with rabbits that live inside eggshells, and the insides of the eggshells are painted blue.

Digging Pointer's grave took longer than I expected. I picked a spot about halfway between the house and the back section of the chain link fence I'd put up for her when I moved in. The weather got hotter as I dug, and the sun got higher. The cicadas started in before too long so I had a counter-rhythm to my digging.

Not that keeping up a rhythm turned out to be all that easy. I would've thought cocktail waitressing five nights a week would keep me in shape, with all the walking and carrying, but I guess digging's harder work. The soil was a mix of wet, packed-down sand and thick, chalky clay as hard as rock. I had to stomp on the shovel's bent upper lip to force the metal down into the dirt after each thrust, and by the third or fourth stomp I'd bruised the sole of my right foot. I could've gone inside and changed into sturdier shoes, but I didn't want to. I just wanted to dig.

My shirt clung to my back and my face got sticky with heat. My hands blistered.

When I had a hole longer than Pointer and about a foot and a half deep, from the corner of my eye I saw Jackie come out of his trailer. I heard the truck door slam and heard him roar off down the gravel road. Dust came up in clouds as tall as my house.

When I had a hole about three feet deep, I figured it was enough. I carried the shovel with me to the back of my trailer and leaned it against the wall. I went inside.

Pointer hadn't moved or changed. She still lay on the rug with the fuzzy blanket tucked under her chin.

I propped the front door open with a chair. I picked up Pointer, blanket, collar, and all, and carried her out onto the porch, down the steps and through the yard.

By the time I got to the hole I'd dug, my breath came pretty short. As I laid Pointer on the ground and knelt next to her to catch my breath, I heard Jackie's truck come back. I didn't look his way. I heard his screen door slam.

When my breathing got easier I squatted and scooped Pointer back into my arms. I half stood up and then planted one foot in the hole. I shifted her weight and held her over the opening in the earth with my weight grounded in the grave, and then I brought the other foot in. I squatted and laid her body against the wet, sandy earth. I left her mostly wrapped in the blanket with her head sticking out.

I climbed out and found out I felt dizzy. I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since I got out of bed. I went over to the side of the house and got the shovel, and I started lifting piles of the dirt I'd moved earlier and dropping them over Pointer's body. Picking up the dirt and putting it back into the hole should have been easier than prying it out of the earth in the first place, but it wasn't. My head felt as though it weighed about half what it should've and my stomach had shriveled up like a walnut. I had to cover every inch of Pointer before I got any water, though. Something told me I couldn't leave her half buried.

Once she was covered up, I knew she'd be okay, but I didn't want to leave the grave half filled. I kept shifting dirt back into the hole. The blisters on my hands opened and dampened the shovel handle.

"Whatcha digging?"

With a shovel full of dirt poised in midair, I looked up. Shane and another kid stood behind the back fence, fingers curled into the chain links. The other kid, the one who'd spoken, was about the same age as Shane, a blunt-nosed boy with acne around the rim of his jaw. I'd seen them together before.

"Ain't digging," I replied. "I finished digging, and now I'm filling in the hole." I threw the pile of dirt into the hole and picked up another load on the shovel. Shane squirmed in the sunshine. His companion's fingers tightened around the fence wires.

"I don't get why you're digging for no reason," the kid said.

"I got a reason," I said. I stopped looking at him and kept filling the hole. When I looked up again, a few strokes later, the boys had gone. I went on moving dirt until the hole wasn't a hole any more but a loose, moist, brown mound with some dirt scattered through the drought-thin