Charlie Kondek

 It started as a kind of wish, almost a prayer, this hope that when he performed a gesture of kindness to Lobo, every other dog he ever owned would also feel it. Not that he had ever been mean to his dogs, just that he had not always been as loving. For example, when Raffles, that wire-haired mutt, jumped up on the couch of his old apartment in Redford to bark insanely at an imagined threat, Frank would shout at him, “Godammit, get down from there! Are you nuts?” When Lobo did the same at the window of his little house in Walled Lake, he’d join her in looking into the tree line for the offender and cuddle her around the neck, saying, “What’s out there, Lobo? Did you scare it away? Good dog, good watch dog.”

Woody the yellow lab mix wasn’t allowed on the bed. Lobo could push Frank out of it with her sprawling, slumbering heat. Frank’s dogs never went hungry, but did any of them eat as good as Lobo? They did not. When he walked Lobo twice in a day, he remembered days when he didn’t walk Raffles, or Woody, or Tee Tee at all. Not because he didn’t want to but because he was too busy working or trying to patch things up with whoever he was married to at the time. One of these wives, Shayna, used to say, “You let that dog lick your face, you can count on me not licking anything of yours.” Bending over to tie his boots and being washed by Lobo’s slobber, he accepted it as penance for every time he had ever fallen short of the expectations of Raffles, Woody, Tee Tee, Brownie or Fritz.

Maybe Frank was going crazy. Maybe whatever loomed on the other side of his retirement, or the loneliness caused by his inability to stay married, was making him that way. But he had begun to feel that whenever he comforted Lobo he touched not just her but every dog he had ever known and every dog that had ever lived or would live. And when through his care for Lobo he atoned for all his shortcomings toward dogs, he sensed he could somehow atone for man’s shortcoming to the Greater Dog. For its stewardship, indeed, of all the earth. 

The guys at work would say, “Who was in the truck with you, Frank?” 

“What?” he’d say. “Nobody.” 

“Then who were you talking to? God?” 

They began to tease him. “Hey, Frank! What did God have to say?” 

“Are we sure it was God and not Jim Beam?” 

“Somebody smell his coffee!” 

Haw haw haw! 

There was a dog that lived on Frank’s route, in one of those poor, falling-apart houses off Evergreen, some kind of pit bull mix with a squat gray body and stumpy legs. It bothered Frank that they left the dog out in all kinds of weather and never picked up its shit from the yard. He was enraged one day to see a group of boys throwing empty beer bottles at it—he had actually pulled his truck over to say something to them when some rough-looking woman emerged from the back door of the house to scream at them. 

Taking the dog in the small hours of the morning, in that neighborhood, would be imprudent, even with a pistol in his pocket. Frank wasn’t sure if the kids would be in school during the day or if anyone worked, but he chose to try the yard one afternoon around 2:00. The dog should have barked at him, chased him away, but it was either too scared or it recognized something in Frank, his intentions perhaps, his relationship to the Greater Dog, and wagged its stubby butt as he approached. Then, Frank saw a face at the house’s rear window that made him pause.

It was a very young child, probably standing on a chair to watch Frank through the rear window. His expression was somewhere between concern and terror, accusation and regret. Frank could not have heard the boy if he had spoken, but his expression seemed to say, “You’re taking my dog? Amidst everything else in my life of poverty, I’m losing this, too?” And Frank imagined, perhaps guided by higher vision, that it was this boy the dog bedded down with at night. Whatever other abuse it and the child suffered, whatever deprivation, they had each other. 

Frank petted the dog, then let himself out, his work boots dodging turds as he went.

At home, Frank let Lobo push her heart-shaped head into his hands. He sat with her on the couch as the sun went down, deep in thought about every dog that had ever happened to him. Remembering it was Lobo’s supper time, he started to rise, but she put one paw over his forearm in that way dogs do, and stared into him with impossibly brown eyes. He waited for her to speak. 

Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer. His work has appeared at Black Cat Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, Hoosier Noir, BULL, and elsewhere. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.

Read more from Charlie:

The Saturday Evening Post – ‘Call it Something Else’
Bull – ‘Whatever Happened Next’