Three Stories by Jim Peterson

Pablo

I opened my front door to let in some light and fresh air. A small dog wandered down the center of the street. On impulse I grabbed my cap and some small dog treats left over from my deceased Jack Russell. This other dog poked his head in the gutter, meandered back out to the middle of the road, then over to the grassy shoulder on the other side, sniffing all the way, sometimes stopping to raise a leg and mark the spot.

I kept my distance. A mixed breed I’d say, with no collar, but otherwise he appeared to be healthy. I followed him for block after block into a part of the town I’d never explored. At busy streets, he paused just off the curb, looked both ways until a gap opened, and then he’d dart across and continue his inquiries on a less busy side street. As smart and nosey as he was, I assumed he knew I was following him, but he didn’t give me any attention, not even a glance.

At last he trotted into a front yard and disappeared around a house. A car was parked out front. A small house, but carefully maintained, curtains pulled. My stomach sank. I wasn’t in the habit of walking uninvited onto the grounds of strangers. I crept into the alley between houses toward the fenced back yard where the dog appeared to be going. The fence was five feet high. Did he jump over the somewhat shorter gate?

I saw the dog rolling in the grass at the feet of a woman who was sitting in a lawn chair facing away from me. I could see the long blond hair on the back of her head and one bare foot of a crossed leg dangling in the air. I checked around to make sure no one was observing, and then I watched for a while.

The woman teased and praised the dog, and he responded to her, letting go of tiny barks I could barely hear. I opened the gate, and the latch made a distinct clink. The dog stopped his games and looked at me. The woman didn’t move. I walked slowly across the yard, the dog watching, the woman silent and still, but obviously waiting. When I got close behind her, she said “Thomas?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Please sit down,” she said.

I sat in the lawn chair near hers. “How did you know?” I said.

“I knew you lived in this town. I sent Pablo to look for you,” she said, nodding toward the dog.

“Pablo?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “he’s a rascal just like Picasso.”

“Oh,” I said, “It’s a good name.”

“He says you were easy,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Easy to lure away from your home.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“Yet here you are,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“I named you Thomas because you doubt everything I say,” she said.

Obviously she hadn’t given me my name, but I let that go. She still had not looked at me, staring straight ahead, and it dawned on me she was blind.

“Can you look at me?” I asked.

“I am looking at you,” she said, though she was still turned away from me, “I am always looking at you.”

The dog barked once. “Pablo wants to check you out,” she said.

“Is that what he just said?” I asked.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m a dog lover myself.”

The dog trotted over to me, jumped in my lap and brought his curious face close to mine, looking steadily into my eyes. He gave my face a good lick. I was okay with that. Then he started sniffing around on my chest. I pulled out a treat from my shirt pocket, and he extracted it nimbly from my fingers. He jumped down and sat attentively in front of her again, munching.

“You’ve aged well,” she said. “Harriet?” I said, and she smiled, her awareness on me almost like the tips of fingers. I remembered her name, but nothing else.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “you will never remember me. That way we can begin again.”

We sat quietly together for an hour. And then, slowly, we began.

Tornados

I walked out into the front yard to trim my thorny hedge. My blades needed sharpening, but they still worked well enough. The lengths of new spring growth fell to my feet. I was careful to dodge those dangerous thorns. I danced and danced as I cut. My neighbor walked by, a retired old gentleman getting his exercise. He stopped and watched me.

“Hey,” he said, “what are you doing there?”

“Can’t you see I’m dancing?” I said.

He stepped into my yard and came closer. “You call that dancing?” he said.

“What’s wrong with it?” I said, still cutting and dancing.

“You’re not keeping the beat,” he said.

“What beat?” I said.

“Here, let me show you,” he said.

I stopped cutting and watched the old man begin to dance. He was tall and skinny and he reminded me of a scarecrow puppet. He did a clog step mixed with some fancy movement of his own.

“What are you dancing to?” I said.

“Don’t you hear it?” the old man said.

I strained my ears to hear. A murder of crows in a magnolia tree were calling up an ancient tune with a strong beat. I started dancing. I danced and danced.

After a few minutes, the old man said, “Not like that. Like this.”

I looked at his legs bowing like fledgling crepe myrtles and his feet flying like carpenter bees—wild and ordered and funny and graceful. I tried, but my feet got lost and I tripped and fell right into the pile of thorns. One of them went all the way through my forearm. It felt like the sting of a huge yellow jacket. I tried to stand up, but my head was spinning, and I fell back down. The old man kept dancing, his face covered in a big grin.

“More like this,” he said, and his legs and feet got faster and faster until they disappeared. Legless, the old man floated in the air above me. His legs were in my chest now, humming like an engine.

My neighbor Rosemary appeared in her flower shift and she laughed loud and clapped her hands. Soon she was dancing too, she and the old man spinning around my front yard like a couple of tornados. Their invisible feet whirred beside my head.

“Don’t kick me in the head!” I shouted, but they just laughed.

Rosemary danced right beside me. Her skirt swirled and opened above me like a vast dark tunnel, her knees two giant pistons driving a great machine. Suddenly I woke up in the hospital.

“Welcome back,” the doctor said, smiling.

He bent over me with a pair of snippers and snipped the hooked point of the thorn. “This is gonna hurt,” he said, and he yanked the rest of the thorn out of my arm. I was back in the tunnel with Rosemary’s knees.

Suddenly I awoke in my front yard, lying on my back. The wind was blowing up in the canopies. Some white clouds were running away fast. The crows still made a ruckus, but it wasn’t music.

I stood up slowly, braced against the maple. The old man and Rosemary were gone. My trimmer lay in a pile of thorny cuttings. I hobbled into my house. It was dim and cool in there.

“How’s the trimming going?” Harriet said. She was sitting on the couch with a book, her feet curled under her.

“I’m taking a break,” I said.

“Be careful, those thorns are killers,” she said.

I looked at her, I realized, for the first time in a long while. Really brought her into focus. That face. She looked at me too, and smiled.

“Tell me about it,” I said, sitting down as close to her as I could.

Holes

The engine just stopped like a candle in a sudden draft, and I let the car roll to the grassy shoulder. I turned the key and pressed the gas pedal, but nothing happened. I got out and stared at the old car. The mechanic had warned me it was on its last legs, that it would leave me stranded. Sure enough. The engine was still ticking under the hood, and the car seemed to be sinking into a long sleep. I picked up my book from the front seat, opened the trunk, and pulled out my skinny suitcase.

I looked out on the landscape. I could hear the wind whistling and cackling over the teeth of great sage and the tongues of smooth boulders. Book tucked under my belt, bag swinging at my side, I began to walk. The heat pressed on my head and cooked my ears. I found a big rock, sat down, and waited. I hadn’t seen a single car all day, not a single human being. A hare, a rattlesnake, a big lizard, several buzzards circling high in the clear sky, yes.

Finally I could hear the sound of an engine faraway to the east. When it came into view, it was floating on a water mirage, a tiny speck glinting in the sun. As it got closer, I stood up and made my thumb super large, a trick I had learned from my mentor. The car barely slowed as it came beside me, and I could see the long-haired driver looking at me. It skidded and came to a stop just a little ways past me. I grabbed my bag, checked on my book against my belly, and ran toward the small white truck, noting the mangled rear fender, the rusted-out bed. The passenger-side door swung open.

“Where you going?” the man said. His hair was tangled but cut back away from his face. His beard was long and darted around on his chest.

“West,” I said.

“Me too,” he said, “jump in.”

I climbed in. The seat was lumpy, splits in the leather repaired with shoe laces. I crammed my bag beside my feet, the floor littered with broken golf tees. If the man had been a steak, he’d have been chewy. He finagled the gear shift into first, his big hand floppy on the knob, and we started rolling. The engine sounded good. No glass in the windows, and up around third the wind pushed me back in my seat. His tattered white t-shirt flew around him like an embattled flag, showing flashes of a body so burnt by sun it was turning black. His jeans had more holes than denim. Sandals dangled from his otherwise bare feet.

“You live around here?” I said.

“Not far,” he said, “you need a place to stay?”

I thought about it for a minute. When we hit 85 mph, I said, “Sure, thanks. I left my car about a mile back.”

“Saw it,” he said, “tomorrow I could fix it for you.”

“Thanks. You look like you work outside,” I said.

“Golf,” he said. He flicked his head back as a signal, and I looked through the paneless rear window. On a solid part of the bed lay an old golf bag holding half a dozen clubs.

“Golf without holes,” he said. “I can play anywhere.”

We pulled off the paved road onto a dirt one, dust wake erasing everything behind us. Rocky bluffs rose up on both sides as the road drew us into a deep gorge. We parked in front of an old trailer. I noted a lone solar panel on the roof. On the homemade front porch, wires ran from a stationary bike into the trailer.

“Home,” he said, pulling the front door open with an inviting bow. He led me to the couch. “Sleep there,” he said.

I dropped my bag to the floor and pulled my book out from under my belt.

“What’s that?” he said.

“My book of answers,” I said.

He got a strange look on his face, then ran to a small desk and pulled a book out of the drawer. “My book of questions,” he said.

We sat together on the couch and opened our books. I turned a few pages.

“Answer 37,” I said: “She wanted someone to touch her.”

He flipped a few pages. “Question 37,” he said: “Why did she leave?”

We looked at each other. Then I turned to the middle of my book.

“Answer 443,” I said: “In the distance, she heard people laughing.”

He turned to the middle of his book. “Question 443,” he said: “Why did she leave?”

“How many times does the book ask that question,” I said.

“It comes back a lot, every week or so,” he said. “Does having the answers help?” he asked.

“Depends on who you are,” I said.

That night I didn’t get any sleep, the answers coming to me so fast I could barely write one down before the next one came. I knew he was writing questions frantically in his little room. I could hear the pencil scratching on the page.

The next morning, before he drove me back to my car and got it running, we compared our questions and answers. “She’s never coming back,” he said. “I guess not,” I said.

Then we played golf. Ragged bags of ancient clubs slung over our shoulders, we climbed a switchbacking trail up the wall of the bluff to the floor of an infinite prairie. He teed up a yellow ball, took his stance, waggled his club a few times, took a slow backswing, and struck the ball as hard as he could. The ball arced against the sky for a long time and landed faraway among the sage.

“Now you,” he said.

My shot sliced far to the east of his.

“Remember,” he said, “there are no holes, only the distance in every direction. Once you start this round, it will never end. I’ve been playing the same round for about ten years now.”

But I wasn’t like him. All day, before we met back at his trailer, I kept seeing “holes,” targets like sage brush or boulders that I aimed for. I couldn’t help myself: I counted every shot. In my head, I kept adding up my score.

Jim Peterson is the author of six collections of poetry, three chapbooks, and a novel. His collection The Owning Stone won Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Award for 1999. His newest collection, Speech Minus Applause, was released by Press 53 in February of 2019. His poems have appeared widely in journals including Poetry, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, etc. He is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Low-Res MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives with his charismatic corgi, Mama Kilya, in Lynchburg, Virginia.