Martha and Me Have This Disagreement

Martha and me, we’re having this argument. It’s about the threshold of age, when life does things to you, instead of you doing things to life. Martha says we’ve crossed that threshold, that we’re too old now to do anything of meaning. She said we’re like an engine block run out of oil. “Waiting for the pistons to seize.” I disagree. I say we’ve got plenty to do, and that sitting here, getting old and fat, is a waste of our human potential.

“Who you calling fat?” Martha says.

“I’m not calling anyone fat,” I tell her, but she’s stopped listening. She’s pulled out her hearing aids and won’t look at me. Then it sounds like her lungs blow a hole in themselves, and the air’s seeping out, so I’m sure she’s got that shrunken-head face put on, the one that looks like someone punched a paper bag. But she’s raised that newspaper, The Times-Picayune, over her vast forehead, so as now, I can’t see it.

For half an hour, we say nothing to each other. The sun beats down on us as we sit on the Buena Vista Senior Center Motel’s sagging front porch, in our aluminum-and-nylon-webbing chairs. The aluminum intensifies the heat. Our thighs sear to the metal framework, and we feel like two of those rotisserie chickens over at the Redstone Bar and Grill.

This burnt-poultry smell wafts off me, seeing I didn’t shower last night, and it brings back the memory of when Martha and me actually went to that Redstone for the first time. Leaves me feeling as if Marcel Proust absorbed me into his novel.

“Look, Martha! They got an entire wall of them on fire!” Which didn’t impress her as much as the Bloody Mary they make.

Martha said, “These’ll tear your stomach lining out,” talking about the Bloody Marys, when she sucked out the dregs of ‌her third one.

“We’re coming every Thursday,” Martha said. “When they got their Early Bird Special.” And I agree, since we’re on a fixed income and all. And now you’ll find us there every Thursday, and maybe Tuesdays soon, when they expand their Early Bird Special, like they said they might.

The box fan does nothing but move mosquitoes and hot air around, like we’re in a convection oven. The citronella stick burned out a week ago. No one’s seen to replacing it. I’m surprised we have any blood left.

I’m staring at the front and back pages of The Times-Picayune because that’s all I can see of Martha. But finally, she lets the paper accordion-fold into her lap and says to me with Panic Pete eyes, “They kill them dogs.”

“What,” I say.

“You talking?” Martha says.

“Put your hearing aids in,” I say. I exaggerate the mouth movements it takes for the words to come out and use hand gestures like Marcel Marceau. And then, like Martha hears me, she’s putting her hearing aids back in.

“Let me put my hearing aids in,” she says. “Looks like you’re lip-syncing James Brown.” I hear that high-pitched tweet hearing aids make. Sounds like she’s snuffing the song from a sparrow as she shoves them in.

“Who’s killing dogs?” I say, and shift around in my chair, so I’m looking directly at her.

“The director of the Greyfriars City Kennel — Colonel Tom Parker, Jr.”

“The one who obliterated my neighborhood for the interstate expansion?”

“The one who’d blast that air horn from the back of his campaigning flatbed, yelling promises out a megaphone.”

“Driving by the automat, he nearly took out all the windows that time.”

“Don’t you know it. He’s building a new kennel that incinerates them right in their cells.”

“The ones he steals?”

“He doesn’t steal dogs. His son Tom Parker--”

“Wait. What? He’s got himself a carbon copy?” Martha sighs deep.

“You gonna let me tell this story, or what?”

We sit and glare at each other for a spell, neither of us saying anything. Then she tells me it’ll cost us, taxpayers, two million to liquidate those dogs faster.

“Like I gotta mint cranking out bills in the basement,” I say. “Barely got the money for lottery tickets.”

Martha doesn’t respond to this. Either she’s seeing the truth in what I say, or thinks I’m an idiot. Her mouth’s slit-down to a hyphen, and her eyes flutter into a half-roll. So she just goes on as if I’d said nothing, talking to herself, musing like a poet.

“Water jets set into the kennel walls wash it all down into a gutter, out to the river.”

A mass slaughter’s coming to those dogs that’ll be scrabbling at their kennel walls, eyes full of fear. My stomach lurches at the thought.

“That Tom Parker, Jr. says dogs are thick. Says they won’t know what hit them. As efficient as indoor plumbing. All anyone does is push a button.”

Martha looks savage, her eyes wet, and she’s tearing the Times-Picayune down the middle. Then she blanks out, falling into that vacuum of memory, taking her from our present. Probably to a story she told me once, about this Muffie dog, her dog, being “sent to a farm” when she was a little girl.

That’s when Martha learned what a euphemism was, from a Sally Bloomfield, who corrected everyone. “Like a person passing away,” she’d said, “meaning they died.”

“Going to euphemize that Tom Parker, Jr., is what I’m going to do.”

“You mean euthani-” And I stop right there, reminding myself I don’t want to be a Sally Bloomfield.

“We gotta do something,” Martha says.

“What do you mean we gotta do something? Didn’t you just say we can’t do anything?”

“I’m not sitting here while Tom Parker, Jr., kills dogs and fills his coffers — taking money from our pockets. You know there’s gotta be something in it for him. I bet that one million goes right into an offshore account.”

And Martha’s rocking her aluminum-and-nylon-webbed porch chair, breaking off more of those plastic footies its got.

“Gonna rock right off the porch,” I tell her. Her chin gets all trembly, too. Lines of rage craze her cheeks. And she’s sputtering, not making sense. “Martha, you’ve got to calm down. Your nitroglycerin pills are back in the room, and I don’t move so fast.”

That’s when the gnashing of her teeth stops, and her shoulders relax a little, but not all the way. And she straightens herself out from leaning forward, and we make plans.

That’s how we end up here now, at the Greyfriars City Kennel at the ungodly hour of two o’clock in the morning, when instead, we should be asleep in our shared room, in bed, side by side, with C-PAP machines roaring into the night. Reminding me of the long sleep we’re heading towards.

Martha knew something about hot-wiring. We detach ourselves from the breathing apparatus. Then we fix our hair into nets so it won’t get in the way. Arthritically, we get our robes on right and last, we lace our steel-toe work boots to the top, with a knuckle-cracking, bow-tying flourish. We make our way to the back parking lot, where the night custodian parks his car. Then we borrow Clarence’s puke-green Skylark convertible and tool our way down to the Greyfriars City Kennel. Clarence, our immaculate custodian, kept that car cleaner than an ICU.

Now, Martha and me, we’re chain-cutting a hole in the Greyfriars City Kennel’s outer perimeter fence. We each operate one handle and have to rest the bolt-cutters after every link drops to the ground with a dull thud. And then we fall to the ground too, to take a little rest now and then.

“Done,” Martha says.

“Done!” I say. “A dachshund couldn’t slink its way through that! It’s gotta be big enough, I don’t have to stoop.”

Her shoulders sag, and she gives me the eye like it’s my fault we’re so old and weak now in the bones. The Handyman bolt-cutters weigh over forty pounds, so straightening up might be a moot point anyway, with our cartilage-deficient backs. We’d borrowed those bolt-cutters from the groundskeepers’ tool shed, not from Clarence. It was my idea, since Martha hadn’t thought that part through. And if I had my way, we’d use them as we intended, and not have to hump our way through like some Quasimoto, even if we, in our decrepitude, were exactly as his name suggests.

“This’ll be a cinch,” Martha said after we’d squirmed our way through the fence hole, it still being less than desirable in proportions, but all Martha would do. It was like being birthed onto the premises, only at our advanced age, so without the energy of the newly born, and all the screaming done now on the inside. “No one puts night security on a city dog pound. Hell, steal a dog. What do they care? One less to kill.”

So, I asked her, “Why we wearing these balaclavas‌ then?”

Martha screws up her lips, and her brow wrinkles. She watches those heist films. And then Martha’s face turns pasteboard white, as if no blood ran beneath her skin. She’s looking at the headlights of a police cruiser entering the parking lot.

We’re in a nervous, quiet spell, watching the policeman move from one fire exit to the next, ensuring the door levers don’t rock down and unlatch. We both have to shift in our crouches to get the blood flowing again, where it has stopped. There’s gravel crunching beneath our boots, and the policeman’s flashlight cuts deep lines into the gloom, as its beam skitters like a spider over the walls of the shelter. The damp earth odor of molding leaves, and our own sweat, reminds me we’re not where we should be. In bed.

“He’s sure doing a thorough job of it,” Martha says. We continue crouching in the dark ‘til our knees feel like they’ll explode through our nightgowns. “Checking locks like he’s working on a lock-checking degree.”

“How long we gotta crouch?” I ask her. “I didn’t agree to all this crouching.” And as if he’s answering my question, the patrolman races back to the cruiser, his flashlight dancing over the stars, and tears out of the lot, siren wailing, lights spinning, and now I don’t have to crouch anymore.

“Like I said,” Martha says. “Nothing to worry about.”

Once we’re inside, our eyes, which aren’t too good to begin with, need to adjust. They don’t give those dogs a sliver of comforting light, except what glows from the exit signs, like it’s telling them where they’re going. Martha’s got a little penlight that makes but a pinhole in the darkness.

We had to hike up our bathrobes and nightgowns to climb through one of those basement half-windows. It’s a bit of a struggle for old bones to contort themselves into a design that will let us in without breaking us. Indeed, though that window did its best to keep us out. It bruised my shins and banged my thighs up something fierce. The metal flashing grated my skin like a lemon zester.

We’d gone in feet first, with our steel-toe work boots, and lowered slow into the darkness. We’re as blind as mole-rats when we land on the concrete floor. This almost made me want to quit. Fumbling around in the dark gives me jitters, things jumping out at me from the shadows. Slowly, our eyes adjust, and now we see all those incarcerated dogs with downcast eyes and tails between their legs. We get to work.

After a few unlocked kennels, we come across a slew of locked ones. So, Martha and me gotta go back outside, this time through the front doors (“I’m not going back out that basement window,” I told Martha) to lug back the bolt-cutters we’d left lying by the chain-link fence. Took us over an hour and a half to free those dogs.

Martha says, “Read them kennels’ll open up like gates at a dog track. Synchronized like they’re in some Busby Berkeley musical.”

“Could use some of that synchronizing now,” I said.

The strange thing was, we’d opened those cages, but they just cowered down, flattening to the floor, so beaten they were. Almost made me cry, their spirit gone like that. Martha’s cheeks look like a set of sails lowered to the boom. So, I head back to the office, rummage around Tom Parker’s desk drawers until there’s that air horn. Martha and I walk back out to the front doors we’d propped open with the office chairs. Then, holding the air horn like a starting pistol for a foot race, I pull the trigger. It blasts loud enough to deafen me more than I already am. The noise from those poor death row dogs would probably have done that anyway, if old age hadn’t already gotten there first. Regardless, the shepherd mixes, the Pyrenees, the pit bulls — we heard them all as they poured from their kennels. Something glorious to see. An ocean of dogs washing through the urine-slick corridors of the kennel, and out the front doors.

The sounds they made now weren’t the same as when they wait for death in cages. Wailing, yowling, turned to high-pitched yips and rapid, excited panting — the sound of freedom. The shepherds leaped, and the black and white border collies ran over each other’s backs, and in all of their shining eyes, they thanked us for this freedom.

They flash by, all fur and tongues, some afflicted with mange, some missing an eye, one with a set of canted wheels half-tied to his back end with leather straps, but all with tongues lolling to the side. Some even stopped to check on us, giving us a sniff, sometimes a lick, and jumping up on our chests in a two-paw embrace. Even some of the three-legged goldens no one wanted anymore gave us an embrace, if not a trembly one.

One of the Pyrenees stayed right by us. Didn’t run away with the others. Laid down in front of us, its tail up and methodically waving, ears laid back like in a windstorm. “I’m taking this one,” I tell Martha. But in truth, I think it was the Pyrenees who chose us.

And then I say, “God should have stopped at dogs. We all should have been dogs. The mistake was in making us.”

But Martha has taken out her hearing aids again. She didn’t hear a word I said.

“‘Sent to the farm,’” Martha says. “I’ll send that Col. Parker, Jr., to the farm, is what I’ll do.”

My spine ached from all that crouching and hauling of heavy objects. But we’d done something good for those dogs, and so maybe it didn’t hurt as much as it could. Not like if we’d done something truly evil to that Tom Parker, Jr. instead.

Tremors raked through my skeletal frame, and sweat soaked my nightgown. And then, one massive ‌cluster headache took up residence beneath my brow.

We stood there watching those dogs run into the darkness. And Bella, that’s what I named this Pyrenees lying in front of us, just looked up to us with contemplating eyes, like some kind of dog god. So, I turned to Martha, almost doubled over in searing cluster headache pain, my mouth dry and brittle, like the pages of an old book. I said this to her, knowing full well she’d never hear me:

“Martha,” I said. “Don’t it make you feel good? Like a superhero. What we done?” And Bella, she moves her head so her moist nose just touches my boots, leaving a dark, wet comma, and now’s when I cry.

I’m thinking, too, as Martha and me, we’re walking back to the Skylark, that most of the time, God doesn’t see us. Martha and me, I mean. Like He’s suffering from tunnel vision, looking somewhere else, and not into the Buena Vista Senior Center Motel. Like He needs corrective lenses of a sort.

But tonight, I’m thinking maybe He does. And maybe He’s doing that through Bella. She is something else to see, slinking those hips as she walks in front of us, that tail curled in a sweeping sideways question mark, facing up to the crescent moon, feathers hanging like the branches of a weeping willow, dangling to the earth. I’m hoping, anyway, He sees this, and not the times I’m taking his name in vain. Like when I put on my boots, or when I’m squirming in my aluminum-and-nylon-webbing chair, cursing and slapping at those hellacious mosquitoes, or when I can’t read the writing on my prescription bottles, and throw them down the sink. You wouldn’t want to hear what I say then. What I say about God, then. You wouldn’t want to hear that.