DoG

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  DoG

  By

  Matt Hlinak

  Edited by Jimmie Ford & Etienne DeForest

  Cover art by 'Pseudo Manitou'

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  For more books like this check out

  www.bizarropress.com

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  Part I

  Fool’s Gold

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  Diary of Culann Riordan, Day 1

  I don’t know what day it is or how long I’ve been out here or how long it’s been since I found it, so I’m just going to have to call this Day 1. I’m not sure who I’m writing to, since I don’t think I’ve got very long to live, nor do I expect anyone who finds this diary to have long to live either. Maybe it will be found by people from a future society whose science (magic?) is sufficiently advanced to allow them to survive on this island.

  Maybe I’ll be able to teach the dogs to read…

  The point is—well, I guess I don’t have a point, since I’m really just killing time.

  If I had a point it would be that I’m writing this for myself, not even with the expectation that I’ll ever read what I’m writing, but that perhaps the act of writing will help me understand what has happened. That I’m even in this mess seems to me to be clearly the result of my misdeeds, but the fact that I alone survived tells me…what? Do I deserve to still be alive, or is my survival continued punishment?

  I feel reasonably good today (if you can even call what this is “today” when I haven’t seen the sun rise or set in weeks). The right leg is almost completely healed, which has taken a lot of the pressure off the left leg, leading to modest improvement on that front. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to walk without my trusty barstool-leg cane. As you (whoever you are) can see by my penmanship, the right hand is a mess, but I’m considering myself lucky that I can even write at all.

  The dogs are driving me crazy. I can’t take more than three steps without tripping over one of them. It creeps me out the way their eyes follow me whatever I do. Dozens of guileless eyes always trained on me, monitoring my slightest movement. I can’t tell if it’s out of loving devotion, or whether they’re planning the perfect moment to leap on top of me and strip the flesh from my bones. I can’t get that image out of my head…

  I don’t know what I’d do without them.

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  1

  Like many of Pyrite’s other residents, Culann Riordan had run into some trouble in the Lower Forty-Eight and hoped for a fresh start in America’s last frontier. Pyrite is a remote island village about a mile off Alaska’s west coast. In the summer, the population peaks at around forty, mostly fishermen. The rest are the women and children hearty and unfortunate enough to belong to the family of an Alaskan fisherman.

  Culann arrived in Pyrite in early June, just before the end of the school year.

  Someone else would be administering the final exams for his classes. He stumbled off the ferry, dropping his near-empty thermos onto the dock. What little vodka remained soaked into the planks. Culann kicked the thermos into the water where it bobbed in the ferry boat’s wake. The captain, a fat, little man dressed incongruously in a Hawaiian shirt, smirked and reversed his engines, heading back to the mainland. Culann had been his only passenger, and no one had come to greet their arrival.

  At this time of year and at this latitude, the sun barely dipped below the horizon in the evening. The sun was out of sight, but its light still bleached the night sky. Between the black water below him and the pale sky above, the world in which Culann found himself seemed completely devoid of color, like the surface of the moon. It was a far cry from the miles of lush lawns he’d been accustomed to back home.

  He reached into his pocket and drew out a crumpled post-it note with 27 Pyrite Avenue scribbled on it. He walked to the end of the dock and stepped down onto a long, gravel road that seemed to stretch the length of the small island. Though it was unmarked, Culann assumed he was standing on Pyrite Avenue since he could see no other roads. Off to his right was a short trailer which ran right up to the road. A post pounded into the ground next to it had a 1 painted on it. To his left was little more than a log cabin, which had a 2 painted on its door.

  He trudged up the gravel road, setting off a symphony of barking dogs. One dog owner or another would periodically tell the mutts to shut the hell up without success.

  Culann didn’t encounter anyone aside from a sixtyish Native woman with long black hair wearing a raincoat despite the clear skies above. She waved stoically from the doorway of a humble dwelling as he passed by. Culann waved back.

  About a mile from the dock, Culann came upon a dirty, white trailer with a rusty trash barrel out front that had a 27 painted on it. A thunderous barking emerged from behind the thin aluminum door. A familiar voice called out, “Fuck off, Alphonse,” and the barking ceased. Eager to be reunited with his cousin, Culann quickened his pace. He promptly tripped over a rut and pitched headfirst into the concrete step leading up to Frank’s front door.

  “Culann, is that you?”

  Frank flung the door open. The bottom corner caught Culann on the forehead just as he was pushing himself off the ground. He rolled to his back and lay on the grass with one bloody gash in his forehead from the door joined by a smaller cut on the temple from the fall.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Frank asked.

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  “I believe I lost my footing,” Culann replied with a slight slur to his speech.

  “And you’re supposed to be the smart one,” Frank said with a smile.

  Frank grabbed his cousin under the armpits and dragged him up over the step and into the trailer.

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  Before moving to Alaska, Culann had been a high school English teacher with poor impulse control and a taste for liquor. He’d left Schaumburg, Illinois, before they could yank his teaching certificate and possibly toss him in jail. Frank offered to help Culann get on a commercial fishing vessel with him. Culann had no other prospects for employment, so he accepted. But it was more than just a job. The work was exotic, grueling and fraught with peril. It was like he was being punished and rewarded at the same time. If he could hack it, he would emerge stronger, wiser and cleansed of his sins.

  The cousins had been close as kids, growing apart as they got older. Frank was a year older, and they’d spent much of their youth traipsing together through the woods by Frank’s house. Frank maintained his love of the wilderness into adulthood, while Culann developed into a suburban mallrat. In their teenage years, the fifty-mile distance between their respective high schools became an unspannable chasm. They had their own friends, their own hobbies. Frank was into ice hockey, hunting and White Zombie, while Culann preferred soccer, video games and Weezer. After high school, Culann went off to college, and Frank became a roofer. They’d only seen each other at a handful of family gatherings in the past decade, although Culann had attended both of Frank’s weddings.

  After five years in Alaska, Frank was barely recognizable. He had a bushy, black beard that obscured his dimpled-cheeks. His hair, which he’d worn in a crewcut for most of his life, flared out wildly from beneath his tattered Blackhawks hat. Always taller and stockier than Culann, he now sported an impressive beer gut that strained against his t-shirt. Though Culann had softened considerably from his soccer-playing days, he was still slim. The two had often joked about the prodigious bellies their fathers hauled around, but Frank was now every bit the Riordan man.

  Alphonse, Frank’s blue-eyed Siberian husky, growled at first, but calmed down when he saw how pathetic Culann was, bleeding drunkenly on the rug. Frank

  administered “Alaskan first aid” by covering the cuts on Culann’s forehead with a rag and duct-taping it into place. Culann pulled himself onto the shabby c
ouch that formed the centerpiece of Frank’s tiny living room, while Frank stepped out into the even tinier kitchen and returned with two cans of Molson.

  “Here you go, Culann. Not like you need any more. Might as well get it out of your system now, cuz you’re gonna work your ass off in a couple of days.”

  Culann thanked him for the beer, and Frank plopped down on the couch.

  Alphonse got up and lay across Frank’s feet, never once taking his eyes off Culann.

  Frank didn’t have a TV, so they listened to the radio, an AM country-western station out of Fairbanks. Though this broad-bellied mountain man looked different from the boy he remembered, Frank’s gem-green eyes glittered familiarly from under the brim of his cap.

  “So my mom says you’re some kind of child molester,” Frank said.

  “It was just a misunderstanding.”

  “You accidently fell into some little girl’s panties?”

  “First off, I didn’t get into anyone’s panties. And second, she was sixteen.”

  “I’m just messing with you, Culann. What happened?”

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  Culann sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He took a swallow from his beer can and rested it on his knee.

  “It was over spring break,” Culann said. “I didn’t go anywhere. I just stayed in town. There’s this tavern about half a mile from my house called DeLuca’s. I like it because I can walk home if I get too inebriated.”

  “You always were so responsible.”

  “I went over to DeLuca’s for lunch. It was a weekday, Thursday I think, so the place was pretty crowded over the lunch hour, and then there were only three people left after everybody else went back to work. Vic DeLuca, the owner, he’s a nice guy. I’ve been frequenting his place since I got out of college. Well, his daughter was on spring break, too, so she was helping out with the lunchtime rush. I never put two-and-two together, but his daughter is Kat DeLuca, who was in my class last year. Good student.”

  “I bet she really polished your apple,” Frank said while stroking the air with his right hand.

  Culann stood up, drained his beer and headed into Frank’s kitchen for another.

  “Get me one,” Frank shouted.

  “Fuck you,” Culann replied, but came back with two beers.

  “Okay, so you got caught stroking this pussy-Kat?”

  Culann silently sipped his beer.

  “Come on, cuz. You got to sing for your supper. Tell me the story, or I’ll make you sleep outside. Let the mosquitoes suck you dry.”

  Culann was not exactly enjoying Frank’s teasing, but he appreciated how they’d fallen instantly into their boyhood banter. Plus, Culann relished the opportunity to tell his side of the story to someone inclined to give him a fair hearing, wiseass comments aside.

  “So Kat DeLuca was waiting on me, which was really weird for both of us

  because we were used to seeing each other in a completely different context. We’d spent hours together in class, but we really didn’t know one another at all. She’s used to seeing me in a tie everyday, and here I was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, not to mention a long sight from sober on a Thursday afternoon.”

  “I bet you made quite an impression.”

  “I suppose I did. So, anyway, we were talking, and I was drunk. I was a lot more gregarious than usual. I was asking her questions, like what teachers didn’t she like, and then I was agreeing with her when she told me. These were the kinds of things a teacher shouldn’t be saying. And she was delighted because kids rarely get to hear adults speak so freely around them.”

  At this point in the narrative, Alphonse let out a putrid fart. Frank shoved him away with his foot, but there was no escaping the smell in the tiny shack.

  “He’s your dog all right, Frank,” Culann said with a cough.

  “We can’t all be refined little pederasts like you.”

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  “I’m going to buy you a dictionary, you dumb hick. A pederast is into young boys, not sixteen-year-old girls. Although I’m not into sixteen-year-old girls either.”

  “Okay, Noah Fucking Webster. What kind of perversion do you got?”

  “I don’t have any kind of perversion.”

  “So what do you call a guy with a hard-on for sixteen-year-old girls?”

  “An ephebophile.”

  “I knew you’d know it. So then what happened?”

  “Well, we were really having a good time. I was telling tales outside of school, as they say—this teacher was arrested for drunk driving, that teacher cheats on her husband, this teacher is gay. And she was laughing and saying ‘I didn’t know you were so funny, Mr. Riordan.’ And then she started touching my arm when she was talking, and I realized we were getting into dangerous territory. Her dad was behind the bar, and he had to have seen this. So, discretion being the better part of valor and all that, I decided to take my leave.

  “I just stood up and put my coat on. I played it cool. And then Kat said, ‘It was really nice talking to you, Mr. Riordan.’ And she gave me a hug. She was just the right height that the top of her head came up to my chin, and I wasn’t thinking or anything, I just gave grazed my lips across her hair. It was like an autonomic reaction, but there was nothing dirty about it. It was just a little peck on the top of the head.”

  “If it was nothing, what are you doing in my living room?” Frank asked.

  “Her dad saw it and went berserk. He came tearing out from behind the bar, and I didn’t have to think about it. I just pushed Kat away from me and ran. I banged into a table and bruised my thigh. It was at that point that Vic caught up with me and started punching me in the side of the head. He’s an older guy, but defending his daughter’s virtue gave him strength. I was saying, ‘Take it easy, Vic,’ and trying to push him away while heading for the door. I finally broke away from him, and he said he was going to get his gun, so I ran as fast as I could. I just left my car parked out front. As far as I know, it’s still there.”

  This was more or less how it had all happened.

  “That’s just precious, Culann. You give a girl a little smooch on the head and now you’re a wanted sex offender. You might as well have bent her over the bar for all the trouble you’re in.”

  “That’s life. You get in as much trouble for almost doing something as when you actually do it. Let that be a lesson to you.”

  “Hell, almost doing something has never been my problem.”

  They both got good and drunk that night. Culann planned to dry out the next day.

  Alphonse started to warm to him, or at least was no longer staring by morning, but Culann still didn’t dare pet him. He knew animals to be exceptional judges of character.

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  Diary of Culann Riordan, Day 2

  None of this would have been possible without Worner’s cannonball. He thought it was his good luck charm – the good luck charm that got him killed.

  The Orthrus men were a superstitious bunch, which isn’t surprising given their collective lack of education. More importantly, though, they work the kind of job where one piece of bad luck spells death. I don’t blame them for trying to tip the scales of luck in their favor.

  Worner had the cannonball his grandfather had given him.

  Frank had a lucky rabbit’s foot, which was nothing like the fake rabbit’s feet I used to buy at the novelty shop. No, this was the foot of a real-life rabbit Frank had found in a badger trap out in the woods. The rabbit had evidently gotten caught in the trap, and then some other creature came by and ate the rabbit, leaving just its trapped paw behind.

  Why Frank would consider this lucky was never explained to my satisfaction.

  McGillicuddy, in a surprisingly-romantic gesture, kept a lock of his wife’s hair tied with a strip of lace from her wedding dress. He showed it to me once and told me he’d tear out my “pink little nuts” if I told anyone. I don’t think this diary counts as a breach of that promise, but he can’t carry through on his threat at this point an
yway.

  I didn’t carry any good luck charm with me. Maybe I should have…

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  The cousins toured the island in Frank’s antique pick-up truck, which he’d driven across the frozen sea in winter. It seemed to Culann like a needless risk, since the entire island could be circled on foot in under an hour. Every other shack had its own truck rusting contentedly out front; they had all presumably gotten out here the same way as Frank’s. Most had long-expired or completely missing plates. The dashboard clock said it was seven-thirty in the morning, but the sky maintained the same hazy, twilit glow Culann had seen when he fell asleep. Northern Alaska in June really disrupts the circadian rhythms. As they drove, Frank explained who lived where and whether the resident was “a good dude” or “a guy you don’t fuck with.” Everyone, it seemed, fell into one category or the other.

  The island was heavily wooded and swarming with mosquitoes. The windshield was encrusted with squashed bloodsuckers, and the cousins kept the windows rolled up to keep the bugs out. The inhabitants of Pyrite lived in haphazardly-spaced dwellings along the island’s eastern edge, which faced the mainland across a mile of calm, black water.

  The western edge of the island was rockier and subject to the year-round tantrums of the Bering Sea. The eastern half of the island was bisected by Pyrite Avenue, the gravel road they now drove upon, with a few dirt side streets. “Downtown” Pyrite, which was about a quarter-mile from the ferry dock, consisted of a general store called Wal-Mart Jr. and a saloon with no sign. The latter was their final destination. So much for drying out today.

  “C’mon,” Frank said, “you can buy me breakfast.”

  Half of the men in town were there already. They were all large men. The shorter ones were stocky, while the skinnier ones were tall. Most were stocky and tall. They all wore dirty denim and scuffed boots. The youngest man couldn’t have been much over eighteen, with ruddy cheeks and a sparse goatee, yet the hand he extended to Culann was encased in about four decades worth of calluses. The oldest man was easily seventy, yet his shining, black eyes and erect shoulders suggested a spry youthfulness. Culann didn’t think he could compete physically with any man in this bar, although he realized that he would have to once they were all at sea together.