THE DOG HUNTERS (completed)

31 - GONE

I woke up late the next morning. I could instantly tell by the angle of the sun it was dog hunting time. I felt like the crackhead of yore had killed me after all, or at least almost nearly killed me, and then attached my body to the back of a city bus where I'd been dragged around town for several days.

Tinto and Lulubelle were gone.

They'd left me the blankets I was sleeping in, and for a long while I didn't care about anything except the pain in my head, so I just lay in my cozy nest, and then, as the sun arched higher in the sky, its big hands reached out to me and prodded me up. Through the wall of pain I thanked the sun because the only thing worse than how I was feeling now was getting harassed by the police, which would surely happen ifI stayed where I was much longer.

I wandered blindly until I found a water spigot on the side of little house with no cars in its driveway. Water felt real good. Cold and sharp, like life, and I had so much I puked it all back up – but not my clothes this time. And with the puke came this yellow, jello-y stuff that I took to be bile, which told me that the poison was at least out of my stomach, or had destroyed my stomach.

I found a pine tree near the spigot and lay down on pine needles, and moaned. I told my mother I was sorry, I guess for everything.

I don't know why I lay there and thought about my mother. We were never too close, or just not close enough to have much of an impact on mylife. After I lost my condo and all my savings trying to win that stupid worker's comp court case I moved back in with her, but we pretty much left each other alone.

All told, I'd always thought my mother was a pretty cool character,especially since she put up with my father, who sounded like a dickwhen she talked about him, which was hardly ever. They'd met at thelocal Presbyterian church. He was a pharmacist who fooled around and probably enjoyed lots of anal sex. She was a homemaker and as such she cared about her home, she didn't so much care who was in it. When I was about five dad started deeply dipping into his supply of drugs,taking and then selling, and basically went crazy, and was caught and went to prison. My mother brought in boarders and slept in what had been his office.

My mother was a very tidy person and she never got fat. For reasons that might have had to do with my father going to prison and losing that income, she stopped buying clothes at the time of his departure, and never started again.

Lying on the bed of pine needles, I thought about my mother lying on one of the chaises she had in the sunroom. She liked reading magazines. Ithink this represented the zenith of what she understood life to beabout. She did it as much as possible. When she died, I found out she'd left her prized house to the church – not to me. It was ablow, though not an unexpected one.

 I breathed in the rich smells of pine and packed earth and tried not to puke again, and thought maybe I was having a moment. Maybe there was something here to figure out, about me and my mother, which would then help me figure other stuff out.