Vain Empires

Solon Timothy Woodward

To the open waters. To the open brown waters of the Nacogdoches. Pooch takes a look at his brother, Remmy, and the road pitches in their stupor between gelatinous walls of trees, foliage. The truck lurches—“The transmission is fucked”—and the nails of the pit bull, Sammy, click frenetically across the metal bed. Edison’s Shrimp and Seafood. The late Louisiana afternoon is thick and allows no breath, no full sweat; it’s as if the horizon dehisced and expelled a tumid must. “That’s it, Money,” and the truck coasts to the edge of the service road, and Sammy, barking, barking so that she’s now hoarse, gnaws at the wire grating, her incisors sticking through the little hexagons.
    “A shrimp truck, a fuckin’ shrimp truck,” Pooch says.
    “Yo, you take what you can get, b-boy,” Remmy says.
    Huddled beside the propped hood, Remmy pulls at the engine. A tulle of gnats takes shape over them. For a moment it’s as if the two men were hazily drifting cartoons. The insects coil darkly inward above them, withering into a deflated balloon.
    “Man, fugget about it. This is messed up, let’s take the dog back.” Gnats fly into the mouth: a balloon that delimits speech.
    The whine of a car engine approaches, causing them to drift to the side of the road. For a moment the fulgent glare of the headlights leaps in the face, pinches the eye, leaps off. The dog is startled, quiet. The motor gently fades into the road. Pooch says, “It’s getting late. I’m hungry, man.” Flying small things, black ciphers, hundreds of them spreading upward, stipple the dusk. “Remmy, man. Take the dog back,” Pooch says, and Remmy, “It’s all set, right? Anyways”—the few coiled hairs on Remmy’s chin hold tiny webs of sweat—“I think I’ve found what the fuck’s wrong. Turn the thing, Pooch.”

He met Remmy for the first time in his life six months ago. His father, who Pooch hadn’t seen in dose to a year, across from him in a red vinyl booth—mumbling, cursing—takes out a tiny black notebook and pecks the number onto a napkin. “What are you? Nineteen? That makes Remmy around twenty-eight. Somethin’ like that. Anyway, this was what he gave me the last time I saw him,” he says, yawning, rubbing the side of his nose, lifting his glasses with a finger. “But that don’t mean jack. He could be anywhere. Hell. Could be paying rent in hell for all I know.” The old man howls at his own joke, then crumples up the napkin and backhands it into Pooch’s shoulder.
    Pooch calls. “Hello? Remmy? This is your brother, Pooch,” and they talk and talk with Pooch suddenly telling Remmy of their father’s shooting him a couple of years ago. Hanging up he feels small and stupid. You don’t just introduce yourself and tell somebody, “Oh, and yeah, and the old man shot me,” and he mentally kicks himself. He feels like calling Remmy back and explaining himself again, but he thinks better of it.
    They meet in Alexandria, the Upper Third, in front of the boarded storefront tessellated with faded campaign posters. They go to Remmy’s place. The walkway is littered with human things: a Kangor cap; a sun-bleached plastic bat; wax cups and KFC bags; islands of rain-bloated diapers; a man’s shoe full of rain. The air is littered with sweat, knots of perfume musk. The wrought-iron railing dividing the steps is bent toward the ground, and the security guard is jawing with a pregnant girl in a lemon yellow sweatsuit and a transparent shower cap.
    In the living room, Remmy points out to Pooch two men. His cousins, he says, Kim and Bobby.
    “So they pull up on the street with the van. Bang, right? The sides kicked. Bang! Bang! So I tell Kim to chill but, naw, the nigger pops out of the truck with a cherry and has to open. Out pops this cow on a rope, bellowing and shit, chasing folk all over, right? Kim then gets smart and goes into the garage, coming out with this King Kong-sized monkey wrench in one hand and this lard-ass pipe in the other. Jip grabs the rope, we get the cow to the back lot. Then—what a fuckin’ mess.”
    “But the fool tells me to hit the cow—bam!—in the head with the pipe while they got it, Kim shouts above the blaring of the R&B station, slapping with the bam a Buddha-sized belly through an open brown shirt.
    “Yeah but I tole him,” Bobby interjects, “I tole him ‘Kimmy—bro—hit here behind the neck’,” Bobby gestures, displaying his own neck, “‘where the pressure point is.’ But does he listen? Hell no! He hits the fuckin’ thing in the face.”
    Pooch earnestly sits across from his new cousins. He understands that they had wrestled a Holstein into a U-Haul from a farm near Bunkie.
    The bass from an old floor model hi-fi thumps loudly, jangling the glass baubles on a lamp. It’s everywhere that Pooch has been, the same devouring metronomic thud—from the parked cars, the open windows, the boom boxes perched on stoops. It’s between the brake squeals of the delivery trucks, the grunting yelps in the hallways. It’s a wave with incisors that drowns and consumes.
    They sweat. Midsummer before an open window makes the dusk palpable—furred, sticky. Pooch feels his eagerness as an itch, dissociating, irritating. Damn: a voiceless plosive, he wishes it would rain.
    They get loaded. A buzz. Drunk, he doesn’t like the smell of the day; it smells like spit. They chased the animal right onto Maguerite Street. He squints. All the faces are friable now; with a smudge of his thumb they’d bleed into a mess.
    “Almost into a truck, right? But it ends up zigzagging back into a ditch, Dickhead hanging onto the rope. I remember thinking, I don’t think the fuckin’ thing can see. Anyway, it trips, and Bobby pops it a few more times with the pipe. He then turns to me, ‘I don’t think this is gonna do it.’ All panicky. So I go to the house and get my .38. I pump it a few times, you know, the thing’s dead, right? Stiff, and Ken says to me, ‘You think it’s dead, man? Its eyes are movin’.” I just look at the dick. Then he says, ‘How many steaks do you think we’ve got?’” Bobby and Kim choke laughing.
    “I’ve got to hit your bathroom, man,” Pooch says. Remmy points down the hall. A girl stares at Pooch from a bedroom off the hallway. The bed is rumpled; she’s splayed across the top sheet. Nineteen or so, Creole-looking.
    Back in the living room, Remmy sashays toward Pooch, a burlesque of a conga instructor. “You’ve seen Lita? My lady? My chiquita? Daddy’s Puerto Rican. Come on. Now I’m gonna take you to a picnic. Meet some other folk.”
    Down the street Remmy pulls Pooch over to the garage of an empty house. A streak of sunlight through the window flashes across a gray pelt. “That’s my Sammy,” Remmy says. “Purebred pit.”
    “You fight her?” Pooch asks.
    “Few times. A winner, man. No mercy.”
    The picnic is a backyard barbecue. There is a discussion about the end of the world. About ways to see the end.
    “The visionary children of Medjugorje,” Remmy interjects, reminds everyone that he’s Catholic. The grill flares and blossoms behind him. “The dancing sun and shit.”
    “Crystal-eaters, channelers,” a friend says. “That dude, Nostradamus!”
    “A prophet!” Remmy says.
    “Saw him on Discovery Channel.”
    Pooch listens, sipping beer from a Big Slurp cup he keeps wedged between his thighs. He feels transparent, that his thoughts can be read in the air over him.That his fears sit in a chair above his head. He sits in a ratty lawn chair propped with cinder blocks.
    “Anyway,” his brother says, “there’s this huge black thing—huge!—moving through space. Scientists were talking about it on the news. The thing’s eating up everything-universes, galaxies. They don’t know what it is, but it’s heading for us.”
    Pooch is suddenly convulsed with a dip in his high. A mental paper cut. He concentrates on communicating his thoughts to a woman, a black-skinned woman who wears a platinum page boy wig and holds a cigarette between her fingers like a sparkler.
    “Check the bitch out,” Remmy says, pointing to the woman. “No character.”
    The woman’s wig catches fire.
    After a moment she digs a hand under her hairline and flings the wig into an inflatable kiddie pool. She lists forward for what seems to Pooch like revolutions of the planet. In fact Pooch watches the clouds explode and scarify in a swirl over her head. He looks at her head, little fists of hair knotted about her scalp, looks at the floating wig that resembles a drowned Pomeranian. He closes his eyes and sinks into the ruckus.
    “Like I said, no character. Like my boy here,” his brother laughs. He then grabs Pooch’s knee. “Look, man, just messin’ with you. And sorry about what the old man did. A real work of art, that piece of shit. Anyway, it happens. Check out Marvin Gaye.”
    “It was a fever,” Pooch says. “He was sick.”
    “Yeah, whatever.” Remmy then stares off at the commotion at the grill.
    “Suppose I know what it is,” Remmy suddenly says. “This big black thing’s an assembly line. Assembly line of End-of-the-Worlds, each one found, judged, and fucked.” Remmy pauses. He then throws back his head. “Wild motherfuckers!” he shouts. “Wild to the end!” The dog is Remmy’s, but for the past four months, Pooch’s aunt lets him keep her behind the house.

The dog is Remmy’s, but Pooch feels it should be his: he has love for Sammy. Pooch steps from the dust and shade of a tree and thinks, Yes, she should be mine. He talks, and the road talks-a drowsy, thick dialogue, as if the day’s set in a gray spurt of Vaseline.
    A hot, moist wind pulls in from across the plants a napthene smell from the tankers. The stuttering sheets from the billboard overhead—Mo-, Mo-, Mondrian For Supervisor—pucker, listlessly flap. There’s no resistance to the wind; it enters him noisily, bloats and picks him, leaving his skeleton pastelike and chalky—
    “Pooch?”
    Two dogs hobble into the murk of a waste field—a dance of courtship, then mounting. Pooch melts back into the shade and squats.
    “So that’s how you get off, watching doggies,” a voice says. Pooch looks up and grins. Remmy’s face comes into relief sweated obsidian. With the sun behind him, he’s black, blacker than his shadow. Pooch blinks and moistens his eyes. First he sees a nose, then nostrils, recessed eyes, even the U-shaped dent in the middle of his forehead.
    “Let’s go to On’s,” Remmy says. “On’s World over on Lee. Got to meet someone there.”
    They flag down a bus. “Lend me some change, man, bus fare,” Remmy says, and they leap across a concrete ditch of mustard-colored water where there floats the carcass of a crow, a plastic milk carton, plaid pants. Pooch’s foot catches above the lip of the concrete gash and sinks to his ankle in the mud.
    Sooty fumes, dust, the smell of armpits, breath: the doors remain open as the bus creeps past the Sonya Quarters, belching black exhaust. Receding storm waters make mirrors of ditches, potholes.
    They get off in front of the A&P “I see who I need to see. Come on,” Remmy says.
    It’s the sun, the heat. There are things that heat-tinge, fleck the imagination, memory. The sky is scorched blue now. The run-down supermarket looms, and Pooch enters. This is where he used to work—where the fluorescent lights dangle overhead on thin stalks, where the shelves are gray steel. Some of the tiles are missing; black tar gleams in gaps like missing teeth. “In or out!” a sack-shaped woman bellows. Pooch continues to play with the door’s electric eye.
    “You used to work here, remember?” he says to himself, and he sees nothing’s changed, that Aisle One is still fruits and vegetables, that Aisle Two is, Aisle is—he’s still high.
    Outside, the colors are garish: orange with purple, pink with turquoise: clothes, buildings, sky, cars. A pack of pariah dogs roots through a heap of refuse, glaring slit-eyed at the two of them. A three-legged dog snarls and snaps. Remmy stoops and picks up a crushed can, hurls it at the animal. A metallic yelp cracks and fades into the buzz of the sun.
    They drink in the shade of the A&P, a black triangle that cuts into a parked Buick. A man with a hair net approaches. “How’s Sammy?” He wears a bilious yellow shirt with little wagon wheels—a pajama top!—that’s unbuttoned upon skin so ashy as to be slate blue. An even darker-skinned woman with wiry orange hair plays up beside him. A black diamond of sweat sticks below the breasts of her blue halter.
    They move between the store and a warehouse behind the store, ochre wall, dark brown wall, a split between the two: iridescent blue sky. The four of them stake a stance, their shadows collapse alongside them.
    The man with the hair net is bullish, muscular . . . a thick, muscled neck with a head like a squatting bulldog—a Minotaur. The Minotaur approaches Remmy about his dog fighting Sammy. “How much?” he asks, and Pooch studies the man’s shirt with Remmy responding, “How much you putting up?” There’s a faint smell like bilge, a blast of wet wind sucks through the corridor, the shirt flutters like a flag.
    Remmy argues with the Minotaur, and the woman stands there, raking both hands through her short Afro. Even the hair in her armpits is orange, Pooch notices. I don’t want her to fight, he thinks. I don’t want her fighting this one.
    In the end it’s settled. Tomorrow. The orange-haired woman digs into her jean pocket and withdraws a withered home-roll that pops and crackles as it burns. Pooch and the woman share it, and he adds to their high with a brown-bagged forty ounce.
    “I don’t think we should fight her,” Pooch says. Remmy ignores him as they cross the cracked, gapped parking lot of the A&P A small crater half swallows a shopping cart, and the poled sign is faded; the A and ampersand float above, but the P is in shards at the base of the pole.
    “So you gonna get off on this, right? The doggies?” Remmy gestures. “Just messin’ with you, man. Let’s go.” And they head for On’s.
    Pooch pulls at his beer under the rattle and drip of the air conditioner. “Who’s he, this guy’s dog. Koozie, right? His dog’s Koozie,” Pooch says. “I think the whole thing’s messed up.” He can’t bring himself to look at Remmy.
    “It’s all right, man. All right that you feel that way,” Remmy says. “Either way, you’ve got the check.” He rises from the table.
    Broke, except for change from the store, Pooch looks at Remmy, panic flickering at the edge of his face.
    Remmy says, “You broke? You gonna beg me for some money?” Pooch stares at the center between Remmy’s eyebrows, a little tattooed cross, right under the little dent in his forehead. “I thought so. You a bitch, ain’t you, buddy,” Remmy says and places a twenty on the table.

Wild—wild to the end.
    Remmy is not a clown. He is a professional. He explains to Pooch that he’s like a conductor of an orchestra or the Pentium chip in a computer. “Like the commercial,” he says. “I don’t make the product, I make the product better.” He is a facilitator, a middleman: he provides mules for coke runs to and from Shreveport and Baton Rouge; he blueprints and recruits for break-ins; he has secretaries working Huey P. Long Hospital and Cabrini rip off credit card applications from the terminal cancer and AIDS patients. “It’s psychology, pimp psychology’s all it is. Play into people’s heads.”
    “So you ready, little brother?”
    They are parked behind a deserted shopping center in Fort Polk. A warehouse faces them. It is Remmy’s plan to scoop the warehouse and, with some associates, sell the Christian music CDs in Atlanta.
    The parking lot is cracked and parched like a dry lake bed. Arsenical weeds tuft through the asphalt, pentimenti of graffiti sprawl across the walls.
    “Get ready for some fun,” Remmy says.
    Pooch looks at Remmy and tries to trace the thread of family resemblance. No set of father and sons look so different from each other—his father is light-skinned with BB-shot hair, whereas he and his brother are dark with their heads shaved; Remmy is solid and towers over him and the old man. But shared tics and gestures race between them: all three rub their faces between their hands, pull their ears.
    “What is it? You want to do me?” Remmy asks.
    “No,” says Pooch.
    “Quit staring then,” Remmy says.
    This is the parking lot of the dead shopping center. Pooch is now shaking. That pinch that hits just before coming down from a high. The spectral, looming lamps in the lot are on a timer; every few minutes they flare with a ghastly yellow light then dim out.
    The three of them did get together. Something orchestrated by Pooch where Pooch, Remmy, and the old man met on Decatur Street in East Baton Rouge, right in front of the Pink Pussycat, a porno-movie house. “Yeah, baby! Wholesome family fun!” his father bellowed, striding up to them. They stood under the marquee shooting the bull, eventually running out of conversation. Traffic purred through the silence while their old man stood there, tugging at a turquoise earring. “Shall we go inside?” his father finally said, pulling out his wallet, “Hard-on’s on me.” Remmy shook his head. “I’ll take a rain check. Some other time, Pop.” Remmy snorted and fell into the sidewalk traffic while the old man threw back his head and cackled.
    “Get out the car,” Remmy says.
    Pooch paces morosely back and forth next to a parking island. In an instant it seems to have become much cooler, and Pooch stomps around as if he were in subzero weather, though it has only dipped into the seventies.
    “Why you having me stand out here?” Pooch shouts. Remmy simply leans to the side, his head nested in the crook of his forearm. Suddenly Remmy begins to talk.
    “Did the old man ever tell you about Mills? Mills-the-Sweat? That was the old man’s big story. They called him Mills-the-Sweat because all the old fuck did was sweat. Sweat up a storm. I mean it could be twenty degrees outside and they’d be sitting there in coats and the guy would have to mop under his arms with a towel because he’d be wringing wet.” Pooch sees Remmy isn’t even listening to what is coming out of his own mouth, that his mind is elsewhere.
    A Volkswagen pulls up in the parking lot. The interior lights are on with a man and woman arguing in sign. There is a scrum of gestures, feverish snarls, and grimaces. The woman suddenly turns to the glass and bangs her head against it while Pooch stares at them. The man gives him the finger as they exit the parking lot, the woman’s head pasted to the glass, watching Pooch.
    Pooch turns to Remmy as if to say, “Did you see?” but is suddenly facing a glint, a sliver of gun that Remmy has pointed in his direction.
    “Déjà vu, huh?” Remmys says, then, “Just messin’, man, just messin’.” Remmy yawns, letting the barrel drop, “Little brother,” he says, almost a whisper, “why in the hell did you ever look me up?”

He walks two blocks to his aunt’s house and releases Sammy from a small Cyclone cage in her backyard, a rubbed, raw patch of brown earth with a few arsenical green weeds tufting at the base of the poles.
    “Come on, girl, come on.” Sammy shivers. “You all right, girl?” Leaping about the yard she’s momentarily suspended midair, forming the letter C. She’s too skinny, Pooch thinks as he puts on her choker and chain.
    Approaching the A&P he steps through the vinegary white mud of a drainage ditch, slips, climbs up the embankment, then through a fence again into the parking lot. He sees the man, the Minotaur, without the hair net, without the woman. His hair is slick, blackened, polished. He is leaning against the fence, yelling at somebody in the cab of a truck A boy darts through another broken slat, momentarily catching his foot as if to fall, but he recovers. Pooch pulls on Sammy’s choker when she starts to chase after him. Sammy wheezes and hacks, coughing up a plume of white froth.
    “She ready? There’ll be about eight dogs tonight,” the Minotaur says. Instead of wagon wheels he has on a green and orange Hawaiian shirt shrieking with parrots. “My bitch is in the truck,” he says and thumbs to a cage in the back of the pickup, a gray and black dog lunging, rasping, howling from one end to the other, almost tipping the cage on end, gnashing at air.
    “I don’t know, man,” Pooch says, “she’s pumped, you’ve speeded her.”
    “No buddy,” the Minotaur says, “she’s like that. Wild.”
    The parking lot is as broad and expansive as a tarmac. “Let me tell you how to get there,” the Minotaur says, and a hollowing wind troughs through, scattering newspapers, colored pieces of paper—Mondrian handbills. Another man, a black head-rag knotted at the forehead, approaches, a dog owner. “Now let me tell you how to get there,” and the Minotaur gives them directions to a place just outside Fort Polk.
    Pooch’s heart ricochets about his chest. Edgy, tired, corrosive—no blood but piss through his veins. The A&P sign vies with the midday moon for dominance, but both are anemic. And as he stands under the sign, he notices, next to the ampersand, the exposed hardware of the skeletal fluorescent bulbs, hears them buzzing.
    Pooch waits under the sign for Remmy. Sammy—rachitic and dull-eyed—is stock-still.
    Across the parking lot a truck barrels toward them, the horn blaring, as if someone had died and collapsed across the steering wheel. The truck swerves sharply to the left, then to the right before screeching to a halt a few feet in front of Pooch. The horn stops, but there is a booming bass from the radio inside the cab with Remmy laughing.
    Pooch walks around to the side. A panel truck with metal grating. Edison’s Shrimp and Seafood.
    “A shrimp truck,” he says to himself. “I’m going to this thing in a fuckin’ shrimp truck.” Remmy apologizes to Pooch for scaring him with the gun the other day. “But I see myself as your Yoda,” he says, “your spiritual guide. First off, step back from the situation when someone’s nutting you. You see that someone’s trying to play with your head. What are you going to do about it?” Pooch simply nods in agreement.     
    Remmy gives the dog over to Pooch. He feeds her, trains her. “This Lassie thing. So you know. I’m telling you in advance. This is going to fuck with you, but it can’t be helped,” Remmy shrugs.
    One day Remmy, Pooch, and Lita are sprawled about Remmy’s apartment watching talk shows on television. “You screwing Lita, man?” Remmy suddenly asks out of the blue. “You laying pipe to my lady?” He glares first at Pooch, then Lita with Lita jumping up and storming out of the room. “You asshole!” she shouts from down the hall.
    “I’m not messin’ with her, I swear, man!” Pooch pleads.
    “I know you’re not, but I figure this is a way to see where she is, what planet she’s on.” Remmy pauses, looks out the window. “She wants you, man. In a bad way.”
    Pooch feels as if he was stuck at a board game; aping the moves of his opponent, he still loses pieces.
    “You hear what I say? She wants you. And I’m letting you have her. I want you to go after her, and I’m going to tell her to act like she’s interested. This is a test for her.”
    Pooch puppies behind Lita, buys her things: a lava lamp, an inflatable chair, a gold tooth. “She’s getting soft on you, little brother,” Remmy says.
    “What do you want me to do?” Pooch asks.
    “Whatever you want. She’s a runner for me down to New Orleans, but she don’t know it yet.”
    Pooch is to meet Lita at her sister’s place. He’s left alone and spends the night waiting, looking at a ghostly broadcast from a worn-out television, leafing through old Jets and Ebonys. After a while he gets up and rifles through her sister’s room, nosing through her dresser and closet, through her shoes and things under her bed. He pulls back the bedspread and lies face down into her sheets, smells where she’s slept. Her window faces onto a small car detail garage, a bar, a narrow street lined with cars, and he falls asleep.
    It could have been from waking up strange, a stranger’s apartment, bed—it’s as if the whole world had become liquid and transparent, leaking from the glass into the room, invading him with a strangeness similar to possession.
    Lita sits beside him on top of the night table. In the dark, in the corner, thrown from the light from the street, it was as if you could see Remmy in a bat wing of shadow. Watching over them, the king over his minions.
    They make the beast. Pooch scrutinizes her contours with his eyes, hands. Pooch relishes the vagrancy: the open pores, moles, vitiligous patches. “He knows what we’re doing,” Lita says. They’re not drunk enough. The haze that had enveloped the day has been seared off with this evening’s sweat. Almost a dry fuck. He missteps putting on his trousers. Is she awake? He sits hard on the edge of the bed to put on his shoes, to see if she moves. Her back doesn’t move, but it’s too straight, lithic.
    His trousers are undone, and he looks at his member, pendant, begging turgor.

The truck pulls up a cinder driveway that leads to a fifties-style bungalow. It is a stucco house that squats on the edge of a retention field, a small lake. A For Sale sign juts from the yard—Jackoff and Tina are spray-painted across it. “Somebody put this up when they had money to burn,” Remmy says. “Only a fool builds this close to the runoff.” The two of them meander down a gravel path to an electric pump station. A ways across from the pump is a Quonset hangar. They walk back to the truck and drive down the path to the hangar.
    The building resembles a half-buried can. They enter on one end where both doors have been slid completely open. A hot, near-coital odor engulfs them, their eyes adjusting to the odd light. “I see the guy who’s pit killed Tone’s,” Remmy nudges Pooch. Several men are seated around a wooden box fan, seated in sedan or bucket seats ripped from old Buicks and Chevys. One man plunges his hand into a pail of water held between his knees, soaks his face and neck, and juts his head into the onslaught of air.
    It is something halfway between a repair house and a storage hangar: chains suspend a disembodied nose propeller; alongside it, grayed bales of weevil-ridden material. A giant bust from the poor man’s Mardi Gras parade in Alex is partially collapsed into a hayrack. “Listen,” Remmy says: one can hear the shifting of the rats through the papier-mâché skull plate.
    There is a boil of men toward the back, men jostling each other, pressing each other down, craning necks to follow the action. Some of them, those on the outer edge, dead-eyed and heat-sucked, face away from the pit, sitting on their heels. Two men, a black man and a white, both in their late forties, cleave through the crowd. Pooch recognizes the black man, bare chested in oil-stained denims—he’s brought together previous fights. The two men push through to the open door where they stop, shake hands. The black man must have said something funny; Pooch sees the white man double over laughing before leaving. Then a mask slides off the black man’s face as the white one’s pickup lurches down the drive. He wears a “don’t mess with me” grimace, shoving through the men crouched in their seats at the back. The back door of the hangar slides open, and somebody drags in a cage, and Pooch takes a draw from a cigarette that is passed. He can hear, if he presses his head to the hot corrugated metal, the faint soughing of the pines across the way.
    The Minotaur has brought in his dog. He bashes the side of the cage with an ax handle and the animal half-moons its eyes, boiling through the cage, spraying urine about the concrete. “Listen to your own bitch,” Pooch says to himself, “she’s scared,” and he hears the distant yelping from outside in the truck. The disorder has returned, a segue into the heat, the must, the stench of the place. Now he would think himself into Lita’s sister’s apartment, a surrender of his mind’s voice: there will be a stranger’s tongue tonight.
    Remmy nudges him, “It’s time,” and Pooch totters up and leaves. Outside, in the truck, Sammy whimpers up to him through the grill; they drive around to the back; Pooch lets her down; she squats, shakes herself. “Glad to get out that fish hole, girl?” he asks. He then pulls on her choker, slaps her muzzle, “Come on, don’t piss on me,” riles her. Sammy snaps at his hand.
    The windows are on a slant, boarded from outside. The cavernous area burrs in voices, the dogs’ barking and panting, the hissing of two or three Coleman lamps. It is a yellow, flickering light, and Pooch scans the room, sees the Minotaur, sees the clot of nineteen or so men clamoring at the edge of the pit, someone hammering his fists against the Minotaur’s cage and laughing, sees the fluttering shadows on the curved tin walls. The Minotaur laughs, too, his dog lurching about the cage.
    The Minotaur edges into the pit. It’s as if he was stepping into a pool: he dangles his feet over the edge, drags the cage up beside him, and then gives a hop in.
    It’s a brown night. The heat and humidity have not let up from the day. From the large door comes the continuous clanging of the pumps, muffled between rushes of wind. Pooch is distracted by the wind, by the hint of drizzle that brushes over his face like eyelashes. Remmy, though—“Come on.”
    Pooch does the same as the Minotaur: a little hop in, and he finds that it is not concrete underfoot but a crust of carpet limed with oil and excrement and blood and slaver. Pooch pulls Sammy to the edge, pulls her by her choker. He slips, catches himself, and gently gathers Sammy into the pit. She sniffs about with Pooch leading her around the pit. A repair pit, he deciphers, from the oil stains and hieroglyphs on the wall.
    Pooch grabs Sammy alongside her muzzle—she’s visibly shaking—holding her now, aiming her, looking down her muzzle at the other dog, a rot, as if he were a sniper peering through a scope. They release the dogs simultaneously, and the two men clip over the edge.
    The two dogs appear tethered to each other, two short foci, curving inward, spiraling; “She’ll go under for the inside?” Pooch asks, and Remmy, “Yeah. She’ll pop inside.” The Minotaur—his parrot shirt open at the chest now muted grayish-green, transparent in sweat—screams at the rot. Sammy lunges, misses; she is on her back now, her paws a blur, grasping almost, like human hands. The speckled rot has the dog’s foreleg in its jowls, pulls, pulls again, and it begins: the bleating, the yelping, and Pooch thinks, Somebody help Sammy, the dog bucks, thrashes, and Pooch, Help Sammy, somebody help Sammy.
    The dog twists out and with limping little hops gathers itself. Pooch pushes through to stand over her. The speckled gray rottweiler hulks repeatedly in a half circle across from Sammy. Pooch reaches down, Sammy cowers, and he grabs the dog by a mat of fur at the neck that is slick, slimy with blood and froth. “Stand up, goddamit! Stand up you goddam bitch!” he yells. I let this, I let this happen, he thinks. The other dog makes its lunge while Pooch has Sammy, and he quickly pulls back his hands. “That’s it, it’s over!” he shouts and brushes past Remmy to the Minotaur, but by the time he pole snares his dog, Sammy is limp. Pooch leaps into the pit, wrestles up Sammy while the Rot repeatedly lunges against its choker. Pooch gathers her up; her coat is sweated, clammy, like wet clay.
    A roaring dissects from the back, rippling frenzied. “Goddam Frenchman!” the bare-chested man says, not to Pooch, though Pooch is standing under him in the pit. “Goddam Frenchman fucked me!”
    In back of them, pulling up the long drive, is a swirl of blue-and-white lights: three sheriff’s cars followed by the battered white pickup.
    The crowd at the door—at first static, clotted, moths beating around a lamp—suddenly spills out into the flashing blue-and-white air. “Remmy?” Pooch yells and lifts Sammy over his shoulder. “Remmy, where are you?” The spill of men moils over the fields toward the trees. Just as he’s about to leave, Pooch sees the trinket-size coke packs, crack vials, joints of crystal meth hurriedly discarded and littered about the ground. He’s about to run, Sammy unable to follow, and he stoops and picks up a joint, shoves it into his pocket.
    Pooch hides on the edge of the lake under a clump of trees, his body pressed flat, his legs sucked into the mud. He can see the Quonset, the ceiling lights now illuminating; the hangar glows.
    He waits for close to an hour. The sheriffs make only halfhearted attempts at chasing down anyone, picking up the few stragglers too stoned to run. The cops and the pickup owner laugh—he has a booming laugh—and an officer prods and playfully kicks at a junkie lying on the concrete. They continue to laugh and relax and pick up the scattered packets and vials and other paraphernalia. They shoot a solitary pit bull.
    The Quonset is finally dark as the police cars file away. The ambient light is shimmering, silver, eerie. Curving from the base of Sammy’s skull to her midback is a scimitar-shaped gash. It is an excrescence—virile, iridescent in the moonlight. Pooch squats and leans against the base of a tree, sucking air. Sammy is mostly still, but her chest softly moves. He pokes her with his foot, and she whimpers, shifting away.
    There is a high wash of wind shaking the pines, and a moan descends. And there begins a faint rain, too, enough only to coat the hairs of the arm with globules, Pooch notices, little spheres that cling to individual strands.
    The smell of ferment is apparent, and the mosquitoes gnaw, eviscerate. Pooch thinks, That son-of-a-bitch! Now cars, cars that were hidden, crouched, waiting along the back roads, quietly creep through the traces leading to camps or main roads. The headlamps are off. There is only the creak of cabs, the muzzled whimpering of a salvaged animal, the scraping of tree limbs on hoods.
    A full rain descends, and a straggle of dogs gathers at the hangar. They pace and bark and howl, their noise echoing through the hangar, echoing over the rain-pocked lake.
    Pooch gathers up Sammy and, wobbly, trots off, hugging the mud bank farthest from the hangar. As he moves the barking gradually ceases, and it is quiet; there is again the clanging of the pumps through the wind as he hurries for the empty house.
    The patio door is open. A brick lies nearby where someone has smashed the latch. Pooch enters and places Sammy on the linoleum, the rain sweeping in behind them. There is a phosphorescence to the moonlight in the house, and he is not alone: Remmy? He knows Remmy is not there, though: no shrimp truck, nothing is seen on the driveway.
    Waist-high watermarks stain the walls in the rooms. And the walls are gashed with stripping of electrical wiring.
    Yes, somebody’s here, Pooch thinks. The mosquitoes stab; Pooch absently slaps. Moving through the house, he comes into a room where a gaunt man is knotted in the corner, his shins crossed. He stares vacantly into the space where a window once had been. Pooch squats across from him, pulls out the desiccated joint of crystal meth, and lights up. He offers a hit, but the man simply stares.
    Pooch listens now, listens with his eyes but sees nothing. Hears, though. He hears a jingling: This is what reindeer must sound like, he thinks, and the jingling approaches, and he sees not shapes, not shadows even but the movement of absence—where the shadows of tree trunks suddenly collapse into blackness and then reappear. The pits and rots and other dogs have convulsed into a pack. They smell an easy kill, Pooch thinks, half-thinks—for suddenly the crystal smoke hits hard. As he leaves the room, a spoor of himself, a dribbling of ghosts, trails from him; and as he enters the room where Sammy was, he almost doesn’t see that she’s gone: just the spray of rain through the patio door, a spattering away of the black, brushlike sweep of blood on the linoleum. But he does not see now, only hears. He follows the voice back to the room, the voice that isn’t his, and the rope-thin man still coiled in the corner stares at Pooch. Pooch doesn’t even see him, doesn’t even see the catastrophe of lightning that submerges the planet. He leans back against the wall and slowly slides down, the voice telling him She is there, she is waiting for you, Pooch, she is not sleeping, she’s pretending, she’s there Pooch, and even if you will not be there tonight you will be there tomorrow. Tomorrow night, Pooch.

“Vain Empires” appears in our Summer 2002 issue.