Street Eyes
A man’s best friend?
I
usually didn't let people come into the bar with animals -- considering the
disease and how easily it got transmitted around, especially through
unprotected vermin. I told the dude as much, but the dog didn't look
threatening, or ill, and with the rotten weather outside, I figured to cut the
son-of-a-bitch a break.
He
didn't look mean either, an unusual feature for this neighborhood that stirred
up my curiosity and drew some questioning glances from my clientele, all of
them wondering if maybe there was a story behind all this.
The
dude told the dog to sit, then pulled himself up onto
one of the stools at the bar. He was a little too
clean cut for my kind of place, something that hinted of the protected life,
yet didn't look like an Insider, nor had the bad attitude I got from spoiled
kids raised behind the walls of one neighborhood or the other.
But
he did have cash, new bills, from the reissue that no Outsider saw short of
wealthy merchant -- and putting that bill down on the bar drew more eyes than I
ever wanted looking at me, and manufacturer more mugging schemes that anyone
like this fellow would ever survive.
In
my business, however, you don't ask questions. You take the money, you give him
his beer, and you let him face his own fate once he's back on the street.
He
must have read some of my thoughts on my face, chuckling as he sipped his beer.
"You
worried about me, mister?" he asked.
"I
don't worry about anybody," I said. "But I do
question some people's habits -- and yours seem particularly self destructive,
if you ask me."
The
man grinned, lifted his glass to salute me, then finished the beer and nodded
for me.
"I
guess I had that coming," he said.
"You've
got a lot more coming once you're out of here," I said, glancing around at
the bar full of vultures, each watching the man's every move, waiting to rise
up when he did to follow him out. "Unless, of course, you got body amour I
can't see."
"No
amour, no shield," the man said. "Only my dog."
I
glanced down at the beast -- though beast was the wrong word. The dog hardly
resembled any of the packs of wild dogs that roamed the streets at night, nor
any of the more refined breeds used by the wall guards in their patrols. I'd
seen pictures of house dogs from the old days, when people could still afford
to have them outside the neighborhood walls, and this beast looked as much like
one of those pictures as I could make out.
"Maybe the dog as body armor?" I said.
"No,"
he said. "He's just a dog. But I take him with me when I can."
"You
must be a regular animal lover," I said, meaning something else that
amounted to "crazy," but in this business, you don't insult the help
either.
"No,
I love animals nor hate them," the man said. "But out here in the
Outlands, you need something to keep the bikers and the bullies off your back.
A bark through the door when someone knocks, and those bastards outside know
you're not totally helpless."
"I
hear some neighborhoods keep whole kennels of dogs, hungry dogs to let loose in
case the walls get breached or some wandering gypsy manages to get inside with
a gun," said Mario, one of my regular patrons -- a disability man who had
lost one arm, part of one leg and his right eye to the wars in L.A."
"How
those folks managed to feed the beasts in times like these, I can't
imagine," I said. "It's hard enough putting meat on the family table,
let alone some in the dog dish, too."
"That's
what I thought when my kids brought this beast home," the clean cut man
said. "No point in feeding something we didn't need. I didn't even see a
point of insiders owning a dog when they paid hard cash for wall guards. Out
here, without walls or guns, dogs made more sense, an extra pair of growling
teeth to keep the human kind of beasts away.
"But
seeing the mutt lick the faces of my giggling kids,
didn't inspire a great deal of confidence either. This was the beast that would
keep the creeps from kicking down our door? He looked about as mean slug and
nearly as greasy, looking at me with that sly sideward stare, knowing I
couldn't refuse my kids if they had their hearts set on keeping him.
"`Where
did you get him?' I asked, imagining just what kind of disease the dog brought
home with him, his ratty coat needing a few weeks soaking in the tub to get the
oil stains out. I figured he'd hidden under a car somewhere to keep the roving
street kids from cooking him up for beef.
"`We
just found him, Dad,' the kids said. `Can we keep him, huh? Can we, please? Can
we?'
"You
know the routine. We've all heard our kids ranting the same way, whenever they
see something they want, whether its the fancy and
expensive three-D reality games they see at the toy stores in the mall, or the
fashionable, non-bullet-proof sports wear they see the stars wearing on TV. In
those cases, it's easy to say no. With my salary at the power plant, I'm lucky
to pay rent, let alone putting out the kind of money stores want for that
stuff, money many of the Insiders have, but we don't.
"But
the ranting had a more desperate pitch when it came to the dog. After all, I
couldn't prove our inability to feed the creature as easy I could by pointing
to a price tag. The expense of feeding and caring came over time, paying for
the beast on the installment plan rather than cash up front. All
the kids saw was the initial investment, and it seemed reasonable,
especially considering the emotional reward.
"I
guess this last thing convinced me to take it in. How can you deny a kid a
thing so small with a world so vicious around them. I
mean things have changed since I went to school. The most I had to worry about
was crossing a busy street. They have to worry about muggings and rape, not
only on the way to school, but in school, fearing the guards, teachers and
maintenance crew nearly as much as the other students. You never knew what
would set a man off. Two days ago, a teacher from a
"I
try to provide the kids with those necessary things to assure their safety,
bullet proof vests and shields, miniature mace projectors, and in the case of
my eldest daughter, an anti-rape system complete with alarm, poison darts, and
a complete body shield. But in the rat race, you often leave out those
psychological things that make kids happy like three d-video games or fancy
clothing, or in this case, something as simple as a dog.
"`Okay,'
I said, thinking about how the dog might walk the kids to and from school or my
wife to the store, or even me from time to time to work. I suppose I could have
bought a gun. I had hundreds of offers weekly. But the whole issue scared me.
People who carried guns in this Outland called attention to themselves, making
themselves targets for the wandering spike-haired gangs or the overly
aggressive wall guards shooting before they think, or even for the variety of
police patrols that float through the crumbling streets in armored vehicles,
often questioning the reason you believed you needed a weapon when you could always
call on the police. (As if the two hour wait after a
911 call was a reasonable response time.)
"But as I said the dog looked ratty. I didn't find the
creature repulsive the way I did many of the beasts that scrambled in and out
of the buildings around us. In the city Outlands, people mostly worry about
mice and rats, out where I live, in what once might have been called the
suburbs, we got everything from moose to water moccasins, a thriving wild life
as dangerous as it is diverse, some of the creatures driven crazy by the nearly
nightly gang hunts, gun blasting the landscape from dusk till dawn, wounding as
often as killing, making some of these beast wary and wise and likely to attack
without provocation, though in most instances, the creatures that crawl up from
abandoned sewers and basements looked more pathetic than pathological, sad,
scummy creatures hunting food.
"The
dog, while dirty, was not disgusting. Someone had taken care of him at some
distant time in the past, letting him loose in a gesture of kindness when many
Outland homeowners killed them for meat. His coat, was greasy, however, I could
have squeeze out of court of oil from it.
"`First
thing is we clean him up,' I told the kids. `Then we'll figure out how to get
him to the vet.'
"From
the sour look the pooch gave me as the kids led him away, you would have
thought I'd ordered his execution. Indeed, he let out such a fuss from the
bathtub that I turned up the radio to keep the neighbors from calling the
police. The struggle sounded more we were murdering something than trying to
make it presentable. Yet after the accusing stares and the nearly constant
howling, the dog looked little better when he was done. Wetted down, he looked
more like a large rat than anything I thought might keep the burglars and
rapists away.
"`Maybe
he could use with a little grooming, too,' I said as I picked up the telephone
and discovered it still had a dial tone. Most days the phones died just before noon,
and did not come alive again until near morning -- repair crews tracing down
the latest break, usually as the result of a bombing or a firefight near one of
the neighborhood walls, the desperado’s always making the mistake in
believing that the Insiders depended upon service from outside. Most did not.
Most had their own electric generators and used cellular phone systems. Only
the Outlands depended upon anything so conventional as
copper wire.
"Getting
a veterinarian, however, proved far less simple. Most had gone out of business
or taken up whole Insider neighborhoods as clients, signing a contract that
sent them to this walled citadel or that once or twice a month. Outsiders with
pets were such a rare species that a vet could starve depending upon them for
business. After about a dozen phone calls, I found one vet willing to look at
the dog and give him shots, but at such an exorbitant fee that a three-D video
game would have seemed a bargain.
"`The
license is extra,' the vet said when I finally got the pooch to his office, my
stationwagon overheating from a huge detour, sewer and water lines exploding
along our chosen route in the same mistaken belief that the Glen Ridge walled
neighborhood used them. We had to circle the city to get around the punctures,
and the road blocks, and the exacerbated gangs smashing car windows to vent
their added frustration.
"`Okay,'
I said, cursing my kids and the increased regulations that would double the
cost of the dog before the beast even settled in. `I can understand that.'
"`And
you have to go to the county building to fill out the forms.'
"`The county building? Are you crazy? That's a war zone
down there. Can't you fax it in or something?'
"The
vet shook his head as he plunged the needle into the dog, drawing a slight
yelp, but no violent reprisal.
"`They
have to have the original downtown. It's the gangs. They've been training packs
of pit bulls. God knows why? Do they think the dogs can storm the walls any
better than they can themselves?'
"So
we took the drive downtown, over the pitted roadways left by the metal tracts
of the police tanks and armored vehicles, the park across from the county
building still smoldering from the latest clash between gangs and police. I
left the kids and the dog in the stationwagon, confident that the steel plates
and commercial grade bullet proof glass would keep them safer than the halls of
the county seat, where TV reported at least one death a day to machine gun fire
and small explosives.
"Even
in broad daylight, the place scared me, the two dozen steps up to its columnar
facade, thick with concrete barriers, and mounted machine guns, and police swat
teams in full combat armor, perched behind firing posts, squinting at me
through their thick plastic face protectors, the snouts of their heavy caliber
weapons moving with me as I climbed.
"For
a dog, I was doing this, I thought as I reached the top, and faced another
small army of well-armed men and women, each of them glaring at me as two more
lightly armed clerk type cops frisked me then asked me for identification. Even
they disbelieved me when I told them I'd come to get a dog license, eyeing me
as if I needed serious psychological attention. But they let me pass, letting
some other bureaucrat inside worry about me.
"Several
searches, banks of metal detectors and bands of security guards later, I
finally reached the deck which could issue me the license. Unfortunately, they
wanted to know more than I could tell them, about blood type and family
history, and what kind of training the dog had had. Had it or any of its sires
served as attack dogs for the army.
"`How
the hell am I supposed to know,' I yelled in
frustration. `I found the dog on the street.'
"I
don't know why they gave me the license, but they did, perhaps only to get rid
of me and my outrageous screeching protests over their insistence on
registering a dog more thoroughly than a pistol. I could have bought a rocket
launcher with less trouble, and launched it with less suspicious stares.
Something registered in their eyes when I said this, making them stamp my
papers and shoo me away.
"When
I got back to the car, I found it surrounded by blue and purple haired
motorcycle freaks, their gang distinguished from the hundred other local gangs merely
by the fact they rode motorcycles rather than Jeeps or ambulances or Wells
Fargo-style armored cars. Their faces had the same dread expressions I
encountered daily on my way to and from work, almost bored in their attempts to
be outrageous, like workers on an assembly plant seeking some new and original
way to get their kicks. Each held a gun. Each grinned in at my kids like a
savage. But each kept from hammering at the glass or twisting open the metal by
a set of snarling teeth on the other side, furious teeth that seemed determined
to set themselves on the gang member's throats.
"Oddly
enough, the gang parted as I walked up to the car, each glaring at me, as I
drew the ordinary metal key from my pocket and inserted it into the ordinary
lock, backing away from me when the lock clicked and the door opened and the
howling of teeth snarled at the crack seeking blood.
"`Hey
man,' one particularly ugly gang member said with green spike eyebrows to match
his green spiked hair. `That your dog?'
"`Yes,'
I said, staring at the man. `Why?'
"`That's
a dangerous beast, man. You shouldn't go around driving with a beast like that.
Somebody could get hurt.'
"`I
know,' I said, with a grin nearly as nasty as the dogs. I slid into the
driver's seat, pushing the beast back with the heal of
my hand. No teeth touched me. Then, closing and locking the door again, I
started the engine, continuing my grin to match the grin the dog gave the
intruders, no longer begrudging the beast his share of the food, no longer
thinking the trip here wasted.
"I
wiggled my fingers and drove away, our newest family member howling up a storm."
The
man reached down and patted the head of the patient dog. Everybody in the bar
stared at the dog, including me. And when the man drained his drink and made
his way towards the door, the dog padded along behind him. No one else in the
room made a move to follow, though a heavy sigh of relief sounded when the door
closed and the man with his dog was gone.