A Dream of Dogs and Cattle
I’m not sure if this story is about me or someone else.
I woke up this morning with this story in my head, as intense as a real experience. I still remembered every moment; it was a story about a strange vacation involving heroic cows, mysterious coyotemen, and a dog. I got my coffee and started typing it out, hammering the words into my computer, banging away to get the story down before the vividness wore out. I reached the end, hit “save” and the story disappeared.
Gone. The computer just swallowed it. Or it got sucked up somewhere, retracted by whatever force gave me the story in the first place. I was still filled with an urgency to get the story told before it vanished out of my head, so I typed it out again. The second version was a bit faded, a bit perfunctory but adequate. I hit “save”.
It vanished again. I hunted and hunted for it: documents, downloads, the trashcan, those weird places my computer sends stuff every now and then…My story just disappeared. Twice. I’m getting kind of freaked about this. But here I go again, trying to write it out one more time.
It starts with a vivid dream.
The vibrating was irritating and her butt was sore. She sat with her arms locked around her knees, shaking in time with the thrum of the engine, bored, but unable to relax. They had been aloft for hours, winging across vast expanses of land, but she had seen nothing but the harsh dirty yellow of the windowless cargo hold. She had every bolt and every spot of grime memorized. Maybe this vacation would be a bust. It was a possibility.
She had assumed that the plane would have windows. Wasn’t that a natural assumption to make? She had bought a ticket from a minor airline for just that reason: to sit by the window and watch all the geography roll by. The flight itself was supposed to be part of her vacation. She should have realized that there was something wrong with a ticket so cheap.
So instead of watching the earth from a seat in the sky, she had been staring at a curved metal wall from an uncomfortable spot on the floor.
The possibility of a bummer vacation got stronger when they landed. Alice crawled, dragging her backpack, to the open door of the cargo hold. There she unbent her sore legs, wriggled her stiff shoulders into the backpack, and decanted herself awkwardly on to the tarmac. The pilot watched, not helpful, not interested.
It was unbelievably hot. They were out on a bleak stretch of asphalt, in the midst of a bleaker expanse of yellow prairie. There was nothing to see but a row of shabby rusted Quonset huts. The pilot slammed the door of the cargo hold.
“Where are the mountains?” she asked. There were supposed to be mountains, a little town out on the edge, with nearby mountains.
“Town’s that way. It ain’t far,” he replied. “No mountains.” He was lanky and dark, eyes hidden behind reflective lenses, voice laconic. There was something feral about his boney frame in his t-shirt and jeans. Like a coyote, she thought.
He looked her over skeptically and added, “The best hotel is the Rose. It’s about halfway down the main street. Can’t miss it.”
He strolled off on some coyote business, leaving her in the heat and glare. “Thank you,” she called after him. She was grateful for the snippet of advice. The Rose. That sounded nice. She had a destination now: find the Rose. Get settled. Maybe she would feel less disoriented once she had her nighttime accommodations sorted.
She headed out, plodding under the weight of the backpack. Lacking any signs or directions, she picked a path between two Quonset huts. On the far side she found a dirt road and in the distance she could see the wooden roofs of the town.
She had known this vacation would be rugged, but she was tough and independent and liked extremes. She had been to the Arctic, to the Amazonian rainforest and to rural areas of India. She had expected to find an odd little town, one that could provide experiences interesting and challenging, but fundamentally safe. Now she had doubts about the safe part.
It was an odd little town. She could see clear through, in one side of town and out the other, just by looking down the main street. There was no traffic light. The streets were rutted dirt. And she couldn’t see a single motorized vehicle parked along the measly dirty main drag. Some horses snoozed in front of a bar, a donkey wandered loose, and some chickens pecked and gossiped in a vacant lot. She felt like she had fallen through a hole in time.
There didn’t seem to be many people out and about. A shop keeper emerged from the darkness of his store, glanced at her and returned to his darkness, slamming the door behind him. The slam was overloud in the quiet afternoon. A boy appeared, walking purposefully out of a side street, leading a pitbull. The boy had small dull eyes embedded in a pasty, doughy face and lips that wriggled into a sneer when he saw Alice. The battle-scarred dog gave her a glance of stoic indifference. She knew they were on their way to a dog fight. Broad daylight: culturally normative behavior. This was not a place she wanted to be.
She stopped in the street to let the boy and his dog pass. Then, sauntering down the sidewalk as if they owned the town, she saw two tall dark men. They wore matching fedoras, their eyes were masked by shades, and their long dark dusters swept behind them like capes. They were the masters of this community, the reason the other residents were keeping their heads down, out of sight behind their closed doors and darkened windows. She knew immediately that she needed to protect herself; she must not appear as prey to these men. She straightened her back, directed her gaze to the distance, and strode down the middle of the dusty street as if she, too, owned a piece of this town and had a right to be there.
She felt their eyes on the side of her face as they passed. They had noticed her. With an effort she kept her chin up and her face blank. In spite of the acceleration of her heart, she slowed her walk; she knew she must appear unhurried. Behind the blank glass of shop windows, the locals watched her progress. They would not help her if she was attacked. She didn’t look for the Rose Hotel; she kept her eyes on the distant yellow line that divided the prairie from the sky. Back straight, chin up, eyes forward, she marched right straight out of town.
She knew that eyes were following her. People were watching from behind their dirty windows. She knew the two men in their matching long black coats were watching her. She could feel their eyes like bullet holes in her back.
She needed to find a place to hide overnight. Tomorrow she could catch a plane back home, but her immediate need was a hideyhole, a place of safety in the blank, bare, shelterless landscape. Her only hope lay in distance and the falling darkness. She walked, still striding purposefully, conscious that eyes were on her back, swinging her arms as if she had somewhere to go. Keep moving, she told herself, but don’t run.
The hot sun of late afternoon cooled into evening and slid gently out of sight behind the horizon. Long blue shadows coalesced into a more generalized darkness.
Then the air itself darkened as night fell. A fat silvery moon appeared in the night sky, glaring balefully, casting a pewter spotlight on her as she stumbled through the dark. Far behind her the lights of the town were a low hanging row of yellow glitter. She stopped to reconnoiter. She left vulnerable and exposed, even in the night. Someone standing at the edge of town would be able to see her, even at that distance, even through the black air. She had to hurry, had to get farther away.
She pushed onwards through the night, stumbling occasionally on some stick or stubble. The moon subsided and stars appeared in the velvety black of the sky, but the air at ground level remained transparent, providing no protection. She was visible still, even from a distant viewer. She could feel the gaze of distant eyes. And then she heard a far off rumble: some kind of motorized vehicles coming her way.
Suddenly harsh lights appeared. Trucks were advancing toward her, pickup trucks, their headlights bouncing, the engines growling. Five or six of them, fanned out to herd her back toward town. There was nowhere to hide and she could not outrun them. She knew the trucks were driven by dirty, squatty, little men—laborers—and their intent was to rape her.
She couldn’t do anything about it. She could only try to maintain her dignity, if such a thing was possible, to not scream or cry too much. But it was going to be horrible, nearly unbearable, to be touched by those toadlike men with their jeering faces and their diseased penises and she knew she was going to cry and sob and beg. The trucks closed in on her relentlessly. She stood still, there being no point to running.
And then she saw the cows.
A shuffling herd of longhorns, accompanied by the smell of dung and a fog of flies, grunting, sniffing, and snorting, emerged from the darkness, churning the dirt beneath their hooves. They were united, shoulder to shoulder, long smooth horns glowing gently like moonlight. Their kind brown eyes sought hers. And she begged them with her mind, “Please help me.”
To her surprise, the cows heard her.
The cows turned their attention to the approaching trucks. One by one the trucks braked to a halt amid flamboyant swirls of dirt. Engines roared and settled to idle, lights glared, doors slammed, and the stocky, stunted men jumped out of the cabs. They were grinning in anticipation until they saw the cows.
The cows, in a huddled dense mass, marched toward the men. They lowered their horns but did not speak: no snorts of threat, the lethal barricade of horn was enough. The men began to yell. Some waved their hats, some took a step or two toward the cows, but most retreated. When one climbed back into his pick-up, the others followed suit. Doors slammed, engines gun, final insults were shouted. The trucks circled and roared of into the darkness.
“Come with us,” the cows said. She was too grateful for their care to wonder why they were speaking English or to wonder how they could communicate silently into her head. She followed the cows as they ambled off into the night. She felt protected within the fog of dung and the cloud of flies. She traveled with the herd over a small rise that hid a pond from view from the town. Around the pond the grass was deep and lush. The cows settled down to sleep, black heaps in the darkness. Alice curled up in the grass, not minding how dirty she felt. She was grateful to be alive and savored the sound of the cows breathing, their gentle snores and long snuffly exhalations. She lay in the dark for hours, her eyes wide open, listening to the cows sleep.
In the morning the cows were gone. She must have slept through their departure. She got up slowly, and made an attempt to brush the dirt, cow dung and grass from her clothes. She felt both stunned and oddly indifferent to her surroundings, no doubt due to the lack of caffeine in her system. Perhaps that was a good thing; reality was not to be fully faced this day. She needed to get back to the airport and catch that outbound plane with as little drama as possible.
She climbed the low rise and looked toward the little town, barely visible as brown sticks on the horizon. The sky was a tender blue, the color of very early morning, and the air was cool. The fresh green grass of the prairie was decorated with tiny flowers. It was a subtly beautiful landscape marred only by the distant malignancy of the town. But no one would be awake there, she knew. They would all be sleeping off their binges of the night before. She aimed herself at the town and began to walk.
It didn’t take long. And she was right: the streets were quiet. She walked down the middle of the main street, kicking up dust with each step, listening to the silence. She was about halfway through the town when she hard a low grunting sound. It was the boy with the pitbull. They saw her and stopped to stare.
The boy looked the same, a bit mussed from having been up all night, but still blank-eyed, still thin-lipped and sneering. The dog was battered and wounded. His lip was torn off on one side and one eye was swollen shut. She looked into the other eye and asked with her mind, “Why do you fight for that guy? If you are good at fighting, why not fight against him?”
The dog gazed back at her, thinking. The boy gave the leash an impatient yank and the dog turned, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth into the boy’s leg. The boy screamed, windmilled his arms, staggered backwards and fell. The dog let go of the leg and picked up his leash. He carried his leash to Alice and presented it to her. She said, “That isn’t mine. You belong to yourself, not him or me. But you can come with me, if you want.”
The boy sat up. His expression was threatening, but he did not speak. Alice wondered if he was cursing them in his mind. She turned away, hurrying toward the airport, but keeping to a fast walk, so as not to trigger a prey drive in any local predators. The dog kept pace with her. He held his head up, on watch, ready to protect.
They arrived at the airport Quonset huts. Alice went from hut to hut until she found the office. The coyote man was there and immediately Alice knew he could hear her thoughts and that he knew she had learned to communicate with animals. It was a frightening realization. She thought at him, “I’m going home no matter what, and this dog is going with me.”
He answered, “Your choice.”
Alice and the dog found a place in the shade to wait.
They waited most of the afternoon. Alice felt oddly calm, not entirely due to lack of caffeine. She knew, somehow, that she would catch the plane and would go home.
She woke up when something, maybe a spider, ran across her chin. The strange sensation rocketed her out of sleep, heart-pounding, startled and confused. It took a moment or two for her to orient herself: she was back in her own comfortable bed, beneath her voluminous comforter in the soft, warm darkness of her own bedroom. “What a vivid dream!” she thought, as her heart climbed back into her chest and settled down. “I need to remember that story.” Even the most intense dreams can slip away in the night, leaving nothing but a tantalizing touch behind, images which nag on the mind, but are too blurred to interpret. To trap the dream in her head, she began to recite it to herself: the flight, the predators in the town, the rapists, the talking cows, the dog, the wait at the airport. She recalled her feelings at each point in the story: the initial confusion that curdled into fear, determination as she passed through the town in the morning, the odd calm while waiting for the return flight. What an amazingly detailed and clear narrative! But the spider that ran across her chin—was that part of the dream? Or was the spider real?
Suddenly she felt it again, multiple skittering feet making tracks across her neck and up her cheek. She screamed and slapped herself, flailing her hands against her face, and neck and hair. I erupted out of the bed, yelling, and flung the bedclothes aside.
And there I was, sitting up in bed, my heart banging its fist against my ribs and my mind full of the dream. I didn’t know if the spider was real or not, if it had run across my face once, twice or not at all. All I knew for sure was that I was finally really awake. I fumbled for the covers, pulled my blanket up to my chin, and waited for my heartbeat to get back to normal. And then I remembered how the dream ended.
It ended with me deplaning somewhere outside of town, maybe in a field. I got off the plane with a vast feeling of relief, more than ready to plant my feet on familiar ground. I wanted nothing more than to be back home, settled into my routines. Just to be polite, I nodded a farewell to the coyote man. He spoke into my mind, scaring the hell out of me.
“Now that you have been to the edge of things, we can always find you. Best to forget.” He spoke casually, but the words shot through me like lightening. I backed away from him, stumbled into a turn, and fled at a fast walk toward town, the dog by my side. I thought to the dog, “You can come with me,” but realized that he could not hear me. Now that we were back to reality, our mental communication was broken. He came with me anyway, trotting along by my side.
That’s how the dream ended.
There. I’m done typing. That’s the story. I have typed now typed it out three times. I’ll hit save and see it this time it sticks… there. Well, it saved this time. For better or worse, it’s in my computer now. That dream seemed so real. I’m going to print a copy—
I just heard someone come up on my porch.
Whoever it is hasn’t knocked yet. They must be just standing out there. That’s weird. Why is someone just standing on my porch?
I’m sitting here in silence, listening with every nerve. I can hear someone breathing. I should be the only one breathing in this house.
Silence. Maybe I’m just imagining things.
There’s daylight out my window, the hot light of late morning. A yellow patch of light brightens the old carpet on my floor. My desk is up against a window; I can look out over my lawn, but I cannot see the front porch or the front door. My front yard appears innocent of threat: a neat patch of green fringed by a fence and the messy tangle of last year’s flower beds. I need to get out and so some gardening. I can feel my nervous system settling down. I need to get up and away from this computer and this story.
A bark. The short sharp sound stabbed me in the throat. I freeze, then force myself to type. There can’t be a dog in my house. I have to have imagined it. I don’t know what’s going on with me. I need to go downstairs and check just to prove to myself that there is nothing to be so scared of.
Oh, shit—I just heard a growl from downstairs and a bark. I didn’t imagine it. There’s a dog downstairs. There’s a dog downstairs and it’s barking at someone on my porch.