Rumble Tumble

Herman smiled, walked us around to the other side of the machine, showed us a transparent plastic cage where the dogs had been delivered. There were three all right, and they looked puzzled as all get out. I suppose I would too, I was sitting in my living room, was suddenly sucked up a hose and into a plastic container. I reckoned prairie dogs were developing a rather interesting set of stories about alien abduction.

“Well, ain’t they the cutest little things,” Brett said. “You don’t just box ’em up and send them to Japan, do you? I mean, I can’t see a bunch of them dogs in a box with air holes cut in the sides.”

“I sell them to a distributor,” Herman says. “He has them shipped. Big business, actually. After everyone gets their cut, I make about a hundred and fifty a dog. Most of the time. Sometimes the market’s a little less.”

“Looks to me like you’d run out of dogs,” Leonard said.

Herman waved his hand expansively. “This is seven hundred acres, and it’s all mine,” Herman said. “Got it for a song.”

I looked out over the land. Bleak and gray and ugly, with splotches of mesquite. I hoped he got it for a short song. A ditty maybe.

“Place is riddled with dogs,” Herman said. “I farm ’em. I come out here and watch ’em some afternoons. Kind of educational, really, watching them pop out of their holes and look around. You get so you know when the babies are grown up enough to suck out of the ground. I don’t like to get no little bitty dogs. I want them to grow up. Then I’ll suck ’em up. If I was to run out of dogs here, there’s plenty of ranchers be glad to see me coming with this baby.”

Herman detached the cage from the vacuum and slid a perforated top over it. He sat it in the bed of the pickup. The dogs rose up and pressed against the plastic and pushed their noses to it.

The vacuum was hooked up to a little motorized device. Herman fired it up with a jerk of a cord, sort of steered it to the pickup by holding on to the back of it. At the pickup, he cut the motor back with a switch, pulled a wide piece of plyboard out of the bed of the pickup and fixed it so one end was in the truck and the other slanted to the ground. Pushing the throttle switch, steering the device with his hands, Herman guided it up the ramp and into the truck and killed the motor. He pushed the board up alongside it, said, “Y’all climb in somewhere.”

Leonard got in front beside Herman, leaving me and Red and Brett to ride in the bed. We sat with our feet dangling over the open tailgate and Herman drove us slowly to the church, bouncing along the hard ground.

“I don’t know why Leonard didn’t let me sit up front with Herman,” Red said.

“I do,” I said. “We don’t want you telling your brother a line of shit before we got time to lay things out.”

“Don’t think ’cause you’re with some family,” Brett said, “that everything is hokey-dokey. You’re still our prisoner, and we still got guns under our shirts, and I’m just dyin’ to hit you on the other side of your little punkin’ head.”

“There’s that little stuff again,” Red said. “There’s just no peace from it.”

18

The inside of the church lived down to expectations. It was ripe with the smell of sweat and boiling pinto beans and something baking. It was very hot inside, and Herman shoved at the swollen door until it hung open and a shaft of sunlight fell through it and hit the dirt floor and gave the cigarette butts there a sort of royal glow, as if they were floating in God’s own butter.

There were four long pews to the left, and the closest one had a cot mattress on it with a sheet and a pillow that drooped over the side. The edge of the mattress, where it touched the ground, was brown with dirt. There were plastic cases with perforated tops in one corner behind the pews, stacked on top of one another, and in the cases were water pans and food pans and prairie dogs and newspaper lining and piles of prairie dog shit, both fresh and dry. The dogs reared up against their clear plastic cages and took note of us.

There was a wooden stove with a big iron pot on the top, boiling away, and the heavyset Mexican woman was stirring the contents of the pot with a long wooden spoon. She watched us with the same lack of enthusiasm she had showed us in the yard.

To the left of the stove was a doorway so narrow you’d have to turn sideways to go through it. The door itself was open, and I could see an ominous-looking shitter in there, stained black and green with a stack of newspapers by it, and on the other side a cardboard box.

Herman strolled over to the window with the yellow paper, pulled at the shade. It rolled up and light came in and made the place look worse.

Another step deeper and I could smell the prairie dogs and their offal, and it wasn’t something that went with pinto beans and baked goods.

Red looked about, took off his hat and held it in his hand as if acknowledging the dead. “Kind of let the place go, haven’t you, Herman?”

“Reckon so,” Herman said. “People quit coming.”

“You always gave a good sermon,” Red said.