As for Bruno, he didn’t seem to have a conscience. Helpless, old and vulnerable vs young and healthy made no difference to him. He continued leading me through one suburban loop after another, his nose peeled to the pavement.
We passed a lot of houses with no cars in the driveways, and no brats running around the yard. I tried to size up the appearance of these places, to determine how often the people were home. If a house had an unkempt appearance, with weeds overgrowing the property or the porch looking like it hadn’t been swept in a while, I made a mental note to come back later for more data.
To the shame of my species, Bruno was a better judge of prospective sites than I. By day two I learned to trust his bulbous black nose. Often I would find a place interesting, then tug on his leash to slow down for a closer look, but the dog would charge ahead, uninterested in whatever had caught my attention.
How long has this damn dog been doing this? I wondered. Who the hell trained him?
Bruno didn’t care if I got weary, or lost interest through sheer boredom. Once he was on a scent, you couldn’t shake him.
So far I had identified that old lady’s house that clearly met Dusty’s specifications, plus a few apparently occupied by people who only slept there. I failed to locate any in the vacant category until late in the afternoon.
I had been walking several exhausting hours by then, but Bruno seemed indefatigable. He kept leading me along, even as the sun lowered in the sky and the shadows lengthened, transforming Lake Christie into a different world altogether. Perhaps we had slipped through a wrinkle in the fabric of reality, known only to dogs’ noses.
Around this time, Bruno’s sniffer rose from the sidewalk and he pointed toward a house across the street. He had one paw lifted in the air, hunting dog style.
“Okay, I’ll make a note of it,” I said, tired and irritated. “Come on let’s go.” I was completely wiped, and just wanted to go home.
Bruno did not respond to my repeated tugs upon his leash. He remained in the pointer position, as if gazing upon a distant duck pond, his elongated snout remaining fixed on the house.
The dog suddenly tugged on his tether while I tried to hold him back, remembering Dusty’s injunction about keeping a safe distance from potential hotspots. But Bruno seemed to have his own ideas.
I felt I had no other choice but to follow him. His canine instincts seemed to be cut out for this business. Was Bruno a prop for me or was I a prop for Bruno? Maybe he was doing the real work, and I was only an adornment.
I looked both ways as we crossed the street, not for worries over my personal safety, but to check if anyone was watching. It really didn’t matter, Bruno was hot on the trail and I was going to follow him, even if heaven and earth entire monitored our deeds.
Just like the old lady’s house, Bruno’s target appeared unaware of the invention of the powered trimmer, being overgrown by weeds and tangled shrubs. The place looked vacant, and if not, should have been condemned by the city of Snowmist. Yet when I strained my neck to spot a telltale realtor’s lock box hanging on the door, I couldn’t see anything through the gnarled mass of greenery.
“Okay, you win, you goddam dirty dog,” I said. “This looks like a good spot. I’ll call Dusty right now. Let’s get out of here before someone sees us and calls the cops.”
Bruno paid me no heed. I turned to recross the street from whence we came, but he would not slacken the leash. My canine slave had become the master. In anger I yanked harder on the line, but Bruno pawed the Earth and scrambled deeper in every time I relaxed the pressure. Even I was not scoundrel enough to strangle a dog to death, so I finally relented, and allowed Bruno to forge our path through the wilderness.
The dog lunged into the overgrown yard, trying to pull me places no human should go without a pair of pruning shears. Nevertheless, I scraped and scratched my way through low-hanging branches and prickly twigs until the damn mutt had gone as far as he could, then plunked down upon his haunches before the big front window, his dripping tongue wagging side to side.
“Okay, now what?” I growled. I couldn’t understand why he had dragged me here when I had seen everything I needed, except to verify the presence of a lock box. But in this tangled morass, even the doorknob was barely visible. The leafy screen concealed the presence of such a device.
However, I did see something else, though it took me a while to determine whether it was real, or just the diffraction of light in the thicket.
The house had no curtains or blinds hanging in the windows that would confirm Dusty’s definition of vacant. For that reason, I could see the face looking back at me through bare window glass, although it wasn’t so much a face as a pair of beautiful disembodied eyeballs that seemed to be suspended in mid air, of female origin by their doe-shaped look.
My glimpse was brief. The floating eyeballs drooped with gentle tenderness at the sight of Bruno, outlining heavy lashes hanging down over their glassy orbs, reinforcing my conclusion they were female. Then the eyes met my own and rapidly recoiled in the opposite direction, as if terrified.
“Wait, don’t go, I mean you no harm,” I muttered in vain through the impervious glass, enraptured by those lovely ovals.
Over the two decades of my life I had never fallen in love. In fact, up until now I always scoffed that such a thing was possible. Not to say I was a stranger to females, nor did I shy away from them. In the past I had certainly expressed the term to various young women just to get in their pants, but had never been sincere about it. This was my first time to approach the altar of love with a confessed soul, expiated by the grace of an irresistible attraction to take holy communion there.
The angelic eyeballs did not reappear. Had they been an illusion? They vanished as if vaporized in the heat of a bomb blast, without even the shadow of a retreating body to prove their origin as human, not otherworldly.
As soon as the mysterious eyeballs went away, Bruno began writhing around the entwined walkway on his side, paws in the air, followed by a bout of whimpering, followed by a bout of painful howling, which he pinched off abruptly without any impetus from me, as if recognizing in his own canine mind he had overstepped a boundary.
Now that the eyes had released me from their trance, I began to feel exposed on this strange, entangled front porch.
“Come on Bruno, let’s go,” I said, and this time the dog obeyed.
Bruno had now switched off his bossy alpha dog attitude and become uncharacteristically compliant. The thoroughly defeated dog followed me placidly, his lethargic leash dragging limply behind as we made our way back to Dusty’s van.
I saw a flash of white in my peripheral vision, and looked up to see the mail truck to my left, idling at a stop sign. What the hell is that old man doing spinning his wheels there? Doesn’t he have a job to do?
Humans, and certainly dogs too, possess the sixth sense of being able to feel eyeballs upon them. Being a fairly well read college student I was familiar with the ideas of Charles Darwin, which made me wonder whether this uneasy sensation was an evolutionary mechanism, produced by some undiscovered human sensory apparatus. Or was it supernatural in origin, a phenomenon outside the explanation of the current body of science? Whichever one, I knew that old fart mailman up the block was keeping an eye on me. Had he seen us in that yard?
I hurried along to the dog walk van, Bruno trailing meekly behind. Once inside, he shot straight for his bowl this time, knocking it over with his snout. I filled it to the brim, and while he munched away indecorously, I weighed whether I should call it a day and go home.
Then it occurred to me I had forgotten to check for a Ring doorbell on that last house. I had crawled through branches and thorns all the way to the door, only to become mesmerized by a pair of beautiful eyes and forget the most important detail.
I looked at Bruno in the cargo compartment, resting his head down on his paws, kibbles scattered everywhere and a puddle of foamy drool puddling beneath his furry mouth.
I had let a damn drooling dog lead me to damnation. No telling if I had been caught on video in that green quagmire, occupied by the diffident princess who would come to haunt my dreams.
For the first and only time I raised my voice at Bruno.
“You led me into a trap, didn’t you!” I barked. But Bruno didn’t even look up to acknowledge my anger. He kept peering blankly ahead with sad, lonely eyes, to a distant place and time that only existed in his canine memory now.
Fuck it, I concluded. Vacant or not, doorbell or not, I’m not reporting that house. I got the queasy feeling disturbed spirits were more possessive of their property than the living.
I could tell by Bruno’s indifferent attitude that he had shot his load, and no amount of coaxing would have gotten him off his shaggy ass.
I’ll just go back, park the van, and start again tomorrow, I thought. Who’s going to know the difference, and who’s going to care?
Probably Dusty. She seemed to be the type to stick her own keen nose in her sucklings’ business, as they gnawed on Benjamin Franklin’s teat. I suppose you kind of had to, in the rough blood sport she engaged in. Yeah she looked like a pudgy doughball behind the desk, but her brain was definitely not girdled in adipose tissue. You could sense her keen, observant intellect watching your every move. I could almost sense it from here. If I didn’t call off, I would hear about it.
I dialed the secret number I had already committed to memory. Dusty picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?” she said, sounding a little weary herself.
“I’m calling it a night. There’s nothing left to see out here. Bruno is done.”
I blamed the dog, just like you do when you fart in a room, and there is a convenient fur baby nearby.
Dusty gritted her teeth in frustration across the phone line.
“I gave you my best fucking dog,” she finally spewed, “thinking you would make a great team. His nose, your brain. And that’s the best you can do? One fucking address in an entire day?”
Nobody likes to be reprimanded by their boss. From years of being bullied on the playground, with no father to show up and tower above my taunters, I had developed a take no shit attitude myself.
“Look, I did the best I could for the first day. If I hang around here people are going to call the cops on me.”
I could hear Dusty sputtering spittle into the phone.
“Do better tomorrow!” she shouted, and would have slammed the receiver for effect, if flip phones could be slammed.
When we arrived back at the Dogwalker parking lot, I felt guilty about leaving my canine coworker alone in the van. I was going to report inside and ask Dusty what to do with him, but the lights in the building were off, and I could see no one was there. Nevertheless, I yanked on the door handle at the entrance, just so nobody could accuse me of animal cruelty later.
I was more worried about crimes against dogs than crimes against old, helpless grannies, I suppose.
I parked the van exactly where I had found it, in the shade of an overhanging Scotch pine. I thought about taking Bruno home with me, but there was no way to smuggle him into my apartment, and when I glanced back he was sound asleep anyway. With nothing else to do I left the van windows lowered and went home.
I treated myself to a brewski or twoski before bed, while the satisfying burn of walking several miles tingled through my tired muscles. Despite that bitch Dusty’s attitude, I felt pretty smug about myself, thinking I had pretty much nailed it on day one, and that this job was going to be easy money. My only nagging doubt was how much my first find would net me.
I drifted into slumber with that gorgeous, glowing pair of doe eyes looking down on me from the inside of my eyeballs, as if through an impenetrable membrane, like glass, but more malleable. It was a tantalizing glimpse, but I couldn’t reach through to touch them. Perhaps I tried, because I jolted awake with my fingers extended in the air, before rolling over and going back to sleep, dog-tired.
I neglected to set the alarm clock on my phone. Dusty had never given me a strict schedule, so I assumed I could keep my own hours. I was a little surprised when my secret dog walker cell lit up with her number on the screen.
“What are you doing?” Dusty inquired sternly.
I checked the time.
“It’s seven AM,” I answered groggily.
“That’s when most people walk their dogs. If you want to keep a low profile, you should be out there already. Have you ever heard that expression make hay while the sun shines?”
“Sounds like something my grandpa would say.” I answered snarkily.
“Your grandpa is right.”
“Well okay, whatever. I’ll be right there.”
“And see if you can do a little better than yesterday. I’m a little disappointed in you.”
“What do you mean? I got you a good one.”
“Just one?” That neighborhood should be a gold mine. Melissa says it’s full of old farts and starter homes where the owners work around the clock. Do better today.”
“Who the hell is Melissa?”
She had hung up already.
So much for kicking ass my first day. As I scrambled to find a relatively clean shirt to conform to Dusty’s “respectable” dress code, I thought that if I wanted this kind of stress I could have stayed scooping popcorn at the AMC, going home reeking of bad grease every night, or yanking the one-armed-bandit expresso machine at Starbucks and getting so wigged out on caffeine I couldn’t sleep for a week, or any countless other crappy gigs I had sampled and abandoned in the last couple years because they were beneath my perceived dignity.
When I looked inside the Dogwalker van that morning, something besides Bruno’s fuzzy face caught my attention. It was a small brown envelope on the dashboard, containing a hundred dollar bill and a note.
I wasn’t enough a student of history to know if Benjamin Franklin was a lady killer or not, but he sure looked like a handsome devil at that moment.
The note read: A little advance on your commission. Now go out and get some more.
I stuffed ol Benji into my pocket, my attitude considerably improved from when I had been yanked out of bed by the phone screaming in my ear. If this cash was just a little taste of that to come, as the note implied, I resolved to be a better boy scout and get up with the chickens going forward.
This must be Dusty’s motivational technique, to alternate the carrot with the stick. It seemed to work and I took a mental note of it, since I couldn’t leave a paper trail.
We walked a different part of Lake Christie’s neighborhoods that day, and for a couple days thereafter. My peripheral vision soon became trained to spot alien objects on front doors that indicated the owners had been abducted – such as lock boxes and hanging fliers. Maybe my senses were sharpened by the scent of money – ol Benji in my pocket working away with a whetstone.
I phoned in two new vacant houses in this virgin territory. Once Bruno and I finished a circuit of this untapped well, I took him back to the area covered yesterday, to locate the abodes of nightcrawlers who wriggled in late.
Bruno seemed more lethargic than the day before, less anxious to sniff out new trails. This time he clambered back into the van without dragging his furry paws. As I pulled away from the curb, that same mail truck approached, rolling along slowly. As it passed, the grizzled old sourpuss mailman shook his head scornfully at me.
What the fuck is his problem? Isn’t a man allowed to walk his dog?
As far as I knew, I wasn’t technically doing anything illegal. Yet I had an aching feeling the mailman could see right through the dog walking part, and knew my real objective.
What was my real objective? I wasn’t sure yet, but over the next couple days I started to get glimpses behind the curtain.
Image by Copilot, from author’s prompt