Ground Beer for the Dogs
by Veronica Shore
When I was little I would follow my father around our yard and smoke his discarded cigarette butts. I’d taste next to nothing but filter and put them gently back on the ground where they used to be. My father and I would have fires and stay up all night to get the coals hot enough to melt his beer bottles. He wouldn’t want to stop until the glass was flat and bubbly. The mornings after I would trudge through the soot and stomp to shatter it all.
Today I went to school covered in dog blood. My dog is pregnant and the other bitch has been trying to kill her, going for her neck whenever she gets the chance. My father says it’s the hormones bouncing around. I had to help separate them. It’s not the first time.
I get to school and a sophomore stops me in the hallway, telling me he hid a bag in the woods. He asks if I want to meet him later.
“I’ll find you,” I say.
I don’t notice the blood until I go to wipe my forehead. I’m worried about the puppies.
“How pregnant is she?” I meet the sophomore after lunch, told my fifth block teacher I wasn’t gonna be there and we walked to the river.
“About to pop,” I say. “When you rub her stomach you can feel them moving around and shit.” I pass the joint to him.
“We thought my dog was pregnant. She had those lumps on her stomach and, like, big fucking nipples, right? And it was right after she had been missing for a day so we figured she was out bumpin’ uglies. Turns out she had stomach cancer and she died like two weeks later.”
“You didn’t notice anything was wrong?”
He shakes his head. “You know how pregnant bitches get. Light?”
I light it for him.
I come home and my father’s in a panic. “It’s time,” he says. “She’s broody.” And I help my parents help our dog. The first puppy doesn’t come until after two-and-a-half hours of labor. Its sack and the placenta are green and my father says that means there’s a dead puppy in there somewhere.
She’s supposed to have seven, but she has eight. The runt was born while I was trying to get another pup to latch. Our bitch didn’t even contract, he just slipped out. My father spends fifty minutes resuscitating him and in the welping log he tells me to write: Born with no sack, not breathing, umbilical cord already severed, white socks.
I keep that puppy, Wilbur, alive for three days. His ears on sideways, and his skull not fully formed. He couldn’t latch. My father falls asleep with Wilbur on his chest because he is warm enough, and in the morning he is cold and unresponsive until we put him on a heating pad.
When Wilbur finally dies, the mother—the bitch—starts breathing easier, in that guilty space between sadness and relief. My mother cries and I dig a hole for him in the backyard by a white rock. My father says we can’t bury him today because Sunday is a day of rest. We’ll do it tomorrow. I get a text from the sophomore to meet him by the river. I need a cigarette, he says.
The rain is soft and I cannot recognize which house is mine so I stand in the road until I find it in the place it’s always been. It’s been there for so long, I was just by the river. When I walk up the driveway my father is sitting in the garage. “I’m out of beer,” he says. “Drive me.”
I get in the car and my throat hurts. My father, he lights a cigarette. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s my fault.”
“It isn’t,” I say.
“I know you hate me,” he says, “I can feel it.”
“I don’t,” I say.
“Drive.”
At the gas station, I have to fill up the tank. My father says I’m getting this truck when I go off to college and I just hope he remembers. A man comes up to me and asks me for a light and I give him my lighter. “I know I’m not supposed to smoke at the pump, y’know, the signs,” he gestures. He’s funny. “But a wet cigarette is worse than eating the filter.” He pushes me and laughs and I touch the pepper spray in my pocket. He’s funny. “Can’t get this fucking thing to work,” he says.
I hand him matches. He takes them and laughs, stumbles, and splashes gasoline over my shoes. “Take care,” I say and my father comes out with Allagash White and pistachios.
When driving home he lines up the fully shut nuts on the dashboard and hits them with the back of his phone. “Sorry,” he says when the shells get on me.
“You’re fine,” and I pull into the driveway.
My father takes a beer out of the six-pack and hands it to me before he leaves. “For your trouble,” he says.
I stay in the truck and open the bottle. I don’t like beer but I drink it anyway. The rain has stopped, and I take off my shoes and put my feet up on the dashboard. My socks are wet so I take them off too, walking barefoot behind the house to smoke a cigarette. My father is there messing
with the fire pit and he asks for my lighter to get it started. I stand there staring at him, “Everything is wet, dad. It’s not gonna light.”
He looks at me, and then the grave by the rock. “It’s all mud,” he says.
Veronica Shore lives in coastal Maine with her family. She is a student of creative writing and English literature; a dedicated thespian, having performed throughout New England; and the winner of Regional Fine Arts awards for fiction. Her most recent works can be found in Malasaña.
