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Flood

The dog skirts my heels. He's a daft dog and it's a daft wet day. The kind of day where you're wet before you put on your slicker, as they say, even though it's not properly raining. Moisture oozes from the puddles, trees drip endless drops and all that. A gore of grey to the sky. I'm wondering why the dog is so happy to go trotting out in the rain. He's been out and about for these last few days, unlike me. I've been trapped in the small space between the cot set up each night in the sitting room and the crowded front kitchen. Reading old copies of Reader's Digest and watching assorted relatives and neighbors troop in and out with their condolences. Really just waiting for the skies to clear to take this walk. Take any walk, but this one will have to do, I suppose. So the dog, who is already soaking wet to his muttish skin comes bounding up when I shuffle out the back door. His muddy swamp breath and nose snuffle against my ears as I lean to the struggle of pulling on a pair of olive-green Wellingtons. After I have the Wellies on, I pull the door behind me, and it scrapes hard on the cement of the path as it swings shut. The dog jumps at the sound. Skittish dumb fucker. Through the big glass window of the kitchen I can see Granny (or is it Mom?) sitting by the fire. She doesn't wave or nod and I just look up into the daft day and try to think up something profound to meld the melancholy day with my moldy mood.

But who am I kidding? It's just me and the dog and the damp. Nothing profound in that. And the dog at my heels is a fool. He's mad, possibly rabid. He's got black spots on his otherwise mud-white back, and one green eye, and one blue. Another black circle around his blue eye. He comes back to the farm covered in blood and bites at least once a fortnight. Or so my cousins (or are they my siblings?) say. I haven't seen him wrecked like that yet, though, and I've been here a week. They say he doesn't know which fields are his (even though he's almost three years old) and thus other dogs give him a thrashing when he waltzes through their barnyards in search of adventure. Whatever else about him, he looks the clown. Or like a mad dog. So maybe he is rabid. But there's no rabies in Ireland, right? He runs ahead of me and growls at the red rusting gate. Has he raced past it two thousand days running, or just one thousand? How many days are there in three years?

So the dog is a fool sometimes psycho. And I'm a psycho sometimes fool. Playing at these words. Playing at these games. In my mind there's a field under water. And there's a dog that rousts a hare. And there is a chase, moronic and beautiful. I think this has some sort of meaning, so I have decided to write a story about it. But I can't. I'm sitting here listening to Emimen and digging the rather ridiculous rage that the guy funnels into his tunes. What am I trying to do again? Oh yeah, write a beautiful and meaningful paean to the struggle of life and death, life over death, death over life, and so on and so forth.

I see all this in the imaginary scene of a hare and a dumb dog in my mind. I see it again and again. It's on my uncle's farm (I was only playing that it was my brother's) back in November '99 when half the fields around the house were under water. Not unusual for Galway in November, but I guess not that usual either. Kind of like getting sucker punched with a brain tumor at age 49: not so usual, not so unusual. Sometimes I rhyme slow, sometimes I rhyme quick. Sometimes god's a gas and sometimes he's a prick. But I'm getting away from the chase. That's the whole point of this, in case you haven't guessed. (The chase, or getting away from the chase? The chase, you gobeen.) The chase of this mad dog after a frightened, out-of-sorts but wily and tough hare was/is something to behold. Though I never really beheld it. But because I can imagine this scene and feel something from it, about it, I am therefore an artist, and am entitled—no, obligated—to share it with you, because that is the role of the artist. To broaden your life view with his or her insights. And what if the artist's insights are sightless? Too bad, I suppose. You'll just have to muck through it, just as I am mucking through stretches of shitty water behind the dumb daft dog as I follow him towards a field submerged in water.

But despite not being there, I do see the hare and dog. It's like hearing stories about your childhood that you can't really remember any more than you remember the first time you wiped your arse, but you hear them so many times the picture becomes clear and then you're swearing in court that your Cousin Remus did touch you there, and no you didn't like it, and no, you don't give two shags if he rots in jail. Though thankfully my made-up memories never took shape like that. If they did I wouldn't have to write about made-up sightings of dogs chasing hares, would I? No, most of my made-up memories are rather benign, like the one where my mom's dad spent an afternoon coloring in my coloring book with me. The dignified old-man smell of his skin mixed with the scent of the old style lather he used to use. The burps of the turf in the fire that hums behind us oh so cozily. The serenity of the generations meeting over yellow and brown Crayolas. But I was told, rather unceremoniously, after repeating this story during one particularly maudlin family gathering, that that is actually my brother's memory, which happened the time he went to Ireland back in the summer of 1980 with my mom, and I just stayed in New York with my dad and sister eating bloody burnt steak five nights a week while the skin on my back peeled from one sunburn after another.

Anyway, I am losing the thread of this made-up memory. It's not about childhood. It's about a dog and a hare. A dog chasing a hare through skiddings of water with the sole intent of sinking his hairy and yellow teeth into the hare's sternly muscular neck and then throttling the fucker until he is dead. So anyway, after I turn right at the rotting red gate I find myself slopping down the lane that the cows tread twice a day, on their way from the milking back to the pastures. The mud/shit/water comes up over the tops of my Wellies. It's stopped misting though. But the sky is still all grey. Rancid tumescent grey. Like the skin of an unshaven eighty-year-old bum. Like the skin of my arthritically mellow grandfather. It's grey as all hell. And over the hedges that border the lane to the left and right I notice that there is a good foot of water on the ground. The cows are absent; must have found some patch of a field that was drier. Oh, actually, no, this is November. The cattle are in the barn. Nothing's in the field but water. So I don't know where I'm going, or why I am walking down this lane. Everything is just wet as all hell and I think lightly about what it would feel like to have your head blown off with a shotgun. I'm not suicidal; it's just that the day lends itself to such musing and I wonder what it would feel like. Look like. Maybe I just like the sound of the words: "He blew his head off with a fucking shotgun." Seems better to me than having your head eaten inside out by some pale grey worm of a cancer. Like those mad fucking wildebeests on the Discovery Channel. The narrator intones gravely: Once the flies reach the wildebeest's brain and lay their eggs, it is all over for the host animal. The eggs soon hatch and begin to feed. The wretched wildebeest, can, we suppose, feel the pain (cue shot of mad wildebeest kicking in the dust and banging his skull with his front hooves). This erratic behavior is a dead giveaway to the carnivores, whose main role is to single out the weak and sick members of the herd (cue shot of thundering lion ripping the ass out of the wildebeest, or said wretched wildebeest crumbling under a smarmy fury of hyenas). The narrator wraps up the sequence: Such is the harsh cycle of life on the African savanna. But not on the streets of New York, Marlin? Not in Madrid or Bangkok? Not so in the villages of Colombia or towns of New Foundland? Lucky shits are we, aren't we, we humans who mustn't endure such arbitrary nonsense as a fat pregnant fly deciding that your brain is the place to squeeze out a few dozen larvae or so.

But again I lose the thread, or the thread loses me. I'm off the Eminem and onto Live at Leeds, so the rage is ebbing and is being replaced by, by something else, fuck-all joy, I guess. Anyway, I don't see a pained, worm-ridden wildebeest anymore. I'm back in the lane and it's wet and stinking, but a good, cool, Irish farm stink. Nothing unhealthy about the stink of cow shit. Just grass gone through the wringer, I think one of my uncles once said, though we shouldn't put too much credence on that, considering the nature of memory. But amid this healthy stink and gross gloss of grey sky, the underside of the right hedge erupts in a ruptured guitar blast of brown and black and snapping twigs and slapping water. The dog, to the left of me, cocks his head for half a second and is after the eruption of brown fur before the hedge's branches have bounced back. Water splashes my knees and thighs as he bounds past me after the animal—it's the aforementioned hare. The hare goes straight up the lane, straight ahead of me for about twenty yards or so and the dog is just at his back legs before the hare cuts right with such deftness I am left with no words to describe it beyond football clichés, which actually work in this instance because the hare does cut on a dime, unlike the 225-pound running backs, the hare cuts right without any further forward movement. The dog slushes and slags face-first into the water, attempting to put on his brakes. But in cutting right through the hedge and into the open field the hare must have hit some interference because he didn't blast out at the rate you would expect he would. He's out a second or two later and by then the dog is going right also and is through the hedge in a hail of canine cursing and growling and they're like two surface-to-surface missiles burning through the Strait of Gibraltar after some renegade U-boat or something and then I can't see them.

I notice that my breath is hanging in front of my mouth like a fog. I stand still and search for the two to reappear. Wearing just a windbreaker, I feel the raw of the day glugging into my intestines. They're gone from the field to my immediate right. They must be in the next field up, before which there is another hedge, just like all the endlessly gridded fields of Ireland. Swishing my Wellies through the water to get closer to the edge of the field I wonder if they're going to come back. The dog wouldn't stand a chance in hell of catching the hare if it wasn't for the condition of the playing field. But that is what is making it interesting, even though I already know the outcome. You see, it was my father who actually witnessed this scene on a coarse day such as this, and was so taken with what he saw he felt compelled to relay the events of the chase in great detail to me on two occasions (though in his defense I must add that the others in attendance on the two occasions were different). So anyway, he tells me this story, this chase that he saw the day after his brother's funeral, and his face betrayed how riveting he found it to be. He had previously doubted that the daft dog was capable of anything other than ripping up old footballs and in turn getting his ears ripped up by other dogs. But I already said that, didn't I? He found the dog's feck-all gusto of a pursuit to be wonderful, and the hare's steady scrambling of escape even more so.

So anyway, I absorbed the story; I being a mad and tormented writer took it all in and put it in the category of "possible future fiction use." And then I sat down to write the story. But from what perspective was I going to tell this thing? The usual third-person (through the eyes of my father) line, with lots of exposition, genuinely Irish exchanges of dialogue and then ultimately tying my uncle's death in with the chase of the hound and the hare with a grand Hemmingway-esque flourish? But previous efforts ended up well short of that sort of thing, whatever the intentions. It always seemed to turn into a monotony of predictable action and soberly detailed description. So what the hell to do? Go first person but still stick with the basic facts? Go first person and make it me in Dad's place? And what's the difference? And for just what reason would I put down on paper the story of a dog chasing a hare the day after they put my cancer-ravaged uncle's body in the ground?

But I can't answer that quite yet because I can see the frigging hare again. I wish I had looked at my watch when this drama first kicked off. Just how long can an animal, running for its life, keep going full blast? I suppose that if I had listened a little more closely to the nature documentaries I would know. Anyway, the hare broke through a hedge on the far edge of the field to my right and is still gunning through the slop and water. One second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, before the dog appears. The hare is putting a bit more space between them. "Daylight" as the schmaltzy football announcers would say. So he's putting more daylight between him and his pursuer and is headed right for me. He's coming back to where he started. In a moment he's through the hedge in front of me and he's in the middle of the lane. He stops and looks at me from his left eye. He's a big bastard. He's a throbbing, chest-heaving big old hare. If you're expecting something similar to a rabbit, a hare's size will surprise you. This bugger is way bigger than your average cat. He's two and half foot from the tip of his tail to the top of his ears. He looks like he weighs at least fifteen pounds, and his mighty back legs are all efficient force. And he needs all that force today, because the dog is still coming and however big the hare is, the dog is bigger and is anxious to get his slobbering jaws around the hare's throat. Turning to watch the dog break through the hedge I miss the hare taking off with another watery explosion and the two mad morons are going back at it full throttle up the lane. I walk up after them but the lane turns left about a hundred yards up and I can't see them anymore.

It's really a brilliant chase, better than all the Discovery Channel and Channel 13 nature shows put together. I'm sure I'm falling short of expressing the energy and urgency of the thing, even though it's all there for me to see. It's bloody real. I can't recall the last time I was this close to a real life and death drama. There was the time I saw a stoat with a rabbit in its mouth back in Leitrim. That would have been a great photograph, truly National Geographic quality, but we didn't see the stoat take the rabbit down. And after looking at him for a few seconds before he scooted down a hole with his prize, I just kept on walking down the mountain and didn't think of him again. Well, except for to include the scene in some bad wanna-be-Yeats poems. And there is also the story that my brother told me once, about a hawk and a squirrel out on the golf course where we used to caddy. My brother and his group were on the 12th green or something when he heard a ruckus overhead. A big elm or oak or some tree along those lines shaded the green and there was all sorts of mayhem going on in its branches. My brother looked up to see a hawk emerge from the leaves with a furious and frantic squirrel in its talons. The squirrel was really writhing and the hawk was having trouble with him. So after only getting out of the tree the hawk lets the bloody thing go—and it lands right on the frigging green! Falls 20 feet to the turf in the middle of the golfers and just takes off running to the nearest tree. The hawk lopes off somewhere else, a bit embarrassed, I would assume, and my brother turns to the golfers for their reactions. But none of the fuckers even noticed! My brother couldn't help but chuckle and just went up to the hole to tend the pin for the guy who was all set to putt.

That's actually a pretty good memory, and I envy my brother for having it. Maybe in ten years' time I will have appropriated that one as well. For drama, it may even beat this thing unfolding in front of me. Which begs the question again, what exactly is this thing unfolding in front of me? It's not just a chase now, is it? No. Of course not. I meant for it be the frame upon which I interspersed an elegy for my uncle. A brilliant fucking elegy I was going to compose, for my brilliant and beloved uncle. I've already written a story about my knocking about in Dublin the day of his fiftieth birthday, which is also the last time I saw him. But the story is as flat as all hell. It would probably even be a bit of an insult to him and it certainly would offend some of the family. Must keep that aspect of things in mind, because Lord knows, unless your art is pulling in money, it's kind of self-destructive to affront the family. Unless of course, your Cousin Remus really did touch you there and you need to get that shit out there in the sunlight so you can heal. That's what it's all about, right? Healing. Some might say that that is the real reason behind this mish-mash of stolen memories and misguided thoughts. A proactive attempt to reach closure. Oh me oh my. And what do you know, but the rain has started up again, right on cue. A very poignant rain it is. A bitter, mournful Irish rain. It rained the day they buried John too, I suppose. But I don't really know that, because I didn't make it back for the funeral—I just believe that if it ever was going to rain in Ireland, that would've been a day for it (so goes the originality of my literary leanings). It was just fortunate that I got to see him again for his birthday, and before he died, even though the hideous slut of the tumor in his brain had already pretty much scoured him down to nothing. He couldn't really talk that day, though I'm certain he could still at least understand what he heard. Couldn't walk without people helping him and all that. All that and more. So that was pretty much that. Six weeks or so after that visit he was gone. Loads of people went to the funeral, including the president of Ireland, and there were articles in the Irish Times and elsewhere about him and so on. The day after the funeral my father found himself going for a walk and the dog followed him and so then I was there too and I could smell the cold damp and see the bald grey of the sky but I didn't really have a clue what my father was thinking about; it was his little brother that they had buried and the dumb daft dog chasing the beautiful and powerful hare gave him something to think about, so he told me about it on two separate occasions and I was glad that he did.

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