Pounding
Pounding
By Patrick Quinn
“Send it to the pound.”
“Why this one?”
“There’s obviously something wrong with it.”
Damien couldn’t help himself. We started morally, only finishing off the roadkill we found still suffering, their lifelines as thin and sparse as the strings of blood webbing from each dismembered limb, but the cracked streets are overrun with strays. The dogs are like maggots with their writhing white bellies and wasted gray and pink nipples exposed to the sun. Their legs flail, their skin boils on the asphalt. The virus keeps them from scurrying away from their own panic and pain, and has made them multiply like infected cells. The media refrains from the use of the word zombies to keep from upsetting civilians, to be sure not to remind them of the pets lost to a slow, parasitic death, but we all know that’s what they are. There is no better word to use to describe when they stopped coming home. It was so unlike our companions.
The gingery dog we’ve selected, our guess is an Irish setter, freezes its autonomous play and looks at the five of us, upside-down, crowded around it, chin to the sun. Its fur is viciously matted and disarrayed. We watch its plagued eyes dart in circles. Its long, limp tongue, the color of twilight, spills out of the side of its mouth and curls up like a vivid tendril on the ground.
“Hey there, bud,” Damien coos. “Wanna come with us? Come on!” He pats his thigh as we start to walk to the site. The dog has nothing to do but follow.
The “pound” isn’t a real pound. It is where we’ve been going to pound. It is an off road quarry we discovered off the bank of a scarcely explored hiking trail deep into the woods of Moonlake Park. The pool is shallow, the size of an ancient abbey courtyard. It deepens toward the other end where it opens up to the Saltmilk River, flowing the entire way down the center of the country. The quarry’s jagged edges make it appear like a filthy star embedded in the earth.
The crest of summer: the sun is violent in the sky, the great, cool blue surrounding it isn’t enough to calm it down. Heat sears our napes as we travel over the barren ground into the stomach of the park. The weak reeds whistle in the outlying fields congested with animal bodies, either dead or eating the dead. The virus only affects canine heritage. The hot, gamey smog finds and hangs over us, scratching the walls of our nostrils. A brief eruption of thick, humid wind rushes into our backs and causes our heads to survey the festered landscape. We pass a black Rottweiler mounting a silver spaniel.
We arrive at the bronze quarry. We kick off our shoes and slide our socks off, leave them on the bank, we beat into the water, soaking the cuffs of our jeans, our legs like soldiers. The hostage fidgets in our arms.
“Help me here,” Damien says. “Grab its ass, Corey. Jesus Christ, bro, look at the balls on this thing.”
“I don’t see why we have to keep doing this. It feels wrong.”
“Shut up,” he barks. “This is the sort of dumb shit we can only do in the summer while we’re young. Now hold its legs. Mack and Drummer, you two grab the abdomen.”
“Dude, but why?”
“Man up.”
Damien holds its ears down and clutches its skull with his hand like a talon. Its lavender tongue, speckled with white, lolls all around, laps the thrashing water, which is so loud the day can remain idyllic over our sin. The flat, smooth rock, meters in length and width, appears like a soothed sheet of clay a few inches under the water’s surface at the quarry’s entrance. We pet it with our toes, it seems to breathe under us, its softness is almost like fur as we pin the dog down. Damien pulls back on the head of the stupid thing and begins pounding its face into the stone.
The hard smack of it is audible over the distant rapids. It squirms under our grasp, its fur turning to slime in our wet fingers. It begins to slip away, but we hunch over and swathe the storm. Damien continues on for what we count to be forty-six rounds, rearing back and mercilessly slamming its nose into the brown rock. Pounding. Punishing. Pounding. We grunt. We can feel the tremor of the skull splitting as Damien chips it away under his grip. The shrill yelps of the dog are choked by rushes of bubbles thrust out of its throat. Rockets of strawberry blood shoot and swirl and stain our shins with red ripples, the blood is almost alive in itself, a kind of dancing shapeshifter, but it mixes with the water and dilutes. We’ve made its life invisible to anybody. We feel the dog’s unhooked teeth tickle our ankles as they jet downstream like minnows. When we look down underneath the limp carcass, the rock is scarred from the imprint of dogbone. We push the body off and the rust-colored corpse rides the water to the river. Something will find it for dinner.
This life is entirely unpredictable. We never saw the virus coming for our pets, nor the additional carnage it would plant throughout our ecosystems. We never knew Damien would become so recklessly excessive, but he is our friend, and we cannot choose our desires. We never would have seen ourselves here, pounding the gaunt body of a dog to its death, but it is where we were put, by some giant hand in the sky. We sit and we stay, however infected we are.
