Donnez Cardoza & Bob Bickford

Honolulu-Toronto

You came around last night, Ghost.

“The kids saw a loose dog running down the street,” you tell me. “They’re sure it was Sydney. If I had been home, I would have brought her inside.”

I remember Sydney. She’s a mongrel who keeps company with an older guy—Tyrone or Tyree, something like that. He’s hard to understand. He’s also usually friendly, probably harmless, certainly homeless, and nearly always drunk. I figure Sydney takes care of him, not the other way around. I can’t imagine the two of them separate. They are an aggregate, walking together, drifting from one curb to another.

If the dog was running by herself, something is wrong.

“The kids also said Patty Pickleball followed, in her car, rolling slow.” Your voice gets hot. “Taking pictures of the dog with her phone—an undesirable, running loose without a leash. The monsters will have come around, to grab her. I better call the humane society tomorrow.”

I remember Patty, too. A rich woman wearing jogging makeup, professionally slender, driving a Mercedes Benz, now on a mission to get a wandering dog sent to death row. She’ll call the authorities, send them video with her Bluetooth. When Bylaw snags the mutt, she’ll go home and toast herself with a champagne cocktail, turn on the television news to watch other undesirables being led onto airplanes. Dogcatchers wearing badges grab people off the street these days, take them to cages on death row.

The poor kids won’t get Barbie for Christmas this year, not that they ever did. The forest rangers are all looking for jobs. Raise a glass to the teevee, Patty Pickleball.

“You’ll get Sydney out, if she’s impounded,” I say, because you will. You keep your promises. “The dogcatcher isn’t a sure thing, though. Sydney knows the street and the places to hide. She’ll be okay.”

As her Mercedes taillights melt into a sea of traffic light, I start walking the opposite direction. I can walk a long way without getting tired. Feels like practice, because someday I might have to. The theaters are letting out, and I need to step around clusters of people. Eventually, the sidewalks empty and the flow of passing cars lessens and dies. The real darkness settles.

I love the city at night, deep into the clock, after the bars close. At one in the morning, the street aches with tired. I like crossing on red lights, with a million people asleep behind the windows above me. No witnesses.

Because it rained earlier, colored signs get reflected in the puddles. I reflect from windows, a tired person walking alone, as insubstantial as I feel. 

A police car turns the next corner and approaches, rolling slow. I’m not guilty of anything except being a young guy at one in the morning, a guy with nowhere in particular I need to be. I take my hands from my pockets, hold them a little apart from my body, empty and visible. This is a game I know how to play.

Right on time, an all-night diner appears to my right. Somewhere to be, so I pull the door open.

Red leatherette, the smells of eggs, vinegar, cigarette smoke. I peruse the candy behind the cash register, one eye on the cop car rolling past the window. A dirty white apron asks what I want. He slaps a pack of Export ‘A’ Green on the counter, turns away to pour my coffee-to-go into a white Styrofoam cup. While I wait for my change, I scan the booths. Tired faces look back.

This is the bad part of town. These are the people nobody from the day shift sees, or even imagines.

Old people who never expected to be alone in this strange city stir in cream and sugar, making cups last. They can’t sleep, and came to hear voices that don’t come from television sets. A couple of garbage guys, halfway through their shift, eat middle-of-the-night lunch. They’ll be deep into their third beers by the time the sun comes up. Hookers and drug dealers sit together, get a quick plate of French fries, with ketchup and gravy, before their next business. None of them want anything from me, and they mean me no harm.

These aren’t the monsters, the dogcatchers. They are mostly just exhausted folk who live in walk-up apartments without any pictures on the walls. The daytime scares them.

The bad guys aren’t bad at all, and the good guys are monsters. The world isn’t as easy to figure out as I’d like.

The dogcatchers are all at thirty thousand feet now, flying toward Europe, drinking champagne cocktails and pretending the dark outside the airplane window got invented just for them. They have nice clothes and hearts that smell like a sewer. They toast each other, because they made a fortune shorting Chinese toys on the stock market. Won’t be any Barbies this Christmas.

Dark nights weren’t invented for anyone. I always knew better. 

Stay safe, Sydney. Run fast, girl.