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“Why didn’t you stop?” I ask, feeling my internal gear switch from argumentative to combative smoothly, a well-oiled machine.
“What?” She’s fuming now, her breath coming in shallow gasps that aren’t giving her brain enough oxygen.
“You swerved to miss the bag. You care enough to report it. So why didn’t you stop and do something yourself?”
“My kids are in the minivan,” she says. “I didn’t want them to see anything they shouldn’t. Look, I’m doing everything I can. I feel sorry for those puppies—”
“I’m sure they appreciate your pity,” I say.
She’s done playing nice. I see her own gears switching and know that I’ve pushed too far, called out a sanctimonious would-be do-gooder who isn’t going to fold under my logic.
“Who is your supervisor?” she asks, glancing around the room as if suddenly realizing she’s the only adult here.
“God,” I say.
5. PEEKAY
“God?” I close the passenger door of Alex’s car and she kind of half smiles as she starts it. The shelter is locked up, the sign flipped to “Closed,” a heavy cloud of dust marring the air from the lady in the minivan, who tore down the driveway like we’d loosed a biter on her. Alex left a message on Rhonda’s phone telling her we were checking into a “tossed bag that is moving” out on 9—not specifying puppies or kittens.
“Technically it’s true,” she says, in answer to my question.
“So you believe in God?” I want to kick myself as soon as I ask it, because first of all it’s not the best icebreaker in the world, and secondly I just firmly filled in all the cracks of the preacher’s-kid mold I’m trying to crawl out of.
But Alex shoots back with a question I’m not expecting. “Do you?”
I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that before. It’s assumed, like the fact that I don’t own any naughty underwear or am tattoo-free.
“Yeah,” I say, and that’s actually the truth. I don’t like being a PK, but I’m not a liar, either.
“Why?”
I feel my imaginary ruff going up, like a dog trying to make itself look bigger. I don’t know Alex, I don’t know if I like her, and I don’t feel like defending something as big as my belief in God during our first conversation. I’m about to say something along those lines to her, even though it’ll be the pared-down version—fuck off—but I bite my tongue. All the shitty things I could possibly say back up in my brain because it sounded like an honest question, not a single-syllable word laced with derision, which is what I’m used to. And I guess if I’m going to be working with Alex at the shelter, we have to speak to each other at some point. Might as well cut the shit.
I take a second to put together a real answer, not some blow-off recitation of “Jesus Loves Me” where I tell her it’s “because the Bible tells me so.” I know I’ve got something to say, but I want to get the words right, so I look out the window as Alex drives toward 9.
We hit the one light in town on a green and head north, going past three bars and two pizza places before we get to the dead zone—a couple of paved streets with real signs (Fifth and Sixth) but nothing on them except dead-end drives. The town planners got a little overexcited in the nineties about what they thought the new calculator plant could bring to the community. Ended up all it had to offer was a broken lease and a big empty building two years in.
Oh, and like a lifetime supply of free calculators for the school. But then someone programmed them all to spell BOOBS when they powered on (58008, upside down) and they got tossed into a school auction. In a terrible twist of fate, a church the next town over bought them for their school-supply drive and apparently a bunch of fifth graders got more than they bargained for the first day of math class. But none of that musing is getting me any closer to giving Alex an answer about why I believe in God, and she’s kind of giving me the side-eye while she drives.
“I guess it’s because sometimes when I’m really upset, if I quiet down and let myself be still, I can feel . . . something.” Tears well up in my eyes even as I say it, because Lord knows I’ve been really upset lately and that feeling of comfort surrounding me for no reason I can put a finger on . . . well, yeah. It makes a girl cry. Even one who’s trying to shed the PK stigma.
But in the end it’s still a shit answer.
So I’m surprised when Alex nods like she totally gets it.
“You feel it too?” I ask.
She shrugs. “No, not like that. But things have a way of falling into place for me when I need them to.”
“Cool,” I say, and our big soul-baring is over.
Alex turns onto 9 and we spot the bag at the same time. It’s an industrial-strength black garbage bag, visible heat waves rolling off it. Alex pulls over and puts her hazards on—although why she bothers, I don’t know. We’re surrounded by cornfields waiting for harvest and haven’t seen another vehicle since we passed the last bar in town. We both get out of the car.
I know before we get to it that there’s no hope. The bag’s not moving, which is part of it. But there’s also the reek of urine in the air and the slight metal tang of fresh blood. I don’t even know if I want to see inside, but Alex doesn’t hesitate. She opens it without flinching, both smells amped by about a thousand when she does.
I look away.
I hear the rustle of the bag while Alex checks to make sure they’re actually dead, and then the zip sound of her lacing the drawstings up tight and double knotting them.
