Research: Journals
The Journal, Issue 31.1
Prose: "Time in Texas"
by Alan Rossi
Where I Work
I got stuck in Lubbock after the arrest. I’d been planning to move and had put in a request for a probation transfer. In the courtroom, the judge ignored the transfer request and gave me time at an outdoor animal shelter. I asked if he had any air-conditioned community service. He didn’t like the joke and added on to my probation six months without transfer.
In the morning I work at a bicycle shop, and in the afternoon I do the shelter, during the hottest part of the day. The place lies outside of town on about ten acres of dead farmland. There are dusty rows of dog pens, two or three dogs to a pen, and several air-conditioned trailers for cats. I do the dogs. There’s a horse that nobody, not even the owner of the shelter, can touch, it’s been so badly beaten. There are two Chows that chew on the chain-link fence if you come too close to their pen. One of the Chows got loose once and killed a beagle. The mean animals, the shy ones, those are the ones that got beat.
There’s a shed turned into a makeshift animal hospital out behind the owner’s house. The owner, Joe, is half-vet and he runs the whole place, goes around on a golf cart, kicking up dust and gravel. He’s got a bad knee and has a hard time bending down. He’s got deep-set eyes and brown skin and must be around sixty. Prisoners come in the mornings to work for him. A bus brings them in. He pays them and talks with them and drives around on the golf cart making sure they’re doing work. From what I can tell, they only work when he’s looking. Volunteers and people like me come in the afternoons and evenings.
My Home
I live in an efficiency on Georges Street. The one window looks out onto the main drag of town. I’ve got a small fridge, a cooking surface, and a maroon carpet in there, plus a plant I water once a week and two chairs. The carpet is Mary Beth’s. She’s called for it several times and each time she wanted me to bring it to her. If I could’ve gotten the transfer, this wouldn’t have mattered. She never would’ve known I was gone. I’m still here, though.
The last time she called about the rug, I said, Why would I bring it to you? If you want it, you can come and get it. You can be such an asshole, she said, and I pictured her neck all red. Texas girls play it cool mostly, but when they get mad, their necks go red, veins appear. She slammed down the phone.
She hasn’t come to get the rug yet, so it’s mine. I often lie on it and stare up at the ceiling. At night, cars pass and send angles of light sailing across the ceiling and the walls. Before dark, the blinds cut the sunset into the room. The difference between the rushing light of the headlights and the stillness of the sunlight is something I take note of. When I watch long enough, I can see the sunlight creeping through the room, too.
I don’t have a TV, so in the evenings I set a chair in front of the window and sit with a glass of milk and watch the street. I unplug the phone. Across the street is a building, all cinderblock, with a glass door. Painted on the cinderblock, in mural form, is a guy in a wheelchair throwing a basketball. The store sells super-powered wheelchairs to the handicapped and elderly. I watch a lot of people come up the ramp, some of them pushing themselves up with the old kind of wheelchair, and an hour later whirring out on a motor, all smiles. I still can’t figure why the painted wheelchair guy on the building has a basketball. He’s not playing with anyone else. Who’s he throwing it to?
Co-Workers
Dogs dig holes in the dirt to keep cool. They pant and stand in water buckets. Flies buzz around the dogs’ ears and birds wait on fences. Sometimes a dog will pass out because of the heat and we’ll put it in the hospital. There’s no real shade, just the tin roofs above some of the pens. Distant storms pass us by, clouds rolling up into the sky, puffed and white at first, then flattening out all dark and grey. Each day I wish one would hit us.
This day I’m working with a guy wearing a cowboy hat. He’s taking classes for domestic abuse, part of his probation. We put ointment on dog ears that have been chewed up by flies. The dogs don’t like it, they try to shake it off, but they need it. Several only have a half-ear left. He holds the dogs while I put on the ointment.
What’re you here for? Cowboy says.
Hold him, I say. Like this. I take the nape of the dog into my hands, pull back so its neck is straight and it isn’t able to move. I volunteer, I say.
He doesn’t say anything at first, then says, I got domestic abuse, but my lawyer’s taking care of it. All I’ve got to do is take these classes.
I wipe a glob of ointment onto this dog’s left ear, rub it in. Yeah, I say.
Yeah, these guys in these meetings are talking about how they’re learning to control themselves. How when they want to hit somebody or something, they take deep breaths instead. I’m thinking, Jesus, I shouldn’t be here. The lady keeps telling me to share my feelings. I told her, I’m not like any of these people. You know, these people are totally different from me.
I can see that, I say. He lets go of the dog and it shakes. Slobber gets on my jeans and we move on to the next pen. Before we get there, he stops and drinks at the hose and hands it off to me. I drink and he points.
Who’s that? he says. I follow his finger and find a girl named Chelsea, a girl I’ve been watching lately, about a hundred yards away near the Chow’s pen, two big dogs leashed to her and giving her trouble.
She volunteers, I say.
One of the dogs, a tan Labrador, slips his collar and bolts from Chelsea. The place erupts. The dogs bark, some howl. The Lab goes up to pens, front paws on the chain link, trying to get at the other dogs, dust everywhere. Cowboy goes running after the loose Lab. Chelsea’s trying to control the husky she’s still got on a leash, but he’s wild, thrashing. She yanks the husky to his pen, the dog yelping, and pushes him in. Cowboy’s chasing the Lab, kicking up dirt, but it’s not coming to him. I go to a nearby shed, grab a box of dog bones and shake the box. Half the dogs stare at me, including the Lab. He rockets right for me and before I can even think he springs at me, knocking me over, sending the box of bones tumbling in the dirt.
The Women I Know
Just before sundown on Fridays, my mother, Cheryl, calls. She always calls at the same time, not by any clock, but as the sun’s dropping and making long shadows on the street, windows reflecting orange. She doesn’t say she wants to see how I am, she says she wants to talk, but I know. I sit in front of the window and watch the street, the wheelchair building.
Have you been drinking green tea? she asks.
Just like you said.
It has healing properties, she says. You should do a toxic flush. Do you know your body has between fifteen and twenty pounds of fecal matter built up in it? Along the colon walls.
I feel good, I say. I feel great.
Are you exercising?
Every day. I’ve got that new job, working with animals.
That’s right, she says. I forgot. That sounds great. You need to be doing things that are good for you physically and mentally.
That’s why I’ve got the new job.
You sound so good, she says.
There’s a pause in our conversation. A black man on a bicycle hops up on the curb and does a few tricks, spins and kicks, in front of the wheelchair store. He’s got a cape on and has a long grey beard.
I’ve got to get going, I say.
It hasn’t rained here in months, she says. She lives in Indiana, the place I thought I would transfer to, though now I don’t know why I thought that. The place I wanted to go could’ve been anywhere, Indiana didn’t matter. They say it won’t rain for another week, she says.
The bearded black man gets off his bike and sits down in the middle of the sidewalk. He waves at cars and tosses a tennis ball up in the air and catches it. People walk by him. Some switch to the other side of the street before they get to him. I’ve seen this man with the beard and cape before, on other streets. He’s never with anyone else, but he’s always waving to people, smiling. Like he knows something. Now he’s looking up at my window.
Cheryl, I’ve got to go, I say, wanting to watch the bearded black man, maybe shout down to him to come up.
Okay, she says. Pray for rain. God knows we need it.
I will, I say, and hang up fast, but the black man is already on his bike. I unplug the phone and watch out the window.
Mary Beth, though she hangs up on me, won’t stop calling me, either. A couple days after watching the black man and his bike tricks, she comes over. It’s during the evening, the only time I’m home really, and I believe she’s finally come for her rug.
She knocks on my door and I look out through the peephole. She has one of her homemade dresses on, a cream thing that goes down just below the knees. She hates her knees. She says they’re wrinkled. But she’s always worn dresses. When I first met her, I asked if she ever wore normal clothes. What are normal clothes? she said.
I admire her through the peephole, and stay quiet, hoping she will, too.
I know you’re home, she says. I saw your eye cover up the little hole.
I move the two chairs and the plant to the corner of the room. I get on my knees and roll up the rug. Mary Beth knocks harder.
Hold on, I say, setting the rug next to the door and then opening the door.
Mary Beth looks at me. She picks up a box she has next to her in the hall. The rug slides down the wall and into her way. She steps over it and stands in the middle of the room, hugging the box to her chest.
Where do you want this? she says, smiling.
Where do I want what?
She looks at me, sets the box in the middle of the room. She goes out and brings in another box. One has a small TV and radio in it. The other has an answering machine and various pictures and candles.
What is this? I say.
I thought you could use some things. Look, we can put the TV in the corner. I’ve got you some pans in here. She pulls a pot out and sticks a lid on it.
I can’t use some things, I say.
You don’t have anything in this place.
I hate when you do this shit.
This isn’t how people live, she says, her neck and face getting red. This is how a child lives. You’re a grown man.
We’re not together anymore, I say. I don’t want you or your things. Take your rug and your boxes.
She looks at me and walks over to the window. She stares out the window, arms folded across her chest. A semi passes on the street. Her face gets red. She looks beautiful that way, flushed and full looking, not pale.
You should get outside more, I say. You could use a little sun.
Jesus, Michael, she says, walking past me. Keep the rug.
I don’t want the fucking rug, I say, calling after her.
Break Time
The first two hours I’m at the shelter, I clean up shit, and do waters, and scrub bowls. While I work, I catch glimpses of Chelsea. I make sure to keep my eyes covered by the brim of my Cubs hat, paying attention to anything but her—a dog, a bucket, the horizon—when she comes my way. I don’t know why I do this. I could easily go up to her, but the thought of Mary Beth being in the same town, maybe seeing me with someone else, is something I don’t want. Two hours in, I take a break and stand in the shade of a pin oak that reaches over a fence.
Today on my break, there’s the sound of the wind up in the oak and I look out over the fence. My hands ache from working with a shovel. Along with cleaning up cages, I’m also doing over the long gravel driveway, something the prisoners were supposed to do. The pile of gravel has been there for two weeks though, so I started in on it. Now my hands burn, and I touch them to the cool of the smooth tree trunk. I haven’t done real work in a long time, but I like the way my hands feel now, the way the blistered parts pulse. I can feel the pulsing in my head.
I blow on the palm of my right hand. Three birds light on the fence near me, avoiding the barbed wire. They stare at me; one’s missing an eye and keeps its good eye turned toward me. Some days I’ll catch them carrying away dead mice I’ve tossed over the fence. Today they only watch, and then fly off only to land further down on the fence, three black dots on the horizon, farm fields of dirt stretching away behind them. I look out across the fields and wonder what Mary Beth is doing, and far down on the fence-line, I see Chelsea dumping dirty water from a bucket.
Chelsea
I first saw Chelsea when she was trying to get the horse to come to her. She stood at the edge of the barbed-wire fence, a fence that enclosed a circular area of grass. She walked up to the fence, not the horse, then started edging her way toward the animal. I was filling up a water bucket and overfilled it onto my jeans and sneakers. She didn’t look over. She kept edging toward the horse, holding out some hay, and it moved away from her, pulling grass from the ground. I watched how patient she was, and I imagined that’s how she would be in bed, gentle movements, small give-and-take love. I kept watching. She made smaller and smaller movements, like the smaller the step she took, the slower she took it, the easier for the horse not to notice. The horse walked away. Chelsea looked around to see if anyone saw. She didn’t see me huddled against the main trailer, just a part of the scenery, and then she walked away too.
Her second day at the shelter, she got bit by a rottweiler mix; I watched it happen from under the pin oak, on my break. She looked small in the distance, the heat shimmering up from the ground distorting her. She stepped into a pen, opening the gate. She was being too cautious about it. The dog’s hair stood up, razor-backed. It backed away. She edged into the pen and the dog backed against the fence. I didn’t know what she was trying to get at in the pen, maybe an overturned water. As soon as she moved toward the dog, it sprang. It clamped to her arm and she yelled. I stood watching the whole thing, not doing a thing, the dog clamped to her arm. Joe was nearby. Chelsea yelled again. He came running as best he could with his bad knee. He sprayed the dog with a hose and it ran to its doghouse at the back of the pen. Chelsea came running out. Blood dripped down her arm and I could hear her saying how it was her fault. There was a wind up, stirring the dirt roads of the shelter, but I could hear her.
It was my fault, she said.
That little bastard, Joe said.
I didn’t let him smell me, she said. I was too nervous.
He’s not a bad dog, Joe said. But I’ve had problems with him.
It was me, she said. Joe took her arm in his hands and looked at it. He helped her into the golf cart and they drove off to the makeshift hospital behind the house.
I cursed myself for just standing there, for freezing, and went home early.
Texas Heat
It gets too hot to work one Tuesday. I take the hose I use to fill up the waters and spray it straight up in the air, raining down on me, then on the dogs. Water drips from the chain-link fences and the tin roofs. Some of the dogs run away, some let me spray them. Everything’s still. The dust dies down and the sun won’t go down. Texas is the only place I’ve been where time seems to ease up, slow down, the heat baking everything dead. At one cage, I spray a black mutt and he chomps at the stream of water, chases it around. He’s never let me touch him, but when I pass by his cage again with the water hose, he wags his tail. I spray into the cage again, watch him chase the water, biting at the stream. It must’ve been something his owners once did. I spray more and Joe comes up behind me.
That’s his secret, he says. I couldn’t get him to play with anything when he came in. He loves water though. He stands in his water bucket when it gets too hot.
As soon as I clean it, he’s right back in, I say.
I stand in water buckets too, Joe says. Clean ones especially. I look at Joe quick, but he’s turned away. He laughs. A truck pulls into the front of the shelter, drives in on the gravel, the wheels crunching the stones. Joe squints, puts his hand up to shade out the sun. Can you be here this weekend? he says. I’ve got about twenty kids coming in, like a field trip.
I stick the hose through the black dog’s fence. The dog wags his tail, waiting. His mouth hangs open, smiling. There’s yellow gunk on his teeth.
You don’t have to, Joe says. It’s not part of your service.
I want to ask if Chelsea will be around, but don’t. Yeah, I say. I can be here.
Joe starts walking toward the entrance, where the truck pulled in. I’ll give you double hours, he says. Be here around eight in the morning. Beyond a row of dog pens and a cat trailer, a man in a baseball hat steps out of the truck, carries a large dog in his arms, and walks toward us on the gravel road. A small brown woman walks by his side. Joe’s feet raise dust when he walks, one foot dragging some, and as he meets them, he steers them toward the hospital.
Jail Time
There were five of us in the holding cell, one other white guy. We each had a metal bunk with sheets and a pillow. There was a stainless steel urinal and sink and mirror. The mirror was scratched and bent, and you couldn’t have seen yourself in it if you’d wanted to. There was a phone nobody knew how to work. The other white guy kept trying it. He got into it with this big black guy, the black guy telling him to stop fucking dialing. We need a code for it, the black guy said. And we don’t have one.
I’ve got a code, the white guy said.
You don’t have a thing.
I’ve got a fucking code from my buddy in another cell.
Right then, the white guy got his nose broken by a straight right hand. Some guards got there quick and took him away, blood all over his face and shirt, his nose out of place, looking like a piece of warm red clay.
The black guy kept saying that it was self-defense and he asked each of us, didn’t we see the white guy swing first? We were all quiet and all said yes, we saw the white guy swing first. He paced around the cell in the middle of all the bunks. A Mexican kid had sat up on his bunk and was looking at me. He had a white film at the corners of his mouth and wore sunglasses, but I could see his eyes wide through the lenses. I lay back on the metal bed, a dirty pillow beneath me, and pretended to sleep. I peeked once and saw the Mexican kid lying back, too.
With my eyes closed, I could hear the pacing guy breathing, his feet shuffling. I hated the sound and to block it out I thought about Mary Beth sewing her dresses, how I always wanted her to wear something else. In the cell though, I loved the thought of those dresses, her wrinkled knees and fingers with tiny pinpricks; of her asking me to live with her and how maybe I should’ve said yes. I kept replaying things like that. It took forever to get out of there.
Visiting Hours
I call Mary Beth and tell her to come over and see the place. What I’ve done to it. She’s quiet on the phone, doesn’t say anything at first, then says okay and hangs up.
I wait for her by the window. She parallel parks her black Corolla behind a big white truck and gets out of the car. The way she looks from my window, she could be anyone. A ponytailed girl with sandals and these flowery summer dresses. But somehow she’s Mary Beth and I know her. She was almost my Mary Beth and now I feel like I owe her something.
When she knocks, I let her in the room, opening the door and moving with it, so that she can step in. She wears sunglasses that she wasn’t wearing on the street a minute earlier. She goes to the window and sits on the sill, takes off the glasses and puts them on top of her head. She glances at the room then looks out the window.
TV’s in the corner, I say. I’ve got the pots put away. I open up a cabinet and she raises her head to look.
You don’t have to keep this stuff, she says.
I don’t want you to feel bad, I say.
Is that so? she says.
Yeah, I say.
She’s quiet for a minute, looking out the window. What’s that smokestack? she says.
I shake my head.
There, she says, pointing out the window at a hard angle.
I come up next to her, look out the window the direction she’s looking. There’s a brick smokestack, black against the sky. I didn’t know I could see that from here, I say.
Let’s go, she says.
We walk to the smokestack. When we get there, the sun’s gone down and a yellow moon comes up all big and hazy above the grain warehouses. We have to squeeze through an opening in a fence to get to the smokestack, and we do. She holds her dress close to her body so it won’t rip and I wish I was holding the dress against her. Inside the fence, she picks up a broken screwdriver, walks up to the smokestack and chips at the brick with it. Up close, the smokestack isn’t as impressive, it’s worn and cracking, pieces of brick on the ground.
I stand behind Mary Beth. She turns around and tosses the screwdriver past me, into the empty lot. It lands in a tuft of grass that’s broken through the cement. Everywhere, cement and brick crumble, grass and small trees breaking through.
The main building attached to the smokestack is missing a back wall. There’s a window without glass and you can look through it and out the back of the building far down to a Seven-Eleven. Mary Beth goes in. I stay outside the building.
Your place still looks like shit, she says, looking at me through the broken window. Why don’t you put up some decorations?
It’s temporary, I say. I’m not staying there, so why do anything with it?
If that’s how you see it, she says. She walks out of the building and back to the fence. I follow.
Where are you going? I say.
Home.
Why’d we come here?
I don’t know, she says. Sorry for wasting your time.
Hold on, I say. I’m trying here.
Why? she says. Why’d you start this at all?
I don’t know what to say. When we get to her car, she gets in. I grab her hard by the arm.
Get off, she says. That hurts.
I can’t think. I hold her arm. She yanks out of my grip, laughs and shakes her head. She drives off without saying anything.
Mud Storm
I’m at the shelter by eight o’clock on Saturday morning. The sun’s up on one side of the sky, and on the other there’s a storm riding in. Joe stands at the back of the land, staring at the clouds. Lightning flickers. Two airplane towers disappear in the far-off rain and dark.
I think we’ll call this off today, Joe says. Chelsea’s standing near him, along with two other men. One of them is the domestic abuse Cowboy. He’s talking to Chelsea. Looking at the two of them, and at Joe leaning hard on his right leg, I remember Mary Beth asking if she could volunteer, work here with me. Just to be closer. That was after jail, after she asked me to live with her. I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea. I didn’t think she’d fit in. Now I don’t know if that’s true or not, if I really didn’t think she’d fit in, or if it was something else. I don’t know what I wanted.
Cowboy leans closer to Chelsea, telling her how he wished there wasn’t this storm coming. He was looking forward to getting double hours. She leans away from him, crosses her arms across her chest, her red hair in her face in the wind. And for a minute, I wish there wasn’t this storm either. I was going to ask Chelsea to help me with this old donkey we have, was going to have her help the kids feed the donkey while I held it, but watching her all closed up to Cowboy, I don’t really want to get to know Chelsea. Because she’ll never be what I want. And even if I don’t like Cowboy all that much, I don’t like how she’s ignoring him either. I’d rather let her be whatever she is in my head and then let her go.
Joe tells everyone to go home. Me and Cowboy stay on with him, though. The wind picks up. Dust flies around, into our eyes, rises up into the sky. We hurry, putting the puppies we had out for the kids back in the puppy house. After the puppies, we stand under a trailer’s awning, watching the storm coming. We don’t talk. Cowboy sits near a husky’s pen and scratches the animal’s ear through the fence. Joe looks toward the highway, like he’s trying hard to see into the storm. I stand under the awning with Joe, and even though Cowboy isn’t ten feet from me and Joe’s even closer, I’m distant from them both. Neither of them, nobody really, nobody except Mary Beth matters to me.
By the time the storm hits, it’s dropping mud from the sky along with rain. Cowboy comes over to where we are, tries to talk to Joe, but Joe’s not listening. Cowboy stops and the rain comes harder. Thunder cracks then rumbles. Some of the dogs huddle in their pens, under their awnings if they have them, or in their doghouses. The black mutt, the same one that chomps at the hose water, is out even in the rain. I watch him and think that I could bring him home. With his front legs, he pulls himself on top of his doghouse. He stands on top of the doghouse and barks at nothing in the rain and mud.
