CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

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IMMEDIATELY following that prodigious blizzard in Denver, (reviewing a worthy-to-note retrospect here), Shanan had a not-so-inconsequential quarrel with the apartment owner, Claudine Gabe. He flamed at her viciously over the phone, calling her a cheap Jew and a folio of other ethnical smears, believing he was righteously angry for her failure to have the driveway cleared quickly enough for him to free his van. Although he had eventually arrived at the bingo hall church and had slipped its key surreptitiously beneath its doors, which were thoroughly barren of even the first congregant manifestation, he had apparently wrenched a mechanical part of his van, causing a clacking noise that enraged him to the level of bared teeth and grinding molars.

 

     Unknown to him at the time, as I believe I have gleaned from Shanan, this fierce and vengeful trait of his, a week prior, had wounded the flesh of his dog, and her stomach had bloated to ten points beyond physical description. Shanan bawled emphatically and prayed profusely to the Lord and, in a day, Amy’s stomach had relaxed back to its normal size. Not taking this unpleasant affair seriously into account, however, on the day he left Denver, Shanan again cursed the apartment owner, but on this occasion by posting a publicly conspicuous note on the hallway-side of the door to his ex-home of many sufferings. The note contained a variety of accusatory finger-pointing, more ethnic slurs, and a flaming reprimand concerning her “outrageous and lousy lack of responsibility toward me!” He had fantasized to the base of his naive heart (but quite mistakenly) that tenants in the building, upon reading the eye-level communication, would thus relate to and instinctively sympathize with his withdrawal from the mile-high premises.

 

     Driving through the cold, black of the night, Shanan did not realize until stopping at a rest area to let Amy do her duty that her stomach had again bloated to enormous dimension. By now, her midsection was so obese she simply wandered in an aimless manner around the open park, staring sadly back at him, with her big black eyes, as if she were praying, ‘Please, God, don’t let daddy drive away. Not now…not ever….’

 

     This impaired situation frightened Shanan, and he entered his domicile, leaving the door wide open, and entreated the Lord to intervene and heal with His saving hands. Shanan was astonished as Amy climbed tediously back into the van. Genuine tears were falling, honestly falling from her eyes. In all her days, in all her scraps with other dogs, he had not ever seen her cry: She hurts so badly…because she can’t even go the bathroom. Oh, Lord…and his worry heightened again. Not once did Amy whine; she simply moped lethargically into her seat by the window and was soon facing the oncoming traffic—but very unresponsively, very, very unresponsively.

 

     During the next hundred, cold and anxious, miles, Shanan, more apprehensive than ever, filled with whimpering and light prayers the interior of his van; but upon close examination at the next highway exit, he found that Amy’s bloated stomach had changed not; undeniably, her stomach was beginning to appear fatter. Shanan at last parked in a highway rest area for the night, and scrambled promptly to the shelter of his pile of blankets—cold blankets—and prayed again, but now fervently raising his voice to God. Amy, in turn, tunneled in at his knees and tried curling herself next to them to get warm.

 

 

THE CLATTERING of chilly morning rain upon the roof of the van awoke him, and he blinked the tracks of his sleep from his eyes, surveying his van for Amy. She had crawled deeper into his bedding and was now merely a large cold lump at his feet. Amy was dead.

 

     “Holy God!” he wept, drawing her stiff little body slowly into his trembling arms. “Oh, my God!” he cried again. “What did I do…?” and he grieved bitterly for her life.

 

     Every sad emotion he had ever known, and a shipload he had not, were sailing their insufferable way back into his lonely, broken soul: Amy…? Dead…? NO…! NO…!

 

     His entire body wracked with tribulation, and in his grief, he sobbed to the Lord. Memories of Grandmother Bin flooded his ebbing spirit, and he ached with unchecked frustration.

 

     “Amy is only ten years old, God!” he erupted in great remorse. “Please, Lord, you can heal her!” Tears flowed into crystal springs down the lusterless cheeks of his face, and he relaxed his pitiful hold reluctantly. Four or five heaving breaths ensued, and he released his precious Amy back onto the cold floor of the van.

 

     Having dressed and dragged himself back into the driver’s seat, he drove on through the pouring rain, weeping and praying, struggling off and on throughout this miserably protracted trip to New Mexico. Life…? Life had no real significance. Death? Death would allow him ultimately to reach out to his Amy, his only real companion, and they would run through God’s life-surging heavens eternally.

 

     “MY BABY…!” he shrieked as tears repeatedly exploded from his dispirited face. “She was so soft,” he wailed. “I love my Amy…I love my Amy…I love my Amy…Oh…God, how I love my Amy…Jesus Christ, God…I love my Amy. Please, O God, have mercy on her…

 

     His driving was by degrees. His head bowed with grief every inch of the way, and tears falling to his lap in abundance steadily blurred his vision. The upper front of his jeans was soaked by the time he was a half-hour from Las Cruces.

 

 

DARKNESS had thoroughly mantled the City of Crosses for hours, but warmth supplied a comfortable breeze. From bygone travels through this area, he recalled a barren patch of desert that was five miles north of Las Cruces: a secluded site where he and Amy had parked occasionally, ate their evening meal, and played with sticks during happy and carefree circumstances. Pulling off the Dona Ana exit, he made a left and drove under the viaduct. On, a tenth of a mile, he turned north and drove a thousand feet. Pulling cautiously off the right shoulder and fifteen feet over a pea-graveled floor, he finally parked on a flat of firm sand.

 

     Eyes were dry, face and heart now stained through the torture of his long, lonesome trip, and Amy had lain dead for hours. He was in horrible torment. “I love my Amy…”

 

     He stepped silently from his van and relieved himself beneath the starless night. Nothing but vague silhouettes of wild desert shrubs and rocky soil decorated the nearness. His face was expressionless as he watched and listened to distant cars and trucks hiss or grumble their way north on Interstate Twenty-five. Climbing gradually back into his van, he began to see mental pictures of his father’s Shell Gas Station, the beautiful pheasant brought back to life, the puppy at Big Bar, California, and the child’s glowing, tearless face as he handed the resurrected and squirming puppy back to her. His confused mind swept into a veritable domain of animated visions as he tried to ponder a hope by those spiritually eventful past days. Staring in disbelief, he crumbled to his shaky knees, to the floor of his van, and gathered pathetically onto his lap, his baby, Amy.

     “Dear Lord and dear God,” he began, quietly raising his face to the Highest in the heavens, “you’ve done a thousand wonderful things in my past…O Lord, please look down on me now, and hear my prayer…O Father,” he supplicated, his face shimmering with wetness in the gloom of his van. “Please, God…I love my Amy…I love her more than anything in the whole wide world,” he wept, ever so affectionately stroking the velvety hairs on the back of Amy’s slender neck.

 

     “Oh, God, she used to put her neck over mine to tell me she loved me, Jesus. You saw it…” His eyes again forfeited cups of tears from the deepest of hidden wells; his heart melted into the void. “My God…! I know you can do this for me. I love my Amy…I know you can make her alive. Ain’t nothing you can’t do. I know you. I believe in you. You’ve helped a hundred other times…I love my Amy, God…! Please make her alive,” he whined to heavens of mercy. “…Please. —Pleeese…!”

 

     The anguish he was going through could not be described. The torment of barren loneliness flowing within his own life’s blood was now complemented by Utter Misery dolefully coiling her trailing lace with choking punctuation, shrouding his every agonizing word….

 

     “God…God!” he cried with shivering whimpers. “I love my puppy, inghh…. Please, Daddy, please…nyhh…, Oh Abba…, please m’m’make my puppy well again….” His weeping and suffering and grief were so, that his heart throbbed into his ears at an alarming rate. “I beg you…, Father…, y’you ma—made the pheasant alive…, Jesus. You made the little girl’s puppy dog alive…. Oh, mmmhh…my God…! Please hear me…just this once…,” and he rolled softly over and onto the floor, in his desolation, to the side of his baby, Amy, and gently caressed her body to his chest. She was loving him harder than ever, and he knew this…but she was not smiling….

 

     He closed his eyes and dropped his weeping head and, as he held her, swayed melancholically back and forth, remembering Amy’s little coal-button nose; her furry little white face; the thousands of occasions he threw her sticks and ran with her over those immeasurable fields of happiness; her nine little baby puppies yiping and squeaking for those seven cherishable weeks; and her unmistakable sorrow as her puppies, day after day, were being bestowed into the hands of strangers—her big, black, sad eyes….

 

     The numberless kisses of sheer excitement she had planted all over his face immediately came leaping back to it again: You sneeeeky lil phubby, youze lil youze…echoed up from the depth of his every beloved memory, but nothing, nothing other than tears were the reality with all of his lamenting sobs: Amy…was dead! Now, only the single eye and the single ear of the Mystery of Memory and her endless pursuing could bring Amy into this man’s despairing realm again.

 

     Not for the rest of that bitter night did he let her slip from his tearful caress. Thus, in the severest depression, he fled painfully from distress and into compounded dreams of woe: C’mere, youuu…sneeeeky lil phubby, you…youze lil youze. She died, riding in the van, with daddy: her greatest joys. This — was — his Amy…!

 

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

 

AMI WAS STILL IN HIS ARMS, as he climbed slowly from his blankets. No new day was arising, just your basic “ragged, dead day upon this wicked Earth.” Amy’s rigor mortis had tapered, and he thought: As quick as things perish in this rotten world, it’s a wasted effort even to name them. Reaching for nothing to eat from his ample food box, but withdrawing a black plastic leaf bag, he slid it sorrowfully over and around his precious Amy.

 

     While driving ever so mutely back to the southeast incline of the Dona Ana viaduct, he sadly reflected on Amy’s everyday desire: The side of a busy highway is the only place to bury my baby; all she ever wanted to do…was go for a ride…with daddy. He parked his van, removed a small foldup camp-shovel from the rear, climbed sluggishly up the sloped shoulder of earth to a level piece of land nearest the freeway, and wept as he began to dig.

 

     The date was the thirtieth of December, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven. He found an old discarded license plate, faded colorless by the sun and the desert elements, and descended languidly back to his van. Holding the plate horizontally, he cut it in half with his tin-snips. He tilted the dated half and hammered its original letters flat on a desert rock; and, upon so doing, he tapped a straight-slotted screwdriver and crudely engraved the large letters AMI. He nailed the plate to a narrow piece of desert-eroded board, returned to Amy’s grave; and, with especially loving care, pushed the makeshift assemblage vertically into the yielding earth.

 

     These days, a noteworthy depression rests deep in the earth where he buried his baby. The wild wasteland animals doubtlessly, or an unexpected reason, assisted through the call of their way—possibly nature’s impatient diet. Albeit, if you were to visit her little burial ground this moment, Amy’s sand-weathered wooden marker might yet be standing exactly where he had placed it, but potentiality does exist that the wooden marker is no longer erect and still at the head of her empty grave.

 

     Now, if a consolation could be appreciated, morose as this may sound, he did gain at least a twenty percent increase of time in which to devote himself to his Bible studies. Nonetheless, this unjustifiable conviction produced a bottomless guilt within him, which he carried for years, and this sentiment seemed to imply a total absence of his Amy would have rendered a preferred option. Because of this awkward and heart-rending and mental disorientation, and with a burdensome amalgamation of past and present negative impressions draining his shattered heart, he now felt personally accountable for what he regarded as her premature death; and the massive weight of this self-contracting, ironclad gloom depressed his already acutely scarred soul—intensely.

 

     Slowly…slowly…slowly…slow…slow…shhh…slow...

 

     He stood gaping at her little grave…, with his big watery eyes, as though caught in a spell…, attempting to reach into the heart of the universe to draw forth the reason and the conclusion to this grieving confusion…. Bowing his head…, he finally turned…, and taking a lingering breath…, he raised his eyes and meditated across the sprawling desert landscape…. Sadly…, as he descended the knoll to his profoundly friendless van…, he peered back over his left shoulder and toward the highway-side grave, and, tenderly through his weeping countenance, whispered, “You and I will run again, honey…. You sneeeeky lil phubby you…. Youze lil youze…. Oh, God…!”

 

 

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We genuinely appreciate your very sincere sympathies thus far; but, at this juncture, we strongly recommend you interrupt your reading. Divert your attention toward another pleasure, if you will, and relax awhile. Upon returning, dip into the next CHAPTER, but, with an open mind, for it may not be quite what you are expecting. This pre-apology is based on the possible misunderstanding of its rather sensitive context. Please, at least consider this suggestion. Thank you.

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

 

 

WITH RESPECT to Shanan’s mournful prayer: The day Shanan left Denver, he did not notify his business partner, Lambert Henry, who was always compelled to listen to his sermons (usually concerning righteous acts which true believers were to emulate to prove their faith) from the beginning to the end of all of their meetings. With matching thoughtlessness, Shanan had not reflected upon his failure to forgive the owner of the apartment building, and ask her forgiveness: a humbling, a very critical humbling, which, in that instance, he had to perform in person—and without excuse. What was more, he had not repented to his God for the trail of nefarious speeches and deeds he had lain so maliciously into the living dust of the Mile High City. Furthermore, we cannot say God had killed Amy, but a compassionate Wing might have encompassed the scene had Shanan repented directly to the above-mentioned parties—and Party.

 

Judge not,

and ye shall not be judged:

condemn not,

and ye shall not be condemned:

forgive,

and ye shall be forgiven

 

Wherefore now let the fear of the LORD

be upon you;

take heed and do it:

for there is no iniquity

with the LORD our God,

nor respect of persons

 

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