Part 18 - First Customer

Imogene opened the trailer door. George did not raise his head from its rest on his front paws, but looked up at her.

“George, that must be you. How is your day going?” Imogene asked as she flipped on the light switch. She was at once taken aback by the décor of the trailer and by the absolute lack of any warmth. She was able to take in the living room and the kitchen at a glance from her place in the doorway.

The living room had heavy gold brocade drapes, in some type of polyester fabric. There was a couch and swivel chair, both, amazingly, with plastic covers. The carpet was immaculate.

The kitchen was brown and robin's egg blue. The sparles in the formica counter top glittered in the morning sun, which accessed the room through a small window above the sink. There were mushrooms, in olive green, on the turquoise curtains.

Imogene was transfixed by the perfection of it, yet disappointed that it was full of cardboard boxes. The kitchen was piled nearly to the ceiling with boxes, and the living room was practically filled with one huge box which was heavily reinforced with nylon straps.

Who lived here, and how could they expect a dog to be happy here? She wondered. Was this person a traveling magician, and that big box was the place where he sawed ladies in half?

“Okay, George, I don’t see how I can sing to you in this place. I just don’t feel like singing, surrounded by cardboard. There’s nothing fun or funny. First these boxes need unpacked, and you need a delicious snack.”

George, on hearing the word “snack” wagged the tip of his tail tentatively, three times.

“Yes, I like snacks, too.” Imogene agreed, as she opened the first box that was preventing her entry into the kitchen.

It was filled with sheet music. She flipped through one of the booklets and marveled at all of the black dots on the staffs. When Imogene was eight, she had taken piano lessons, but the music for Daffy Duck’s Parade Day had lots of white space in it, and the notes were simple black circles, for the most part. She had always imagined that they were little black beetles, climbing up the staff. This made it difficult to keep them straight, because she could never remember which beetle was which. Was it a different beetle, or was it just the same beetle, at a different point in time?

It worried her when the beetles started coming in pairs and formations. It made her feel like there was some kind of beetle war brewing, and that casualties were inevitable.

The music that she held in her hand looked like a full scale beetle holocaust, or perhaps beetles being attacked by aliens. The pages were nearly black with little dots, and they were all tied together in all sorts of strange contrivances. Dots and strange symbols littered the pages.

She closed the booklet and stuffed it back in the box, shuddering slightly.

“This doesn’t need to be in the kitchen,” she noted in George’s direction, and hefted the heavy box.

She looked down the hall to see if there were some less prominent place to put it.

The hall was just wide enough for her to walk down, carrying the box with her elbows out slightly. It was paneled with blond wood. The carpet in the hall was the same gold shag that was in the living room, except that it was covered by a ridged plastic runner that made zipping sounds under her feet.

At the end of the hall was a bedroom, which she assumed was the master.

Instead of intruding there, she turned toward her left, which ended up being a tiny bedroom with no furniture in it. It had nothing in it, actually. The fact that the person had not bothered to put the boxes in the empty room, rather than in the kitchen bothered her a little bit. It didn’t bode well. But her job was not to criticize her employer. It was to sing to dogs. And in order to do that, she needed reasonably happy surroundings. Therefore, it was part of her job to move these boxes.

She spent the rest of the morning carrying boxes. George stretched out comfortably and took a nap.

Part 17 - Mavis meets George

Mavis crouched in the corner of her dog cell, trembling. They had taken away her sweater at the door. The noise was constant. Yapping and whining echoed from the cement floors to the damp ceilings and there was a constant dim ringing of paw scratching on the chain link kennels. When a person walked through, all of the other dogs would yap. All except Mavis and George. George lay there like a glacier in his kennel, apparently oblivious to the noise. Mavis crouched, with the glassy stare of a lifer, a low growl persistently rumbling in her small chest cavity.

Part 16 - At the New Trailer

“Do you want to go to the Beethoven thing at the university with Aunt Polly and me?” asked Phil’s mom as she edged backwards through the door of his new trailer, carrying a heavy box of books.

“Hey, let me get that,” Phil tried to grab the box, but his mother fended him off with an elbow.

“I have to unpack,” he explained as she hefted it onto an old wooden ironing board that served as his kitchen table. “Also, I am sticking with my pact never to attend a public event with Aunt Polly again.”

“Oh, Phil, she’s not that bad,” said his mother, reaching into the book box and examining a copy of “Being and Nothingness.” “Have you actually read this, or are you just carrying it around to look intellectual?”

“I’ve read about four pages,” Phil confessed, “It’s one of my holocaust books. In case I have to hole up in here for a really long time.” He took the book from her and opened it to a random passage.

“Jesus, if I were going to hole up, I’d want to read something a little more uplifting. Do you read Michener?” his mom asked, poking half-heartedly through his book box.

“No, I do not read Michener,” he replied.

“A bit testy?” his mother accused, poking him playfully in the chest, as if picking a fight.

Phil smiled wryly.

“Well I’m meeting Aunt Polly at four,” his mom said, grabbing her purse to leave. “Maybe this time you should unpack.”

“Maybe,” said Phil.

Part 15 - Madge Barkwell

Imogene’s decision to take the day off for her health had come about partly because Ricky stole her alarm clock. He was against things that made loud noises, and was not averse to taking vigilante measures against them. If she left her phone where he could get at it, she would invariably find that it had found its way under the couch or to the bottom of a pile of dog toys. In the case of the alarm clock, Ricky had a personal vendetta. He had been trying to drown it in his water dish for years.

On this particular day, the alarm clock had been knocked off the night stand when Imogene replaced the book she was reading, a history of vulcanized rubber. Ricky had been stealthy. There is no telling what had inspired him to change his tactics. But Imogene did not hear the alarm's wan ringing from the bottom of the toilet bowl until well after 10am.

By that time, she had missed half of her shift at the coffee shop. She put on her bathrobe and dug under the couch for her phone.

“The perfect crime…” she said, accusingly to Ricky, who was laying as flat as he could make himself and regarding her cautiously from the corner of his eye.

Imogene didn’t get sick leave, but she considered her tip money a sort of sick leave/vacation fund. Granted, the sock was close to empty, but she was faithful that it would eventually be bulging again.

As she gazed at the guilt stricken Ricky laying there in the filmy winter light, she decided that fate had brought her this day to explore her personal interest. So after listening to the six messages on her phone asking her where the hell she was, she reached into her coffee can of personal day excuses and drew out a small folded piece of paper. After dialing the coffee shop number, she put on a hushed voice and explained that she’d been in a coma caused by eating some chicken salad that had fermented. Yes, she had thought it smelled a little funny. No, she hadn’t stopped throwing up yet, but she was certain that she’d come through it okay.

Yes, technically, this was lying, but it was a dishonor in exchange for the dishonor of working for an employer who didn’t offer any benefits. Besides, it was an unspoken code between her and the other baristas. They all lied, because there just wasn’t any other choice. They couldn’t get away with truths like, “I just couldn’t stop crying after I watched Now Voyager last night, and now my eyes are much too puffy to be seen in public,” so instead, they said they made up plausible diseases.

After Imogene made ham porridge for Ricky and did the crossword from last week’s paper, she decided to become Madge Barkwell for the day. It would make an event of putting up her new flyers, and also protect her from being seen out and about while she was supposed to be throwing up rancid chicken.

She got out a pair of polyester slacks that she had purchased at the Senior Citizens hall fall festival rummage sale. They were the color of orange sherbet. They must have belonged to quite a thin little lady in their past life, because they hugged Imogene’s thighs in a rather comical way, and made her butt look much wider than she knew it to be. She liked the effect, though. She dug out a sheer blouse that was decorated with an olive green sprig and little orange polka dots and selected a scarf from the cardboard suitcase under her bed. She decided to go with a cream colored one, in order not to have too many shades of orange going at once.

There was a plastic shoebox full of cat-eye glasses on her dresser, and Imogene found a pair that didn’t obscure her vision too much. Then she plucked the Madge name tag from the dish on her dresser. Usually, when she started a new job, she closed her eyes and let fate choose the name by which she would be known, but in the case of Madge Barkwell, she had hand-picked. She had always wanted to use the Madge tag, and it had never come up by chance.

During her brief stint at the public library, she had been Juanita. Patrons at her waitress job at the Cowpuncher Diner had known her as Pearl. The great thing about the name tags was that none of the names were things like Brittany, or Heather. They were all 1940s names. At the laundromat, she has been Mildred.

Since the dog therapy job was more of an independent venture, though, Imogene figured that it made sense to hand select her identity. She could have gone by her own name, Imogene Gardner, but it just didn’t have the spunk she was looking for. Her name sounded way too much like a movie star for her taste. She preferred to sound like a character in a badly, but lovingly written novel.

Usually she didn’t go to the extent of creating a full character, but Madge was sort of a hobby she had been thinking of for a long time, so she had gathered bits and pieces of the Madge outfit, and even had a Madge wig. It was that short, curled all over do that only women over 50 get, in a rusty brown. It was actually a very good wig, so it looked like real hair when it was on. The final touch to her outfit was a clear raincoat.

Part 14 - Mavis Takes a Ride

Mavis shook like a leaf in the back of the animal control van. The woman who picked her up spoke in a soft, sweet voice, and put her pink sweater on her before taking her to the van, but that didn’t mean that Mavis wasn’t out of her wits. She didn’t eat the dish of food that the woman put in front of her. She wasn’t hungry. Her bottom was cold, and it smelled like sick dogs in the back of the van. She would have hidden under something, but there wasn’t anything to hide under.

Part 13 - Dog Grits

Imogene looked into the sock where she kept her extra cash. There certainly wasn’t much of it. The ad in the newspaper was costing her an arm and a leg. She decided to give up on that tack, and try larger flyers in all of the pet stores. Meanwhile, she called Ricky in for some belly rubbing.

It never took Imogene long to think of a new song. It depended on the dog, and she had to admit that with Ricky, the songs tended to be about the same topics, mostly, but what really mattered was that Ricky knew that the song was just for him.

“Oh, it’s almost time to eat your grits,
dog grits, is dog grits,
Oh it’s almost time to eat your grits,
Dogs they likes to sits,
Oh, it’s almost time to eat your grits,
That’s gonna give your tummy fits,
Eat yourself some grits, my boy, eat yourself some grits.

Ricky smiled delightedly, and then rushed off to the kitchen, where Imogene handed him a plate of hotdog pancakes. He ate them like a pig at a trough.

Part 12 - George at Play

George didn’t like it at the animal shelter. For one thing, meals were not served on the “help yourself, the bin is open” basis. He didn’t like the whining and barking of all of the younger dogs. He also didn’t like the shit smell. He lay on his side, huffing quietly, his large belly creating a challenging landscape for any small creature that might have been viewing him.

When the volunteers came to walk dogs, he didn’t get up unless they offered him a Milkbone. Then he would drag himself to a sitting position with an enormous grunt. He followed cooperatively as they led him out into the play yard, but he didn’t feel like chasing any ball or catching a Frisbee. If anyone threw something his way, he watched matter-of-factly while it hit the ground, and then looked up at the volunteer, as if to ask, “Have you had enough, then?”

When it was time to go back in, he wasn’t too thrilled about that, either, but he followed. He knew that he would get another Milkbone when he got back in. He wasn’t stupid.