The Dogs…Barking

By Jan Notzon

The Dogs, Barking is the story of a boy growing up on the Mexican border in Texas who, as he grows into a man, battles with the demons his upbringing has instilled in him. First, he must navigate the wild-eyed, rebellious temptations of university life in the sixties and then the raw power of the concrete jungle of New York as he desperately pursues an acting career he hopes will quiet the fiends that torment him.
To his astonishment, he finds the answer in the home he had abandoned and the lonely howl of the dogs that once serenaded him to sleep.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465394125

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The sweat-stained blanket of night spreads mercilessly over the land. And in the distance, the dogs… barking.

The heat of day that manacles the spirit in a desperate prayer for deliverance clings like a sultry appendage to every forlorn atom of the air and blows a desiccated, anhydrous whisper, born in the bowels of the earth’s molten core, across old wooden windows that protest in an angry rattle and, with time, crack and bleed from aching void of moisture. It rouses from a restless sleep the dust from gravel roads and desert’s exsiccation that claws and scrapes its way into each and every pore, turning the throat to sandpaper and grit.

For Jason, the implacable, barbarous heat making sleep a fitful wish, the moments pass like hours, hours an eternity.

The wind dies a halting death; the windows settle into mute stillness, and the silence of the night starved of motion and grace descends in pitiless exigence of air and space. Then slowly, faintly, and from such a desperate distance it echoes hollowly in the lugubrious night-cowled viaduct, now abandoned by all save the Equis, the Chacon, and the other darkness-loving youth gangs that haunt it—one solitary beast, a wary sentinel in the vacuous oppressive night air, begins its nocturnal duty and forlornly emits its plaintive call. Its distant, troglodytic warning jiggles the syrupy somnolence of the tenebrous desert town, now all, save one, imprisoned in the arms of Morpheus.

Immediately, two others then join the dirge, answering the companionless cry of danger or suspicion; the timorous tocsin then complemented by a siren perhaps and, after a breath of eternity, another. The ponderous iron thudding of a distant train with its whining mournful wail; cars, unconcerned by sleeping officials, whizzing by in the night air; the ubiquitous cricket, unconscious and unconsciously questing its perpetuity; all joining the mysterious white noise of the still night.

The gentle breath of Jason’s one dear friend at his side on the floor below, ever-loving, ever-vigilant in her canine devotion, brings a hint of solace.

But outside, there were ever the dogs… barking.

So still it was, so dead, so bereft of movement, of escape from the heat and the sweat and the senseless sounds that take possession of his soul as he struggles to escape his involuntary vigil.

He agonizes, Jason does, sometimes cries, for the loneliness he senses in the dogs barking. He knows them; soul mates they are—close now, down the block, across the forlorn street, over the friendless viaduct as it echoes and magnifies the sounds’ shrewd sorrow. The claw of agony grips his viscera with a fist of iron and twists the red-hot pike of despair in his guts that is his constant companion.

He longs, he aches for… what? He prays, he begs God for… he cannot say; he has not the words.

But breath after shallow breath, as he struggles to fathom the mystery so elegantly posed by those constant feral companions of sound, his anxious eyelids grow heavy, dance the dance of halting somnolence; the taught muscles of trepidation in his stomach lose their struggle to remain so, marching heart slowing to a lowering nocturne, and desperately though grudgingly, he drifts into the murky haze of life’s balm, the little death-of-sleep.

PART I

The Dogs Appear

CHAPTER 1

He has sad eyes, Irene observed, dipping her tea ball into a cup of recently boiled water as was her custom every morning.

"Sad?" was Agatha’s incredulous reply as she held her youngest child and Irene’s youngest grandchild, Jason, on one hip well accustomed to its charge. She scarcely paused in the midst of preparing a hearty breakfast of bacon, soft-boiled eggs, and toast slathered with margarine the whole family called butter, for her husband and four other children; the routine after so many days, weeks, months and years made the task automatic and left her mind free to ponder.

Adding the customary milk to her tea, strong enough so that you can stand on it, as her late husband, Patrick O’Hanlon was ever wont to order, Irene continued, Um-hum. Beautiful, penetrating, intelligent… but sad.

From the start of his voyage in this vale of tears, Jason’s dear grandmother, kindness and generosity personified, had an acute sense of this seeker of reason, Jason.

But Agatha, Irene’s only daughter, though fatherless from the age of two, a fountain of equanimity and good humor, confident in the love of God and with an unshakable faith in the Catholic Church, was still perplexed by her mother’s observation. Oh, Mother, I don’t think a baby can be sad. Babies can be fussy and demanding, and Jason is surely that. And he seems to already have quite a little Irish temper, small as he is; but sad? What could a baby possibly have to be sad about?

Taking a thoughtful swallow of tea with milk and two carefully stirred teaspoons of sugar, in her most uncompromising Scottish-Welsh way, she simply replied, Good question.

Irene was that most rare of human creations: a will annealed in the blast furnace of hard times and genes of hundred-year-old tempered oak, but a gentleness together with a piercing sensitivity and insight that she could only betray with the coming of her grandchildren; as both mother and father to her own two children, that indulgence was then denied her.

When her husband’s brother, Sean, was released from his prison term, the result of an errant swing of a baseball bat during a boyhood brawl, he had come to live with Irene, her husband and two children, Agatha, two, and Patrick Jr., a bare two months. What Irene and Patrick only found out later was that Sean’s knowledge of having violently terminated a soul’s journey on this earth, together with experiences in prison that turned his own soul into a cinder in a crucible of guilt, had made him a slave of heroin and alcohol.

I want him out of this house, Irene said with a voice as calm as the first breeze of autumn and a resolve that could have parted the Red Sea.

Irene, he’s my brother. He has no one else, Patrick answered in an equally firm but at once beseeching tone.

Words in those days were at a premium and terseness a supreme virtue, and though Irene deferred to her husband in all other things, when it came to her children she said with a finality that was proof against all the arrows of heaven, Fine. Then you stay here and I’ll take the children.

Sean was gone the next day.

After Patrick’s death, when an unsuspecting railroad pump wagon met head-on with an unforgiving train, Irene would raise her two children in a home where a mother’s devotion was unspoken but certain as gravity and the sun rising in the east; and where the rules, firm and unshakable as papal edicts, provided security and predictability that swaddled Agatha in an atmosphere of common sense and duty.

"This is your little brother, Irene pronounced to Agatha with portentous gravity when Patrick Jr. was born. From this day on, you will take care of him." And with a sense of pride and joy, Agatha did.

Now, however, given her unflappable good humor and optimism as constant as the ocean tides, it would always remain a deeply puzzling enigma for Agatha: what was this ill-tempered gloom in her youngest child? And she did not, as Jason believed in his youthful assumption of parents’ omniscience, misunderstand willfully. No, it was simply that she could not see anything in this world to be sad about. Disappointment, frustration, sadness momentary and fleeting, she knew and could comprehend, but this world-weary desperation was never a part of her life.

And so the gulf between them, though devotion was never wanting, became a river as wide as imagination and nightmare, a maelstrom so treacherous that no swimmer could hope to survive nor ablest Charon ever venture to traverse.

A child cries as though the world were coming to an anguished, tormented end, and Agatha responds with her wonted perplexity. Oh, Jason, it’s not the end of the world. And having some mysterious, intuitive sense of this woman at once so near and so far, Jason replies in agony, "I don’t care about the money!"

Well then, what is it?! she demands in a tone of consternation born of simple confusion.

He could not answer her. He could not explain; he had not the words in those early years.

You broke a window, she said with exasperated incomprehension. You apologize and you learn from your mistakes. It’s not the end of the world.

Oh god, it sounded so simple! He had no language to express the shame he felt at his own stupidity, his father having warned him beforehand to cover the window with a screen.

No, only his older siblings could name the darkness of his sin.

You stupid little bastard! Stephen, his brother closest to him in age, condemned. God Almighty, Stella, the oldest girl, chimed in with equal tone of contempt and derision, whittling away at what little self-esteem was left him. Idiot! his other sister, Angela, would deeply stab with a virulence that smelled of pus and putrefaction. So his eldest brother, Nicky, who had been his protector in his infancy, added to the ignominy with Mindless cretin! But Angela, the middle sister, always had to inflict the final mortal wound. You worthless little shit! she concluded.

They had the words. They always had the words. And from the dawn of his days, they used them.

Jason is a b-o-y, Stephen would taunt, knowing his rival as youngest could not yet spell. You better be quiet! Jason would protest hitting his big brother with blows punctuated by the grunts he heard in the cowboy movies he devoured. This would only produce derision from the offending object. You must be hurting yourself the way you’re grunting, Stephen would bait him with a laugh.

"You be quiet! Jason would demand, and the fecklessness of his blows fed the burning flame of his frustration. Why? All I said is you’re a b-o-y. As tears and whines of molten anger explode forth in impotence, Jason screams out a baleful Stop it!" and swings impotent fists with all the fury of the gods of wrath.

Oh, Jason, Stella exhales in impatient remonstrance, all b-o-y spells is boy. And Jason, a boiling cauldron of confusion, outrage and shame, in his ignorance pauses in indecisiveness as to the veracity of his sister’s pronouncement.

Then Stephen, taking full advantage of the mental torment that gives him a sense of power and retribution for Jason supplanting his place as the baby, must go in for the kill: Looks like he’s a c-r-y-b-a-b-y too.

In explosive rage, Jason takes the forbidden step: "You shut— but before he can complete the offending command, Stella cuts him off, Ah! You better not say that, Jason. You know Daddy doesn’t like that word."

And Jason, shorn of all weapons of defense, can only cry and scream in indignation, YOU BE QUIET, YOU STUPID! YOU BE QUIET! YOU BE QUIET! as the childish blows draw more and more derisive self-satisfied laughter from his elder brother and condescending sneers from the rest.

CHAPTER 2

And so it was that the assault of his siblings prepared, tuned and tenderized him for the inadvertent coups de grâce of two elementary school teachers who, through the best and worst of intentions, reinforced in him the elementary lessons of self-abhorrence.

First, there was Mother Cornelia, a small portion of her scrunched-up face peering out of her ample black-and-white habit, with her simple Catholic lessons that, through spiritual osmosis, were certain to keep her young charges towing the papal line.

All right, class, listen now. Who can tell me what sin is? she would begin their arduous review of the Baltimore Catechism. This, of course, would ever provoke a shrieking chorus of Oh, Mother, I can, I can! and I know, Mother Cornelia, I know! with beseeching hands raised and waving like flags in the wind.

Willie? she would deign to the most urgent student’s importuning.

Sin is like getting mad and not obeying you mother and father and—

"Well, those are examples of sins, yes. But who can tell me what it is? What is the nature of sin? Then she would pause dramatically for the essential theatrical effect, the Catholic Church being the origin of modern drama. Only Diana has her hand up. She must be studying her catechism, she would proudly and critically utter at the same time. Go ahead, Diana."

Diana Guerrero, with one of the highest IQs in the state, would recite verbatim from the reliquary of rules that would govern all Catholic children’s behavior until time and doubt and aching ineluctable passion would shatter the religious apron strings of docile obedience. There are two kinds of sin, she would begin, original sin, which we inherit from our first parents, Adam and Eve, and actual sin.

Tiny, emaciated, and ever-so-slow Everett Marks, known as Pickles to all of his cohorts in crime, whispers anxiously across the aisle to Jason’s ever-studious cousin, "Pssst, Donny Ray, what’s inhert mean?" as Diana would continue word-perfect her recitation of what was to Catholic school children more definitive than the Bible.

Actual sin is any willful thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the law of God, she would conclude and Pickles would continue his interrogation: "What’s contary, what’s amission?" as Donny Ray studiously ignored him and burned in his competitive fever for Diana Guerrero.

"Very good, Diana. Now, can any of you tell me what sin really does?" And again Mother Cornelia would pause, arousing fevered anticipation in her spellbound pupils. As she did, there would be a nervous cough, the scraping of a desk being adjusted better to hear the incipient proclamation. In the quiet anticipation, cicadas could be heard outside, incessantly buzzing the scorching heat of day, and a desiccated, calid wind blew through the open windows.

Hmm? No one? she added for effect. "Well, whenever you commit a sin, even the smallest venial sin, you put Jesus through his pain on the cross ALL OVER AGAIN."

Oohs and ahhs resounded through the classroom like a distant clap of thunder gradually diminishing to the insistent murmur of a falling stream.

That’s right! the doubtless nun averred with all the calm assurance of a general in God’s Catholic army.

It was 1957, a time of moral certainty and unquestioned respect for authority. And while there was fierce debate among Christian sects about details such as the host and wine truly becoming the body and blood and varying interpretations of biblical text, as there was hostility and caviling condescension, the fundamental values and moral imperatives were as near to universal as belief the earth was round, and they were written on familiar tablets of stone.

In fact, all Jason’s Jewish friends and schoolmates celebrated Christmas, and most Jewish families in Luz Oscura sent their children to the best school they could find, with little choice beyond St. Mary’s, St. James and Holy Trinity. And in the Catholic sensibility it was not only the pope who was infallible, but rather all his faithful lieutenants throughout the world.

That is correct, this unwavering anchorite continued. "Every time you lose your temper, talk back to you mother, talk out of turn in class, you put poor Jesus all over again through his agony on the cross. Now, don’t you want to spare the Lord Jesus who loves you so much that pain and suffering?"

Immediately and practically in unison, a chorus of Yes, Mother Cornelia arose in a veritable plainsong chant as though anticipating and at once influenced by Gregorian masses slept through but somehow remembered.

But there was one voice stifled, one mind benumbed. Jason, digesting this fearsome declaration, sat paralyzed with bewildered terror at the countless atrocities he had committed against the all-loving Lord Jesus, and dumbfounded that in his classmates there was no stunned silence, no mask of horror imprinted on any face beyond his own.

Oh, the times innumerable he had caused such pain and humiliation to the sweet, loving Lord Jesus! How could this be possible?! And being true, as it surely was coming from this earthly representative of God, how could he live?! His siblings’ judgment of his worthlessness echoed in the portals of his soul and settled in the finality of Mother Cornelia’s divine wisdom.

And how, how could his classmates, all of whom had heard the same horrifying proclamation, have returned to their customary habits as though nothing had changed?! How were they not benumbed to paralysis by those earth-shattering words?!

Hey, Jas, you all right? Willie asked, and the voice seemed faint and faraway like the distant humming of the sisters in prayer.

"¿Estás orando o qué?" came another, deeper but seemingly at an even greater distance.

Reviews for The Dogs…Barking

[lilnursesuhy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really enjoyed this story but it seemed like the author took a while to get to the point.


** I received this book for free through a first reads promotion.