Show dog

I entered my dog in the dog show.  It was just something to do on a Saturday.  He wasn't really a show dog, as far as I knew.  I don't really know what a "show dog" is.  He was dirty because he'd been rolling around in the dirt that morning before I drove him over to the show.  He came in third out of four dogs.  One of the dogs began seizing while it was doing its little trot around the ring and they had to put it down on the stage in front of everyone while the owner stood there crying -- that was the one that came in fourth.  I got a little yellow ribbon that said "3rd" on it, and then underneath that the woman had written, "due to seizure."  That whole day my phone was ringing because I was supposed to be at work.

I was out in the parking lot with my dog and I saw a woman I'd gone to school with.  Melinda or Melissa or something.  She saw me coming out of the dog show and congratulated me.  She didn't seem to know how poorly my dog had done.  "I'm glad to see you getting involved in something," she said.  "I always figured you'd kill yourself with drugs."

"Drugs make me paranoid," I said.

We agreed to go to a restaurant.  I tied the dog up to a parking sign out front.  He wouldn't sit down, like he didn't think I'd be in there for long and he didn't want to go to the trouble.

We ordered.  I got a soda and decided I wasn't hungry, so I got the cheapest thing that I thought would still look like a meal to someone, which was a cream cheese sandwich.  She got an omelette or something.

I asked her what she'd been doing.  She pulled a gun from underneath the table and pointed it at me, very smooth, like it was the most natural thing in the world, so no one else in the restaurant noticed.  She had a jacket draped over it.

"I don't want to answer any more questions," she said.  I told her, all right.

The waitress brought our plates and Melissa covered the gun quickly with her jacket.  The gun made a very heavy sound when she put it on the table.

Her hand was still on it when the waitress went away.  "Do I need to keep showing it to you, or can we now proceed knowing that it's right here, on this table, and I just have to grab it?"

I told her it was fine, she didn't have to show it to me.

The cream cheese sandwich was disgusting.  I couldn't even look at it.  I unfolded my napkin and covered the sandwich with it.  The cream cheese sweat through the napkin in a couple places so I tried not to look at it.

"How much money do you have in your wallet?" she asked me.

"I don't know."

"Take a guess."

I thought about it.  "Twelve."

"Dollars?"

I nodded.  She considered this.

"All right, take it out."

There was actually like sixty in there.  I was impressed with myself.  I tried to read her face, but it seemed like it could have just as easily been twelve or sixty or six hundred for all she cared.  I started to hand it to her but she made a move to her gun and I froze.  "Put it on the table," she said, so that's what I did.

We sat there for a little while like that, with the money between us.  I realized the reason I had so much more money than I thought was that I'd never paid the dog show entrance fee.  Melissa took a couple bites of her omelette.

"Do you remember Mrs. Perkins' class?" she asked me.

"Science," I said.  "Chemistry."

"We were in the same class, weren't we?"  I nodded.  "I remember one time, we were doing some experiment with batteries or something.  Do you remember that?"  She seemed to want me to remember, but I didn't, so I didn't say anything.  "That weird girl, Allison wasn't wearing her goggles.  So you and Jim threw some powder in her face, something harmless.  But she freaked out because she thought it was, like, acid, or bleach or something."  Melissa thought this was quite funny.  I vaguely remembered the powder, but I thought it was Jim throwing the powder into my face.  Melissa was still laughing -- "her whole face turned red."  It could have happened that way, I couldn't say for sure.  If I'd thrown the powder, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to remember it that way.

"What are these anecdotes?" I asked.  "Where does this anecdote come from?"

She stop laughing and just smirked at me.  She thumped the gun on the table again two more times.  I got a little smaller.  She got back down to business.

"Here's what I want you to do," she said.  She took a quarter out of her pocket and slid it across the table at me.  "I want you to go over to that pay phone and dial this number" -- sliding a piece of paper now.  "Someone will answer, and you will say 'sixty-two dollars,' and you will hang up the phone."

"What if I don't do it right?" I asked.

"This is extremely simple, why would you not be able to do it right?"

"I don't know."

"Honestly, it hardly matters."  I took the quarter and the slip of paper and walked over to the pay phone.  I put the quarter in but I didn't hear a dial tone.  I hung up and the quarter clanked into the change slot.  I was going to try putting it in again, but I noticed a call cost fifty cents.  I didn't have another quarter on me so I walked back to the booth.

Melissa had been watching all of this.  "What's the problem?"

"It's fifty cents."

"You don't have another quarter?"

I shook my head.  She checked her pockets for another quarter, then her bag, but couldn't find one.  She pursed her lips and shook her head.  "Fifty cents for a damn call."  I shrugged.  "We'll get some change," she decided.  I sat back down and she tried to get our waitress's attention.  "Only people in the damn restaurant and we can't get a waitress over here."

The waitress noticed us after a minute or two.  She took our money and Melissa took a comb out of her bag and started changing her hair.  She brushed her bangs back and shifted everything over to the right side of her head and bunched it up in a bun or something.  She looked basically the same.

"Who am I calling?" I asked.

She smiled, thinking about something else.  "My locker was right next to Mr. Lincoln's room.  Remember him?"  I told her I did.  "A couple years ago I heard he left his wife and came out of the closet.  I don't know if that's true though."

"I never thought he was gay," I said.

She shrugged.  "He probably wasn't gay."  She took out a pill bottle and shook a couple of sky blue pills into her hand and washed them down with some ginger ale.  "He probably just wanted to make his wife miserable."

The waitress brought back the change.  There were no quarters -- just a big pile of dimes and nickels.  Melissa swore again.  "Forget the call," she said, "let's just go.  You get up first," she said.  I stood next to the table.  She finally pocketed my money and put her gun away very carefully.  "I'm not leaving a tip," she said, mostly to herself.  They'd never taken my sandwich away -- it was still there under the napkin.

We walked outside together.  We stopped in front of the door for a second.  "This was nice," she said.  "We should do this again."  She sounded sincere enough, so I said yeah.

My car was still parked at the dog show auditorium.  I was going to have to walk over there.  "Your dog is gone," Melissa said.  The leash was empty, curled up on the sidewalk, still tied to the sign.  I untied it, then wondered why, and threw the leash in the trash.

My dog was sitting on the hood of my car when I got back there.  He had a bat in his teeth.  It was still twitching and spitting and making a sucking, suffering sound.  He spit the bat at my feet.

"I want my ribbon," he said.

"You can talk?"

"I want my ribbon," he said.  He had a voice like a bell.