A Dog and His Man

Big Boy, pictured with his assistant. Big Boy & the Grass Hallway Big Boy is a medium sized fellow. His name is aspirational. He has a plain coat of short hair, mostly white with a few islands of orange. Though he is not a fancy man human women unfailingly find Big Boy comely. His best friend is Laird, a cat who lives next door. Big Boy has huge ears and a swarm of spots on his pink belly and he tries to make best friends with everyone he meets. Though he will bark when circumstances call for it he is usually silent and appears to be thinking a great deal of the time – which he undoubtedly is – but who could know about what? He sports a gaudy neon yellow collar and is being pulled along by a comically overpriced mechanical leash from somewhere in Germany. It is made from precision plastics and stainless steel and has safety features. As he turns into the hallway the weathered asphalt gives way to a million blades of grass lying on the ground, dead or dying. The felled eight foot stalks are a hundred different shades of green moving to yellow, to brown, and finally to gray. The hall is the width of about two Big Boys (call it a yard) and the grass forming its walls is alive. The hallway smells of chlorophyll, pumice and rain. The giant grass bends from either side forming (almost) a ceiling. It is early evening in mid-winter and the hallway’s soft green glow playfully mixes with the red tint of sunset. The light is different every time they come here. Big Boy leads the man down the gently zigzagging hallway toward the smell of water. Just as the light varies each day the hallway always smells different too, though the man never notices this. The sound at the end of the grass hallway can be angry this time of year but is quiet now because the rains have stopped for a few days. As the mountain stream comes nearer Big Boy raises his nose skyward. The air smells faintly of rust. Big Boy always runs point in the grass hallway sniffing from cornice to cornice in the dim, narrow space. He is an enthusiastic forager, pausing now and then for therapeutic nibbles of grass. The children who made this place sometimes leave things behind and Big Boy once found half a sandwich. It was baloney on white bread with lettuce and a little mayonnaise. He can still taste it. The man notes a lapse in the grass hallway’s grooming as he swats the sharp blades and rushes to keep up. The walls are going shaggy and the giant stalks will quickly reclaim the passage unless the children do their work again soon. He remembers school has started back and smiles at his geezer thoughts about lazy children he does not know and has never seen. The water is louder suddenly and the green walls drop away. At Big Boy scale, they are standing at the precipice of a rocky bluff staring down at a small, workmanlike stream fifty feet below. The little dog covers his fifty feet to the floor of the valley faster than the man can manage his own ten. A scatter of boulders interrupts the stream’s flow in artful ways. The huge rocks change position now and then when it rains hard enough and the god who lives nearby is in the mood to move them. The man does not believe in things like gods and Big Boy and the god once had a good laugh at him. To a god, Big Boy’s laugh sounds a lot like Eddie Murphy’s. The keepers of the grass hallway use potato sized stream rocks to build little dams. These dams form small pools where the children soak and wonder what it will be like when they are all grown up. Like the children’s cares, these dams are ephemeral as the moving water constantly nags the rocks to keep moving to their destination, a great salt ocean five miles away. It is getting dark now. The man listens to the sound of Big Boy’s nails grabbing and scratching for purchase on the boulders as the dog pursues his life’s work: daredevilry. Freed from the stupid German leash, Big Boy stands stock still on the side of the road, pointing into the jungle. A car approaches and as the man takes the twenty pounder into his arms the prey vanishes. * * * At home later on a cool tile floor Big Boy twitches and makes small sounds as he chases the prey from earlier. The winter rains have started again and the man sips a scalding brew of half chocolate-half coffee as he watches Big Boy sleep, pulling for the little dog to bag his dreamtime prey.