ARCADIA DOGS // EXCERPT

The Story of Arnie

His bloated body rose up near the shore of Lake Lavalford in April of ‘09. He was swollen, and blue, and his eyes had been nibbled out by the local smallmouth bass. He wore a tattered white polo and blue jeans which were split down the seam on his left leg, leaving a fleshy open wound that had long since stopped bleeding. He wore no shoes. The bottom of his fattened feet were decorated with broken and missing skin, the small coin-colored fish flitting around him the perpetrators of the teeth marks that tore it off of him.

But that’s not really his story, is it? That’s the end of it - the careening off of Old Wharf, the sift of the splintered metal shooting up his leg, and the blossoming of blood when his head caved in on the stony bed of Lavalford. Through the dense warping of green water, there was a muted crunch. He was swarmed with curious minnows and gaping catfish whiskering his cheeks. In the dead of night, nobody had even heard the splash.

But it was what was before this that was Arnie’s story. It was being born in Arcadia in 1951, during a thrashing spring rainstorm. It was a bristly patriotic father who died on the battlefields of Vietnam; what they brought back of him was but a jawbone and a metal filling. His sister died in ‘65 of pneumonia, leaving behind a doe-eyed mutt and a flowery diary. Arnie started yardwork for cash in ‘67 to stop from mourning. In 2005, a year after his divorce from Ellen Maywater, his mother suffered an aneurysm. She died instantly.

After that, Arnie started going to church.

Some would argue he was a good man. The kind that knew him from church, from folding dollars into the basket and holding doors open for his God-fearing neighbors. Some would say he was nothing more than just another man - baseball caps, bad beer, broken-hearted from an ex-wife that moved to the city and took the kids with her.

His kids’ names were Max and Emily. Good names. Simple names.

Near the time of his death, he’d nearly retired from yardwork due to a fault in his hip. He didn’t like it - wasn’t happy about it. Like many seniors, it was what he’d known for so long, to let go felt like losing. But he did what his stern doctor told. He drank, attended church, watched the game, called his kids, fed the cat named Biscuit, took slow walks through the place where he’d been born, and ignored an ever-looming presence that had only crept closer with time.

Perhaps, he thought, it was his parents, or their parents before them. His father, too fire-blooded to not get himself blown to pieces by the enemy in Nam, remnants shipped back with a piece of shiny cloth like that would bring the man back. His mother, stubborn and bird-eyed and gossipy, too proud to send herself to the family doctor when she became house-bound by splitting headaches. She hated cats; she would’ve hated Biscuit.

Or perhaps it was his wife, Ellen. She wore her hair short and never wore dresses, only blue overalls and sturdy shoes. They called her butch, a sour insult as if it was the worst they could muster.

She was beautiful. She left, but she never stopped being beautiful. He detested her, and the violent fantasies that shamed him often included siphoning that contempt out of himself, where he could do something with it. Where she could see it.

But they were getting old, weren’t they? Their children were growing up.

It was the human condition, he reasoned. They’d given it to him, all these people, as his skin started to prune and his hair began to thin. It was a growing gut and dimming eyesight and children that were eight, fifteen, nineteen, twenty. Babies were so brief, so temporary. Sometimes, Arnie wept. If he’d drank enough.

He wasn’t sad, per say, or depressed. He was just old, and getting older.

The night Arnie died - a Friday - he’d driven his 1964 Pontiac GTO to the Flea on the edge of town. The Flea was a pub, a janky old rundown brick building pasted on the front with crooked neon signs, fast food advertisements, and vintage pin-up girls straddling blown-up beer bottles. The flickering neons displayed the promise of cold beer, live sports, foosball nights, state’s-best-fries, and restrooms for paying customers only. For over fifty years, the lonely old men of Arcadia had flocked to the Flea like geese to feed - greasy corners and overstuffed booths and the ability to smoke on barstools like it was still 1960. There was an overall friendly nature to the place - a quiet oasis of sorts, if you were older and lonelier and considered whiskey and burgers at eleven pm heavenly.

Arnie was these things, and he did.

Later, the usuals - men who believed they knew Arnie well enough - would say that Arnie himself didn’t usually get particularly hammered, but he had that night. Maybe there was a shift in his demeanor - or in his brain. Or perhaps there wasn’t anything at all, and he’d just been thirstier than usual. He ordered one, two, three - took a shot or five. There was a soccer game on the television - the Timbers playing the Whitecaps. A group of younger men were drinking Bud Lite and swiping balls back and forth on the foosball table.

The cork ball was ricocheting across the rows of plastic men with a spastic:

ping! ping! ping! ping! ping!

By the time Arnie had thrown back his fifth shot and the world was starting to waver, the bartender, a man named Marcus, stopped wiping the countertop and said:

“Maybe you should head home, man.” He blinked, then added, sheepishly: “Sir.”

Arnie messily wiped his bottom lip and shook his head. “M’fine.”

Marcus frowned, shrugged, and walked away.

Arnie ordered one more beer. As he stared into it, and the glassy amber liquid started to slosh, he felt a cold, uncomfortable sweat break out over his skin. The back of his polo stuck to the small of his back. Grasping the bottle drunkenly, he stumbled off the stool.

“Hey, Arnie,” called a man with a deep, gravelly voice down the bar. His name was Stan, and he was drinking a martini. “You need a ride?”

“No,” Arnie had slurred.

Stan raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead. “Shouldn’t be drivin’ anywhere as wrecked as you are.”

“M’just taking a walk,” Arnie managed back, before shoving awkwardly at the front door. Cool air rushed in and embraced him. The bell on the top rang crazily.

“Come back, okay?” Stan called.

The door swung shut, muffling his voice.

It was a wet night. The pavement was damp, the sky was dark and clouded, and green lights blinked in the tall shivering grass on either side of the gravel road. Arnie ping-ponged between parked cars before tripping over his feet onto the rocks. They crunched beneath the soles of his work boots. The beer bottle swung at his side, dripping behind him as he shuffled on without reason or destination.

His mind was fogged completely by the alcohol. It would be seen later during the autopsy that his body had been decomposing in the water too long for a reliable alcohol content to be taken from his blood. But I know so there is no reason you cannot: it was at .19. Not the most drunk you could get, but definitely much drunker than he should’ve been.

He wandered off road at some point, through the firefly-flushed grass, straying far from the reflective STOP sign and the winding dirt road. On the horizon, black shadows broiled beneath the clouds, a deep insurmountable forest. Arnie didn’t realize any of these things because somewhere in his alcohol-addled mind were thoughts of his children - Emily, age seven, finger painting a garden of misshapen flowers. Max taking his first joyride on a bicycle without training wheels, weaving and crying out happily the entire time. Emily, with her third grade graduation certificate and a jack-o’-lantern grin. Max, at his eleventh birthday blowing out every candle with a deep exhale of his tiny little chest.

Emily, Max. Emily, Max. Emily, Max. Emily, Max -

And, oh, Ellen - beautiful Ellen. Her hair goldenrod and silky, her eyes so blue it was as if you looked right through them straight into the sky. She had a good solid face, strong collarbones, big feet. And more - he missed it. He was bitter. He was an old man now, but in his head he was touching her breasts, and her plush thighs, and the soft bush between them, and -

No, stupid. Stupid.

Feed somebody. He had to feed somebody. But who? It was vague, it was fleeting. Somebody. Something. The fridge. A mewling cat.

And then the thought was gone.

His foot caught on a root rising fishbacked out of the ground. He stumbled, knees digging hard into the wet dirt. His knuckles cracked against rock. He let out a belated cry, disturbing the chatter of bugs in the brush. The clouds hadn’t cleared; the moon was blurry and its light was mute.

Arnie rolled onto his side and attempted to yank his foot from the root’s hold. When it wouldn’t come loose, he let out a small bark of frustration and awkwardly pawed at the laces until they disentangled. He shimmied his foot free and fumbled to his feet, panting. He found he was still holding onto the beer, and it wasn’t yet empty. He took a swig, felt the warm relief seep down through his chest, then felt that wearing one shoe and not the other was absurd.

So he removed his other shoe, after cursing and slurring until it popped off.

The moist earth beneath him wettened Arnie’s socks, and he didn’t like that. He removed them as well. He thought of Ellen and the kids and suddenly found it all very funny.

He, barefoot, laughed until stray tears cut down his face, and then he walked on.

***

Note:

It was not murder. There was no murder in Arcadia. The people only killed themselves, again and again until blade broke through their bodies and instead they pounded against the earth. When there was nothing left of themselves to kill, that was when they turned their agony outwards. That was when husbands beat their wives and mothers drowned their young in bathtubs.

The closest Arcadia had ever gotten to murder, at this point in time, was self-defense or manslaughter.

(Man’s laughter. Funny how that happens.)

It was when Margerie Ford’s husband swung at her one too many times and she grabbed the closest thing she could find; she was lucky that Henry Ford loved his firearms. She splattered her nice new wallpaper in bone cartilage and scraps of skin.

It was when poor little Tomaz Kaminski blew his baby sister’s brains out with his father’s Smith and Wesson M&P. The autopsy showed the bullet had gone right through her fontanelle like a target.

And it was when old Bricks the drunkard hit a teenage girl on her bike, then later hanged himself out of grief.

But it was not murder, not in the technical sense, nor in the legal one. It didn’t make them murderers; they were just products of being people.

(Don’t get me wrong:

Arcadia was rank with tragedy. But not that kind; not yet.)

***

In 2045, a serial killer will stalk the borders of Arcadia, taking out neighborhood dogs and crucifying them in crop fields. He will kill three young women and a man within the span of five years. When the local police department finally finds him, he will fit his feet into Hitler’s shoes and swallow a bullet in the bunker beneath his ramshackle ranch. His mother will call him Gideon Chapman, but the people will call him Arcadia’s Angel of Death; Azrael. He will be no angel, nothing truly Biblical, just a man with a complex and the physical strength capable enough to haul women onto crosses and cut men’s scalps from their bodies.

They will bury him in an unmarked grave.

***

Arnie then found himself on Old Wharf, the crumbling cobblestone bridge that unfurled over Lake Lavalford. He gazed around, the sky spinning, wondering how he’d gotten there. The feeling of the bridge floor was gritty between his bare toes. He wiped them in the dewy grass before venturing on.

From afar he would look like an odd, clumsy specter, snaking his way back and forth around the guardrails. He pressed to the side of the bridge and found himself looking over. Lavalford was an expanse of shimmering darkness. Just then, many things happened at once. Life tends to do that; there is never a forewarning, and merely seconds between one incident to the next.

First, the clouds split like a grin and moonlight shot down onto the surface of the water. Then, Arnie caught sight of his own reflection, a black blotch on the undulating surface. He couldn’t quite catch sight of himself, just the jutting out of his ears and the vague whispers of hair on his head. He leaned forward and, thirdly, the broken rung beside him started to groan and slip. You see, as drunk as he was, Arnie had both missed the fact that the area of railing he was using to support himself was broken, and forgotten that there was something wrong with his hip.

It was genetic, a case of osteoarthritis that set in a little too early for comfort.

When he curled over the railing in search of his own face, his hip faltered. Pain flared up his side and he flinched; floundered to right himself. Yet the rail had already caved in and disappeared beneath him, swinging crazily to either side. Hip blaring, he slipped forward and off the edge. As he did so, the fractured pole ripped up his leg with a great tearing sound. Blood flashed in the moonlight before he tumbled off completely.

He let out a startled cry and -

The world pivoted crazily around him, cold air whistling in his ears.

And right before Arnie hit the water, he caught sight of someone watching him from above, standing quite calmly on Old Wharf. Perhaps it was Ellen, hair as soft as fine silk and golden as spun straw, strong hands folded in front of her denim overalls. But no - it was his father, in ragged green briefs and an ash-blackened face. And then a child with big, sparkling eyes.

Emily -, he thought.

And then Arnie plunged into the water.

A great cloud of bubbles hugged him. His skull cracked against the rocks.

Everything went black like a light.

Click - darkness.

***

They would find, later - the authorities - his shattered beer bottle on Old Wharf next to the broken patch of railing. Flies and gnats would be stuck in what was left of the alcohol, buzzing around it hungrily.

***

Arnie’s corpse wandered the lake for three days and two nights, in which these things happened:

Marcus met up with his girlfriend, a woman named Abby, who taught kids with lisps how to pronounce ‘systematic’ and ‘Mississippi’ at Arcadia’s elementary school. They had very good sex in the back of her Saturn Aura and then got extremely stoned, enough so that Marcus forgot completely about Arnie. When Abby’s ex stormed over around two in the morning to fight, Marcus really forgot, and ended up getting his nose broken. It’s crooked to this day, and while usually it would be an entertaining story to tell, it just reminds him of the old man Arnie.

Stan got a call from his brother. His brother’s name was Rob. Rob’s wife had cancer - the kind that gets into your bones and eats them. When he got the call, Stan had been smoking a cigarette outside of the Flea, feeling slightly buzzed and keeping a cautious eye out for Arnie. He wasn’t particularly concerned; most drunks wandered back around. Most. But then his Blackberry started to vibrate in the inner pocket of his flannel coat. Rob said that his wife was feeling very sick and the toddler wouldn’t stop crying and their sitter, Natalie, couldn’t come last-minute. So Stan got into his pick-up truck and puttered to the city of Norman. He rubbed his eyes to keep the sleep and drunk out of them, and chain smoked until he got there. He’d forgotten completely about Arnie by the next morning, when he was flipping pancakes for his brother’s daughter. He thought of him briefly for a moment when he stepped out for his first morning cigarette, but Stan couldn’t remember if Arnie’s car had been gone by the time he had left. Two years later, Rob’s wife’s cancer went into remission. She grew all of her hair back.

Two young children, ages six, were living their lives normally, as children do. Technically, at the time, they were little girls. But their relationship with the word was formal and obligatory and not all that personal. Then, on the morning of the third day, they’d met up with butterfly hoops, tricycles, and metal lunchboxes full of plastic dinosaurs and superheroes. At a young age, they’d wandered Arcadia effortlessly and seamlessly; it was their home, like their skin was. They appeared at the shore of Lake Lavalford around noon, where they sat to eat the pb and j’s their mothers had wrapped in wax paper. Around one, the redheaded little girl saw something bobbing funnily in the water.

“Looky,” she said. “D’you see that?”

The dark-haired one was too busy peeling the crusts off of her sandwich and scowling. “See what?”

“There’s a thingy.” The red-head stood up, short-cut locks bobbing playfully in the breeze. She wore frayed cargo shorts with unicorns stitched into the back pockets and a blue Marvel T-shirt splattered with Kool-Aid. Her fingernails were colored in with highlighter and her scraped-up knees were covered in pink butterfly bandages. She’d recently taken a tumble off of the side of the trampoline in her backyard.

The dark-haired one inspected the peanut butter on her sandwich and kicked bugs away when they swarmed on the rocks looking for food. “I don’t see anything.”

The red-head pointed. “Look.”

She sighed irritably, a funny sound coming from somebody so small, and stood up. She was wearing a purple jacket, a limp lacy skirt, and black leggings. Her flat black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and there was jelly dotting the corners of her lips. Next to her sat a tattered orange tiger stuffie nearly half her size - his name was TJ.

“It’s a lake monster,” said the red-head excitedly.

“No it’s not,” her friend responded, bringing a tiny hand up to cover her gaze from the sun’s glare. “It’s probably…a boat. Like Vinnie’s.”

This concerned the little girl. “Do you think he lost his boat?”

Her friend shrugged.

There was indeed something boying in the water, getting closer as it lapped at the pebbly shore. It looked like a dark, shapeless mass, round wet corners sometimes peeking up at them.

The red-head hopped onto the nearest lichen-eaten rock. “It’s getting closer!”

Her friend scrambled up beside her one-handedly, grasping her sandwich still.

As it started to float nearby, already knocking against various rocks and a sodden log, the duo began to notice something they hadn’t thought of before. Why would they? They were so little, and when they saw it was a man they didn’t think: body. They thought:

person.

A knobby head, a swollen torso, skewed limbs that looked as if they’d been filled with water like balloons. Arnie was face-down and splayed open like a sea star, his jeans soaked black and torn, his shirt billowing softly in the current like a wet sheet. There was something wrong about his head; there was a nasty dent on one side, and the stuff inside of it looked gray and tissuey, resembling a broken bowl of mush.

The dark-haired one’s body went very cold all of a sudden, from the top of her shiny head to the tips of her highlighter-purple toenails. She was frightened. She couldn’t say exactly why, but it was an animal tendency: a deep, natural reaction. “Pip,” she said, gripping onto her friend’s shirt. “Let’s go away.”

But her friend was gazing down at the man as he bobbed against the rocky shore, enraptured. “Is he okay?”

“This is grown-up stuff. I wanna go to Lilliput now.”

The red-head shook her off. “Just wait one second.”

“Piper.” She stomped her foot, more panicked now then angry. “But I brought coins!”

“I’m just gonna look,” said her friend, “yeah? I think he’s fake.”

“Fake?”

“Like - like the balloon man at the car shop.”

She furrowed her brow disbelievingly. “Oh…”

“I’m gonna crawl down there and touch it.”

The dark-haired girl looked down at her sandwich, which was now squishing between her fingers. “I still don’t know.”

“Stay right here.”

“Pip -”

It was too late. The red-head was already scrabbling down the other side of the rock, feet fumbling for footholds in the weedy debris. When they found what they were looking for, she carefully nudged her way to the mossy green waterline. The man - the strange thing - was bumping slowly at the sedimentary rubble, shimmering waves licking over his body.

The dark-haired one shuffled anxiously above, feeling grape jelly ooze from her squashed sandwich and run stickily between her fingers. “We should tell my mom.”

“Shhh,” said her friend, who knelt with a sort of awe in her voice. There was a childish wonder she couldn’t shake, the idea that perhaps anything new, anything peculiar at all, might be a gate or a lane or a friend, come to lead them somewhere sparkly and special. Even if something felt off, or uneasy, surely Wendy was at first afraid when she saw Peter’s shadow prance across her walls? And surely Alice felt frightened when she slipped into that hole and started falling indefinitely? That was the philosophy the little red-head ran by; even if there is the possibility of getting flung off the trampoline, one must jump as high as possible every time, so that perhaps one day she’ll feel the sky brush her fingers.

Arnie was not the sky, or a posh little rabbit, or a mischievous green-clad boy who never grew up. At that point, he wasn’t anything but what he’d left in the world after he’d gotten his skull caved in; and that was something abstract completely. It was the small diamond necklace Ellen Maywater still wore, and the tabs she still took off of her pop cans and collected in jewelry boxes because that’s what Arnie had done when they were in their twenties. It was the bike he’d taught Max how to ride, and the book he’d taught Emily how to read about the pleasant children and their spotted dog. It was orange cream sodas on hot days and the perfect way to get a strike while bowling. It was the smell of chestnut aftershave, whiskey and rum, and the rabbit-eared way he tied his shoes. It was the way Ellen always thought of him when she saw marigolds on the side of the road, whether she wanted to think of him or not. So many things, but not really Arnie, not anymore. Arnie was gone, and the thing in the water was just what he had inhabited before he’d gotten swept away.

These children did not know this. That is why the red-head, getting her knees wet, reached forward and grasped at his collar. Mesmerized, she managed to swing him onto his back. He bobbed and lolled and his seeping purple face bulged up at them both. His fleshy pink eye sockets were torn and swollen, his lips were like fat bruises, and his cheeks were white as ice tinged the faintest of sickly, undead greens.

He looked like a monster.

The red-head reeled back, letting out a little cry.

The dark-haired one on the rock screamed and dropped her sandwich. It plopped into the water right next to Arnie’s-body’s head. And then it sank.