Soup Can

By the looks of it, the dog hadn’t been there for very long. Luke hoped it had died by natural causes but something about its position—dumped haphazardly among the used tires people were known to dispose of in the woods—made him uneasy. But the more he gazed down at this dog, its god-given demise looked suspect but unfortunate. He pushed aside the discarded tires filled with the muck of rainwater and dead leaves and ran his fingers across the dog’s silvery hair. Insects floated in the liquid of its half-open eyes and its black tongue, limp and lifeless, hung partway out of its mouth. A light rain was softening the edges of the afternoon heat so Luke figured he would have to come back later to bury it.

---

Soup Can found his way inside the bar at around noon. He loathed the blistering heat of the summer days and how it affected the gleam in his silver hair, and Dogman’s Bar & Grill was the oasis for him because he knew not only would he be welcomed but there was always a chance for him to receive free booze and the best rubdown of his life.

He weaved through the legs of the barstools until he reached the end of the bar and bumped his way through the doors into the kitchen. Chandler was running an unsupervised inventory check on liquor in the storage closet; finding ways to skim on what they had so the big Bossman known as The Dogman wouldn’t notice he had been taking home boxes. Soup Can padded quietly over to the stoves, trying not to pant so loud in case Chandler caught the prying eyes watching him steal from the only man in town who’d hire him.

When Chandler turned around, he kept his focus on the paper he was scribbling on until he looked up in surprise at the dog.

“Dang, Soup Can!” Chandler yelled, the piece of paper slipping from his hand to the floor and soon fluttering under one of the stoves. “You can’t be sneaking up on me like that.”

Soup Can’s tail started wagging and Chandler gave him a scratch around his scarred ears and the dog instinctively winced. Years ago, Soup Can had tried staking his dominance over an arrogant labradoodle but the labradoodle was trained in fighting arts Soup Can was unfamiliar with and this devil-with-curly-hair had set its teeth around Soup Can’s ears, leaving scars where the silver hair refused to grow back.

“Where you been these past couple days?” Chandler asked. “Sarah and The Dogman were fearing the worst and thought you were dead.”

The once-cherry look on Soup Can’s face disappeared when he remembered an old pal of his, a regal-looking Golden Retriever who was the lifeblood of his pack, being left for dead on the side of a busy road. As much as Soup Can never wanted to admit it, everyday was a reminder that he was always too close to arriving at the gates of the Great Chickenhouse In the Sky.

“I’ll tell you something else, Soup Can, our boy Dogman,” Chandler said, in a somewhat somber tone. “Dude never wants to admit it, but he’s just been the biggest downer on the crew. Says you give the place character. Says you’re the only one he’s willing to give a free beer to and feel like he ain’t losing money.”

Soup Can let out a serious of loud barks at a word he revered and was fully in agreement with, despite knowing firsthand him and The Dogman got along only on the basis he didn’t leave doghair everywhere or pawprints on the countertop.

They walked back out to the bar, and Chandler poured the silver-haired dog a beer into a bowl labeled “Soup Can” and set it on the floor. Soup Can lapped it up, all worries of the summer days’ annoyances a distant memory.

---

Luke grabbed a shovel that hung in the garage and hauled it outside along with one of those industrial-sized garbage bags he’d found in a box in the corner. He was pressured on account of the rain and he didn’t know if he had the time to construct a proper coffin. Getting his father’s help with it without an explanation as to why his son wanted to build a coffin for a strange, dead dog was something Luke didn’t even want to think about.

He stepped onto the road into the muggy afternoon that was being pumped with rain every few minutes. It was coming in waves and filled the ditches out in front of the house to the brim and flooding onto the road. Luke didn’t mind if the rain threatened to stop him; if he had to, he’d toil through tougher conditions just so the dog could have a proper burial.

He trudged through the dense briers and the suffocating hold of the kudzu that choked him to the dumping grounds of used tires to where the most beautiful dog he had ever seen was left to rot. He dropped the shovel before the pile of tires and looked to where the dead dog had once been.

Luke frantically looked around at the stretch of woods, only hearing the occasional rustle of creatures whose steps were too small for a dog. Risen from the dead, he thought, since the silver-haired dog was nowhere in sight.

---

Some years back there was another hot summer day, a day he cannot help but remember, when he came upon a Collie sitting calmly on the porch on one of those houses in an affluent part of the city. The Collie cooled herself in the shade of the veranda. Soup Can at that moment had no choice but to admire her from a distance. But once the courage grew in him, he pawed his way up the pebbled pathway, with his chest puffed out, his silvery-hair glistening in the sunlight, and the Collie raised her head in passive acknowledgment.

“And what on earth kind of breed are you?” were the first words out of the Collie’s mouth.

“I’m whatever kind of breed you want me to be, baby,” he responded, rather cavalierly.

It didn’t take long for Soup Can to realize what he had said was more brash than he wanted it to be. When the Collie waited for some kind of follow-up, Soup Can instead sulked away and never returned to that neighborhood ever again.

He soon found himself tagging along with a group of people just off work. They were going to Dogman’s for a few after-work drinks and maybe fall into some fun conversation. Soup Can jumped in front of the group and started barking with enthusiasm. He wanted them to know that him and The Dogman were the best of buds; free drinks were in their immediate future if Soup Can could find a way to share his barks in a language they could understand.

“Get a look at this dog,” one of them said. “Ever seen one like it before?”

“Don’t know, but it’s a good-looking dog, whatever it is,” another one of them said, stumbling along past everyone once he saw the neon sign outside Dogman’s. “Dog this good-looking shouldn’t be wandering the streets.”

When they made it to Dogman’s, the group of people Soup Can had glued himself to, wandered off to a table in the back. Soup Can believed they only tolerated him for a little while with scratches and other affections—minding the scarred-up ears out of respect for the silver-haired dog—before they politely shooed him away.

The Dogman, from the other side of the bar, noticed the defeated look on the dog’s face. He reached under the bar and pulled out Soup Can’s silver bowl. Poured him his favorite beer and set it on the bar, and the other patrons didn’t seem to mind since it seemed to be unlike The Dogman to offer Soup Can a seat at the bar without the dog barking for approval. But one strand of silver hair on the countertop and it was to the curb with you, Pooch. But now, since The Dogman recognized this pooch was in the dumps, he let him lap up the beer right there with every other sadsack at the bar.

---

Luke’s father said it was a no-never-not-in-a-million years on him ever allowing the boy to have a dog. They were too much work, his father went on, and a matter of fact, he added, nowadays they punch magnetic chips under their skin that makes them mutts literally attracted to cars passing on the road. And since they lived so close to a road always active with traffic, his father didn’t see any sense in getting a dog.

Over time this caused Luke to craft stories around the dogs he wished he had. One of them he kept thinking about, one that lived so closely with his every move, and who was to deny the boy of the actual existence of this extraordinary pooch?

He called this wonderful dog Gavin, the Intergalactic Space-Dog of Traveling Worlds. Based off a Great Pyrenees he’d seen in a big book about dogs. Luke imagined this dog traveled everywhere. He had traveled not only our world extensively, but others as well. But Gavin, the Intergalactic Space-Dog of Traveling Worlds did indeed have a place he called home. It was with much dismay to Luke, though, that the dog wouldn’t be found sleeping at the end of his bed at nights, no, this dog, this Gavin, he belonged to Luke’s older sister, a sister he rarely ever speaks to or much less has seen in a long time.

He recalled she worked for an obnoxious and too prideful man—according to his father—who went by the name of Dogman, who owned a bar & grill of the same name in town. The only thing Luke could gather was that she served drinks to nasty men—also according to his father—and his father refused to speak to her for reasons Luke never really understood.

How the story played out—the story of Gavin, the Intergalactic Space-Dog of Traveling Worlds—in his head, this Great Pyrenees with his perfect shiny white coat, befriends a version of his sister in a past life, and now that Gavin has materialized into our own, he now takes up his place at the side of this version of Luke’s sister Sarah who was found today working as a bartender in a place called Dogman’s.

When Luke returned home, all he could think about was the dead dog among the tires. Which he soon began to realize that maybe the dog wasn’t even dead because how come it wasn’t there anymore?and the last time he checked dead dogs—much of anything when he really thought about it—didn’t just get up and walk away from being dead.

---

Chandler fed some peanuts to Soup Can until he told the dog to make like Houdini because his gut was telling him The Dogman was going to be in one of his moods, and even laying eyes on Soup Can who’d been gone for much longer than usual, didn’t seem to be the right way to sway him into a better one.

So Soup Can left, much to his chagrin because he thought he had one of those proper understandings with the man they called The Dogman. And Soup Can, even then, didn’t think he had enough booze in him to fend off what hours were left of the summer heat. He wandered down the empty street, nary a car or person about except for a gaggle of stray cats who he was eternally dubious of and were often too prissy for their own good. He soon found himself sitting outside a corner store situated on the road leading to the lake. It had to’ve been one of the hottest days of the summer and people were hauling their boats and floats without a moment’s hesitation to the lake, and Soup Can knew without a doubt they would stop at the corner store for the appropriate supplies.

Some were families with their own dogs and once they caught sight of the beautiful dog perched outside the store like some kind of immaculate marble statue, they began laying upon bellyrubs and headscratches usually reserved for their own pooches, he could never grow the courage to ask if he could tag along. Or even bother to ask them to buy him a sixer so he could stave off the heat by his lonesome.

Right before Soup Can had a feeling the owner of the store would be coming out to tell the silver-haired dog to git, a pickup truck pulling a dingy little aluminum boat rolled into the parking lot and two dogs with the biggest heads Soup Can had ever seen before were sitting in the cab. Their owner hopped out of the truck and raced inside the store, leaving the two bigheaded dogs panting behind a window that was barely cracked.

Soup Can padded over to the truck, ever so cautiously and side-eyed the two bigheaded and possibly territorial dogs, who were now watching Soup Can intently with such a devilish glare that he finally realized he was probably the last dog in the world with a sense of comfort among others.

Soup Can walked over next to the boat and did his damnedest to hop over into it. After two tries he was ready to give up. The two bigheaded dogs were glaring at him curiously now, their long tongues hanging out of their faces.

When Soup Can noticed that the owner of the store and the owner of the two bigheaded dogs were coming out, both carrying armloads of beer and beef jerky, he squatted on his haunches and with the force of a thousand past dog-lives he finally hurdled over the side of the boat and quickly hid himself away under one of the benchseats.

Luckily for Soup Can the owner of the two bigheaded dogs quickly cut the dogs incessant barking with a shut up and sit down and he didn’t noticed the stowaway pooch.

---

Luke drove with his father to the baseball fields so they could hit a few balls before they signed him up for little league in the fall. His father said he should work on his swing; None of that pussy shit like dipping out when the ball is coming at you, no no no, none of that pussy shit, do you hear me son, I don’t want to see you doing any of that stuff pussies do.

Luke’s attention was on the trees that passed by in a rush. He tried counting them one by one, leaf by leaf, to drone out his father’s instructions. But his father seemed to keep speeding up as though he realized his daydreaming son was counting the trees as they went by.

They pulled into the parking lot only to see there was some kind of company softball tournament going on and all three fields were filled with games running simultaneously.

“Well I’ll be damned,” his father said, knocking the palm of his hand on the steering wheel. “Look at all these worthless sacks of shit taking over all the ballfields.”

Luke had no ire for the softball players. He was fixated on every person who had a dog on a leash, or sitting in their laps, or being carried around like a newborn baby. He tried to identify every breed he could but so many were variations of one kind of another. Damn fleabags, you ask me, his father would say, just mangy old worthless fleabags, nothing more than that. As his father finally realized his plan was squashed, Luke caught at the last moment a man walking a Great White Pyrenees to the concession stands. Luke let out a small yelp that caused his father to look at him strangely.

“The hell’s the matter with you?”

Luke composed himself. He sat back in the seat as if nothing had happened.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just thought I saw somebody I knew.”

“Well, don’t go screaming like that. You're starting to sound like one of those pussies.”

On the way back home, they stopped at the McDonald’s and ate in the parking lot. Luke couldn’t really tell if it was the excitement at the thought that he had finally manifested Gavin, the Intergalactic Space-Dog of Traveling Worlds into our world, or if it was the realization that he was finally having some kind of sit-down meal with his father. He would never really truly ever understand the impulse when he asked his father, for the thousandth time, if he could get a dog.

“What did I tell you about getting a dog, Luke? It’s a lot of hard work and I just don’t have the time to look after you and a damn dog. You gotta understand one thing about life, son, and it’s never about getting what you want. Take today for example—” He stopped for a moment to wipe away the ketchup from the corner of his mouth and muttered something unrelated and under his breath about the bad service he had gone through only minutes before—“I was thinking that maybe me and you could spend some time together since I got some vacation time from work, and we could’ve gone out and hit a few balls and work on your fielding and your batting and some other stuff, and just maybe have us little fun while we’re at it. Things like that are important for a boy and his father. But what the hell happens? A bunch of sackless shits who think about nobody but themselves decide to hold a company softball game on this one particular day. This one stupid day that I picked. You understand me when I tell you that in this life you never get what you want? And not for a moment do I want to hear you say that I never once ever tried to give you the things you needed.”

Time passed when Luke’s father finally finished his point, a half mile from home.

“You gotta understand something else,” his father said. “You gotta understand that no matter who try to rely on, they’re just going to let you down.”

---

Somebody had brought fireworks to the lake and the two bigheaded dogs Soup Can had tagged along with were losing their goddamned minds. The owner told them to both hush but there was a lack of seriousness in his tone and it made Soup Can think he could have found a better and more diplomatic way of shutting these dogs up.

Soup Can lingered around the other lakegoers on the shore of the lake and knocked over the beers they had set at their feet while some conversed conspiratorially and others rambunctiously and others who yelled from shore incoherently to the ones on their boats. He lapped up the warm beer from the trenches made from the lakegoers dragging their feet in the sand and moved from one to the next drunken fool.

In a short while the night became fully illuminated when the fireworks filled the last dark spots of a starless sky. The lakegoers were hardly abating and their numbers grew so large that Soup Can wondered how each and every one of them could possibly find their rightful spot in this world without taking up space of the ones who believed they belonged there.

The two bigheaded dogs had joined their owner when he pushed his little boat out onto the water, and despite the pops and fizzles of the fireworks overhead, they had found comfort in each other and were soon fast asleep under the boat’s benchseats.

Soup Can, on the other hand, was feeling hazy and nauseous. It was cheap beer he’d been guzzling and it was cheap beer still flowing through him and whether he cared for that feeling or not, it was now a sole resident of his being and what followed was a diabolical mixture of pain gripping his insides he knew could only be muscled out by the pouring on of excessive bellyrubs and undying affection.

He wandered off up a hill and onto the main road, easing his steps carefully on the edge of the road after vehicle after vehicle raced by careening around the blind curve with their rickety boats swaying from side to side on trailers whose squealing cracked Soup Can’s delicate eardrums. When the vehicles who passed by only honked their horns at Soup Can and never once pulled over to the side to see how he was faring along, Soup Can cut across the road into the deep and dark woods to a place he could find solace for the rest of the night.

He came upon a pile of discarded tires. It was a monument made of waste, the perfect place for a beautiful yet despondent dog could weather his woes and lick his wounds. He climbed atop them and came upon a place in the mountain of tires that seemed carved out just for him. He dropped down into that oddly fitting place and he felt as though he traveled miles down into that dark and cavernous hole; standing water and dead leaves whose pungent scent smelled of sewage and rotted rubber bothered him none. His heightened senses were on furlough and taking a breather in another corner of the world.

Soup Can doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke he heard soft footsteps around him, and it wasn’t long before a little boy came into his view at the top of the hole he had found himself in, and the boy stared down with bewilderment and sadness in his eyes. The little boy poked at the seemingly dead dog and then ran his short fingers through the now rainsoaked and mud-covered silver hair.

The boy blinked away the tears in his eyes. He didn’t say anything, only continued to stare down at the dog. Soup Can lay still, performing a trick he blamed on dogs who he claimed to lack freewill, and played dead, a phrase he would abhor for as long as he lived and even when he became just more of the dirt.

Moments later the boy walked off into a part of the woods he couldn’t see from where he was laying in a hole whose sides were an endless darkness. After that, Soup Can lay in that spot for another indeterminable amount of time and regretted every opportunity he didn’t take to acknowledge to the little boy that he was still all there.

It started raining again when Soup Can made it into town a few minutes later. His legs were aching and his stomach empty except for the booze and a little rainwater sloshing around in there somewhere, and his once silvery hair had dulled to a depressingly lifeless cloud of gray smoke.

The whole walk to Dogman’s he had flashes back to his time with a little girl named Lee. She was his one true companion, as he liked to remember her. She was a little girl with short hair who was obsessed with Joan of Arc and liked cracking sunflower seeds between her teeth like a professional baseball player, and there was never a moment when she didn’t at least make one appearance in his mind before she swiftly slipped away again. But he can never recall those small moments he shared with her as often as he wants to now; they have become just brief swipes of memory before they disappear as Soup Can moves onto his next unimportant thought. But it seemed every moment his feet made along the pavement, alone down an endless street, they led him to Dogman’s, to a place that seemed to accept him even when he thought he had wronged his past self in ways he could never truly mend.

When he came up to Dogman’s, Sarah was out front smoking a cigarette, watching the afternoon morning shower of rain. She turned and saw Soup Can coming down the street and her face lit up. She tossed her cigarette to the ground.

“Soup Can!” she exclaimed. When he got closer, her face fell at the sight of him. Soup Can sat there at her feet and collapsed next to her, laying his head on her shoes. “What’s the matter, Soup Can?” Sarah said, running a hand across his neck, her fingers tracing the scars on his ears. “Are you feeling OK, boy?”

Soup Can could only respond with a sigh. But once Sarah walked into the bar with a wave of her hand to follow her, Soup Can gathered what strength he had and followed inside.

The Dogman never kept any proper dogfood around since he didn’t want people to get the idea that there was a chance it could slip into the real food. So Sarah pulled from the freezer some ground beef and grilled it up for Soup Can. A real treat for you, Soup Can, Sarah told him.

Sarah found the silver bowl labeled “Soup Can” and to Soup Can’s surprise ran it under the tap and filled it with tapwater and sat it there on the counter. When the burger was done, she carved it up into little squares and Soup Can watched her with strange familiarity. Sarah wore her hair long yet it was always tied back or sitting atop her head in a bun, but Soup Can was always imaging it a lot shorter. She smiled over at Soup Can, one of her teeth crooked, and she slightly covered it with her upper lip as a sign she was consciously aware of it, even in the presence of a dog whose silver hair wasn’t gleaming at full strength.

She watched him eat. Soup Can didn’t mind at all at the sounds he was making as he ate.

“What’d you get yourself into, Soup Can?” Sarah said with sadness. She ran her hand down his back and picked out what leaves and specks of mud were matted in his hair. All with a careful and gentle touch.

“You need you a good home, Soup Can, do you know that?” she said. “You can’t just be wandering the streets all the time.”

Soup Can responded again with a sigh. He stopped eating for a moment and looked at the woman, the resemblance too great and he could only guess that she had traveled worlds to get here. But he believed too that it somehow matched the face he saw when he was regretfully playing dead.

“You know, Soup Can,” Sarah said, leaning across the bar and staring Soup Can deep into his eyes, his silver hair gradually regaining its gleam. “I have a little brother who would just worship the hell out of you.”