The Taste of Rust

I forget stairs sometimes. I am Moose, an Alaskan Malamute, fifteen winters old, and this small town is the size of my memory. I map it by scent: coffee steam, rain in dust, the empty chair at the diner window. Tonight the bell counts nine and the wind brings a lost note: Mason. I follow it to the shuttered grain mill. From the old well comes a thin cry. The rope tastes of rust. My teeth burn as I pull, paws scrabbling. A new smell cuts through, sharp and wrong. Gasoline. Then the scrape of a match.

The match scratches bone against stone. A blue bite, then orange crawling like a hungry thing along the wet floor. Gasoline climbs my nose and makes a hot roof in my head. I do not let go. The rope is rust and old well and metal moon. My teeth are fire. My paws find no purchase and still they try. The voice below is small as a leaf. Mason.

Boots near the rim. A man-scent, sharp with bitter drink and pepper and fear under it. Wrong, wrong. He breathes a curse. I throw one bark at him. It lands heavy. He jumps and the little flame slips and becomes many, running the gasoline to the boards, to the walls. His smell rips away down the alley like a rabbit that has seen the fox. Let wrong run.

Knuckles above the dark. Pale. Trembling. I drop the rope and take cloth. Sleeve and boy-sweat and blood iron. My neck settles into the old harness that isn’t there. Pull. The world narrows to the circle of stone and a small hand and my own breath. Pull. Hips that remember long, white roads. Pull. He comes up hard against the stone lip and we tumble, floor knocking my chest, his cough wet and black.

Heat licks. Smoke threads my throat. We go low. The air near the planks is thin and honest. I shoulder him where he needs to go. He understands the push. He puts one palm on my ribs, steering or thanking, I cannot tell. He says my name and it is a warm wind that smells like last summer’s river.

Light is a rectangle with teeth. The door gapes and the heat is a barking dog that wants to keep everything. We go through it anyway. Outside is cold, and loud, and full of feet. The bell at the firehouse wakes and calls and calls, metal throats answering with water that hisses and snakes and wins. Arms gather Mason. Hands find my collarbone and the old hollows over my shoulders. Old boy, old boy, they say. Somebody starts to say whose dog, then laughs soft because by now everyone knows.

I lie down because the ground is sweet as creek mud. My paws are blister fruit. My lungs have eaten ash. The night air tastes like penny and rain. The wrong smell is gone, shredded. Mason is somewhere near, wrapped in wool, and his crying turns into the kind with salt only at the edges. He keeps a hand on me as if I am a door the world might slam. I keep breathing so it stays open.

Morning comes pink as the inside of a shell. The mill is a black tooth with steam at its root. Trucks idle like big animals. The diner lights come up and butter and coffee push their easy hands through the street. Inside, the woman with the coffee breath folds a napkin under my chin like I am company. Her eyes smell like ocean, like storms that have finished. The empty chair is for Mason and he fills it with elbows and a laugh that is apple and sun and relief.

They bring me bacon. I am not supposed to have bacon. I have bacon. Each person brings their day and sets it down on the wind for me: river and laundry and old books and the lemon sting of clean. Palms brush the place between my ears and leave the warm stamp of Here. Someone says hero and someone else hushes them because the word is too big to waste.

I sleep. In sleep the stairs I forget turn back into drifts. The old command rides the air though nobody speaks: pull. I am small again and the rope is seaweed and my teeth are new, and winter is a blue that does not hurt, and everything comes to me and I am equal to it.

The bell in the square counts noon. Shade pools under the window table and I settle in it. Mason’s shoe nudges my haunch so the two of us remember the same night. The town fits my chest and my chest fits the town. It holds a mill that did not take a boy. It holds a chair that is no longer a hole. It holds the sound of water beating fire and winning, and my name said by many mouths like it belongs to all of them.

I forget stairs sometimes. I am Moose. I do not forget this. If another lost note comes on the wind, I will follow. If it does not, I will sleep in the window sun and let the day press its warm paw on me until the snow returns.