the wiener dog story anthony pennay I saw a wiener dog eating a placenta once. Down at Dumb George’s place. Dumb George has big Victorian house that leans at a slight angle towards the banks of the South Fork of the Santa Clara River. Rumor has it that at one point there was both a North Fork and a river, but now it’s just a six mile dirt ditch with olive green shrubs and small crooked branched trees growing at odd angles up and down the slopes. The closest it gets to a river now is when the junior high school kids go down there to have spitting contests after school, or when Dumb George’s dad dumps an old bean can of mash whiskey down his throat, passes out in a grove of shrubs and pisses himself. Dumb George is called Dumb George because he’s dumb. In California they’d call him special and put him in a class with a bunch of other special kids who work on special art projects, but here in Retchville we just call him dumb and put him in the front row. Truth is Dumb George isn’t any dumber than the rest of us, he’s just got a bigger forehead and ain’t so quick on the uptake. Every once in a while, when Mr. Algorithm is facing the board in in math class, I’ll slip George a piece of chocolate and he’ll get hyper and start rubbing himself, but other than that he ain’t all that different. On Ash Wednesday he has the biggest cross in town on his head. That’s a source of pride for his whole family. “My God,” George said when we were sitting on the banks of the river and trying to skip stones, “what’s that wiener dog got in its mouth?” “Looks like a placenta.” I said. “A what?” “You ain’t got no sense at all,” I told him. “A placenta is a separate organ in the womb that transfers oxygen and nutrients to a fetus. It’s like the Wal-mart that stocks the nutrition superhighway for embryos.” “My mom didn’t have one of those,” said George. “She fed me from her teat.” “Man alive.” The placenta was about three quarters the size of the wiener dog, and it struggled something fierce to drag it into the bushes, and even from George’s porch we could see the bottom all coated with a powdery dust that made it look like filched baked goods. “Say,” George said, “if that wiener dog has got the placenta, where do you reckon the baby is?” You see what I mean about Dumb George. There I was just sittin’ back and enjoying the vision of a wiener dog absconding into the high brush of a dry river bed, trying to get all the details just right in my head so I could tell my Pa about it in a letter, and I didn’t even think about the implications of a wayward placenta. “My God, Dumb George, you’re right! What if that wiener dog is rabid and snatching babies from the goodly young unwed mothers of this fine town? Let’s get him!” George nodded, and stood up slowly. The two of us were always up for adventure, and to tell the honest-to-goodness-toes-on-the-griddle truth, there wasn’t much adventure in our town except for what we made up in our own minds. Already I pictured the two of us crashing through the bushes in wild pursuit of this fierce and foaming creature. I hopped up from my perch on the step and took two bounding canters towards the river bed. The dog had nearly disappeared in the bushes, except for the edge of the placenta got snagged on a brambleweed, and when it saw me coming, the dog snarled and I jumped back. “I tell you what, George, that dog is rabid as a morphine addict!” “If we’re going to have an adventure,” George said, “then I need to get my jacket.” The dog snarled again. “Excellent idea, George, you never know where adventure will take you.” We headed into George’s house and kicked all of the toys out of the pathway. George was fifteen years old, but he still played with all the same toys he had when he was a baby. Everything squeaked and had broken wheels and big clown faces, but he loved them like they were new. I shoved a bright green dump truck filled with the glue-like remnants of a rainbow sherbet ice cream cone out of the way and we headed for the closet. George’s Auntie Josephine, who musta been about 600 years old because of all the wrinkles on her face was sleeping in front of the TV. Rumor had it she hadn’t moved more than fifteen feet from the TV in over 200 years (The first hundred or so years the TV was plugged into nature itself and never went fuzzy), and that the house had been built around her and in the still of the night so as not to disturb her viewing. The TV was turned to the color and sound channel. Every fifteen seconds the color changed and a new sound was played in the background. “Pur-ple,” said the baritone announcer through a bramble of whiskers, and then the sound of a buzzing bumble bee came on. It was the only station George got because his family couldn’t afford cable on account of his father’s lousy drunkenness. Once George saw Auntie Josephine in the chair he held his finger to his lips and tiptoed over to the closet. We didn’t want to wake her because even though Auntie Josephine was 600 years old, she was one of those people whose own business had long since faded into the nooks and crannies of her madness, and therefore she couldn’t keep her nose out of everyone else’s. Business I mean. And even though she hadn’t left her chair in front of the TV in over 200 years, she knew more about the goings on in Retchville than I did. What made this even stranger was that no one talked to her except for George and the young lady with the nose ring who brought her a nutritious meal three times a week. Even George’s dad didn’t talk to her, which isn’t news to anyone in this stretch of the world. George’s dad’s deepest and most profound friendships were forged only with teeming cans of moonshine whiskey. But like every other connection in his life, these too soured and became antagonistic, his friendship with the can only jovial when accompanied by the rusty slosh of eyebrow melting sour. The cans were not the only things he cursed, smashed, and threw at the chipped brick walls of the dank, foul alleys of his past. Auntie Josephine had a Bible on her lap. The cover was worn and most of the pages were torn and yellow, and I swear to you that this was the original copy of the Holy Bible this thing was so old. The letters on the cover just said Ho Bib. It was never more than an arm’s reach away from her, and when she wasn’t sleeping or nibbling the corners off of a saltine, she was reading from the Bible. Or at least pretending to. She had a reputation for being the biggest misquoter of the Bible for fifty miles. And no one corrected her either. On account of she was so old. You don’t want to send a lady that old into the Promised Land with a frown on her face. Might come back to haunt you later. George handed me a jacket and nodded. I turned around and wanted to make haste out to the river. The day was half over, and there was no telling how far a dog that small could get. I figured he’d be slowed down somewhat, on account of his cargo, and I couldn’ta imagined him being properly and athletically trained for his undertaking, but I didn’t want to let him get away. I saw George’s three foot plastic yellow baseball bat with a “G” carved into the knob. The “G” actually looked more like a “C,” but George wasn’t too good at whittling, and I figured the seventeen scars on his pinky were more than enough to make up for what he lacked in skill. The bat leaned against the hall table, and I bent down to pick it up in case we needed protection or to whack our way through the thick brush of the riverbed. I guess George was looking back at Aunt Josephine because he bumped into me and I bumped my head into the table, and the lamp fell onto the ground and broke into seven pieces and made a terrible racket. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the admiral of breath, what in the name of Holy Heaven are the two of you doing?” George and I were on the ground all tangled up with one another. George’s jacket was half on, and two tufts of down slipped through a crack in the sleeve of the other half and into my mouth. I tried to pull them out and flick them to the ground, but they stuck to my fingers. “George and I were just heading down to the elementary school to play some baseball,” I said. I held up the bat as if seven ounces of Taiwanese plastic was enough to fool a 600-year old lady. “Without any balls?” She looked up at the ceiling and closed her Bible. “Forgive them, Lord, for they are yet but babes. When the shepherd reaps the wheat, they will shine like blistered almonds.” Then she looked at us. “The two of you are adventurin’. I know because the only time you two wear your jackets is when you’re up to no good.” “We saw a wiener dog,” George said. I elbowed him in the ribs but it was too late. “A wiener dog?” “With a placenta.” “Yea and the chosen ones ventured forth unfrom the cruelty of Pharoh, and into the dry and desolate temptation of the placenta. It’s a sign, aw lawdy it’s a sign!” When Auntie Josephine got excited, her jowls started jangling and small short whistles like a dying teakettle issued forth from the corners of her mouth. There were roughly seventeen hundred spittle discolorations mixed in with the dark floral upholstery of her chair. “You boys, help me up. It’s the Book of Revelation, the end of civilization, and the coming of the four dachshunds of the apocalypse. You can’t be on an adventure like this without someone who knows how to read the signs. Now help me up!” George and I stared at each other for a bit, because we weren’t sure what we were supposed to help her up from. She’d been sitting in the chair so long that most of the people who saw her assumed the chair itself was a mutation resulting from the medieval like surgical practices of the Retchville Hospital, which had continued with solemn regularity until well into the last decade, and were responsible for more than a few sets of blackened attic windows. Even looking at her closely I couldn’t be sure where the chair ended and she began. So I stood there and did some calculations, and tried to figure out the opportunity cost of bringing Auntie Josephine along, and how far away the wiener dog would get if we had to run down to Lars Fincherberger’s place and borrow his tractor. George put his hand on my shoulder, looked up at the ceiling, and put every legitimate effort into looking pensive. “Just come over here and grab me!” Aunt Josephine barked, and the two of us hopped to it. In addition to being 600-years-old, Auntie Josephine was also just a shade over 600 pounds. Even without the significant weight of the chair. I’d sent several letters to the Book of World Records, figuring that she had to be some kind of record, but I never heard back from them, not even when I drew a picture. Auntie Josephine heaved a bit as we got her up, and the strain of it all nearly made me hyperextend my elbow, but Dumb George is strong as an ox and twice as hairy, and she was on her feet in no time at all, and George and I saw that only the parts of the chair beyond the bounds of Josephine had been reupholstered. The original fabric, a rough grayish mauve, had been covered with intertwined black roses, the shadows of which we could see seared into the back and shoulders of Aunt Josephine’s outfit. On account of her elephantine size, it was difficult to procure properly sized clothing for Auntie Josephine. When she was younger the family would just drive into the city, where nearly everyone is 600 pounds and buy her the height of bright yellow carnation bedecked second hand dresses, but once she got up in years and the Social Security Administration stopped sending her checks because they figured she was dead, these extravagancies came to an end. Nowadays she wrapped herself in off season tablecloths held together on the inside by valiantly insufficient duct tape. But I’ll spare you the details of that because you never know when someone is eating. For as long as I had known her she had worn a subdued green tablecloth with tassels that dangled in an “x” across her chest and in a vast oval just below her knees. “Let’s go,” she said, and she pointed out towards the riverbank as though it had been she, and not us, who had seen the wiener dog. As though it was George and I who were holding her up. “Hey,” I said, “This is our adventure!” If Aunt Josephine heard above the Cessna-like clearing of her throat, she didn’t make any indication, and she wrapped her thick arm around our shoulders and moved forward. It was then that the three of us headed out the door, down the banks of the arid and desiccated river, and into the dim twilight of adventure. “You see, Auntie Josephine, you see!” George hopped up and down and pointed to a flurry of small paw prints half erased by the encumbrance of the placenta. “It disappears up there in the bushes,” Auntie Josephine said. “That’s where we last saw him.” “What’s that?” Auntie Josephine clutched her Bible up under her arm and ambled over to the edge of the brush. That’s the thing about Josephine, even though she’s older than most of the dinosaurs, she has superhuman vision, sometimes even prescient vision, and can ask you, from across the house, about a scratch on your finger that you haven’t even got yet. George and I quickly pursued. “Be sure not to step on the tracks,” I cautioned him. “In case the wiener dog doubles back and tries to confuse us.” “You never can trust a wiener dog,” George said. Auntie Josephine leaned over as far as she could and tried to pick up a stick. She swiped a few times at the ground, with her elbow resting on the top of her leg and most of her butt hanging out in the breeze, before George grabbed a nearby branch and handed it to her. His solution was better than mine, which consisted of feigning a keen and sudden interest in the Delaware shaped scab on my elbow. “You see that, boys?” Auntie Josephine drew a circle in the sand around a discolored wet mass. She was still leaned over, so I maneuvered myself so that the George’s hulking torso blocked out any unsavory view of her nether regions. “What is it?” George asked. “It’s blood!” I said. “You know what that means?” “That the other three dachshunds we haven’t seen yet have got a baby?” George asked. Auntie Josephine thumped the stick into the ground. “No,” she said. “What it means is that the end of days is upon us. It means that evil has finally kicked good right in the raisins, and you boys better start saying your prayers.” I thought a drop of blood in the soil wasn’t all that much to get stirred up about. I mean, to be perfectly honest, it seemed a little too obvious a symbol for something as grand in scope and scale as the end of life on Earth. I envisioned something subtler, like a wilted flower, or maybe even a child born with goat hooves and walrus whiskers hopping onto the roof of a supersonic jet plane, as a signal for the end. But I didn’t mention any of this to Auntie Josephine, because I didn’t want to waste any more time finding the wiener dog. A disagreement with Auntie Josephine meant hours upon hours of irrational argumentation until you conceded her point. Even if you conceded, she’d take the counterpoint and argue against you agreeing with her. And it didn’t make no difference at all if you conceded her point five minutes in, because she’d still give you 600-years worth of counterargument upon counterargument, until you were so tired and worn down you felt as if it had been you who’d lived through the better part of six centuries. “Something evil is at play here,” she said. “I’m certain of it.” She poked at the bushes with the stick and a few of the smaller branches landed in the blood. “Follow me, boys, and repent afore you enter the sacred brush of the dead river. I can see this is leading towards evil.” She knocked a few branches out of the way and, with her stick curled up under her arm like a general, followed the faint trail of the wiener dog, the tassels on her improvised muumuu erasing all evidence of the crime. I poked George in the ribs and stuck my chin out at Auntie Josephine as if to say, ‘You see, this is why we shouldn’t have brought her along.’ George nodded as if he agreed, and then picked up some dirt and rubbed it across his top row of teeth. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “Repenting.” George spit out the excess dirt into a thick black mass in the dust, and he followed to get behind Auntie Josephine because the sun stoked the flames of summer when adventuring was taking place, and George needed the extra shade. I should’ve left the both of them right then. I should’ve run up ahead and come in from the east, and cut over through the dead tributary, because that was the next clearing up, and I figured the dachshund wasn’t going to risk getting his placenta snagged on the brambly lower branches for long. With all the noise they made and with Auntie Josephine erasing all the evidence, they’d be lucky to find a dead rat. I should’ve left the both of them. Then I started thinking about what else might be hiding in the dry bushes of the dead river bed. Maybe Josephine was right and a whole army of saber toothed wiener dogs, no longer satisfied with mere afterbirth, waited, foam mouthed and in packs large enough to take down an elephant, at the darker corridors of brush surrounding the clearing. Maybe a musically inclined and hirsute madman, with a penchant both for lesser known classical works and human flesh, played his devious violin in the shade of the shrubs. I swear to everything I saw something about that on the news once. I should’ve left the both of them to their misshapen adventure, but I didn’t. In the end I followed them, not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid not to. The sun got lower on the horizon and you could see the foot or two of dust we’d kicked up hover in the thin cloud above the highest of the bushes. The faint rattle of the junior high school kids riding their skateboards over the wooden sidewalk kneaded its way into the river brush and mingled with the dust and the breeze, and, like us, lost any definite form in the waning light. I covered my mouth because I didn’t want to breathe in any of that dust and get black lung. Blue jays and cardinals swooped down from the oak trees and soused themselves in dust before they chirped and fluttered their way back into the foliage. When they did that I couldn’t see them, on account of the shadows, but I sure could hear them, and they were a lot better to listen to than the skateboards or Auntie Josephine. She mumbled to herself and circled little gobs of blood and placenta shrunk and sealed by the dirt and crusted over on the branches in sticky black globs. When we arrived at the seventh such glob, Aunt Josephine poked the stick into George’s chest. “You boys like each other?” “We’re the best of friends,” George replied in his slow donkey voice. “You sweet on each other?” “What?” “You touch each other in the pants? What was all that nonsense about when you two were rolling around on the ground with each other’s clothes in your mouth?” George and I looked at each other, and for just the briefest of moments I pictured in my head what it would be like to kiss George or stroke affectionately at his ear, or have him whispering sweet donkey voiced nothings into my ear. “No,” I said, “Why would you ask that?” “These globs. There’s seven of them. That means that somewhere around here the sanctity of a traditional marriage is being polluted by the wayward hands of the wicked.” “The hell it does,” I said. “All it means is that we still haven’t caught ourselves a wiener dog.” Maybe I was a little harsh with the way I responded to Auntie Josephine because she slapped me across the mouth with the back of her hand. “Blasphemer!” It didn’t hurt too much, because the back of her hand was thick and soft as a pillow. To be honest, the strain of lifting a seventy pound arm, thick and shapeless as a bag of coffee beans, hurt her more than me, and she rubbed the stick back and forth over her shoulder. I heard five sharp cracks, and I couldn’t be sure if they were from the stick or her shoulder, and I felt kind of bad for her so I patted at my cheek with a sleeve to make her think it hurt. “We still don’t have a wiener dog,” I mumbled. “And now you’ve erased all the evidence.” “If you boys hadn’t been dawdling along, we would’ve found this dachshund already, and smashed his head in with a rock, putting an end to it. Once and for all.” “We don’t want to smash his head in,” I said. “We just want to see where he got the placenta from. Don’t we, George?” George dropped his head and took a step to the left, so that he was equidistant between Aunt Josephine and me. “I don’t know,” George said. I could tell George was in a bind. I was his best friend, and Auntie Josephine was his flesh and blood, and I suppose the bond between them was all that much stronger because she had such a terribly high amount of actual flesh and blood. He didn’t want to displease either of us, and I felt bad for putting him in a situation like that. “Ah, to hell with it. I hope the wiener dog is never found. The two of you don’t know how to have a proper adventure at all.” I dropped the plastic bat and walked back home following the tasseled trail of Auntie Josephine’s muumuu. George called after me a few times, but I pretended not to hear over the chirps of the cardinals. When I got home I went into my room and stared up at the ceiling for a while. It was a plain ceiling for the most part, except for the black wisps of smoke that gathered at the edges because the chimney was partially blocked by bird’s nests. I must have stared at the ceiling for an hour. Nothing much happened except the smoke gathered in the corners and occasionally I coughed. My mom knocked on the wall and hollered that George was waiting out on the porch for me. She didn’t let George in the house because she said he was liable to break something with those big clumsy shoulders of his. My mom left her packet of cigarettes on the railing, and I figured she must have been out here watching the sunset and reading her novels because a few wisps of smoke and perfume lingered at the edge of the porch. I picked up the pack and tapped it a few times against my hand. A cigarette fell out and landed on the porch. “You want a cigarette?” I asked him, even though neither of us smoked. “No,” he said. “We found the wiener dog.” I picked up the cigarette and lit it. I did this mostly for the effect. I wanted to look casual as hell, like one of those movie stars with a white jacket. “Did you bash his head in with a rock?” I asked. “No.” “Why not?” “Because he was sitting on my dad.” “What?” “Aunt Josephine says he drunk hisself to death.” “Guddam.” “And the wiener dog was just sitting on his chest eating away at that placenta like it was corn on the cob.” “Guddam that’s a vision. What happened to Aunt Josephine?” “She’s in her chair. She passed out. I had to carry her all the way home.” “What about your Dad?” “You never can trust a wiener dog, so I steered clear. Unless he moved, he’s still laying out there.” “You bet your ass you can’t trust a wiener dog.” George took a seat on the edge of the porch and I took a few drags from the cigarette. “You gonna miss him?” I asked. “He pissed hisself a lot.” “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I took a few more drags, and rubbed the cigarette out on the porch. The sun had mostly gone down and the dust had settled in most parts of the river bed, except for right near the horizon where the junior high school kids had changed their skateboards for dirt bikes. They took turns crashing into the bushes, and I could hear their laugher and shrieks across the horizon. It was peaceful, I suppose, or as peaceful as it got in a place like Retchville. “I got to get home,” George said. “In case Aunt Josephine needs a saltine.” He stood up and I could see the imprint of his butt on the dusty porch where all the dust had come together because of the sweat. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll have another adventure.” “Yeah,” he replied.