Dogs

What Marla remembers the most is the way the middle of the suitcase lurched upward as the kid slammed it atop the hood of her truck, the way the middle bulged so big at that moment that she thought the fabric of the thing would tear and send the horror within soaring. There was the thud of course, and the sound of the kid’s Chuck Taylors slapping against the pavement during the escape, but nothing was as vivid in Marla’s mind as the lurch, as the dog’s body, bound within the suitcase, bouncing into the air one last time.

This is the story she thinks of at the Legion while nursing a Gansett and listening to an ex-cop’s yarn about discovering a dead dog in the bed of a missing Pittsburgh kid some years back. The kid - a wealthy writing student at the local college - it turned out that he done the deed before skipping town.

“Two in the chest,” says the cop, “while pulling a B&E. His accomplice? Get this: it was his professor.”

“Get outta here,” says Marla with mock-enthusiasm.

“I am not shitting you,” says the cop. “It was all hushed up by the college, o’course. Probably why you never heard of it.”

“That,” says Marla, “or the fact that I ain’t never been to Pittsburgh.”

“Nah,” says the cop. “If that’d made the news, it’d be all over. National story, I’m telling you.” And then, after a healthy pull from his Coors, the cop adds, “Fucking academics.”

“Fucking A,” says Marla.