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Chapter 9 is at DOGZPLOT

The street was no longer than ten or eleven blocks; it ran parallel to the highway before ending in an onramp. Helen merged into traffic and the car windows tinted to protect her from the unapologetic perversion of light that bore down from overhead, exposing each credible surface of the strip. The sidewalks, parking lots, walls and windows were all home to incredibly important messages concerning Helen’s skin, hair, her cracked and peeling hands, her sore throat, and any number of other ailments right at that very moment preventing her from enjoying life to its fullest.

“Do I smell funny to you?” she heard Rocket ask. She could hear him sniffing himself, quick little startled breaths, and felt sorry for the simple animal.

“Don’t listen to them, Rocket,” she assured him, feeling almost tender. “You smell like a dog.” She watched people getting in and out of their cars, driving through drive-throughs, and milling about in parking lots, stretching their legs. It was a comfort, somehow, seeing people doing normal things. She’d been spending so much time in her Neighborhood™, where public behavior was rather strictly defined, that the sight of people, here, the sight of them being openly hungry, being tired, all of this was refreshing. She couldn’t help but wonder how they produced enough Buzz with this much on display, but this thought was easily overcome by her own pangs of hunger, which were growing, and her attention found its way back to food, and the fact that she was passing it by.

They were almost to the end of the 1st block.

“Tell me if you see something,” she said, and changed lanes.

Each restaurant along the way boasted better deals than the last, and Helen watched the numbers go down, the “value” go up, and special coupons for unrelated consumer items appear on her dashboard, broadcast by restaurants still blocks away. She was urged to pass by the choicer real estate and take her chances with something closer to the end of the street, but traffic was moving so ponderously that the dashboard bargains seemed desperate. They were giving away free staplers at the Tempeh Teepee©. Competition was fierce.

She eyed her options with suspicion, waiting for the right offer to guide them in, steer Joan’s car off the slow moving street.

“Really, Helen, any one of these places will do,” said Rocket impatiently, and she knew he was right. It didn’t matter. But she was caught in a kid-in-the-candy-store frame of mind—she only had a dime, and she wanted to get the most for it. She toyed with the shiny disc, flipping it across her knuckles. She salivated and sucked her tongue, walking up and down the aisle, her ears burning from the old clerk’s hard stare. But she wasn’t stealing anything. She had a right to be there. She was determined to scout it out.

“You gonna buy anything or what?” he asked in a gruff, throaty voice. Stupid old man. She avoided his eyes.

“I’ve got a dime,” she said, holding it up for him to see. This seemed to satisfy him, for the moment, and she heard the ruffle of his newspaper as he went back to reading.

“Whatever you say, kid,” he huffed.

When it came down to it, the content of the packages mattered less to Helen than the packaging itself. She ogled the ostentatious wrappers, read and reread each promise declaring gooey delight, but not without a degree of humor. She took exactly none of it seriously. She liked to consider what the manufacturer was shooting for, put herself in the mindset of its target market, and judge from there the relative success of each campaign. It was a game. Of course, there was an underlying sweet-tooth, but she liked to tickle that tooth, feel it squirm before giving in and coating it with caramel.

Then she saw it. Among the ads for stopwatches and switchblades, crockpots and dish-racks, wholesale merchandise bought on the cheap and turned over to drive-by customers under the rubric of added value, an ad popped up on her dashboard for something she knew she liked. Something familiar. Something with guts and grease and everything she wanted rolled into a perfectly bullshit-free package she knew she could trust.

“Looks like ol’ Knuckle made it big,” she said, almost under her breath. She felt like she was telling a secret. She was giddy. She’d take Rocket out for his first Dirty Dog and watch as he happily grunted through the gastrointestinal nightmare following their splurge. She accelerated out of their lane, moving into a spot beside them that seemed to be moving more quickly. She passed by the colorful wrappers, the Sugar Bombs©, the Gooey Gobblers©, all the hard candy camped out, row after row, and felt the hard eyes again on her back as she left the store.

“Hey kid, where do you think you’re going?” he called after her. But she was gone.

Knuckle’s was only a few blocks ahead, according to the ad. Helen was excited, gearing up to tell a story, an anecdote about one of her early Dirty Dog experiences, but before she could she was startled by a moan from the backseat. Could it be a complaint? She was aghast. And that wasn’t even the end of it. Before she could protest his protestation, Rocket launched into a tirade, obviously upset. Much to Helen’s surprise, the dog knew all about Knuckle’s.

“Word is they use dog meat,” he began. “And don’t try to tell me any different, Helen. I have it on good faith from a basset hound I know—honest dog—who told me his uncle’s best friend was picked up on the street by a Knuckle’s van. Poor dog howled like a siren for a couple blocks and then nothing.” Rocket was showing some emotion. “Happened right in front of his bitch.” He paused, and Helen imagined him staring out the window, looking forlorn. She still hadn’t met his eyes. “And don’t even get me started on that freak Junior! The bastard has no soul!”

But Helen didn’t have to get the dog started. Rocket shot off on his own steam about the Knuckle’s empire, its climb from a scummy hole in south-central Seattle to the chain they were about to patronize. He explained how it boasted a franchise at every rest-stop along every interstate in America, Knuckle’s dragging down both coasts like fingernails down a chalkboard, and he described the old man’s son, Junior, his voice cramping up in what Helen took as the deep, downward whine of a dog’s abject fear.

In many ways, it was a familiar story. When Helen was neck deep in her new life, pursuing a near perfect anonymity, I watched it unfold with some astonishment, the way you watch an oversees war on TV: little spotty images filled in with loads of conjecture, a touch of scandal, and then you wait for the real story to emerge so they can make a movie.

But it was simple. Knuckle was a pawn. He was one of the lucky ones in the beginning, one of those people whose emotional energy output was high enough to earn him a hefty reputation. As soon as word reached the Feds they were on him. They collected these people like pets in the early days, gave them what they wanted, thought they’d be useful later on. But with Knuckle it was more than that. Emotional energy spread power pretty thin, and there was a big movement on the Federal level to keep pace with the rise of “emotionally productive” entrepreneurs. I think they reasoned that if they could keep a few of the right people happy, they could secure their input once the New Economy was up and running. Which happened basically overnight.

Having taken Knuckle under their tutelage, teaching him business strategy, subsidizing his investment in high-profile storage facilities for the energy he was producing, the Feds maintained a direct route to a private business world that found them, in a word, irrelevant. They also got to pose for great promo shots.

But then, the story goes, Knuckle began to get unruly. As much training as he’d received, they’d still only managed to give a small man big power, and as the Knuckle’s empire got underway, franchises popping up everywhere, that awful and undeniably catchy jingle about Gettin’Dirty™ ringing in everyone’s ear, they began to sense a small defiance from the man. Poor guy. Not to excuse his insolence, but I can just imagine what kind of a laughing stock he must have been at those board meetings. “Busted Knuckle”, they called him. Spoon-fed by Uncle Sam.

He finally flipped out entirely. He began openly challenging the government, telling the press that they’d never helped him at all, that they were just scavengers wanting a piece of what he’d made for himself. And the press ate it up. They knew it was arrogant, misguided if not patently erroneous, but they broadcast Knuckle’s taunts in bold type until the government had no other option but to withdraw its support, and play dirty. They took him to court.

Helen’s eyes were glazed over in hunger. Rocket’s lispy voice slithered into her ears and slid around in her brain, looking for purchase and finding none. She stared at the traffic, now glacially moving along the strip, and she thought of the lovely candy shop she’d run out of, the old clerk who, while initially seeming gruff and mean-spirited, in hindsight was probably just concerned for Helen’s well-being, not wanting her to miss out on what he surely knew was to be her only chance to eat something, ever. The weather was kept relatively constant by enormous weather controls surrounding the rest-strip, but flakes of slice and loops of slerm were visible now and then. Helen watched for them, counting. Rocket continued.

“But that wasn’t the end of it,” he explained, tail anxiously thumping the seat. And it wasn’t. He still hadn’t told her about Junior. And this is where it gets scary for dogs.

With Knuckle tied up in a court battle that would soon become his obsession, the ersatz chief of the hotdog chain began to garner public attention as a spiffy, well-dressed and savvy substitute for Busted Knuckle. His name was Junior. Junior was Knuckle’s son. That Knuckle even had a son was a well-kept secret until the trial was well underway, and many saw it as the most shrewd business maneuver of Knuckle’s career, though it was probably just complete emotional abandonment. But Junior didn’t let that stop him. He hit the ground running with a series of what seemed at the time to be highly astute marketing decisions in a context where the franchise was getting slammed daily by a government run media still not conceding to the “post-national emergency landscape” of the New Economy. He gave away free food. He made enormous charitable donations to organizations fighting to end the scourge of obesity plaguing the nation. He championed the largest recycling campaign the world had ever seen.

Then he appeared on national TV and ate a live chicken. He didn’t even pluck it.

The press, for obvious reasons, loved it. Completely fictional accounts of his early childhood began to appear in otherwise respectable magazines. Psychologists appeared on talk shows explaining the term “psychotic break.” But before the young man could be helped, Junior disappeared.

“And that’s when dogs began to go missing,” Rocket concluded. His voice had finally steadied, as if he’d gained some control over the issue by relating it out loud.

Helen jerked out of her daydream, where she was leaning over the glass countertop of a candy store, watching the large, sweaty clerk behind it massage himself through his pants, and said, “So, what, are you saying you don’t want to eat there?”

“Of course not,” the dog replied. “I just thought you’d want to make an informed decision.”

And with that, Helen took the car into a miraculously fast moving lane and turned on her blinker. Knuckle’s Dirty Dogs, she thought, dreamily, that sure brings back memories.