Paws and effect

“They’re outlawing friendship?” I whimpered. I would never be able to hide my friendliness for long enough to stay out of trouble. “They can’t really send you to the pound for charisma, can they?”

I flopped down in the shade of the Wagon and waited for Mom to unlock the door, but she was still standing halfway across the car kennel staring at the Witch.
“What does she want now?” I asked, not because I cared but because I wanted Mom’s attention back.
“What the heck does shelter in place mean?”

“Is shelter in place the one where you’re supposed to climb under your desk and hold your head?” I asked.

“I think you’re thinking of duck and cover,” Mom said. “I’ve never heard of shelter in place before, but Lily said that they’ve closed down Portland and she thinks San Francisco is shut down too. Imagine that! A whole city shut down. The world has gone absolutely crazy!”

When I tried to picture it, my imagination turned black. “What does that mean?”

“Like people are grounded and can’t leave their houses.”

“Oh, I get it.” I half closed my eyes the way smart people do to show they understand. “So they can think about what they’ve done.”

When I was a puppy, Mom used to put me on time out in the people bathroom to think about what I’d done. The trouble was, no matter how hard I thought, I never could figure out what made Mom turn into a dragon. Many times she would come in the door smiling and poof! she transformed into a fire-breathing monster, fuming about slippers, or trash on the floor, or whatever. When a Bad Dog comes to the Stuck House these days, Mom just makes me sit-stay to watch her be a dragon while she incinerates everything on the floor. Sometimes it feels like the fire breathing will never end, but if I sit with my ears back and let my eyes get big like a Japanese cartoon, the fire eventually burns out and Mom kisses it all better. Then it’s peaceful and I have time to think about the things that Bad Dogs do.

How bad would a dog need to behave to send the whole City on time out? How many I-turned-my-back-for-one-second sammiches would he need to swipe to cancel walks for every dog in the City, and their people too?

“But what did they do wrong?” I asked.

It was Mom’s turn to think. “Be disease vectors, I guess? Breathing, touching, snot, and face-scratching are a fact of life. It’s like they’re saying we’re unclean in some fundamental way.”

“How many minutes are people grounded for?”

“I have no idea! Not minutes, that’s for sure.” She said it as if my wrong guess was someone else’s mistake. “Days? Weeks even? They’ve even closed down schools and businesses. Can they do that? I don’t think they can do that.”

“No, they can’t do that,” I said, proud to share my people-behavior expertise. “If people don’t go to work, they can’t buy dog food or anything. Then they die.”

“Exactly!” Mom said, like she’d known it all along. “Speaking of which, we should probably find a town to pick up supplies.”

She finally opened the Wagon door and we sat inside while she had an emergency conference with the Witch. “There wasn’t much besides that gas station in Escalante. They probably have big supermarkets in Page or Kanab…” She sliced her finger around the Witch’s face. “If we’re going into town, I could really use a hot meal that didn’t come from a can.”

“Dream on. That didn’t even exist before the boogeyvirus.”

“I know.” Mom slumped miserably. Mom was an herbivore, and everybody knows that there are no plants in the desert. She had to graze far and wide to find a restaurant that serves vegetarians.

“Have you ever tried a hot dog? They’re not really made from dogs, you know.”

Mom brightened. “I have an idea!” She pulled the Witch to her mouth like a police walkie talkie. “How far is it to Sedona, Arizona?”

“Traffic to Sedona is light, so I’m estimating six hours and thirty-seven minutes,” the Witch taunted.

“Do you know what’s just 350 miles away in Sedona?” Mom said in the same tone I use when I know she’s hiding a toy behind her back.

I tried to remember what I knew about Sedona.

“. . . where can we find wifi, somewhere to sit, and all the hot food required for happiness?” Mom hinted.

In Sedona we’d found the Law, white dirt, brick-grey dirt, and the most delicious warm meal that a rambling dog could possibly hope for.

“In Sedona there’s a…” Mom drew out the aaaaaaaaa for suspense, which meant I was supposed to guess, but I already knew the right answer.

“McDonald’s!” I cheered at the same moment Mom exclaimed, “Whole Foods!”

The excitement dropped out of Mom’s face when she heard my guess. “McDonald’s? You can get that anywhere. This is the only Whole Foods between Las Vegas and Albuquerque.”

“If McDonald’s is so common, why don’t we go more often?”

“I’m sure there’s a McDonald’s in Sedona, too.” Mom said dismissively. To the Witch, she ordered, “Take me to the Whole Foods in Sedona, Arizona.”

“Continue east for two hundred and seventy-four miles,” the Witch commanded.

Mom spurred the Wagon with the key and it giddyupped back onto the car-trail. “I knew something terrible would happen if I went out of cell range for too long,” she said. “I leave civilization for 2 days, and look what happened.”

“Why is it your job to fix… whatever it is?” I asked.

“It's not my job. There’s nothing I can do. Absolutely nothing. But if they’re shutting down entire cities, who knows what they’ll try next. I don’t even know if we’ll get in trouble for not being home.”

“But you are home. Home is wherever the Wagon is. You can do nothing from here, can’t you?”

“I don’t know what they can do. They’re already saying that people can’t earn a living, go where they want to go, and see who they want to see. It’s like they’re trying to outlaw our very existence. I’ve never seen anything like this in real life.”

“They’re outlawing friendship?” I whimpered. I would never be able to hide my friendliness for long enough to stay out of trouble. “They can’t really send you to the pound for charisma, can they?”

“It’s more like house arrest,” Mom said dismissively, as if I was the one missing the point. “It’ll never work. They can’t send you to prison just for having a body like you can take a dog to the shelter if you don’t like how much he sheds. That’s some toxic shame, original sin nonsense.” Except she didn’t say nonsense.

“Neener, neener, neener! You can’t house-arrest someone who doesn’t have a house. Suckers!” I agreed.

“Who knows what rules they’ll come out with next. The next piece of news could be something that lands us in jail for being so far from home.”

“You can’t change the rules in the middle of a game,” I reassured her. “The rules are the game.There's no winning without rules to play by.”

“Right! See? Even a dog gets it. What ever happened to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? It’s a virus, not a… not a…” Mom stuttered while her imagination sputtered to come up with something powerful enough to stop the whole world. Her imagination pooped out. “This isn’t Hollywood,” she finished un-grandly. “But if they can prevent people from working, buying useless junk, or coming and going as they please, maybe they can force us into house arrest.”

Mom took a deep breath to turn down the movie in her head: “Let’s think about this: If the reason they want everyone to stay home is to avoid contact with the virus,
“and the virus is in California…
“and the virus needs people to spread…
“and there are more people in the cities…
“… then we’re safer in the wilderness out here than a city in California, don’t you think?”

“Good idea! We can live in stone houses in the cliffs like the Anaschnozzy people used to. It’ll be fun. Haven’t you always been curious about what you’d do in a survival situation?”

“This isn’t a run-for-your-life kind of survival situation. It’s more of a stockpiling thing. Plus, it gets cold out here at night.”

“You’re supposed to build a fire, duh. You know how to make fire, Mom. You just pull the trigger on the flamethrower and woosh, the stove is hot.”

“Ah yes, the traditional Bic long-neck lighter of the ancient Anasazi civilization.” Something about the way Mom said it made me think she didn’t mean it. “The people who knew how to survive out here lived a very different life from how we live today.”

“Don’t be breedist. Humans aren’t all that different from each other. Even the ones that are ghosts.”

“No, I mean they were mostly hunter-gatherers.”

“We see hunters on the trail all the time,” I reminded her. “And people are always gathering… Or, they were until this week anyway.”

“I mean they didn’t have Walmart or Whole Foods, so they spent most of their time outside searching for supplies.”

“Spending all day outside sounds like fun,” I said. “You already spend most of your time searching for things anyway. Your keys, your wallet…” Mom probably wasn’t ready for the best part; the Witch would never survive our caveman lifestyle. “What ever happened to the Anaschnozzy civilization anyway?”

“I think there was a drought and they disappeared.”

“Into the earth like Saint Bernardino?” I yipped.

“No one really knows, but they probably migrated on to Mexico or something. Some people think that the Anasazi homeland became the Aztecs’ Aztlan.”

“See? They survived.”

“Until European diseases killed their descendants.”

“All of them?”

“Not all of them, but too many.”

I’d never heard of anyone actually losing a whole civilization before. When Nature tried to bring its savagery to the human world with something like a sandslide or a tsumommy, I thought people just went somewhere else until they could tame Nature's wildness again. But the boogeyvirus was a kind of wildness that people carried inside themselves, so there was nowhere to escape except from each other. If disease was enough to wipe out a civilization tough enough to live on cliffs like the Anaschnozzy, what did that mean for us? Thank goodness I was traveling with someone who could save the world just by keeping her socks dry.

I watched the wilder-ness flow by out the window and tried to count the towns we passed through to take my mind off of things. I kept losing count, not because dogs can’t count that high, but because every time we drove through a town it had been so long since the last one that I forgot how many I’d counted already.

A frightening thought occurred to me. “Mom, could you get sick?”

“I guess.” She shrugged like it was no big deal. “I’m not so worried about getting sick myself, but I would feel terrible if I got someone else sick. Maybe someone vulnerable, or someone that a vulnerable person relies on.”

I was glad we didn’t rely on anyone. It sounded risky.

“Lily said they’re not even letting family members visit hospitals to say goodbye, or hold memorials for people who’ve died. I couldn’t live with myself if I put someone in that position.”

“Nobody knows who’s boogeytrapped, Mom,” I comforted. “Accidents happen. They can’t send you to the pound if they can’t prove you’re a murderer.”

“It’s not just that, Spud. Getting someone sick would make this trip a selfish mistake, and I don’t want to believe that my existence is a selfish mistake.” She flattened a little under the colossal responsibility of keeping the whole world safe against something she couldn’t even see.

“So what will we do if you get sick?” I asked.

She tilted her head to rearrange the kaleidoscope of thoughts inside. “I suppose I would drive us home as fast as I can. We have enough supplies to avoid stores for a week, and I could use the dog bathroom so I wouldn’t spread germs in any public places. The only thing I really have to touch is gas pumps. I guess I could fill up with poop bags on my hands.”

“And that stops the virus?”

“It’d better! If poop bags let germs through, I’m never, ever picking up one of your turds again. I’m just worried about what happens if we get caught.”

Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.