That summer the dog was the size of a Volkswagen. It seemed to grow each season in proportions so out of reason that I stopped thinking about them. According to the rumors around the Oasis bar, it was trained to attack viciously any trespassers. One should listen for a high-pitched whistle, the bar patrons said, because that was Arnold Moenstien's signal for it to attack.
I could barely imagine what that would be like. I'd seen the dog charge out from behind the barn at the UPS truck, hit the side of the door and fall to the ground only to roll over and chew rabidly at the front tire. A dog that big left a dent in the brown side of the panel truck, a dent that formed a bulls eye in the middle of dog spit and mucus. It actually tore a hunk of rubber from the tire's sidewall. After that, deliveries were stopped. The rumors had it Moenstien all but quit coming to town.
The dog grew even larger then, bulkier, with cockle burrs sprung up along its flanks. One eye, some said, got all milky and rheumy, the result of a poke from steel delaminated off the front radial tire of that UPS truck. The dog was a force, like gravity. The dog was ageless, too. I remember him from when I was a kid, never as a puppy but always as full-grown and still getting larger, bulkier, more intense. How could anyone deal with that?
Old Moe, as Moenstien was called by locals, owned three miles of the best trout stream around. It was beautiful water, legendary, with a small "L" in its thin path through the countryside. The stories about its trout were legendary, too. All around Moe's farm the stream was open, anyone could fish, but those three miles were posted shut. Not with the polite hardware store signs that change with Milton Hardware's inventory: "No Trespassing" in red and white, the next year a yellow "No Trespassing Under Penalty of Law" and most recently "No Hunting Fishing Trapping or Trespassing" in black and white.
Moe used tires and the white paint left over from painting his house. "No" on the top and "Trespassing" wreathed the bottom. Those tires were hung on fence posts and in trees, high as the bucket on the front-end loader could lift Moe, well out of any vandal's reach. The tires appeared, it is said, all in one night, when I imagine the world closed a little too close on Moe and he decided to do something. They were everywhere, like poison ivy.
I crowded the borders of Moe's land from both ends and I could see the wealth of his water. And each time I approached his section of land, each time I got right up to the old tire hung on a tight strand of barbed wire over the center of the stream ---like the pendulum of an evil grandfather clock-- I would crawl up the bank and peak over. The dog would be standing at the edge of Moe's yard, a half-mile or so across the pasture, looking right at me. Its ears were turned in my direction and if I followed the line of his body to the nearest window, old Moe would be looking out past the dog in my direction. Once I saw him slowly lift his hands near the top of his soiled bibs, his fingers circled and ready for a whistle. I saw the muscle along the dog's flank straining with a mixture of obedience and the desire to run something down. Then old Moe dropped his hands and turned away from the window interrupted by a phone call perhaps or by tea whistling from the stove.
I always felt I left these little encounters knowing something. And although I'm a man, I always felt a little squeeze in my stomach, a little wobble in my knees, as I turned back away from Moe's property.
The path to the big fish, everyone agreed, was at the farthest point from Moe's house--way at the end of the pasture. There was a huge corner turn in the stream after a long stretch of waist deep riffely run. Moe had dumped a couple of cars in the stream to prevent erosion and although cars in trout streams are a cliche, I was unaware of that at the time.
I had mismanaged my life so intensely, so completely, by then that the thought of being mauled by a dog trying to catch a large fish didn't seem that ridiculous. And the fish were really supposed to be big. Although my life was precipitously devoid of standards, my fishing was not. I knew the fishing had to done in broad daylight and any fish had to be caught with a dry fly. Not because I was a fishing snob, but because if I was going to be mauled by a dog while catching a fish I wanted the catching to involve every sense. I wanted the whole thing: the rise forms up next to the bank, probably by a taillight, a perfect drift, the take as delicate as the skin on a girl's wrist, and then the explosion of a wild trout thrashing against taught line and stifling air. That air was alive with electricity.
The dog, big as a Buick by now, lurked in the dark edges of my mind, lurked in the spots reserved for doubts, desire and dreams.
