“Dogs” by Lena Valencia
Ruth had spent the morning thinking of ghastly things that could befall her protagonist. The script was a revenge flick about a supermarket checkout woman who—after years of dealing with callous customers, a lecherous boss, and a manipulative boyfriend—goes on a killing spree. One of the notes she’d received was that when the protagonist snapped, it just seemed to come out of nowhere, and that Ruth should make the bad things that happened to her worse. She should consider flashbacks to traumatic incidents in the protagonist’s girlhood to create a more accurate psychological profile. “Dial it up,” were the words the producer had used, which made Ruth imagine an old-fashioned cartoon villain turning a dial labeled Violence from “moderate” to “extreme,” and cackling with glee as his captive writhed in pain.
Her ex-husband Steve had their daughter Sabrina for the long weekend, so she had booked herself three nights in a vacation rental adjacent to Joshua Tree, which was all she could find last-minute. The area looked like Joshua Tree, but had fewer lithe desert witches and more meth heads. It felt decadent and almost too perfect to be paying hotel room rates for a silver Airstream trailer on a road called Trigger Drive. Decadent because she could just be writing in her office in her empty house, but she told herself she deserved it. She told herself it would be good to get away. That without the distractions of the city she’d really be able to nail down this beast of a script.
There’d been a bit of a snafu the day she was to leave for her retreat: Steve had texted asking if it was true that Sabrina’s teacher had extended the deadline on her English paper so that it was due next Monday instead of this coming Monday. Ruth called him back and explained that their daughter was unequivocally lying, and then Sabrina and Ruth had a long talk on the phone during which daughter tried to persuade mother that of course she could finish the English paper on Sunday, it was on Wuthering Heights, which she’d read a million times (she’d read it twice, in fact, before it was assigned for school), and couldn’t she go out with Emily and Jocelyn on Saturday night, pretty please?
Ruth had already been briefed on all this by Steve, who was planning on grounding Sabrina. So be it. Ruth gave her the listen to your father treatment. This was, as far as she knew, the first time their daughter had lied to her parents, and as she drove past the bland strip malls of San Bernardino and into the arid drama of the Mojave, Ruth’s anger with Sabrina melted away, leaving admiration for her daughter’s boldness. Ruth had never been able to tell a fib with a straight face. Perhaps her life would be easier if she could. Which was not to say that Sabrina’s life was easy. She was far too smart for the education her school provided. The truth was that she could have finished that paper the morning before class and aced it. Other parents bragged about their gifted children, but Ruth felt sorry for her daughter. The dull kids were the only ones having a blast in high school.
It grew dark, and if it weren’t for her GPS Ruth would have missed the turnoff for Trigger, a dirt road off Highway 62. There had been no mention of a dirt road in the listing that she could remember. Slowly, carefully, she steered the Subaru over rocks, wincing as brush scraped the sides, braking just in time for a coyote to trot through her high beams, out on its evening scavenge. Finally, the Airstream appeared, gleaming in her brights.
Now, after a fitful night’s sleep, she sat at the kitchen table staring at her laptop screen, coffee and blank yellow legal pad at her side.
Was the protagonist abused as a child? Was she involved in a sex trafficking ring run by the mob boss she was after? Or maybe kiddie porn? Parents who took cash and looked the other way? Was she held captive, shackled in a basement somewhere on a quiet tree-lined suburban street? She listed them all on her legal pad, each more ghoulish than the last, these ideas for how to “dial it up.” This was how she used to work in the old days. Black coffee and a notepad she filled with grisly dismemberments and sadistic plot twists.
This script was, for Ruth, a return to form. It was supposed to be her comeback. She’d been something of an indie darling early on in her career. A female filmmaker who wasn’t afraid of blood and guts. Her first feature, In Sickness or in Hell, shot on a shoestring, was a cult favorite: a slasher flick featuring a killer bride. Then came Slit, her most acclaimed work: a thriller about a stripper who picks off every man who’s wronged her.
A-list actresses took notice. How refreshing it was, one said, to finally have a woman’s take on the genre. A major studio had showed interest in her next project, slated to be her bloodiest yet, about a housewife who tortures her abusive husband to death.
But it never got made. In the early aughts, Sabrina was born, and Ruth couldn’t finish the script. Her creative output slowed. She cobbled together an income to supplement Steve’s admittedly heftier one by doctoring scripts and shooting commercials. She told her friends that she’d lost the bug, or that she was too busy parenting, but the truth was that something had shifted in her when her daughter came along: in Ruth’s mind every brutal rape, every strangulation, every artfully choreographed stabbing was happening to Sabrina. Her protagonist felt more alive than ever because, to Ruth, her protagonist was her daughter. She tried writing something else, changing course: a sweet coming-of-age tale, but producers scoffed. No one, they’d said, would want to see a Ruth Grayson movie without blood. Perhaps she’d gone soft after having a kid. It wasn’t unusual for that kind of thing to happen to women.
Her marriage fell apart. She threw herself into her freelance work. What was the point in trying to create something of her own in a system with the odds so stacked against her? Then, a couple of years ago, a programmer had discovered her old films and invited her to do a Q&A at a screening. The event was written up and made the rounds in cinephile circles. There was something so feminine about the rage of these working-class female protagonists, said the critics. A feral viciousness that couldn’t be captured by a man. Interest in her films was reinvigorated. Maybe Hollywood was different now, she’d thought, more accepting of those it had left behind. Willing to atone by giving a forgotten female filmmaker a second chance.
She frowned at her legal pad, ugliness now scrawled all over its first page. It made her a little sick.
A walk would clear her head. She filled her water bottle, slathered on sunscreen, and put on Steve’s sweat-faded Dodgers cap. The sky was a dazzling blue, the mountains dark and crisp against it. From her little trailer on the hill she could see the valley below, dotted with the browns and greens of desert flora. A fine layer of dust coated her running shoes as she walked. She was mentally exhausted—all those images of violation and torture swirling around her like sick ghosts—but the desert’s stark simplicity—the binaries of shadow and sun, of rock and sky, were a salve.
They’d been camping around here years ago, before the divorce, back when Sabrina was an infant and they still went on those kinds of trips as a family. It had been a chilly morning like this one when they’d hiked, but Sabrina’s tiny body in the baby Bjorn warmed Ruth’s own. She’d felt a sort of high then, a feeling that everything was exactly as it should be.
Now she took out her headphones and put one of Sabrina’s mixes on Spotify. It had been a while since she’d listened—really listened—to the playlists her daughter had made her. This mix featured mostly sweet-voiced men singing about despair, true despair, not just the vapid tripe that Sabrina used to favor. She slowed her pace. Was her daughter trying to tell her something? How could Sabrina understand this sadness at fifteen? Ruth wanted to throw her arms around her, shield her from whatever it was that was making her so upset, that was causing her to listen to these songs. The desert spooled out ahead as she trudged heavily on, and a dulcet voice crooned in her ear about wandering streets at night, drunk on convenience store malt liquor.
She’d walked a little over a mile when, through the gentle guitar chords in her headphones, she heard a dog barking behind her. She turned, expecting to see a retriever straining a leash, a walker scolding him and apologizing. He’s harmless! But no. Instead she saw—and she counted—five dogs. No leashes or humans. These were not the little terriers that warmed the laps of the wealthy in Beverly Hills. These were dogs you’d get to guard your shit. Two pit bulls, two German shepherds, and a gargantuan white mutt with quivering strings of slobber hanging from its jowls. She froze, facing the animals. They stood in formation, creeping closer and then bounding away, as if daring her to make a move. The leader, one of the shepherds, let out a low growl and flattened its ears against its skull. Its eyes turned to brown slits under a furrowed brow. It bared its teeth at her, revealing its black spotted gums, and began to bark and snarl. It’s jaw, Ruth realized, could probably crush her skull like eggshell. The rest of the dogs followed suit, emitting deep woofs. Ruth removed her headphones and continued walking. Maybe if she ignored them they would go away. But when she cast a frantic glance behind her, she saw they were following her, jaws snapping, hair on end, barks increasing in volume and aggression.
You can’t reason with dogs. Ruth knew this. When she was fifteen, her parents had sent her and her younger brother away for the summer to live with her Uncle Josh and his three pit bulls, assuring the kids that they’d like the country, that they’d be good company for Uncle Josh. What they didn’t say was that their marriage was falling apart and they needed space to work it out.
The animals worshipped her uncle and treated Ruth and her brother like their own siblings, for better or worse. Priscilla, Annie, and Scotland: they were all well-behaved until her uncle left the room, at which point they became erratic whirlwinds of muscle and drool. They were embarrassingly sexual, too: Scotland’s member, pink and shiny, appeared at random intervals; Priscilla and Annie licked themselves relentlessly. Needless to say, Ruth and her brother never had any friends over, not that they had any friends in that dreary vacation town.
She considered collapsing, letting the animals overtake her. Her friend Cassie, an avid jogger, had once told her that if you covered the back of your neck with your hands and curled into a ball even the most hyped-up dog would eventually tire of trying to murder you. And what was a dog bite compared to the pain of childbirth? She’d been bitten once that summer when she’d tried to take a bone from Priscilla. It was the first time she’d seen a wound like that. The blood gushed from the puncture, trickling down to her wrist as she stared at it, stunned. Its color was darker, richer than the ketchup-red ooze she was used to seeing in the R-rated horror movies the video store guy would let her rent if she asked nice enough. She vaguely recalled the sting of hydrogen peroxide, her uncle’s rough hands tenderly wrapping her own in a bandage, a feeling of betrayal at the dog that she regularly played with, an ache for days after. But her uncle had scolded her, not Priscilla. “Never,” he’d snarled, in that dark way of his, “take a bone from a dog.” That taught Ruth. She still had the scar on her left hand, just below where her wedding ring used to be.
She was powerwalking now, emitting short puffs of breath with every step. She could run, she thought, but she knew that would only make things worse. Her uncle’s dogs went into a sort of mania when she and her brother ran with them, becoming untrustworthy, reverting to wolfhood. It was after running with the dogs that they’d jump on Ruth and her brother, leaving muddy pawprints on their clothes. It was after running that they’d nip at hands and ankles. Ruth was not going to run.
The desert dogs followed at a cautious distance, creeping closer and then bounding back. Their barks echoed through the hills. She wondered if their owners heard them, if they even had owners to call them off. A couple of them, she’d noticed, had collars. Her uncle’s pit bulls would only listen to him. In front of her uncle, the three could have taken Best in Show at Westminster. In front of her uncle, they would sit, paw, and roll over. In front of her uncle they would fetch and actually drop the ball rather than make you pry it from their slimy maws. “It’s because I’m the alpha,” he’d said.
She breathed into her diaphragm. She closed up the bottom of her throat, deepening her voice. She imagined that she wasn’t a petite forty-eight-year-old woman with nothing but an aluminum water bottle in the way of a weapon but a beefy six-foot-tall contractor, the kind of authority dogs happily bounded around, joyfully slobbering. She imagined she was her Uncle Josh. “Down,” she commanded in a deep voice. “Get. Go away.” A few of them tweaked their ears, but the leader barked louder, and the others followed along.
She imagined the headline: Woman Killed by Dogs in Mojave Desert. It would garner a few clicks, at least. Who didn’t love a dead woman? Dial it up. Sure, she wasn’t exactly a young dead woman, but her face was still pretty enough to play well. Why on Earth was she walking out there without a weapon, inquiring minds would ask in the comments section. It’s sad, but it’s her own fault, they’d conclude. She’d gotten what was coming to her.
Then she could hear traffic zipping by on the 62, and she knew she was nearly to the end of Trigger Drive. Perhaps these dogs knew better than to cross the highway, with killer cars racing by at seventy, eighty, ninety miles per hour, and no cops to slow them down.
They did not. She dashed into the road. A car whizzed by behind her. The animals scattered, but regrouped. She heard another vehicle coming, stood in the middle of the road, and waved her hands, Kiss Me Deadly-style, except it was daytime and she was wearing a lightweight Patagonia down jacket, not a trench coat. A mud-spattered blue Ford Explorer came to a stop.
“Do you mind giving me a ride?” she said breathlessly into the open window, not caring who the driver was. “Those dogs are chasing me.” She pointed in the direction of the dogs but the pack had dwindled to one. The leader was still eyeing her, sniffing the air, mangy and smaller, now, without his pack, more malnourished coyote than attack dog. The others had disappeared into the brush, as if they’d never existed.
The driver regarded Ruth as he took a sip of a comically large Slurpee and set it back down in his cup holder. He was a kid, Ruth saw, college-aged, probably just a few years older than Sabrina. He had a narrow, pale face and aviators perched on a pointy nose. He wore a wrinkled blue button-down shirt with a rust-colored food stain over the breast pocket. Unkept brown hair peeked out of his beanie. He looked, thought Ruth, like the kid who gets bullied in the teen dramas Sabrina called “guilty pleasures.” The one who gets the girl at the end. Her heart softened. She felt herself smiling.
He nodded at the passenger seat. “Just push that crap onto the floor,” he said. His voice was deeper than she’d expected. The crap was several newspapers, a carton of Marb Reds (oh, how she craved nicotine in that moment! The burn of smoke in her throat!), a National Geographic, empty beer cans, and a box of Winchester .22 Rimfire Ammunition. She did as she was told, gingerly placing the box of bullets on top of the rubble. Ruth reminded herself that this was common in the country—a gun was a necessary tool, like a screwdriver or a flashlight. Her Uncle Josh had used his shotgun to cull the rabbit population of his back yard. It was perfectly normal.
Still, her heartbeat quickened as she thanked him profusely and latched the seatbelt, cautiously avoiding trampling the pile with her dusty feet.
The car smelled of cigarettes and dirty socks. Ruth pressed the button to roll down her window, but the child lock was on.
“Dogs giving you trouble?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard what she’d said. On closer inspection, she saw his stubble, the sunken eyes behind his glasses. Not in his teens, she corrected herself. In his mid-20s, at least. Not a boy, but a man.
She laughed nervously, realizing she would have to tell this man where she was staying. “I’m just at the top of Trigger Drive.” She gestured at the dirt road. He turned in that direction.
“You out here alone?”
For a moment she thought to tell him that her boyfriend was waiting for her in the trailer. Her giant, gun-wielding boyfriend, who lived in a trailer on Trigger Drive. But she was a horrible liar. He could probably sense the singleness on her—men can do that, she’d learned. “Uh huh,” she said.
“Here from LA?” The SUV bounced over a small hole and she was briefly airborne.
“Sherman Oaks.” Just give him your home address, why don’t you, Ruth scolded herself. He was going slow enough on the dirt road that she could jump out if she needed to.
“Lived in LA myself. Got into some trouble. Had to leave.” He smiled to himself, remembering. His teeth were stained red from the drink. “What brings you to these parts?” He put the orange plastic straw to his lips and sucked noisily.
She clutched the door handle, contemplating what he meant by trouble. “Just wanted to get out of the city.” This was as close to lying as she could get. She turned her face away from him. The desert crawled by outside, the spiny plants bleak and callous.
“Did you look them in the eye?” he said. “The dogs,” he added. “They hate that. Makes them crazy.”
Had she? She’d looked everywhere, taken it all in: furrowed brow, spotted gums, spiking hair, strings of slobber, yellow teeth.
“Their bark’s worse than their bite, you know,” he said. “They wouldn’t’ve hurt you.”
“Well,” she began, but fell silent as the driver slowed to a stop.
“I’m a little further up,” she said. Her mouth went dry but she was afraid to take a sip of water, afraid to do anything this man might comment on. In moments like this, being visible was a liability. Her protagonist would have been completely calm, because her protagonist carried a hunting knife in an ankle holster and had no qualms about slitting the throats of men who creeped her out. Ruth was not Ruth’s protagonist. Ruth wanted to disappear, to evaporate into the puffy white clouds in the sky. But she was here. And the driver was talking to her.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he said, lifting his aviators and looking straight at her. She caught a glimpse of his eyes—dark blue, almost violet. “You got kids?”
“A daughter,” said Ruth.
She thought of Sabrina’s sad music, the real despair she’d know if her mother’s body was found crumpled on the side of Trigger Drive. Her imagined headline shifted. Body of Missing Female Filmmaker Found. The postulations would be insane in that comments section, especially if this guy knew how to cover his tracks. They’d assume all kinds of things: an ayahuasca trip gone wrong, a serial killer, drug cartels. Research for a script that got too intense which—hey—wouldn’t be so far from the truth. The CSI episode based on her disappearance practically wrote itself.
“I don’t get it. Why women like you assume they can do the same shit that men can.” He drank more Slurpee and slammed it down hard enough so that neon red liquid sloshed over his hand and into the cup holder. He cursed and wiped his fingers on his jeans, leaving dark smears. Her hands grew hot. Her old dog bite scar, the divot below her knuckle, pulsed. She half-expected blood to begin spurting from it, stigmata-like. “We’re different,” he shouted at the windshield. “It’s just the way it is. I’m telling you this as a favor. I’d never let my mom come out here alone. You think the dogs were bad.”
“I think I can walk from here.” Ruth tried to keep her voice steady.
“How do you know I’m not some crazy serial killer?”
Ruth tried the door again but it was no use. “Please,” she said, “let me out.”
He looked at her with surprise, and then his face cracked into a laugh, revealing those pink teeth again. “You should see your face! Fucking city people.” He slid his glasses back down his forehead and turned on the stereo, which blared Christian rock. He sang along off-key as they drove until, mercifully, they crested a hill, and the Airstream appeared.
“This is me,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Hang on a sec,” he said. He lifted open the armrest behind the gearshift and rifled through the contents. She tensed, clutching her water bottle, ready to strike. Though it was cold in the car, she could feel sweat droplets begin to form under her armpits. But all he produced was an unopened bag of beef jerky.
“The next time those dogs bother you, throw some of this at them. That’s all they’re after anyway.”
“Thanks,” she said again, and hopped out of the car, and slammed the door behind her.
He gave her a salute from the driver’s seat and puttered off down the hill, trailing a dusty cloud.
She stood there a moment, clutching the bag of jerky, feeling her heart beat in her chest. A couple of crows looped in the sky, their black feathers a shock against the blue. It had been a long time since she’d felt her own heart, since she’d felt that kind of fear. She thought again of Sabrina, how she was the same age as Ruth had been, that summer with the dogs, but how much older Sabrina seemed now than Ruth was then, in her memories: Sabrina, who already knew how to lie, who worshipped the raw voices of suffering men, who seemed to understand that the world was just waiting to fuck you over and break your heart.
Ruth’s mother had picked Ruth and her brother up from the bus station at the end of that summer with Uncle Josh. Later she would tell the two of them that their father was moving out. But on that ride, she was her usual bubbly self, asking how their trip was, how they liked the country, if they’d made any new friends, and how was Ruth’s hand? When the four of them all sat down around that long-gone kitchen table, and had their fateful talk, this act of deception would sting. How dare she have acted normal on that drive home, concealing the truth from her kids? How could she have made conversation so lightly? It would be decades before Ruth would understand the willpower her mother must have had, not to melt down in front of her children, whose lives were about to be changed forever; decades before she’d forgive her mother.
She tore open the jerky bag and put a plug in her mouth, sucking the smoky salt off until the meat turned dull and soggy and she swallowed it. She would not reward the dogs for barking at her, for scaring her into a stranger’s car. She would not be taking any more walks down Trigger Drive. She ate another and another that way, until her mouth burned from the sodium. Being alive, she thought, just being alive and a woman was enough to make her vengeful protagonist behave as she did. Ruth didn’t need to dial it up. She didn’t need to change a word.
Something barked in the distance. Ruth walked into the trailer, locked the door, and gathered her things to leave.
Lena Valencia’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in CRAFT, Joyland, BOMB, the Tiny Nightmares anthology (Catapult, October 2020), and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She received her MFA in fiction from The New School.
