The Beagle of Westwego

Somebody said, a day after the election, in response to a newspaper image of spray painted White Pride alongside Trump’s name and a swastika on a baseball dugout, “Tell me my hatred isn’t justified.” I responded that hatred is never justified. This is how I met Will on the Facebook. Will shared my sympathies, liked the words that I wrote, and supported me with a blue thumb. I wasn’t sure what to think of him after spying on his page. He had no picture of himself, but there were quotes from Alan Watts and Rumi and other links and photos that suited my sensibilities.

I felt we would meet.

I didn’t know that our meeting would come about as a result of my using the facebook as a means of acquiring cheap rusted tin, tin I would need if I were to build the fence according to the wishes of my 85 year old neighbor, Mr. Lee. Though I thought treated wood might be cheap and easy, these thoughts did not align with those of Mr. Lee. In matters of fence building, or any building, or any matters for that matter, I always defer my ideas to those of Mr. Lee. Tin it would be.

            Will told me that he lived in Westwego, a suburb that is arrived at by driving East from New Orleans. I know not whether there was once an Eastwego that was West of the city, or if the Mississippi River has been snaking and confusing people since the time of the Native Americans. I did know that one should never go to any We-go alone. At least that’s what I thought, and I hadn’t seen my friend Michael for awhile, so we drove the twenty minutes, talking about God and Michael's recent trip across the border of Montana and Canada, about kids that get shot in New Orleans, about kids that do amazing things in New Orleans, about what grows best in this city without input, and about anything else that inspired us.

            Will met us in his driveway. He wore camouflage Carhart pants and gripped a long handled machete, not out of the ordinary for what I knew of Westwego, a place where an egret might land on your grass or a car might sit in your yard for years. Will’s house was more egret-in-grass than car-in-yard. His mutts seemed all too eager to take a bite, and it did not seem to matter whether the bitten was an intruder or visitor. Will eased the dogs away from us. He told us the machete might be needed to get to the tin.

I gave him a goji berry plant along with cuttings of betel leaf. I gave him the seeds of molokhia and lablab beans.

            There was a rabbit hutch where he kept his prized beagle, Ashley. He kept her there because the other dogs could not resist her feminine wiles. Will fiercely guarded her chastity. Ashley is a regal beagle, trained to participate in beagle contests on the weekend, trained on the ten acres that contained the tin, trained on the ten acres where Will spent his youth, listening and learning, much as the thirty beagles listened and learned from his recently deceased father. Ashley was the prize, Will’s pick, the only one he didn’t sell after his father was buried.

            My chest filled with my own sorrow.

            Will fed Michael and me red beans and rice because it was cold, it was rainy, because it was Monday. He said the toys on the floor belonged to his niece. Pictures of his family on the wall. The Stars and Stripes framed in a triangular glass case. Will told us what he had realized after his father passed, how beagles are like the best and worst of humans, how only the leader of the pack is actually sniffing while each one behind lazily follows, pretending, taking credit for what is really being accomplished by the leader. He explained the point system involved in these weekend beagle contests, a credit for sniffing out the rabbit, a credit for a marked turn (when the beagle senses that the rabbit has done a hundred and eighty degree turn.) Followers never get these points. Instead, they bump into one another like the Three Stooges multiplied.

            A leader beagle is aware, intuitive and adaptable. A leader beagle enjoys pain, relishes in the relief of running through brambles, takes delight in the cold and the wind and the blood dripping from the cuts on her skin.
            "It is not cruel," he said. "It is what these dogs have been bred to do for hundreds of years. It is what they love."

            I told him that when I think of beagles, I think of Snoopy and other fat dogs that friends of mine have had, of lazy dogs that lie in front of sunny windows, rising only to the din of food hitting their dish.

            “Ashley’s not fat,” he says, defensively. He paused and considered. “Well…she is fat, but you get her out there, you get her running through the woods, tracking a rabbit, and you would never know. You wouldn’t even be able to tell. You guys smoke weed?”

I said I didn’t. Michael said sometimes. Will said I don’t smoke it all the time, but when you are going to where we’re going it makes everything more beautiful.

I walked outside and looked into the hutch at Ashley. She appeared content and eager at the same time. Her ears were not as floppy as I would have expected. And she wasn’t fat. Thick, yes. But not fat.

I took more lablab beans from my truck and planted them near his fence to ensure there would be growth even if he forgot to plant what I’d given him.

            We loaded up and left in my truck. The ten acres were smack dab between the roads of Westwego, not far from the restaurant where New Orleans mob boss, Tony Marcello, conducted his affairs not so long ago. The ten acres seemed like a kind of place where his goons might have taken somebody for a ride. It seemed like the kind of place where men would hunt other men. I was glad that I no longer smoked weed and wished that I could have had the seeming trust that existed in Michael.

            It was muddy and dark beneath the canopy. We discussed turning something like this into an edible forest by working with what was already there, how it might become a model for other such projects, and only ten miles from the French Quarter. Will told us to be careful, that in fact, it’s proximity to the train tracks, where gutter punks disembarked before their ten-mile walk to the French Quarter, created random piles of human shit. 

            Will told us his dad’s dogs would listen to others but would never have another master. He led us toward what had been discarded: makeshift dog coops and lumber and tires and garbage; fenced-in areas set in the middle of a forest of oak, hackberry, saw palmetto, blackberry brambles, crawfish nests and other genus and species I did not recognize.

            “Let me show you the rest before we collect the tin,” Will said.
            He was our leader: ducking under branches, over logs, around trees, and through brambles, remarking upon the differences in light and microclimate, letting us know that a beagle—that Ashley—would indeed love this moist earth, the scent of the leaves, the way the sun split the seams of the canopy.
            Ten minutes in, everything looked the same. Were we walking in circles? Had I told anyone where I was going? Had Michael? I could no longer see the highway. I began to think that even Will was lost, that this was how weed made everything more beautiful, that this was what I loved about running through the woods as a kid, that this was what I loved about getting far, far out in the ocean, that this was what I feared about both. There would always come a point, a need to return to the beach, to the clearing, to the place where I felt comfortable and safe.

            My truck, along with all of what some might call rubbish, produced a sense of ease, a sense of trust, and if I was honest, there was really only ten percent of me that believed something might be awry.

Will exuded sincerity.

He went to work taking screws out of coops, pulling the tin from the roofs of dog kennels. I did not consider then how the facebook had turned from love to tin and back into love, but it did. In the midst of loading my truck, Michael asked Will whether there had once been a road in a spot that appeared more trampled than the surrounding area.

            “Come on.” We followed Will to a fenced in area. “This is where we brought the beagles that needed separated.”

            Two chairs, the plastic straps for seat and back coated in moss, sat next to one another, facing the gate door that was no longer connected to anything.

            “This is where we would sit,” Will said. “We would just let them calm down.”

            I thought of the last hours with my dad, of dipping a sponge the size of a sugar cube on a toothpick into water and then putting it in his mouth so that he could wet his tongue. I thought of him trying to reach for the back of his head and how I reached between his head and the pillow to scratch the matted hair just above his neck. It was the last warmth I felt. It was the last time he looked at me.

            Will leaned over and rested his arm on the back of the other chair. None of us said anything. Not even the traffic far off in the distance interrupted this moment that must have taken place all throughout Will’s life. He tapped the back of the chair.

“It’s been a long time, Dad.”

            And what I realized at the end of all this was that sometimes you think you are going into the woods for this tin and you may never cross the bridge back into the city, yet you never think of all the connection you are able to bring, simply by saying yes. And to think…only hours before you almost sold yourself short in this game of seconds and minutes, almost talked yourself out of going in this cold rain, and who would have told you that this was the wrong move?
            Nobody.
            People would have said to go another time. People would have said why not just buy the sixty sheets from that other guy and forget about all of this. But there is something which exists within each one of us—call it god or conscious connection—and this something was screaming to go, and in these moments of Yes!...when the entire picture becomes clear, when the realization hits, when you understand just how all of this is connected—this is the realization of your birth.