The Ungrateful Domain

The Ungrateful Domain

       by Rouglas Deimer

rover rover in the clover

when yer gonna bark

hover hover little lemman

how'd you get in the ark

give me money give me sweet things

suck the candy till its gone

rover rover in the clover

i've got nothing left to pawn

Sniffing sharply, Rover barked his concern and turned to defecate by the fence, as close to his neighbor's yard as he could wedge his back end so the smell would possibly penetrate deeper into that ungrateful domain. Rover had never forgiven Bob and Wilma Yearly for building that fence. He could now never see them anymore, the boards between them as they were, and force them to acknowledge him with look and pretended gentleness in order to impress upon his, Rover's, guardians, that they liked a dog they hated.

       Yearlåy managed a company called Ye Olde Trailmix. Every day at seven a.m. he left home for the office. Each night at six p.m. he returned. The company had recently declined in viability for one reason or another and Bob had decided to take what money he could out of it and hide it in his back yard in waterproof containers so as to make sure that his retirement was secure. So now, during the month of January then--now being one winter some years after erecting the fence that Rover increasingly disliked--Bob spent each evening laying Tupperware down under the snow in a drift close to the fence between the neighbors and himself. He dug right to the bottom of the drift and laid the containers of twenty-dollar bills on the frozen grass. By the end of January, having done this twenty-six days altogether, he had amassed a substantial sum of money there. Though he had not counted it, Bob had secreted one thousand times one hundred times twenty, for a total of two million dollars. Bob knew that the monthly finances would be completed early in February and so he would have to be finished what it was he was doing by the end of January. He himself did not fully understand what he was up to.

       On January 31, 2001, Bob and his wife ate dinner as usual. Then, when she went out to visit the Seafood Emporium on the corner of Taylor and Waverley, as she predictably did when Bob complained at supper that they never had fish anymore, and coupled the trip with a visit to her friend's house for evening tea, as he suspected she would, Bob watched out the living room window till he saw her car drive away and then quickly donned his parka and took up his snow shovel and went into the back yard to dig up his money. He did that. But Rover was outside, too, dropping a big load by the fence. She barked at him with her usual ou faire couler le sang, barked while she shat. She dug her scat under while he dug his cash up.

       Soon they were both finished and Bob could not resist one final act of revenge. He called the mutt's name in tones at once insinuating and ingratiating, accusing and inviting, and Rover responded with her paws up on the fence boards and a voice as raucous as any irate dog could wish for. Immediately, Bob gave the fence a mighty whack with the back of his shovel, the reverberations so gargantuan that they precipitated the canine onto its back. She lay there deafened and surprised, whimpering, and then lunged up with renewed joie de vive du canine, vociferating more insistently than ever before, furious, raging, aching to get at the man she disliked with such a burning dislike.

       If only she could sink her teeth into him, into this smug human who had outmanoeuvred her, had blocked her in, had forced her into her visual exile, powerless to manipulate the world of the two-legged, entirely cut off from passersby. She raged while Bob loaded the wheelbarrow. She bow wowed unrelentingly while he wheeled it away to his car. She howled in the fury of impotence while, she could hear, he loaded things into the car trunk. And she hurled her crescendoing at the sound of him backing down the driveway.

       Rover lost any chance to hurt him. Bob never returned. Rover did not know that where Bob lived others built fences for him and served him and killed dogs that barked too uncivilly if he indicated his distaste for them. On the western coast of southern Mexico one has many reasons to fence oneself in but almost never because dogs bark at one. As well, it is there unusual for the world to reek of dog shit in spring.