17. Ruff

 

 

 

A flea bites a dog; a dog bites an itch—whose story is it?

Let’s say it’s the dog’s, and let’s say the dog is Ruff Drell. Ruff’s been lounging in a bed of forget-me-nots one sunny afternoon a year or so before his entire family is felled. He’s licked every drop of sweat off of his big dogly sac and he’s moved on to sampling to his tongue’s content the crusty delights that cling to his hind-end outpost. Mid-snack, a sensation takes hold of him that’s as annoying in its suddenness as it is in its itchiness. To his consternation, one side of his big dogly sac is penetratingly beset by what feels like the teeth of a shark, digging in and not letting go. Ruff bares his teeth at the interloper and chomps down as hard as he can on that side of his doghood and gnaws away with the hunger of a lost mountaineer at whatever it is that’s biting him bald. In his frenzy to dislodge the microscopically flat freeloader with the microscopically ferocious fangs, you might say Ruff responds a bit too roughly. A tidal wave of red fluid is loosed from his big dogly sac that gushes with the urgency of a hungry mountaineer’s bowels after dining on his own dog cold and uncooked, and as the fluid flows out, so too does one half of one half of Ruff’s big dogly sac, leaving an oozing and rapidly wrinkling half sac that’s not a pretty picture. Had the dog any bark in him, they’d have heard it in heaven.

The image sticks because of that flea. Had the flea not bitten, Ruff wouldn’t have chomped; and had Ruff not chomped, Roo wouldn’t have chopped the remnants of the half of the half that wasn’t chomped, and had Roo not chopped the half of the half not chomped he might have gotten around to chopping both halves fully and leaving Ruff with no sac to attack and no self-dismemberment to remember.

Memories hitch themselves to the advancing years howsoever they can. A flea bites a dog and a dog bites itself and a man butchers a job and a small bit of business grows into legend. Which memories come along for the ride and which ones flee the first chance they get has no formula to regulate their participation in the scheme of things. Add water and sun to ground and seed and a small green sprig of certainty will grow. But this added to that followed by then does not necessarily guarantee that the true story of whatever is the memory that’s remembered now. Ruff Drell is remembered for two things: for being a dog with one half of his doghood sacrificed by a master who hadn’t the heart to do the job fully; and for being a felled Drell. All who knew that Ruff had maimed himself first had kept that bit of business to themselves, and it fell out of common knowledge when all who knew about it were felled themselves. Ruff knew, not Roo, that he had maimed himself not because he was self-abusing, but because a microscopically small intruder with the appetite of a lost mountaineer had hitched a ride on his sac, and if there was anything Ruff could not tolerate, it was a Ruff rider. So he did what any dog would do to put that lost mountaineer out of his misery, only to create a bit too much misery for himself. Ruff went to where all dog bones get buried with a truism buried alongside him, which was that the legend about his lost doghood was a falsehood.

Now take the flea. It hopped from woody mouse to savory chicken to sweaty dog sac, and on that hot and humid ride found itself a feast worth digging its chops into. The flea was only doing what fleas do as Ruff was only doing what dogs and Drells do. Dogs and Drells pay inordinate amounts of attention to their sacs, and fleas bite. The flea had emerged from its larval beginnings as unformed as the day after tomorrow, with both direction and intent subordinate to instinct. It had to have food, that food had to be blood, and beyond that basic necessity, the where and the how and the when of its feeding were as unpredictable in their variables as were the consequences of it getting what it wanted. You could say that all of life in New Eden is like that. You wake up to a day with no absolutes that have to be observed beyond following your instincts for nourishment and excretion and, if you’ve the interest, industry; and if you’ve the outlet—that other business. Where the day takes you is the consequence of how you go about following your instincts—the what you choose to eat, the where you decide to excrete, the how of your industry, the who of that other business—and consequent to all those instincts turned choices come the days after tomorrow and the further choices necessary because of those prior choices made.

A boy goes to take a girl to a dance, gets rebuffed by her mother, takes it out on his father, hides away from his village, and ends his days as a maggots’ feast; and the friend who knew him best keeps the truth locked deep in his heart and whiles away his own life with someone else’s sadness. And whenever one encounters the friend who knew him best, one cannot help but hum the sad hymn that’s sung of the love-lost boy who became one with the everlasting air of the world he left behind. And too, a flea, descendant of the one that roughed up Ruff—to be bitten by one now is to hearken back to that barkless dog as he chomped his sac to stop an itch without a thought of what kind of future might befall him.