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My Pop wanted to visit a good buddy of his, a Bloodhound named Old Brady who has a milky film over his right eye and his left ear half-gone, the ear chewed ragged in a fight when Old Brady was young, which means Brady is now somewhat deaf in his old age and because he’s lived such a long life -- this old friend Pop’s known ever since Pop was a pup; but Old Brady lives across a field of grassy weeds that merges into an abandoned Car dump, and this is where Old Brady lives, this Car dump full of the half-buried husks of Cars and Trucks, some of them the color of dried earth and looking burnt in the summer sun with their doors hanging open like waiting coffins and the insides of the Cars smelling like cooked leather, the tires lying in clumps all over the ground in mounds both small and large, with weeds growing enormously tall from the middle of some tires; and that’s where I first saw Old Brady, all curled up inside the middle of one tire close to a colorless piece of metal that had once been a Car, and old Brady looking deathly sick with his head lying carelessly on the rim of that old tire, looking for the all world like he was going to die right then and there; but Pop just trots up real nice, with his tongue hanging out and Old Brady raises that long muzzle that’s all scarred from fighting Cats all his life and says to my Pop, “Waalll, I see you brought the Pup,” in a raspy voice that sounds like a claw scrabbling for paw-hold; and that one comment seems to hang in the air like the gnats circling above Old Brady’s head, but by then I’m too busy investigating a big mound of earth a feet away from Old Brady which seems to have an uncommon amount of activity going on around it, though pretty soon I’m barking and yelping in pain and running in circles, and whimpering too, but my Pop he goes over and kicks up a mighty ruckus of dirt with his hind legs all over this mound, and then says to me, “Son, how many times have I told you not to stick your head in an ant colony?”
Don
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