Michael Malone - Weebly

not many inhabitants in the trailers, though there were
enough to lead Hawk Haig to call the place a cesspool.
Three years ago there had been more, construction
workers who had been canceled with the highway and
who, unable to find other work in Dingley Falls, had
hitched their aluminum wagons to Mustangs, Pintos, and
Mavericks and driven away. With wives, children, and
in-laws, with broken-spring sofa beds, console
televisions, cheap throw rugs, and nappy throw pillows,
with velvet paintings of Christ or matadors or stags
beside a mountain lake, with chipped plastic dishes,
cracked plastic toys, ripped plastic chairs, torn plastic
plants, with the chips, cracks, and tears of their lives
patched with whatever mending materials the world and
their wills provided them (the consolation of those TV
consoles often foremost), they had moved out.
Some, unable at the scramble of departure to locate
dogs or cats—and short of space and food anyway—
had left their pets behind with other failures of the past.
The dogs, herding into community, had survived and
bred, and now ran in the pack that so troubled Judith
Haig's heart. The lean, restless dogs remained, long