by Debbie Weingarten

Erica Svec, *Untitled,* oil and acrylic on canvas, 68 x 54 inches, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

The Trackers

DEBBIE WEINGARTEN | NOV 2022 | Issue 20

The dog is nowhere to be found. On the first day of his disappearance, the boys fan out through the woods, searching. Summer has burst open like a fruit, every tree cloaked in that perfect July green — long-legged oaks, buckeye trunks crawling with Virginia creeper, star-shaped maple leaves rustling overhead like papier-mâché. Ben calls the dog’s name and Kenny whistles a kind of personal morse code. As they push through the undergrowth, Daniel whacks a stick against a tree trunk, quieting the chattering birds.

“Fanta!” Whistle. Thwack. No dog.

The second day, the boys rove further — past shade-seeking trillium, serpent headed jack-in-the-pulpit, colonies of mushrooms pushing up from wet stumps — to the creek bed with its skittering crawdads and glinting jewelweed. Over the railroad tracks and through a clearing of tall, tick-laden grass into less familiar territory. By the third day, their search takes on an increased seriousness. They fill a school backpack with mayonnaise sandwiches, a Thermos of water, and a can of tuna fish from Ben’s cupboard, and begin to track the dog in earnest.

Because Kenny spent two years as a reluctant Cub Scout, forced to tie knots and whittle soap with other people’s fathers, he maintains that they need to be looking for piles of dog poop. “Scat,” says Kenny, his mouth a serious line. “All the trackers look out for scat.” Ben suggests searching for prints and tamped-down weeds where Fanta might have slept. Daniel says they should also keep an eye out for blood and intestines, maybe a decapitated head, in case the dog has gotten into any battles.

They’re on the cusp of sixth grade, their bodies still wiry but thickening, and on most days wearing whatever they wore the day before: cut-off jean shorts, oversized t-shirts, handed down tennis shoes. Their hair has been shorn into summer buzz cuts, giving their heads the shifting quality of velvet in certain light. Kenny’s hair is so blonde it’s almost white, and he has a big stork birthmark at the nape of his neck, which is hidden during other times of the year. At the beginning of the summer, the buzz cut still fresh and short, Daniel and Ben had teased him about it — Did a strawberry puke on the back of your head? — but then Daniel pointed out that the birthmark meant they’d always be able to identify his body, if it ever came to it, and that was that.

They had met the dog by accident on one of the first days of summer. He came seemingly out of nowhere, bounding through the trees to the place where the boys were burning their initials into action figures.

“Hey dog,” said Daniel, and the dog lay down right in the middle of their circle, next to the box of matches, unrolling his tongue in a wide canine grin. His ears stuck up like perfect mountain peaks. His penis stuck up, too, red and nonchalant. “Look at his wiener,” said Ben, and the boys burst into hysterics.

“It looks like a nightcrawler,” said Kenny.

“Hey,” said Daniel to the dog. “You’ve got a worm for a dick.” And they all collapsed into the twigs and leaf litter, laughing so hard their stomachs seized. The dog observed them, panting contentedly, eyes glassy and bright like two butterscotch candies.

Kenny thought the dog might have fallen off one of the freight trains passing by the automotive plant. “Maybe he’s part wolf,” said Daniel. But Ben figured he was just one of the junkyard strays, little brown mutts always having litters, hardy and roaming or ending up dead on the side of the road.

They named him Fanta a few days later, for the disintegrating orange pop can the dog had brought them like a present — half-rusted out, letters fading — and he padded along behind the boys for the rest of May and June, laying at their feet, sleeping in the sun- dappled woods, sprinting after rabbits but always circling back to the human pack, marking bushes and trees with impressive streams of hot piss, which inspired Kenny, Ben, and Daniel to do the same. In the woods, they were entirely alone, except when they saw the three sisters from the next farm over, skinny and pig-tailed, who had claimed a thicket of trees that seemed to upturn like a bowl.

On the fourth day of the search, they swear they hear the dog — a long howl, followed by a series of pathetic whimpers. They all freeze, listening. Then Kenny whistles back. “Fanta!” Ben calls, his hands cupped over his mouth, which is stained red with Kool-Aid. But the sound doesn’t come again.

This piece is an excerpt from Debbie’s novel-in-progress.

Debbie Weingarten’s journalism and creative nonfiction writing has been featured in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Longreads, Guernica, New York Review of Books, as well as the 2016 and 2017 Best of Food Writing anthologies and the Dear America anthology, published by Trinity Press. She was a finalist for a 2019 James Beard Award for Investigative Reporting and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a writing partner with the Female Farmer Project, and writer/producer for the full-length documentary Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers. She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays and two novels. After sixteen formative years in the southern Arizona desert, she recently moved back to Western North Carolina, where she’s trying to remember what to wear in the winter.

Erica Svec lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.