Body Surfing

territory and check for intruders.
    “Damn it, Gunther.” Van Arsdale stared into the dog’s big brown eyes, but what he saw was the stranger’s eyes. From yesterday. The eyes that had looked at him as if they knew him. As if he, Van Arsdale, should have known the stranger.
    “Fine.” He kicked the door of the kennel open. “But don’t blame me if someone shoots you in the head.”
    The dog darted out of the gate before Van Arsdale could change his mind. He tore across the long slope of the backyard, those massive rottweiler shoulders propelling him over the ground like a wraith of black smoke, kettledrum barks erupting from his throat. He made a beeline for the wellhouse, but when a mourning dove cooed its way into the air he veered off to the left, and then a rabbit bolting for a clump of laurel led him further uphill.
    “Yeah, you’d better run,” Van Arsdale said under his breath, buthe wasn’t sure who he was talking to: the dog or his prey, or the stranger from yesterday.
    Those eyes. The way they’d looked at him. As if they knew him.
    Van Arsdale shook his head, pretended he was shaking the memory out of his brain, but as he made his way back to the lily field he saw the pitchfork standing in the ground where Jasper had left it last week. The last day he’d been alive.
    The pitchfork! That was it! He glanced back at the wellhouse. He needed to gather a few loads of bat droppings for fertilizer. He usually did it right after Jasper turned over the soil in the garden, but, well…
    He looked again at the abandoned pitchfork. The upright handle had the air of a signpost missing its sign—an historical plaque like the one in front of the house, or maybe just a crossbar with a name and a couple of dates on it. No need to get any fertilizer now, Van Arsdale told himself. Not till he’d finished turning over the soil. For some reason he thought that might take a while.
    Gunther’s barks grew fainter as Van Arsdale climbed the stone stairs to the field. He stopped when he came to the loose slate about three-quarters of the way up the hill, remembering how the stranger had stepped over it yesterday, as if he knew just where it was. It was eerie. Goddamned eerie.
    On days like today, when he found it hard to concentrate, he didn’t try to breed. Instead he worked the soil. Like his son, Van Arsdale enjoyed the feeling of honest labor in his bones and muscles. He’d’ve broken the ground with his fingers if he could have, if the schist and granite in the soil wouldn’t’ve cut his hands to pieces. He worked till he’d done one hundred-foot-long row, then another, then a third, far more than he’d need for his upcoming plantings. But every time he slowed he had a fierce sensation of eyes staring at the back of his head, and his mind would fill with yet another vision of the nearly naked stranger in his kitchen, eating his food, putting on his son’s clothes, staring at Van Arsdale as if he knew him. The way he’d stepped over that loose slate. Without even trying it first! Forget what he said about knowing Jasper, about being friends with Michaela, forget about the possibility that he might’ve been to the house a couple of times when Van Arsdale wasn’t around. Even Van Arsdale sometimes forgot where that step was, and he’d climbed up and down that staircase for forty years. But he had watched his wife rot away from cancer until she was nothing but skin and bones and a grotesquely swollen womb. He had gone to the morgue and identified his son by his clothes and the sickle-shaped scar on his left hip because his face had been ripped off. He did not believe a benevolent deity had sent his son back to him for one final goodbye. If anything had come back, it was no longer his son.
    He didn’t realize it had been hours since he’d heard any sign of Gunther until a sudden round of barking caused him to jerk his head up, just as the dog burst through a pair of 180-year-old Newtons and tore into the field. Say what you want about the dog (whose smiling muzzle was visibly covered in blood), he knew better than to knock even a single petal off one of John Van Arsdale’s flowers.
    As the dog got closer, Van Arsdale saw there was more than blood on him. The dog’s hide looked like a scratch-n-sniff poster, blotched with what looked like honey, axle grease, fry oil, several different colors of mud, and something that smelled enough like shit that John Van Arsdale shooed the dog away when the animal