Rob S. Rutherford
The Life and Death of Annie Rich
The first time they saw each other, he put the leash and collar on and she made like a still heavy rock. Somehow he got her into the new blue Isuzu pickup recently bought with inheritance money, not easy because the passenger door was permanently smashed in due to an unfortunate and very long night of which he had no memory, so the dog went in the driver’s door. He named her Annie Rich, and by the end of their first day together she would whimper a little every time he left her alone.
The rough plank loft gave his pale gray ankles angry splinters and made him think of coffins, so after they fired him he slept downstairs and his legs sprawled off the couch by the pitch-black woodstove. She couldn’t climb the spiral rebar ladder because it was made for hands and feet, not paws. She liked this arrangement better.
The stove crackled all night but no matter how much he stoked it rural southern Colorado, with jagged rock teeth mountains reaching into the clouds, still felt like the white plastic ice mold from which he took cubes, covered them with Wild Turkey 101 and sucked the amber liquid down like a marathon runner to which he aspired to be but was not might suck down a neon green sports drink.
Now every night Annie Rich lay beside the light blue stuffed with bricks lumpy couch, and his hand rested over her heart. The regular vibration calmed him enough so he could fall asleep for an hour, 90 minutes with luck, before he woke up thinking how the firing felt like a crack against the jaw with a Louisville Slugger. He had been going to quit anyway -- repulsed by too many nights of drinking with corrupt county commissioners who, wink wink, told him he was the guy who could make life better for everybody in this rinky dink town if he just wrote what the hell they told him to write which he mostly did not.
One such night he got too honest and thought he was thinking to himself but heard his voice say this out loud: “I wanted to be a forest ranger, not a newspaper man. I wanted to write short stories.” Annie Rich thumped her tail and rested her jowl on his thigh to let him know she understood. Then he fell asleep and in a dream his dog could talk human. “Let’s go back south,” she said. It wasn’t really back south for her, she was from Huerfano County and had never left the state except for one time to New Mexico on a kayaking trip with him, but never mind all that. It was a good idea so they did.
He felt the old despair going over the Mississippi River because he remembered his journalistic aspirations four years ago the first time he crossed. The bi-weekly Progress in Prattville, Alabama had just fired him (he was beginning to think it might have been his fault) but he actually made it two years at a tri-weekly in Raton, New Mexico before the daily Chieftain in Pueblo, Colorado (the locals pronounced it “pee-eblo”) made him their correspondent with almost no supervision and paid for published inches and photos. The arrangement turned out to be as bad as he thought it good, he realized after the first month or so. Befriending the organic farmer who grew cheap marijuana did not help matters, or his routine. Nor did spending five nights out of seven at a bar called the Gold Nugget where all the local big fish came to the little pond to drink and lie. Driving over the river made him feel the Louisville Slugger in his jaw again all the way to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Annie Rich scared him the next morning by jumping out of the back of the moving pickup truck to chase a squirrel. Her plan worked, he stopped thinking about the Louisville Slugger, and he actually laughed for the first time in months and even sang to himself a little: “And I thought about a calico bonnet from Cheyenne to Tennessee.” It was appropriate. He may not have made it as far west as Cheyenne, but it was his dog’s song and they were in Tennessee. It was just like in his favorite song from which he sang, The Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, also from where he chose the name for his canine companion.
He found a Christian ministry to work at where they paid him a small stipend redeemable at the local Piggly Wiggly grocery store plus a place to stay. That was about all his nerves could handle, he told himself. He cleaned up construction sites at houses built for poor mostly black families, and the few volunteers and staff initially not thrilled that he’d brought his dog were mostly won over by Annie Rich’s sweet nature. Most of the other volunteers were younger and many quite disturbed, so many disturbed volunteers arrived actually that there was a pipeline from the ministry to a psychiatric hospital in Columbus, Georgia.
It turned out this low stress job was more than his nerves could handle. Some higher ups suggested he take the trek to Columbus and he agreed to go, but only when someone promised to care for his dog during the 21 days he would be inside.
He came out with a ceramic light green and yellow giraffe coffee mug, the handle was the neck and he made it in art therapy, but most of the inheritance money was gone. He would spend the next three years paying back the hospital. For reasons to this day he can’t quite understand he took the hospital staff’s advice and quit the pot and the alcohol. Working odd jobs like helping with the Pecan harvest, he learned to master his nerves at least enough to make it back to a cheap state university the near the ministry.
Nine months later, the alcohol and THC fog had lifted a little bit. A little boy knocked on his trailer door and told him some white man had swerved to hit Annie Rich who, when he found her, thumped her tail but could not get up. He lifted her into the cab of the still smashed up and definitely no longer new pick-up truck through the driver’s side and gently eased her onto the seat. The vet said she might die but he said no, at least try. He paid $375 for the operation which only left him $75 in First Savings and Credit of Sumter County. However, there was virtually no internal mental deliberation. He may not have turned out a short story writer and forest ranger but, by God, he was not some low life who would let his dog die without paying the vet to at least try and save her.
He buried Annie Rich in a forest near a Pecan grove in Americus, Georgia and spent $7.50 on a pink flowering Dogwood Tree to plant above the grave.
Regrets? Plenty. Once he tried to get Annie Rich to swim in the Arkansas River because he wanted her to be like all the other dogs that would follow their owners in kayaks all the way to the take out. She cowered, so he threw her in and she swam to shore and hid for half an hour. He felt ashamed for days. The guitar thing was a regret also. Annie Rich was named after a girl in the song he wanted to learn to play, but the pot killed his concentration so the lessons did no good. He regretted never learning to play the guitar, sure, and even worse that day by the Arkansas River. Along with a lot of other stuff like wasting all those nights in the Gold Nugget drinking Coors and bourbon shots instead of writing his short stories. He did take solace in the fact that he had remembered all the words to Grievous Angel. Many years later when he feels overwhelmed by bills, or his kids gluing their eyes to the phone and grunting to his good morning, and especially when some publisher says his fiction sucks but won’t say why it sucks, he sings it to himself and remembers the soft beat of Annie Rich’s heart by the wood stove which never got warm enough.
“Won’t you scratch my itch sweet Annie Rich and welcome me back to town,” he sings.
He only sings it, however, when he is quite sure he is alone and nobody else, not even his wife and especially not his kids, can hear.
Rob S. Rutherford lives in Scottdale, Georgia with his wife and 19 and 21-year-old sons. He has written since he was a teenager, and is in his second year of an MAPW program at Kennesaw State University. He enjoys reading, gardening, kayaking, and visiting Guatemala where he lived for 12 years.
