The Barometer and the Bite

My name is Lachlan, I'm fifty-three years old, and I live in Ringsted, Iowa, which is a town so small the gas station also sells bait. I drive a truck for a living. Long hauls, mostly grain and livestock feed, in and out of the county all week. I got divorced last year after twenty-eight years of marriage. The house went to my ex, the dog went to me, and then the dog went to my sister in Omaha because I was on the road too much to keep him. So there I was, fifty-three, an apartment over the hardware store, and nobody to talk to except the guy at the gas station about bait.

I'd drive past the town dog pound every Tuesday on my route out to the co-op. It's a low brick building behind the water tower. There's a sign that says RINGSTED ANIMAL CONTROL, and under that somebody taped a piece of paper that says QUIET HOURS MEAN QUIET. For about four months I just drove past it. Then one Tuesday in November I was sitting at the light by the feed store and I realized I had nothing waiting for me at either end of the day. So I turned around and went back.

The woman who ran the place was named Darlene. She was sixty-two and did not ask me a single question about why a grown man wanted to scoop kennels for free. She just handed me a pair of rubber boots and said, "Don't let the hounds rush the door." That was it. I've been coming Tuesdays and Fridays ever since. I like it. The dogs don't know I'm divorced. They don't know anything except that I show up with a rake and treats. It's the best deal I've got going.

There's a Fortin barometer hanging by the back door of the pound. Nobody knows why. Darlene says it came with the building. I tap it every time I walk past, the way my father did with his. It always says rain. It's been saying rain for a year. I figure one day it'll be right and we'll all be very impressed.

This past Tuesday it was cold enough that my knuckles cracked on the way in. I'd been there about an hour. I'd cleaned four kennels, fed everybody, and was sitting at the front desk reading the adoption flyers that nobody updates, when a car pulled into the lot. A gray sedan, parked crooked, and a woman got out of it carrying a laptop bag and a folder she was holding against her coat with her chin.

She came in fast, stomping the slush off her boots, and didn't even see me at first. She was maybe forty-four, dark hair pulled back in a clip that was losing the fight, a wool coat, and the look of somebody who had been arguing with a phone all day.

"Hi," I said.

She jumped about a foot. "Oh. God. Hello. Is there a dog here that bit somebody?"

I looked at her. "Not that I know of."

"A brown dog. A bite report. Today or yesterday." She put the folder on the desk and started flipping through it with cold fingers. "I'm Tabitha, by the way. I'm from the bank. I'm doing an audit."

"Of the dog pound?" I asked.

"Of the paperwork," she said, still flipping. "There was a typo scandal. I'm the liquidity risk model validator for the regional bank, we're a named sponsor of the county shelter fund, and somebody put out a form to the whole grant network that described a dog as an aggressive breed when it was supposed to say affectionate breed. One letter. Sergei types with two fingers at the speed of sound and hit the wrong autocomplete." She shut the folder. "We have nine counties asking if Ringsted has a dangerous brown dog on the loose."

"Do you?" I asked.

"I don't know! That's why I'm here!" She looked around the room as if the answer might be written on the wall. The kennels along the far wall had six dogs in them, all asleep or pretending to be. "Which one of these bit somebody?"

"None of them," I said. "There hasn't been a bite report since before I started volunteering. Darlene would've said something."

"Where is Darlene?"

"Vet appointment in Fort Dodge. Back at four."

Tabitha stood there holding her folder, and I watched her decide whether that was acceptable. It was not, but she didn't have a lot of options. She set her laptop bag on the desk next to the flyers.

"Okay," she said. "Then I need to see every form you have. Intake forms, adoption forms, bite incident forms if any exist. I need to find the paper copy of the original submission and confirm it says affectionate, so I can send Sergei's correction with proof attached."

"He's not in trouble?" I asked.

"Oh, he's in trouble," she said. "But the polite kind. He brought me coffee this morning and apologized in a way that made it sound like the autocomplete was a personal enemy of his. Which it is. I've been telling him for two years to slow down." She was already opening the file drawer behind the desk. "Do you know if these are organized?"

"They're organized the way Darlene organizes," I said. "In other words, she knows where everything is and nobody else does."

"Perfect," she said, in a voice that meant the opposite.

I should probably say here what she looked like, since I noticed it even in the middle of all this. She was short, shorter than me by a good head, and she had a scarf with little dogs on it that she clearly hadn't planned on wearing in front of a stranger. When she bent over the file drawer her coat came open and I looked away like a gentleman, and then looked back, because I'm fifty-three and divorced, not dead.

The file drawer was a disaster. Forms from 2019 mixed in with rabies certificates and a stack of flyers for a fundraiser that had already happened. Tabitha went through it the way I'd go through a gearbox, fast and mean, pulling folders and setting them in piles. I could tell within five minutes that she was good at her job. She'd flip a page, frown, and say something like "inconsistent field labels" under her breath like it was a curse.

"Can I help?" I asked, after watching her mutter at a form for a while.

"You can tell me if any dog in this building is brown," she said.

"There's Rusty. He's brown. He's also so old he sleeps twenty hours a day. The most aggressive thing he does is snore."

"Rusty," she said, and wrote it down. "Affectionate breed. Old. Snores."

"That's what the original form should have said," I said. "Affectionate breed, eleven years old, snores. Sergei just grabbed the wrong word."

"Grabbed it and mailed it to nine counties," she said. But she almost smiled when she said it, which was the first crack in the whole flustered-business thing. She pulled her laptop out and started typing, and I went back to the kennels because there was a hound named Juniper who howled if you forgot about him.

By three, Tabitha had three folders spread across the desk and a document open that she was reading like it owed her money. I was making coffee in the back, the bad kind from the pound's machine, because it seemed like the thing to do. Darlene keeps a note taped to that machine that says DON'T DRINK THIS, and it has been there since Bill Hudson was president.

I set two mugs on the desk anyway, because she'd been typing for an hour and I figured even a bank auditor drinks bad coffee. "It's not great," I said. "But it's hot."

"Thank you." She took the mug without looking up. "This is the 2021 intake log. It's fine. I need the October submission, the one Sergei filed. There should be a printout."

"I might have it," I said. "Darlene pins the new forms to the corkboard by the back door so whoever feeds in the morning can sign off. There's a brown one up there right now."

She got up so fast her chair rolled into the desk. "Where?"

"Back door. Next to the barometer."

"The what?"

"That thing." I pointed at the brass cylinder hanging on the hook by the door. "Fortin barometer. Been there since before I started. It says rain. It has said rain for a year. I don't think it works."

"Why does a dog pound in Ringsted have a barometer?"

"Nobody knows. Darlene says ask the guy who donated it. The guy who donated it moved to Arizona in 2015." I crossed the room and pulled the brown form off the corkboard. "Here. Intake summary, October."

She took it and read it fast, lips moving a little. Then her shoulders came down about an inch. "This is it. This says affectionate breed. Eleven years, male, snores." She looked up at me. "Okay. Okay, so we have proof. I just need Sergei to attach the scan and we can tell nine counties nobody is being eaten."

"Glad I could help," I said. "You know, most people who come in here just want to adopt."

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing, I just meant."

"No, say it." She put her hand on her hip. "Because it sounded like you were about to tell me I should lighten up and adopt a dog, which is the kind of thing men say to women they're trying to charm."

"I wasn't. I was making conversation." I felt my ears go hot. "You've been here three hours. I made you coffee. That's the whole extent of my plan."

She stared at me. Somewhere in the room a dog shifted in its kennel, tags clinking. "Fine," she said finally. "Then I apologize. I've had a day, and every man I've dealt with since eight this morning has said something with a hook in it."

"Fair enough," I said. "For what it's worth, my hook game is terrible. My ex used to say I couldn't flirt my way out of a paper bag."

"That's a strange thing to tell a stranger."

"You asked."

She almost laughed. "I did ask." She went back to the desk and started feeding the form into her scanner, and I went back to the coffee machine because standing around watching a woman scan documents is worse than standing around doing nothing.

That's when I heard Juniper.

Juniper is a hound with a voice like a car alarm, and he howls the second he decides he's been forgotten. I had been at the desk too long. I took the leash off the hook and walked back to the kennels. "I know, I know. Five minutes, buddy."

Juniper was not interested in five minutes. He put his nose against the wire and let out a howl that rattled the window. Two of the other dogs woke up and started in, and the beagle in the corner kennel, a sleepy little thing named Waffles who had done nothing all day but breathe, shot straight up off her blanket and let out three sharp barks like a smoke detector going off.

I jumped. I'm not proud of it. A fifty-three-year-old man, jumped by a beagle. My elbow went back and caught the barometer bracket square, and the whole brass thing came off the hook.

"Look out!" Tabitha was already moving. I don't know how she got across that room so fast, but she got both hands on the cylinder before it hit the linoleum. The glass tube inside slid and clicked. She stood there holding it against her coat like a baby.

"Nice catch," I said.

"Is it broken?"

"I don't think so. It's been broken for years, so it's hard to tell."

She looked at the barometer, then at me, and then she laughed. Not a polite laugh. A real one, the kind where you have to set something down before you drop it, and she had to set the barometer down, so she did, right on the desk, and kept laughing with her hands free. "Waffles," she said. "I got ambushed by a dog named Waffles."

"She's a professional," I said. "Sleeps all day, scares volunteers all afternoon."

"That noise." She wiped her eyes. "Like a car alarm."

"That's Juniper. Waffles is the backup alarm."

She laughed again, shorter this time, and I found myself laughing too, and for a minute the whole mess of the afternoon just let go. Nine counties, a typo, Darlene's corkboard, all of it.