Pete's Little Saga, Part III

There’s a trailer between James’s place and mine, a 70's model Fleetwood, single-wide, rental, proof positive there's no Government enforced regulations in these parts as to what is and what is not inhabitable. 

          

    The Trailer's current and primary tenant is a tattooed and heavily pierced young man, named James as well. He's come over a couple of times, talks incessantly, and always as if he were about to cry. Up-the-road James, says he isn't quite right, but has only offered as proof, Trailer James's lack of Drivers Licence and middle school education. With Trailer James—from what I’ve gathered—live a young woman, an undetermined amount of children (hers, I assume), a mother (also hers), who is missing a leg, and two dogs, Amy and Harley.

     Amy is a vicious little sausage of a dog. Not a wiener kind of sausage. Amy’s more along the lines of a Little Smoky, something you’d find stuffed and rigid in the pillowed recesses of some antique store—the classic lap dog.  

    Harley is a sausage as well, though much larger than Amy, a sort of black and tan Basset with stubby legs, mainsails for ears and a belly that is in constant need of rubbing.

      Trailer James and I seem to be caught in a similar Middle-School limbo. We never entirely grew up. He, I assume, for lack of education, and me, for lack of want. I've always been sort of a seventh-grader, doing things the way I thought grown-ups might do them—pretending. Trailer James might not be pretending so much.

     
     Never is my immaturity more evident than when it comes to dogs. Bring a dog into the room and you can pretty much count me out of the adult conversation. I love them with the complete abandon of a boy. I've never actually seen Trailer James get down in the grass and roll with Amy and Harley, like I do with my boy, Bo, but I wouldn't put it past him. Trailer James loves dogs, plain and simple.             

     Perhaps Pete sensed this love in passing. Perhaps his previous home had a similar abandoned quality to the Trailer. Perhaps the children, buzzing around the threadbare yard, were equally familiar. Perhaps Harley had invited him to come and sit on the porch. God knows it wasn’t Amy, viscous as she is. Whatever the case, the Trailer was where Pete arrived next on his journey.