The following is from C. Mallon’s Dogs. C. Mallon is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a fellow of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

What had gone wrong with me didn’t start out with the car. It didn’t end with the car, but the car played a serious part. My friend Dylan bought it used. He got it off a guy called Styrofoam Bob. Bob was this great big autistic kid living in his parents’ converted garage on the west side of town. He was probably in his mid-thirties but everybody would tell you that he had the mental capacity of a little kid. I didn’t think that was true at all. I hadn’t ever understood that. Bob had dropped out of the high school. People were ugly to him there. It made him afraid. For a long time he would only go out at night. You’d see him walking out late in the neighborhood, big gumdrop body, top-heavy, that weird, goofy way that he walked with his knees locked. Broad hands held out right in front of him, cut up in streetlight, making shadow puppets on the split cement and talking to nobody, all by himself, all the time. Kids throwing trash from their scrapped sedans. Kids shrieking terrible things at him. Bob’s mother got him a job, how she wanted him back in the daylight. He worked part-time at the big-box store out by the mall complex, stacking steel shelves too high up for a regular man to reach, bagging the groceries, cautious and totally thoughtful. He did a really good job. His mother drove him there three days a week and his mother would pick him up after. You’d see him waiting on her, sat crosslegged on the curb in his work shirt and his big jeans, sneakers come untied and shoelaces dragging in the dry dirty gutter. I would see her around sometimes. I thought about her sometimes. I thought she had to be so tired. Somebody got to Bob when there was nobody watching him. Somebody sold him the car in bad faith. That was a cruel thing. They cleaned him right out of his savings. He paid what they wanted in cash. It hurt me to think about that. I figured it must’ve been a true blessing for Bob anyhow. Nobody watching him. Something he bought just because he was wanting it, and he had money, he’d worked for that money, and all of his money belonged to him. The car belonged to him. Bob loved the car like nobody had ever loved something before. You’d see him washing it out on his driveway. Dish soap and warm water, big yellow sponge looking just like a regular sponge in his big hands. His hands were always chapped bad from the time that he spent on the car. Anytime he closed his fist tight the knuckles would split up and bleed. He chewed and he gnawed on the pink, itching canyons forged into his quilt skin. His hands looked like hamburger meat. Bob had a lot of sensory problems. He couldn’t stand the grease feeling of all the petroleum jelly smeared onto his skin. They’d spread it on him just like it was peanut butter. It got to be so bad that his mother had to take him to the family doctor. Goldfish and rainbow aquarium gravel. Crayons in the waiting room. She had them slather Bob’s raw hands in lanolin cream and then bind his hands up in long yards of white gauze and tough, flesh-colored medical tape. They sent him back out on the world with his fists tied, the heavyweight champion, nothing won, and he cried hard, and they gave him a grape sucker. Whatever Bob had to give he gave it to the car. It was a bad machine. Brittle and cheap as a tin rocket, inches from rattling red bright combustion. Big boxcar body the color of rough rust and vaulted up off of the axles. It leaked exhaust into itself. You had to drive it with all of the windows down. Both of the driver’s side doors were the wrong color and the suspension was shot. Anytime Dylan hit a ragged, cut-up stretch of road he would hit his head hard on the ceiling. The model had been discontinued. The manufacturer issued a national recall. Anytime somebody crashed it everybody died. I had seen it on the news. Two kids in Colorado left their high school graduation, took the canyon road, headed for some party in somebody’s father’s cabin, and the brakes failed on the mountain highway. They must have been doing eighty-five by the time they struck the power line and rolled, the downed cables still live and binding the car in a tensile cradle, the drag and the spark, and their shirts and hair catching a flame how dry tinder would, tin roof clipped free by their dumb, dark inertia, the driver’s left arm, class ring still on the pointer finger, laying chewed on the median, roughly severed at the shoulder socket joint. Probably carrion birds on the blue sky. None of that was a problem for Bob. He had epilepsy. He was mentally retarded. He hadn’t ever learned how to drive. You’d only ever see Bob hose the bodywork down, work grit out of the treads with a soft-bristle toothbrush or get up on top of the hood with his legs folded, hitting his kneecaps and rocking his body forward, smearing his wet nose upward with his first finger knuckle. Whatever got him to feel good. Bob would sit out on the driveway and talk to the kids and the dogs on the street. Sometimes the fathers would come by and talk with him. Sometimes they’d bring him a bottle of turtle wax, torque wrench, they’d pop the hood for him and look at the spark plugs. Sometimes the mothers would come by and say, how are you doing, Bob, how’s your mom. You’d figure people would be cruel but they mostly weren’t. Mostly they showed him a lot of grace. He was a paperweight. He was a mascot. Even still, Bob’s mom and dad were pretty well inconsolable. They figured sometime he’d get restless and take the car out while they slept. They’d taken to putting the headlights on while Bob was sleeping to run the car battery flat. Somebody always took pity on him, and they’d jump it for him, and his mom and dad would execute the whole sad fraud again until they told him that he really had to put it up for sale. Bob wouldn’t eat for a while about it. You’d see him at the store, stood by the counter with his heart so entirely broken. That was a really sad thing. Bob made the flyers himself and he tacked them up all over town. They said the car had to go to somebody who’d love it for real. They said the price was negotiable. Dylan found the flyer stapled up on some rotted utility pole by the wrestling gym. He tore the printer page, sun-brittle, weakened by weather, down from in between the lost dogs and the garbage thrash bands. He made the long walk to Bob’s faded suburb alone and caught under the black wretched heat of that Indian summer. Dylan smoking, Dylan sweating his shirt through with his foam orange headphones playing punk rock music for him all the time. When I thought about that I could see him do it. Caged in by chain-link, the overpass bridge on the interstate, red eye of October sun open, soldering all the straight lines of his body out. Pausing for red licorice and a cold soda down at the corner store. Dylan found the brick house with the peach pink tulips wilting in the window. Flyer gone damp in his hand, creases shredding how cut cotton would. He went up and knocked on the rusted blue metal garage door. Bob came out, blinking his eyes hard and closing his big fists tight, splaying his fingers back out in a pink baby starfish. Dylan shook Bob’s broad hand, held out the flyer and asked if the car was for sale. Bob said it was, for sure, took the keys out of his back pocket and put them right into Dylan’s hand. Dylan had to have been the first person to come by and look at the car. Any other man would’ve put it in gear and left town. I figure he went through his options. I figure he thought about that really hard. Dylan walked back down the driveway. He got in the driver’s side door and he fit the key into the chrome plate ignition. He punched his tough hands up onto the ridged plastic wheel, and the dash, and he rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles, and hit his fist onto the horn, and he rolled down the window. He called back for Bob and he said, Bob, would you want to come along with me. He said, Bob, all of the car salesmen come for the test drives. He said, it’s policy. Bob’s face split up in this major, bright halogen smile. He scuffed his wrecked tennis shoes on the worn cement, legs straight and stiff in his big jeans, and got in the passenger side. Dylan got the car started. He put it in first and he tooled it out onto the street, left foot doublestamping on the clutch, the seam on his jacket sleeve catching the black rubber seal on the window, locked onto the frame, and Bob, hooting and flapping his hands, just, lit up, so delighted. Coughing on the warm exhaust together in the car. Dylan brought it out wide on the freeway ramp, the tires soft, and bald, and skidding on the powdered gravel, and Bob took to hollering with his head hung out the window like a big dog. I figure it made something different for Dylan, to see Bob that way. He didn’t have to say that out loud for me to know. I could do that for a lot of people. I could work something out for them. We didn’t ever have to talk about it. I wouldn’t ever tell anybody. I just really understood a whole lot more than people probably ever thought. Dylan took the exit on the county line and pulled into the lonesome border truck stop, pissed in the bathroom, paid for Bob’s coffee with cream and with sugar and took out three hundred dollars at the ATM. It was pretty well all of the money he had in the world. It was really decent of him. Dylan drove him home. Bob had his cheek welded onto the factory plastic, fists gripped to the window frame, all of his pale hair sheared back by the drag. When Dylan drew the car up on the driveway he could see Bob’s face, partway crumpled, ridged pink by the outline of the handle and the latch. Dylan thought maybe that he had been saying goodbye. He saw the lace drapes twitch in the window of the house. Bob brought him right on inside the garage. It was dark. He had this great big creased Star Wars poster thumbtacked onto the blue walls. Ice planet of Hoth. Cinderblock under the wallpaper. Wallpaper split with the damp. Bob had a lot of videogames. He had a Super Nintendo videogame console. Plastic faded the blonde color of butter with age and the lettering smeared away, big thumbprint smearing a lilac hollow through the violet plastic of the power button. He had an ivory quilt. Lace trim with the little pink flowers. He slept in a twin wooden bed. I hated that part of the story. Dylan said to Bob, hey, Bob, I really like your room a lot. He was a complicated sort of man that way. He wouldn’t ever have lied to somebody about something like that. He hadn’t ever been cruel in the way where you didn’t know that you were getting hurt. Dylan set the money on Bob’s dresser and he sat down on the carpet floor. Tan carpet, quarter-inch, laid down right onto the concrete. Bob had a hard plastic storage bin, black plastic, yellow lid locked tight down onto it with the thick plastic snaps. Dylan hit the snaps and got it open. The bin was filled partway with Styrofoam packing beads. Bob had been shredding the beads out of big foamy pressed blocks of Styrofoam and he’d been storing them there. It must’ve taken him so long. He must’ve cared about it so much. Dylan sunk his hand down in the polystyrene. He said it felt like television static. Dylan told me, later on, that he couldn’t understand why Bob had done it, but he understood that it mattered. He only ever said that part to me. Dylan wasn’t watching Bob but Bob was watching him. Dylan brought his hand out with the beads stuck on him, clung onto his fingers and his sleeve in a cheap broken set of fake evening pearls. He tried to say, hey, Bob, I like your beads, but by the time he looked around at Bob the big guy was dark blue. He was holding his breath. He’d quit breathing. Dylan tried to get up off the floor and go over to Bob. The cuff on his bluejeans caught the black lip on the plastic bin and tipped it over. The Styrofoam beads spilled on out in a crackling mass of split matter and fixed to the carpet. Bob took a stuttering breath. He was whale-eyed. His body was locked tight and trembling. The way Dylan told it he looked how a stormcloud would. Dylan said that it was something right out of The Exorcist. He said that every time. Let Jesus Fuck You! Bob took a hard breath and screamed. He wouldn’t stop screaming. High, helpless sound in the tin room, just, echoing back. He only quit it to draw in a big breath and then he screamed harder, face dark with the pressure, chest working, ribs pressed out tough, right on the surface, fists split up and clenched, really screaming. Dylan tried to scoop the beads back into the tipped bin. They fixed to his hands and the tan carpet fiber, his wrists, and his shirt, and his bluejeans. Bob smacked his big, clean, pink fist to the cinderblock, got himself bleeding. Thread vessels split in his pink face. Chapped mouth torn wide and bright blood in the fissures. Dylan was losing his mind in the room. He couldn’t manage or stand the great, total, black, battering sound of it. He got up off of his knees and he covered his ears with the heels of his hands, stuck flat, vacuum and pressure. Dylan split out of the blue metal door, walking stiff, agitated, spat out on the heat of the late day. He made it onto the blacktop and turning around he saw Styrofoam Bob’s mother, chewing a cigarette, coming down off the porch steps in her bathrobe. They looked at each other. He said he was sorry. She said to forget it. Forget it. Dylan took to walking down the dotted yellow median. He couldn’t take the pavement. It was too loud on the planet for him, then. Bob’s mother called back for him, got him turned around. She said, please, God, take the car. Dylan went back up the driveway. He got in the driver’s side door. He put all the windows down, leveled the clutch, got it started and rolled it out into the street. In the next yard, and the yard after, all of the dogs were out, pressed to the tough wire strung on the fences, all barking, and drooling, and howling along with Bob’s screaming, the sound of it carrying with Dylan each street that he ran the car down. All over town the dogs were barking for Styrofoam Bob. They wanted to talk. Dylan had his arm hung out the window, looking sometimes at his own wrist and his white hand in the mirror, Styrofoam beads torn away by the warm wind to pack out the cracks in the concrete. All the dogs followed him home with their coarse voices. Dylan with his head hung out the window, tipped back, breathing in the heat, and maybe sometimes he was laughing, sometimes barking with the dogs. I probably heard that story forty times. I figured he didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t know where to put it and he wanted somebody there with him. Something had scared him bad. He didn’t want to be scared. Nothing about the story was so funny if you thought about it hard, but Dylan told it all the time, and everybody laughed.

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From Dogs by C. Mallon. Used with permission of the publisher, Scribner. Copyright © 2025 by C. Mallon.