Rot. What a screwed-up name for a dog. But that’s what the locals in the bike shop had called him.
      Don’t go west of the split, one of the young cyclists had said. Two miles that way and you’re gonna ride right into Rot.
      Evan had not been back to West Virginia in almost twenty years which, he’d guessed, was longer than either of the cyclists had been alive.
      That beast’ll eat your heels before you can climb the hill past his house.
      Rot, the foot-eating Rottweiler owned a house? The thought was amusing and Evan giggled a bit as he slowed to a stop along an asphalt road that was no wider than a lane-and-a-half in the Appalachian foothills. The owner of the bike shop had suggested it as a good ride for newcomers, offering more of a practical expectation than the two teen pranksters.
      If you’re looking for a way to ease into our incredible backroads – you know, coming from Texas and all, he’d said, then Macedonia is the way to go. But they ain’t lyin’ when they say there’s a mean dog on the fork that bears west. Sometimes, he’s there. Sometimes he’s not. All the time he’s not tied down. Lots of farmhouses have dogs that roam freely around here but most only get angry when intruded upon. Rot is more of a...
      Evan shifted out of the bike pedals and set his right bike shoe onto the dusty gravel shoulder and the left onto cracked gray asphalt that, for almost the entire trip, had been sadly potholed in too many places to make the ride carefree like those he’d traveled around Corpus. The west fork in the road was fifty yards ahead.
      ...Rot is more of a bite first and ask questions later kind of creature. If you climb fast, you should be okay.
      They’d thought that just because he was from Texas, he couldn’t ride West Virginia. They’d been challenging him, that’s all. Cyclists stick together, sure, but the twisted nature of humanity was always looking for a few simple thrills. There was no heel-eating dog. They’d just wanted to put a little psych into his ride. They’d wanted to send a gentle reminder that he wasn’t in Texas anymore, one gentle enough that they would all laugh about it the next time he came into the shop: a kind of initiation – not meant to scare away, but more so to vet into the family.
      Evan dismounted to check his gears since they’d slipped on a couple of the short, rolling climbs. Riding miles along the Texas Gulf shores had never entailed much stress on gear ratios but just in the last ten miles he’d needed to shift through just about all of them. A sharp ascent with slipping gears meant sudden pain in the legs, always, but according to the bike boys, slipping gears plus Texas legs meant Rot would have a magnificent feast this night. And as if on queue, in the distance, a dog barked. It was more of a regular kind of bark – perhaps one from a dog that wanted to play with a squirrel, not eat it.
      Visual inspection revealed nothing worrisome. The chain had a bit of grime peppered within its links and the cabling showed no signs of impending failure but, quite frankly, he knew that already. He’d done a pre-ride inspection before he’d left town but the fork in the road and the bike boys’ banter made him second guess. His mind was working against him; trying to persuade him to not go west. It was subliminally reminding him that dog bites hurt.
      “A nothing burger,” Evan said to the bike as if trying to convince it, too, that Rot really didn’t exist. “We’ll do fine like we always do.” He circled to the front of the bike and bent down to stare into the GoPro mounted near the middle of its handlebars. “You hear that, bike boys? Narrow roads nor potholes nor fictitious dogs are gonna stop this forty-something Texan on his maiden voyage across the West Virginia foothills.”
      He stood and removed his Oakley’s and helmet and wiped away sweat around his eyes with the soft glove fabric encircling his left thumb. A forceful breeze that came straight at him from the west fork cooled his short, black-haired scalp and he froze for a moment to inhale it while moisture rolled down the back of his neck. He wasn’t thirsty but he grabbed his water bottle and took a quick swig out of habit. He bent forward once again to look into the GoPro. “Are we ready yet?”
      Traffic, if that’s what you wanted to call it, had been scarce, just like the bike boys had told him it would be. As long as he remained in tune with his surroundings, they’d said, he’d be able to avoid all man-made obstacles, even on a narrow road like Macedonia.
      In tune with his surroundings, he thought.
      Like the way the cool, westerly wind wrapped around his body, suffocating his senses not with the brown salty heat of the Texas Gulf, but with a glove of green spring oxygen that washed the pores of his skin with almost heaven, not heat and humidity. He felt the hairs on his arms lift to greet it. He tasted it as it kissed him. His nose flared open to what was not dense, Gulf Coast stagnation, but was exasperating and took his breath away. June in West Virginia smelled like new life. Texas Gulf Junes smelled more like salt and sand where Nature’s yearly progression was forever masked by dry flora that had grown to survive the harsh southwest ecosystem climate.
      Yes. He was in tune with his surroundings. The mighty trees swayed with bristling branches. Twigs and leaves slapped hi-fives and several of them broke and clamored through dense canopies along both sides of the road. A groundhog startled him for a moment as it poked its head from the brush just a few feet away. It looked up at him, not scared, its beady eyes more curious about the strange addition standing next to its habitual right of way. Don’t do it, the groundhog’s imaginary voice (that sounded a lot like the bike boys) said. A feast for the beast. The groundhog suddenly stood rigid and turned its attention away from him and toward the fork. Another cool, westerly wind breezed over both of them, and the groundhog ran into the overgrowth. It took a moment for Evan to realize that it was not him, his bike nor the wind that had caused its sudden exit. It was the mechanical popping sound of a broken muffler. A vehicle was approaching from beyond the fork and Evan, as had the groundhog, stood rigid while the human invasion to his tuned-in-surroundings grew louder.
      At the fork, there were no trees. Like so much of his ride through this strange new land, the recipe of Nature along Macedonia consistently morphed from pockets of suffocating greenery to long stretches of open landscape that could be seen from hilly vantage points along its route. Evan stood inside one of those green pockets and the fork was beyond this tree-wrapped tunnel. As the muffler popping break in his solitude grew louder, Evan pushed his bike forward a few feet and stopped. No sense in challenging a noise he did not know on a narrow road he’d never ridden. He decided it was better to wait for the obstacle to pass.
      An old, green stepside truck rolled into view from the north fork and stopped at the crossroad far enough away that Evan couldn’t see its driver through the sun glare that washed its windshield. Its popping muffler spewed a thin haze of gray smoke that crept around the truck as it sat, idling. Though the skies showed only scant groups of white clouds, the truck’s windshield wipers suddenly came on as if the driver was trying to wash away the smoke cloud.
      Evan straddled his bike with glasses and helmet grasped in his left hand and waited for the truck to make its next move. But it didn’t. For several minutes it just sat there as the windshield wipers doubled in speed across the face behind the glass.
      Evan looked around. What was the driver waiting for? It creeped him out. It made him regret that he’d forgotten his phone before embarking upon this strange land. Not a soul on earth would know of his demise. The truck was going to mow him over, and his bike and body would be collected and thrown into some wayward lake out past Macedonia where roads didn’t exist. The bike shop boys were in on it. Rot wasn’t a dog after all. Rot described a farm truck that was more than three decades old, had a short stepside bed pockmarked with rust holes that rotted green paint metal, and spewed rotten fuel and oil from under a rotting muddy bumper.
      He shook his head and squinted. The need to wave—to smile—seemed appropriate in promoting himself as a good ol’ boy, from the country, with no malintent for the property through which he was riding. As he raised his right arm, the truck’s horn shot a quick blast that sounded, too, as if it were rotten, old and malfunctioning. He gave the driver a meager turn of the wrist like festival parade riders give to their onlookers as they travel the small-town Main Streets of America.
      The windshield wipers couldn’t move any faster. Evan wondered if they’d fly off their wiper arms at any moment; he wondered why they were on in the first place. The lack of any rainwater made them squeal loud enough to make the squeaky nerve in the back of his head throb and cringe. He rubbed his neck then placed his Oakley’s back on the bridge of his nose just to make sure, for some totally illogical reason, that he was not seeing things. He wondered if Covid caused hallucinations. Perhaps a month of recovery had not been enough.
      The driver’s side door opened, and a collapsed umbrella poked from the cab and quickly expanded as the driver emerged. Evan blinked twice because the umbrella was so beautiful; it looked more like a parasol from the nineteenth century: a dainty-looking dome scattered with the patterns of sunflowers and daffodils and stitched full of brown and yellow lace and hanging tassels and sequins. Standing there, the driver bent forward and the parasol created a shifty shadow across the face from the sun which now emerged from behind one wispy white cloud. Every motion the driver made was descriptive of someone fending off a hard storm but there wasn’t an angry cloud anywhere.
      Evan removed the Oakleys and waved, this time more aggressively. He looked down at his GoPro knowing that it was recording the anomaly parked fifty yards ahead, hoping that it was capturing what his mind couldn’t understand but what his eyes and ears were telling him was real.
      The driver was a woman which became apparent when the parasol shifted to reveal the face of...Evan blinked as did the woman staring at him. Very familiar, he thought. He’d met so few people since returning to West Virginia a week earlier that he wondered if it was someone from Texas. His ex-wife, perhaps, bent on his suffering, trying, still, to take every last penny, trying to destroy his very soul. But that was impossible. She was a nightmare twenty years gone. Besides, the driver was too old. Quite frankly, as the woman’s facial lines formed more solid distinctions, Evan thought she looked a hell of a lot like his grandmother though much younger than when she had died just ten days ago.
      “Wha er ew dwooing?” the woman yelled and one shoulder dipped forward to bring the parasol down in an apparent brace for a wind gust that existed only for her. The windshield wipers squeak-scratched one more aggressive swipe and froze against the center of the glass.
      “Hello!” Evan shouted.
      “Wha er ew dwoo...” The woman wiped away invisible moisture from her lips. “What er ew dwooing?”
      What was he doing?
      “Jus swanding dwere.”
      Just standing there?
      Evan saw that there was plenty of room on the narrow road for the truck to pass and wondered if his presence was threatening.
      “I’m sorry if...” he shouted and the woman suddenly shook her head, collapsed the parasol and slipped back into the cab of the truck. The muffler popped once again as the truck went into gear. A thin, gray cloud puffed like a massive cigar exhalation and the truck rolled forward a couple of feet, hesitated, then turned sharply to its right onto the west fork. It moved slowly away at a speed not much greater than what Evan could manage with his bike on a long, flat road. The tailgate looked as if it had been replaced by a junkyard part that matched the make and model but not the factory green. It had a few circular buff marks, some beige body putty smears and a mosaic of gray primer spray. The word FORD was embossed in the center of the metal and Evan cringed, his helmet and glasses dropping from his hand, when the tailgate fell open just after the truck’s rear wheels hit the first westbound pothole.
      His Grammy had owned a forest green farm truck just like it. He’d seen it in one of the pictures she’d shown him when he’d last visited just after the split with his wife. He’d not been a very good grandson. After the divorce, he’d not been a very good son to anyone. His wicked ex had eroded his faith, his trust, and his desire to achieve such things, and he’d pretty much ended most communication with his closest relationships, Grammy included. For this reason, Evan had been completely shocked when he’d received an attorney’s letter notifying him that he’d been named in her will. Grammy had died from Covid three months after the pandemic outbreak and he was to inherit her entire estate. That’s why he’d returned to West Virginia.

Sunday Afternoon
Valley Speedway, West Virginia
One Week Before Labor Day

Only one bite gone. No dirt. Lots of chili and onions. He chomped half of the remaining hot dog, chewed, savored, plucked a piece of meat from the middle of one tooth and savored it as well.
      “Mom’ll fix you a samich. You don’t have to eat the trash.”
      The Trashman spun around, his toe catching the hole in one old sneaker, and smiled at the little girl behind him. “Don’t think your mom cares for me too much anymore,” he said; chili-painted lips forced an uneasy smile into his unshaven cheeks. “Besides, I’d rather not waist food. It’s perfectly fine.”
      Dandy leaned on one crutch while trying to maintain the aided balance of her leg braces. “The bugs,” she said and pointed at his hand. “What about the bugs?”
      The Trashman considered the hot dog morsel that remained between his grimy fingers. “Those aren’t bugs. It’s just chili chunks and onion pieces.” He studied the girl’s braces, remembering that only a week ago, she’d been confined to a wheelchair. The healing had been very fast—as promised. He stuffed the last bit of meat and bun into his mouth.
      “Dandy!” It was her mother’s voice from inside the racetrack concession stand at the top of the hill behind them.
      “Sure you don’t want one?” Dandy said. “Mom makes ‘em good with peanut butter and banana.” She hopped half an inch to readjust the crutch.
      “You jumped!” the Trashman said. “That’s incredible!”
      Dandy looked at her legs as if they were the strangest two things she’d ever seen in her eleven young years. “Really? I jumped?” A stoic cuteness captured her face, turning her tiny nose into a curl of friendly suspicion. “You’re putting me on.”
      “No. Really. I wouldn’t lie to you, would I?”
      Dandy immediately shook her head and her eyes brightened. She held out her right hand palm up and open. “Those things really work. How many more do I have to take?”
      The Trashman stood at the end of one paint-peeled bleacher seat and absently kicked an empty Styrofoam hot dog box. “Hmm. You started seven weeks ago...that makes fourteen so far. It was supposed to take two months but the way you’re hopping up and down, heck, you’ll be jumping rope by next week. You’re definitely going to surprise some people in your first day of school.” He reached into his blue plaid breast pocket with a left hand that was tattooed on the back with an inch-wide pattern of tiny black text. From it, he pulled out a rusty, small Altoids container, flipped open the top hinged half, and Dandy flinched at the horrible smell that rushed out. He snatched two crimson capsules from inside and placed them in Dandy’s hand.
      Hanging by a bent paperclip from one of his ratty blue jean belt loops was a plastic, two-liter soda bottle with the top third of it cut off. He’d painted the surface over the last several months in a medley of rainbow blotches and stripes from discarded Sharpies he’d found in the trash. He removed it from the paperclip and brought it up to within a few inches of Dandy’s mouth. “Go ahead.”
      “Dandy!”
      Her mother’s voice made the Trashman look away and in that moment, Dandy placed one of the pills in her mouth and stuck the other one in the creased strap that held her leg brace in place. She dry-swallowed and her stomach reacted immediately.
      The Trashman turned back to her. “Go on. Do it.”
      Dandy shifted most of her weight against the right crutch and grabbed her stomach with her left hand. “I really hate this part,” she moaned then opened her mouth incredibly wide and vomited a stream of crimson liquid into the decapitated soda bottle as the Trashman maneuvered it to catch every drop.
      “Dammit!” Her mother appeared a dozen yards behind them, her hands clamped to her hips which was not a good sign. “Dandelion Ashbury. You get your butt up here this instant.”
      Dandy wasn’t going anywhere in an instant, the Trashman thought, and he would have helped her up the hill except for Mrs. Ashbury. He stayed as far away from Dandy’s mother as he could. She didn’t like him anymore. A lot of people didn’t like Chet Thomas anymore because he’d become so disgusting. They seemed to have forgotten what a respectable young man he’d been back at the beginning of the season. And they definitely didn’t know that, to save Dandy, he’d traded his soul to the shadow creature that lived in the racetrack maintenance shed.
      He wiped Dandy’s mouth with a finger that still had a smear of chili sauce on it. She smiled, released her stomach, and hoisted herself onto both crutches. “See you next week,” she said. “I’ll bring my sister’s jump rope.” She moved carefully across pebbled dirt and trampled grass toward her mother as the Trashman placed the bottle of Dandy’s reddna on the wooden bleacher seat, sat down beside it, considered that she’d puked up a lot less of the stuff than last week, then gazed at another piece of discarded food.

***

      “You stay away from him!” Dandy’s mom shouted. “I don’t want to hear any more of it. You start school tomorrow. You should be thinking about that.”
      Dandy’s sister, Cassandra, watched from the hallway that separated the double wide’s living room from the bedrooms. Cassandra knew what her mother was thinking because she was thinking the same thing. How in God’s name had Dandy been able to do that? Hopping? The doctors had said she’d be gone in two years. Now she was hopping?
      “But mom. He’s making me better. Look.” Dandy hopped another inch but it wasn’t as smooth as the first. She stumbled against her crutches and her mother reached out in the reactive routine she’d mastered over the fifteen months since Dandy had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy.
      “Uh-huh. Not so much,” her mother said. “We won’t be discussing it. Cassandra. Can you help her to bed?”
      “Come on Dandy.” Cassandra flipped her long brown hair over one shoulder, hugged her sister, then escorted her down the hallway. “Your first day in middle school. We’ll finally be together. Aren’t you excited?”
      Dandy crutched down the hallway, past the bathroom on the left, and into their shared bedroom on the right. “Do you think Mr. Thomas is a bad man?” she said, dodging Cassandra’s question.
      Cassandra guided Dandy into the bedroom and closed the door. Both sat on Cassandra’s bed. “You mean the Trashman?”
      “Don’t call him that! He was Mr. Thomas before everyone started calling him the Trashman.”
            “Okay. Mr. Thomas.” Cassandra stroked Dandy’s blonde hair. “I think we’ll know a lot more when we get that pill analyzed. You have it, don’t you?”
      “I have it. But I don’t like lying. Mom says lying always leads to more lying.”
      Cassandra knew that motherly trope very well. She held out an open hand.
      Dandy fished the red capsule from her leg brace, handed it over, and Cassandra rolled it across her palm. “This is what the Trashman...Mr. Thomas is making you take? What else is he doing to you?”
      “Nothing. He’s not a bad man. He just cares about me and wants to help. And he’s not making me do anything.”
      Cassandra sniffed her palm because the capsule had left a fecal smell all over the skin. She quickly drew back. “Is that what he told you? He wants to help by making you take this stinky thing?”
      “Two stinky things,” Dandy corrected her and frowned. “They don’t taste as bad as they smell. If you don’t like it then give it back. I should have taken it anyway. Mr. Thomas said that I had to take both of them, together, every Sunday if I wanted to get better. And I did. Made me much better than anyone else has. That crummy wheelchair is gone. In another week, the braces will be gone, too. I’ll be going out to play regular and I’ll have my own friends. Nobody’s gonna look at me stupid ever again. You guys were just gonna let me die. But Mr. Thomas cared.”
      Cassandra had never felt as separated from Dandy as she did at that moment. Through every heartbreaking month, she’d sacrificed so much of her own young adolescence to be at Dandy’s side when their parents couldn’t. She’d been Dandy’s mental crutch and it crushed her to hear such accusations. “You don’t mean that,” she said. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”
      Dandy’s face remained in a pursed-lipped expression of petulance.
      “I know Mr. Thomas isn’t a bad man.”
      “Really?” Dandy stared at the pill in Cassandra’s hand. “You’re not just saying that because I’m crippled, are you?”
      “What’s gotten into you, Dandelion? You know I’d never treat you like that.”
      Dandy fell silent and gazed at her leg braces for a full minute before responding. “Do you love me?”
      “Of course I do. How could—”
      “Wouldn’t you like to see me walk again?”
      “Yes, Dandy. You know I—”
      “Then what does it matter why I am able to walk? God never explains his miracles. And if Mr. Thomas is the person God is using, I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
      Such awkward wisdom from a young mind, Cassandra thought. It was unnerving. “Did Mr. Thomas say that, too? Did he tell you God was using him?”
      “No. Not in those words.”
      “Then in what words?”
      Dandy grabbed her stomach and bent forward. “Ouch,” she moaned. “I think I should have taken both pills. It doesn’t feel the same.”
      “What doesn’t feel the same?”
      Dandy rubbed her tummy without responding.
      “What is it!”
      “He said he’d made a deal so that I could get better. Just two pills every Sunday and that’s what I been doing ‘til now. Maybe I should take the other one. Can I have it back?”
      Cassandra rolled the blood-red capsule in her palm. “Did you say he made a deal with God?”
      Dandy burped and what looked like a drop of blood formed on her lips. When she wiped it away, it smeared her knuckles and Cassandra gasped. “It’s nothing,” Dandy mumbled. “It happens. And then I start walking better the next week and then I take two more pills and I start walking better and...well, it all ends this Sunday. Just two more and Mr. Thomas promised that I’d be all better—forever.”
      “Mr. Thomas promised that God would make you all better?”
      “Not God! It’s whatever lives in the maintenance shed at the racetrack. That’s where Mr. Thomas takes my...” Dandy grabbed her stomach again. “That’s where he takes my reddna.”
      “Reddna. What’s that?”
      Dandy nodded at the red smear on her knuckles. “That’s what Mr. Thomas calls the stuff that comes out.”
      “Looks like blood.” Cassandra gently grabbed the fingers and pulled Dandy’s hand to her nose. “And smells like the pill.”
      “It’s not blood.” Dandy jerked her hand free and wiped it against her leg brace. “He said it’s red DNA. It’s the bad stuff inside that’s making me sick and taking away my legs and my spine. It has to come out for me to get better.”
      “Comes out? You mean he cuts you?”
      “No. It comes out of my mouth. I kind of throw it up.”
      “And you just give it to the Trashman?”
      “Mr. Thomas!” Dandy pushed herself up from the bed and teetered, unbalanced. Cassandra grabbed Dandy’s hips, still amazed that her sister could stand at all. “Mom said we need to get ready for school. I’m supposed to be excited but you’re not making me excited. You’re making me upset.”
      Their mom’s voice interrupted from behind the closed bedroom door. “Everything alright in there? I’m going to start Dandy’s bath.”
      Cassandra stood and went to the door. The last thing either of them needed right now was their mom’s knowledge of Dandy’s conjuring. Mom’s nerves, as she’d often reminded them, had already been obliterated. She was barely holding on while going it all alone and working a double until their father returned from his job at a Pennsylvania drill site.
      “I’ll get her ready right now,” Cassandra said and opened the door a crack. Her mom looked worried but, anymore, she always looked that way. “We were just talking about tomorrow. She’s really excited.”
      Her mom continued to frown. “Let’s get her going. It’s about past bedtime and she’s gonna need all her strength to navigate school.”
      “Be there in just a minute.” Cassandra closed the door against her mom’s glare. She turned to Dandy who had dropped back down onto the bed and was loosening the brace straps that kept her legs functional. Each one fell to the floor and she stared at them as if they were the disease that ravaged her body.
      “I hate you,” she said to them and burped a butt-stinky smell. She pinched her nose and frowned. “But it won’t be long.”