Derby don’t believe in the place and the name. Derby don’t abide with the tag and the collar.
A piece of work is what we are, is what Derby, who don’t got a family, would say, if he’d of been given to words, if he’d of been a being with a voice and not, like he is, a dog. Off the walk he goes and into the grass. Flips onto his back and—the whole of his body the head of a mop—wriggles. Scoots out over the scat and the humus and the goo of the tuber. Blood of a squirrel. Skin of a mole.
Cue the Cowboy. That’s what we call the fella that runs the place. Clop of the boots on the cobble walk, ching-ching of the keys in a caddy at the hip as he reconnoiters the Winnebagos and the trailers and the camper vans with the pop-tops and the retractable awnings. Shirt of a kind you’d see at a rodeo, black with a trim of silver at the collar, down the belly a button of pearl and, out round the sleeve (where you can see it when he beckons) a loop-de-loop of lariat like the piping on a cake.
Bullrider you figure, caballero, but then you see the sway from side to side, the belly like you walk a barrel up a ramp. You can tell by the torque of the shirt he’s thicker than he used to be. Belt buckle with the brass head of a horse, black leather wallet anchored by a chain to the fat of the belt, holster at the hip with the hammer and the wrench and the flashlight big as a billy club. The vestments of power that weigh him down, that burden the earth and bend the birds in flight.
“That your dog?”
“Family dog.”
“That dog answer to you.”
“Sometimes.”
He points. “What’s it say?”
“What?”
“The sign. You can read. You can read, can’t you?”
“I’m a good reader.”
“Read it. Out loud.”
“Keep off the grass.”
“Big letters, right?”
“I ain’t on the grass.”
“But your dog is.”
“Dog not much of a reader.”
“Don’t you get smart with me.”
“Smart as I need to be, sir. Derby. Derby. Come here, boy.” I jiggle the coins in my pocket, so he’s thinking treat. Buzz-cut of a dog, Derby, with a square body and a wayward nose and a stub of a tail like the clapper to a bell. It’s the snout’s what you get for hello, first in the crotch, then the palm when you push him away, then up down around the fingers for the edible better than the flesh of the hand or the glint of the grease or the scent of Spam at the cusp of the knuckle. I gather him up in my arms and off we go.
Opposite the way Cowboy wants me to go I go. Once we’re out of sight in the heart of the park, I put Derby back into play. A scout is what he is, a swimmer in the scent of the firepit and the roadkill and the porta-potty drain at the butt end of the campervan. Derby don’t believe in the place and the name. Derby don’t abide with the tag and the collar. Yip of the bitch, caw of the crow, boom of the jet in the blue—that’s what you get with a dog, a now is what you get, a party in a parcel of roadkill.
“Down, boy, down.” He’s licking the salt off the back of my hand. Inventories the every atom. “Sit, Derby, sit.” This the game we play. He—what’s the opposite of obey? Not disobey. Disobey means you hear but disagree. Derby hears but Derby’s an independent contractor. Ambles off to sniff a blot of grease at the base of a cinderblock hearth. No Alcohol the sign. No Glass Containers.
“Here, Derby. Here.”
He glances up at the opposable thumb I pilot through the air. Impressive. Turns back to the lick the fat off the face of the grill.
“Good. Good boy. Pay me no mind.”
Invisibles that quiver the ears—that’s what he follows. Crackle of clay, fizz of the wind, pitch of the cricket. Chatter of trash in the tipsy bin. The tail a tremor and the back a bristle and the mobile nose a magnet for the shattered apple and the brittle scat and the logy sock at the brim of the puddle.
I roll on. He joins me by and by.
We take the long way home, past the signs that steer the campers to the pure and the straight and the true. No Horseplay and No Fireworks and Check-out at 10 a.m. And the little reminders—Close Faucet Completely After Use, and Don’t Touch The Foliage and Curb Your Dog. Everyday signs you buy at the five and dime, but not Cowboy. He letters them, by hand, with a stencil and a can of spray enamel. Card stock he clips to a gate or the limb of a tree. And plasti-sealed, like back behind the counter in that shoe box of an office he got himself a portable laminator.
Holiday Haven the old-school sign at the entrance, denty the tin but chipper, like he trots out at dawn with a squeegee and a squirt of Windex to buff the age away. This the one sign with a professional finish: roundy white letters on a bed of blue, skywriter white and bordered with puffs of vapor like cloudlets or contrail or flak. Oh. And the addition. The afterthought. In the upper left hand corner, stencil of a hand in a shade of Rustoleum Red, fist with a finger springing out to point you clockwise up the gravel drive to the crisp-as-a-cube-of-sugar cottage with the dropbox and the bell and the placard Register Here. Another sign beneath it, tacked on for Troglodytes and the hard of hearing: No Tents. A sign for the sign. And the No Shirt No Shoes No Service and the No Noise or Loud Music and the Cash Only glued to the belly of the front counter. What’s with these people?
People meaning Cowboy, not the girl at the desk with the scrunchy in her hair, the white elbows wide above the ashtray, the rouge and the Tiger Beat with the Brits on the cover. A teen so taken by the red-as-a-Twizzler nail she pilots up onto her finger she never sees the rig we’re hauling. Dad scribbled out the check, shoved it under the photo spread of Jack Wild’s Shocking Other Life!, ticked the box for Travel Trailer on the form, and in we went.
A tent-trailer’s what we got. Metal box with a coupla wheels and a lid like the top to a carton of take-out. A poor man’s trailer, right? The flaps pop up and out to free the innards, the tent and the trappings of the tent, abracadabra, like one of them crepe-paper pumpkins you blossom open at Thanksgiving to fold flat again when the holiday’s over. Hobo technology. Contraption of canvas in algae green that sweats in the sun and stiffens in the wind and smells like a bivouac in the back aisle of a Army Navy. You smell like a salvage in the morning. Rubber and tar and mildew. The rusty buckle and the soggy batting and the bedding the color of mulch. Industrial the comfort—the tang of tin in the cup, steel rivets in a run up the bunk, aluminum tubery the ribs and the rafters, like a jeep or a jitney or a shipping container, like, why should the cargo complain?
So I bide my time, right? I know Cowboy can spot me from the cockpit of the golf cart he pilots around the park. On the lookout for the riff-raff.
I been around. I know what it means when they say It’s an adventure, and we slip out the house in the middle of the night, and the Volkswagen’s packed to the rafters, and we push it down the drive and down the block to the vacant lot on the corner, and we hitch it to the tent-trailer hidden there, and off we go into the night. Ceecee and Bo don’t know any better. They think everybody’s like we are. When you’re little you measure the world by the scale you been given. When it came time to show Ceecee what a ruler was, Daddy traced her hand on a piece of cardboard. Cut the cardboard to the shape of the hand. Told her the cardboard was the equivalent of one Ceecee hand. Ceecee-hand the unit of measure. They measured the chair and the table and the rug, the stove and the fridge and the dog. Two Ceecee-hands, three and a half Ceecee-hands. That’s the way it works when you’re too little to see out over the curve of the earth, to imagine people who never heard of Ceecee-hands and couldn’t give a damn if they did.
So I dawdle. What with the lots at odd angles, and the random spacing, and the trailers tucked up under the trees, you can’t hardly tell who is who when the red sun falls. On the pole outside the cinderblock bathhouse, the placards—Do Not Waste Water and Three-Minute Limit—quiver. The moths pepper the light. The bug-zapper crackles. Derby paws at a crush of feathers at the base of a tree. Earthy the word, the earth the spur that sends him to the left or the right, to the uphill or down. The sun hot, the water wet, the cookie sweet.
Cowboy gives him a kick but Derby’s a comer. Slips the blow and circles round to tug at the cuff of the jeans.
Almost home when I hear the clatter of the cart. A block or so behind us. Cowboy’s got a broomstick with a nail at the tip. He spears a paper cup and, as he rolls along, shakes it into the trash basket on the seat beside him. We’re at the back of the bathhouse by the primo lots—the full hook-ups for the air conditioner and the electric awning and the mini meat locker with the Auto-Froster and the Wonderwall™ insulation. The rich rigs along a single line of power that runs—in and out the trees—from the office to the baths.
I duck behind a Ultravan Motorcoach size of a city bus. Derby decides to bark. Starts yapping at the breeze, the moon the color of malt, the—who the hell knows? It’s enough to nudge Cowboy up the gravel walk. He parks. Drives that harpoon of his into the turf. Listens.
“Yap. Yap-yap.”
Climbs out the golfcart—dismount more like it, what with the heft of the whole package, the clipboard and the belly and the girdle of gear, that elaborate turn of the turret to position the boots in such a way as to stick the landing.
“Yap-yap-yap. Yap-yap-yap.”
They built the bathhouse on a rise, so the run-off rolls into a culvert that skirts the woods and marks the border of the park. A light shines out through a strip of window at the base of the rafters. Garble of voices. The showers sizzle away. Cowboy stands in the dark, at the backside of the building. It frames him, the steam that flows out the shower house and up through the vents and into the eaves. Sharpens that spear of light he sends my way, the flashlight beaming left and right between the trees and the railing and the rigs in a scatter below. Cradled in the other arm, a clipboard and a fat sack of something or other.
“Git,” says Cowboy. “Git outta here.”
I crouch behind a bush and hiss Derby. Derby. Another one of these imaginary commands we tell ourselves Derby hears, and hearkens, and will, in the fullness of time, obey. He comes trotting round the bush he peed on and into the beam of light. The nose. The tail a twitch. Onto the scent of a something.
“Git.” Cowboy gives it another go, sharper now. “Git!”
The tongue out, the tail wagging, Derby trots toward him, up the steps and onto the bathhouse landing.
Cowboy’s looking for the owner and not the dog. Sweeps the flashlight left and right. Bumps up the voice to broadcast mode. “Boy. Boy. This private property. No trespassing. Come git this dog or I’m calling the sheriff!”
Derby’s on him by now, licking at the—not the boots but the residue of whatever wonder Cowboy’s been stepping in. Barbecue sauce or cow shit or chicken gizzards.
Cowboy gives him a kick but Derby’s a comer. Slips the blow and circles round to tug at the cuff of the jeans. I’m thinking Cowboy’s got a thing about dogs, like people who can’t stand the feel of fur pretend to—make as if to—pet. Pat the patch of air the dog inhabits.
“Dogs on a leash!” he cries. A proclamation. A papal decree. “Dogs! All dogs! A leash! A leash!”
Derby clamps hold of the cuff and launches out into orbit round this body with the spangles and the sweet smell of axle grease and Aqua Velva and candy ham. Cowboy the toy. Cowboy spins. Rebounds off the wall. Drops the bag. The clipboard clatters off the railing as he staggers into the bathhouse and slams the door shut.
Derby’s got hold of the brown paper sack. Slings it from side to side. Upside the wall slams it, and the sack breaks, and out spills a tinfoil plate all stoved up into a asterisk. He paws at the paper skin, and the take-out menu with the cartoony chef on the cover, and the slab of lasagna that skitters off the landing and into the night. Lights out after it.
Too late to unscramble the scrambled egg is what Dad always says. Gotta go with what you got. So I set off into the trees—our camp at the far corner of the park. I figure Derby’s tracker enough to find his own way home.
I know. Home a high word for a shack with a tatter of fabric for a door, but in the dark, when you step out from under a cloud of leaves to spy it, there, across a clearing—the hiss of the Coleman and the murmur of kin and the shift of a shadow when they rock to the one side or the other, and the vessel rocks, and the canvas quivers, and out through the skin the light sings like a—what do you call it?—like a Chinese lantern? That’s what I mean. That’s what I’m talking about. Like what Dad says. Like who wants to live in a box? That’s what they bury you in, he says. A box. The people with the brick houses and the swingsets and the Kelvinator Foodarama Freezers, they’re the odd ones. It’s we’re the ones with the stars above.
Everybody bedding down for the night when I climb into the rig.
“Anybody gotta pee?” says Dad. He says it like you offer a stick of gum or a helping of pie. Good. We’re good. Veterans all.
“The dog’ll be along bye and bye,” I say. Zip the door shut. Dad clicks on a flashlight. Snuffs out the Coleman.
Somewhere out there Cowboy’s whizzing round in the cart, or breaking out a back-up plate of lasagna, or with a grease pencil cross a plank of plywood scrawling No Dogs. No Dogs. This Means You.
Did Jesus have a house? No. That’s what Dad said the day we slipped out of town. And Genghis Khan. Right? Right? Conquered the whole damn world with a bedroll and a tent. I pictured the Mongols when they lick the blood off their knuckles, unbundle the bones of the yurt, strike the flint to kindle the fire. Down onto the center-post they skewer—like you’re chalking a cue—the skull of the enemy.
We snuck out of the house in the middle of the night. It’s like a sack of the city! said Dad as he heaved up onto his shoulder the boxful of tools and kitchen crap, the toaster and the blender and the double-blader egg beater with the precision bearing. I was too busy fetching this and that—pillowcase full of pots and pans, bathroom junk in a grocer bag, blankets in a bundle—to take note of CeeCee, or Bo, or Mom in her PJs kneeling beside them with her hands on their shoulders. Half a hug and half a Hold it there, hold it, as if the wind were fixing to whisper where to go.
It was when I grabbed the diaper bag at Mom’s feet it happened. Boxy-looking bag with the plastic lining, right? CeeCee’d outgrown the diapers, so the bag was brimming over with random crap you get when you gut a cupboard—bric-a-brac in a wrap of newsprint, brush and a mirror and a clutch of curlers, snow globe serving up a Chrysler Building and a thumbnail Carnegie Hall.
It was Derby the culprit. Him nosing at the bag, trying to get at the broken box of animal crackers spilling out the top. Into the booty burrowed. Santa mug with a candy-cane handle. Alligator back-scratcher. Florida Cypress Gardens embossed on the belly of a plastic orange, the sippy straw poking out the top, the innards clinking with nickels and BBs and paper clips. I grabbed the strap on the bag. He clamped onto the lid where the zipper and the fabric met. Gave it a yank. I yanked it back. Out through a tear in the lining spilled a packet, fat, size of a letter. Mom snapped it up—you know how you leap to catch a vase before it topples?—but not before I saw the green of the tens and the twenties tearing at the sleeve of the envelop. In immediate matters—sweep a cat off a kitchen counter, haul a stroller up a landing, hover a screaming toddler up top a high chair—Mom’s an athlete. She got me one-handed by the back of the neck and hauled me in.
“Don’t say a word of this to your father.”
I nodded.
“It’s for emergencies,” she said with a stress on the every syllable, like your piano teacher lays her hand up toppa yours to play the note.
While Derby set to work on the wax paper wrapper and the shatter of little critters—lions and tigers and hippos and bears—she bundled the money up into the folds of her windbreaker. I made as if it didn’t matter. Carried on with the fetching and the packing. I felt like you feel when you step down from a step and the step ain’t there, there’s a break in the riser, like it’s the road that’s in the wrong and not the balance of the body. It never occurred to me the family that ferried me from place to place could ever diverge. Dad on a path that differed from Mom’s. Her privy to secrets and me the keeper.
Funny how it works, how big a dad is at the beginning, how he heaves you up onto his shoulders or swings you by the heels, but comes a day the cosmos shrinks, and the world with its battlements and breakers and bergs the size of a city contracts to accommodate the older you, the you that wrestles with the hitch and the tarp and the jack, the T-square and the map and the trencher, the kerosene and the cookstove and the pit we dig to prime the fire. The particulars—the hammer and the ax, the rucksack and the wheel and the gearshift lever, the wallet and the shot-glass and the clutch of the keys—reconfigure themselves to fit the palm of the hand. The random rock a projectile. The moon a volleyball you lob up over the curve of the earth. The dad who shrinks to a size you wrestle to a draw.
Sometime in the night we hear Derby rustle up under the camper. He’s got a habit of bedding down beside the tires—once, twice, the turn to a circle. What’s that about? Who knows? Maybe dogs gotta wind back the clock of the day so they can dream it round again. Shiver down to a sleep. Shake to make it—like a Etch-A-Sketch—fresh.
It’s still dark out when Mom prods me awake. The bedrolls for CeeCee and Bo already bundled and tied. The rig rocking with the weight of Dad strapping this and shuffling that, battening down the cook stove and the lantern. Gray out as Mom and I make for the shower house with CeeCee and Bo. By the time we get back, Dad’s already cranked and folded the tent down into the shell. Up top the wall of the woods, the black sky burns. Every tree a torch.
We roll out with the headlights off. Red sky rising. Light enough to see the gravel lane between the trees, but the mist makes the rest of it a muddle. Mom and I kill the flashlights. It’s not like we’d never done this before. Even CeeCee and Bo know to keep quiet.
The moment I see the golf cart parked square in the middle of the road at the exit gate, I know. Dad stops. Yanks on the parking brake. Leaves the motor running.
“Come give me a hand,” he says. We climb out.
You wouldn’t think a little cart could be so heavy, but what with the batteries like boat anchors and the heap of tools in the boot, it takes the both of us to get it rolling. The angle is off. The front end hops the curb and thumps to a stop upside the chain link fence, half on the road and half off.
“Good enough,” says Dad.
We climb in. Roll past the gate.
“Where’s Derby?” I say. We stop.
It’s all a gamble when it comes to a fella fierce like the—like that old man of mine.
From somewhere off in the wood there’s a yowl. An answering yip, here, at hand. The golfcart wobbles. Rocks. Up over the steer-bar, yap! Derby’s head. “Yip-yip. Yap-yap.” Sets to pawing at the seat cushion. Lapping at the crumbs.
Cowboy comes banging out from round back of the office. Got his boots on over his pajama bottoms, bathrobe wrestled up over the tee shirt and the girth of flesh below. Without the beat of the keys at the belt to broadcast who is who, of all the whos the who-est, he’s a bell without a clapper. Flush the face. Full of feed. I look for something says Here’s the feelings I’m feeling, but Cowboy got a face like a first draft, face the Maker roughs out then abandons to the weather.
I slip out the passenger side. Run to fetch Derby. Dad climbs out as Cowboy closes in. They meet at the line that marks the border of the park, the groove where the rolling gate rattles to open and close.
A belly’s all the ballast Cowboy needs to hold his ground, but Dad’s an economy model. In place of bulk he—hand on the hip of the cart as he shivers it starboard and port—blusters.
“What the hell—” says Cowboy.
“You can’t be blocking the highway with this wagon of yours.”
“Look at the sign. Look. You gotta check out at the office.”
“You got a license for this little vehicle?”
“I gotta call the sheriff on you? You want I call the sheriff?”
Dad’s got a riot of words at the ready for every occasion, the Right of way and It’s a free country and The law is the law. Cocks the head, jabs with the hands, rocks from side to side like a fella who hops a train to ride the neck of metal where the cars couple, who jerks left and right to compensate for the pitch of the portable earth.
That’s the thing about him, see? Like the time he pawned my bike with a promise, I’ll get you a horse when I win at the track. Or the time he bet me a dollar the bird up there on the stoplight would fly before the flip of the light to red, and him so crazy to beat the odds, and so rapt in the wonder of the bird, the voice of the Maker bids it rest or rise, he slammed to a stop a foot short of the signal. To hell with the traffic in a boil behind us, the broken brass of the horns and me shrieking No fair! No fair! You gotta go! He climbed out. Grabbed a handful of gravel. Pitched it up at the light. It chattered off the steel underside, confetti’d up into the wind. The bird bent at the neck, like you cock your head to accommodate a whisper, then back to the upright again. The light clicked yellow. The sky burned blue. Then—
“It’s red,” I said. “I win! I win!”
The bird unfurled. Took wing. Away.
That’s what I mean. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s all a gamble when it comes to a fella fierce like the—like that old man of mine.
While Dad and Cowboy tangle, I bundle Derby back to the car. A box on wheels, that’s what a VW van is, with a back hatch and a boot for storage. Deep beneath a tatty quilt and a crate of baby toys I find the windbreaker with the bulge in the pocket. Mom too busy with the baby to see.
Dad’s up to full blast. “To hell with you and your—”
“See what the law says!”
“Go! Go on! Go for it you gutless wonder!”
You reach a pitch where a word’s a weapon without a target. Random as hail.
“Grifter and that grifter kid of yours!”
“To hell with you!”
“To hell with you!”
Cowboy does the about face. Dad wheels round to make that slow march back to the car. A retreat? No. A procession of the righteous.
I scoot in behind Cowboy as he bangs back into the office. Catch him at the counter. He’s reaching for the phone when I slam the envelop down. It rattles the bowl of mints and the rack of maps. Sets to singing the silver bell with the little pinger up top. At the sight of me he startles—one hand on the counter, the other en route to the phone. The phone hand wavers, as if it’s wandered off and gotten lost.
“What’s the damage?” I say.
Before he can answer I loosen the bills.
“Twenty a night—three nights—that’d be sixty. Another twenty for your trouble.”
Twenty-forty-sixty-eighty. I lay out the bills, pocket the rest, and—there we go. There it is. Zinging through the still air, that shrill whistle Dad deploys when it’s time to flee. So’s to preserve the picture of that face of Cowboy’s—red ruddy as a slab of Spam—I don’t look back.
I leap up into the van as it rolls down the drive. “I had to pee,” I say. The VW shudders with the clutch and the ratchet and the gear up onto the open road. When we hit the highway Derby scrabbles onto my lap to poke his head out the window. Torques that tongue of his up into the wind. Claws up onto the frame as if fixing to leap.
“What the hell,” says Dad. “What is it? What is it with that damn dog of yours?”
A dog don’t gotta answer to nobody is what I want to say. Dog does what a dog does. Instead I say “A piece of work” I say. “That’s for sure.”
That’ll serve, right? Answer enough. Upside of Derby I lay my head, breathe in the beasty smell, lean out over the portal of this pirate ship of ours to brave the blast, the slam-bang of the air in a battle with the body. Dad yammers on, but all I can hear is the wind whipping at the cuff and the collar and the fur, the hum of the tire, the whoosh and the rattle of the camper, Derby’s heart a hammer upside of mine.
A teacher at Valencia College, Alan Sincic’s fiction has appeared in Boulevard Online, New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, The Saturday Evening Post, The Florida Review, Cutbank, and elsewhere. His stories have won contests sponsored by Meridian, Orison, Azure, Prime Number, Hunger Mountain, Columbia Journal, The Texas Observer, Broad River Review, and others. Recently his collection of short stories Portable Glory won the Futurist Debut Book Award from Alternating Current Press, with publication in spring 2026. His story cycle Peripheral Vision, winner of the Walter Cummins Award, is scheduled for publication with Serving House Books in fall 2026.
Read more stories by Alan Sincic appearing in Terrain.org: “Eva,” a finalist in the 13th Annual Contest in Fiction, and “Mend,” a finalist in the 12th Annual Contest in Fiction.
Header photo by BORINA OLGA, courtesy Shutterstock.
