Ballard walks into Clarksdale, looking over his shoulder like a man with a hundred hell-hounds on his trail. There’s a howling out on the desert floor.

He mutters to himself. —We live in a republic of dogs.

It’s soon after midnight; half-moon hanging lazy in a night sky flecked with stars. Ballard sees Joe, padlocking the church door. —Little late for services, preacher?

—Weather not fit for man nor beast, says RC to himself. —Weather not fit for man nor beast, he keeps repeating.

The heat rises off the cracked clay road in waves. The road is empty; RC walks down the middle of it in the uncanny noonday hot.  Hot that can make a body sit down and ponder why he’s out in it and not out of it.

Pascal moves back and forth between the tables and the F-150, lugging foil-covered plastic bowls, plastic jugs of water. Ballard follows her on these journeys with cases of beer and soda pop; smacks her ass when the opportunity presents itself. She shrieks:

—I am too damn old for this tomfoolery!

He sidles up next to her, traps her against a table with his hip, arms full of cases of cans; whispers with his hand on her rounded belly:

—You’re 50, baby; I’d say we got us a goddamned miracle right here.

Lulu drags a wicker chair over the rough wood of the porch so that she is sitting next to the old woman. She pulls out a folder of black-and-white photographs. Ballard leans against the porch railing, eyes scanning down the wash along the side of Athena’s property. Sees some dogs scurrying through the brush.

—There are ghosts in these pictures, Miss Athena. In those days, to make a picture, you had to leave the lens open for a long time. That created … anomalies. People who moved into or out of the frame during the exposure time often left behind ghost images of themselves. You can see some of those in these flood photos.

Athena wears thick boots and carries a shovel and a rucksack. She slogs through ankle-deep mud down the center of the ruined post-flood town, heading up the hill for the church. In the churchyard, the headstones in the burial ground extrude from the earth like ground-down teeth.

He points to a smaller group of graves, some of which have relatively fresh flowers on them but none of which are freshly dug, around an empty fountain and a small stone statue of an angel.

—Yes. Those are ours. All these others are from over the mountain. They come in wagons, sometimes five or six at a time. Can we go inside?

Joe takes his hat off, bows his head in the rain to the rapidly muddying unmarked graves.

To himself: —For all my friends out on the burial ground.

All of these artists found their way into BALLARD the republic of dogs in one way or another.

Francis Bacon

Jackson Pollock

JMW Turner

Philip Guston

Ed Ruscha

Michael Ackerman

Mark Rothko

William Gedney

Stephen Strom

Walker Evans

Robert Frank

Miroslav Tichy

Music that meant a lot to me during the writing of (and probably influenced) BALLARD the republic of dogs:

Bob Dylan—Thunder on the Mountain

Morton Feldman—Rothko Chapel

Bob Dylan—High Water

Gyorgy Ligeti—Viola Sonata (Tabea Zimmerman)

Bob Dylan—Lonesome Day Blues

J.S. Bach—Goldberg Variations (Glenn Gould, ’82 recording)

Rolling Stones—Sympathy for the Devil (Live, ’69)

Rolling Stones—Sway

Bill Evans—Live at The Top of the Gate