Some days you walk into the wind.

We walked the long way out to the whale skeletons last night, down the bus route street, the main traffic artery through the westside. There's always a high wind out there, as much as it's the westside it also heads due north, and we walked the whole way leaning into the wind. Ruby walks behind me to fight the glare in her eyes and the wind blowing against them, pushing on her disease.

It take a while to walk there, especially in the wind. You could get there going down the railroad tracks, but the train rocks are sharp on dog feet, and there's so much broken glass that lines the tracks. It's just how it is on train tracks, always covered with broken bottles. And the dogs are afraid of the gaps in the trestle where it crosses over the big pond. Me too. So we walk the way that goes past the industrial buildings, where they make tea and electronics and scones and biotech goats. Where the shut down construction site blows away, bit by bit, in the wind, nothing but a layer of dust where they promised a shopping mecca and fancy little live work lofts just across the street from the eucalyptus gulch where the heroin sellers used to lurk until they chased them somewhere else. Not sure where they are now, if you look for the beater rv's covered with tarps you'll find them.

A lady stopped me, like people sometimes do, wanting to know what kind of dogs I had. She had on a big sweater, and little short pants. Big sunglasses and a sharp cut bob. Her dogs were llahsa apso rat terriers, with funny teeth and curled up tails. Apso rats, I guess. They wore sweaters that matched the lady's and lunged at my dogs from the sidewalk. My dogs all layed down. They do that for me sometimes, a neato party trick for standing near lunging dogs in sweaters. She asked how it was I could get them to walk so briskly with me. She had been watching me from all the way down the street, from down by the mobile home park. We do walk brisk, me and the dogs.

I said, "They're just good dogs. They like to walk."

And up they came, and off we went. By then the wind was at our back, and we could walk so much faster. The lady with the apso rats faded back in the distance, and then we couldn't see her any more.