Spirit Gum and Four-legged Dogs

‘This is impossibly impossible’, said the shamble leg man. ‘How can it be that a dog with three legs can run faster than one with four? Like a plague-cart missing a wheel or a radio without a channel-dial. I saw it with my very own eyes, I did, running to beat the band, the four legged dog chamfered in its wake. It was bloody well amazing, a seventh wonder of the world, a whirling dervish in a fez and billow-skirt’. The alms woman shifted her shoulder-strap from one knuckle of bone to another and smiled, a black hole like spirit gum bracketing the space between two bicuspids and a loose eyetooth. ‘Dogs don’t run they trot; have you no eyes in your head?’ The shamble leg man released a billow of parish air, his forehead a bead-game of crinkles and reeds and said, ‘I have, I assure you that madam, and damn good ones at that.’ The shamble leg man had spent the night sleeping in a Red Indian Flour Co. sac behind the church and had somehow inhaled a rectories’ worth of church air, perhaps from a leaky air vent or the throw-away value from the pipe organ. When he awoke, which he did about nine am, he spat up a gob of eel-black spittle and a quarter’s worth of votive wax, a gob or two of which got stuck in the take-away valve in his throat. ‘I’ve know of dog’s that could fly,’ he said, clearing his throat as he did, ‘some that could swim faster than a dolphin and jump higher than a pole-vaulter.’ The alms woman sneered, her eyes closing into the seam of her brow, the smell of cumin thickening the midday air. You see she had slept behind the Jewish baker’s the night before, wrapped up tight as a sausage in a Duckworth’s sleeping bag, the zipper clove to her cheekbone.