A Small Furry Prayer Read Online Free

the “healing room,” littered with cast-off crutches and canes and thousands of notes of gratitude for the thaumaturgy performed by this holy mud.
    It’s a long thirteen hours from California to New Mexico, and by the time I got there I was tired and sore and could have used some of that mud. Worse, I’d left LA in a hurry, throwing on whatever was around and jumping in my truck and only later realizing that whatever was around was perhaps not appropriate. Some dogs, they’ll piss on anything. By the time I’d noticed the stains the road had been hit and the hours logged and it was late evening and pouring rain. I had arrived in downtown Santa Fe, parked, and gone in search of coffee. I was crossing a gas station parking lot when a voice called out to me. I stopped and turned and found a homeless man sitting on the side of the curb. He was dirty and skinny and missing most teeth and both shoes, but took one look at me and said: “Jesus—you got a place to sleep?”
    I had yet to choose a motel, so shook my head no.
    â€œShelter’s two blocks up and one block left,” he said, then looked me over again and added, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got some clean pants you can have.”
    There was no need of pants; there was some need of booze. I bought us a six-pack at the gas station. With no dry spots to be found, we headed over to a nearby park to drink beer under the dead branches of an old tree. Along the way, he recounted a recent speed binge in Tijuana. He was Native American himself, apparently didn’t have much truck with Mexicans.
    â€œFuck-fuckers, throat-slitting, piss-takers,” was how he put it—whatever the hell that means. “But tell you what,” he continued, “damn Mexicans finally figured out how to cook themselves some meth.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that, so we sat in silence for a while. Eventually he took another swig of beer and asked what I was doing in Santa Fe. I didn’t know what to say to that either: There are some demons we kill and some that kill us, and after a while these too become hard to distinguish? Instead, I settled on the truth.
    â€œI came for the dogs.”
    â€œSure as shit,” he said, “ain’t no shortage of those women in this town.”

5
    I bought the house two days later, but by the time the banks were dealt with and the papers signed and the long hours driven back to Los Angeles, we had less than two weeks to spare. Ten days to dismantle our lives and pack up our house and bid our farewells and nobody was getting much sleep, not even the dogs. The phone rang constantly. Whenever anyone asked, Joy said we were leaving California to go run a “real rescue” in New Mexico. A lot of people asked. Eventually I asked as well.
    â€œWe’ve got eight dogs, two humans, and a shoe box for a house—but this isn’t a real rescue?”
    â€œFancy a road trip?” she said.
    This was about five days before we were supposed to leave and I didn’t really fancy a road trip, but what if I didn’t fancy a real rescue either? I had been to Chimayo already and knew that whatever we might find there, it was going to take a while to find it. Our new home had been chosen because of its distance from, not proximity to, civilization. I was about to be up close and personal with this woman and her dreams and not much else. I got dressed. I decided to see what a “real rescue” entailed.
    There are a half dozen real rescues spread across the California’s Central Valley, with actress Tippi Hedren’s Shambala Preserve being the most famous. Shambala is Sanskrit for “peace” and “harmony,” which in Hedren’s case meant “lions” and “tigers.” I have some fond memories of the Ringling Bros. Circus, so a big-cat sanctuary sounded great to me. Joy thought circuses cruel and, since we were moving to