“Why don’t you come about six?” the old man had said. “We’ll set an extra place at the table.” I told him it was quite all right, no sense feeding a stranger, but he’d insisted: “Horseshit. I like to know my pups are getting a good home. There’s a lot of whackos out there these days. Food’s no trouble, got plenty.”
It was a cloudless, blazing summer Saturday, the heat rising off the asphalt in streaks. I’d forgotten my sunglasses and the glare off the hood of my bronze ‘72 Dodge Dart was peeling my eyeballs. How far out could the place be? Twice I backtracked, thinking I’d missed the turn; the guy hadn’t made any reference to distance, just said drive a ways and look out for a white slat fence and cherry trees. Finally, twenty-eight miles from the cutoff, I found it.
I was riding high on an uncharacteristic stroke of good fortune. A couple nights prior, I’d won big at poker at a friend’s in what had started as a long, losing night that had spilled into morning, everyone faded on beer, and blamo!—I get dealt a fucking ace-high flush. Grand slam: two hundred bucks plus, thank you. They’d thought I was bluffing.
Now my wallet, bulging with twenties, floated on the dash giving off a real warm feeling. Instead of blowing my winnings at karaoke night like everybody else, I’d decided to go for something lasting. A companion.
The drive was a pair of ruts that angled through the grove of sweet-smelling cherry trees, over a creaky bridge and across a wide pasture to a farm house and barn. The house and barn were backed against a rock embankment stretching skyward maybe seventy feet. In the distance stood a snow-peaked mountain range.
I parked in the dried gumbo lot next to a blue 60’s Cadillac. A gold rusted-out Lincoln was jacked up at the side of the barn and missing its front wheels; beside it a transmission lay on the ground overgrown with yellow grass and weeds. I looked at my watch. It was almost six-thirty.
The old man pushed aside the wooden screen door and stepped onto the porch. “You’re late,” he said. He looked like Don Murray, in the face and overall, the way he’d looked opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop—skinny, cowboy hat, big belt with a big buckle, tight cowboy shirt—only older and white-haired.
“Sorry,” I said as I walked up and shook his dusty hand. “Got lost.”
“Yeah, that seems to be the way around here. Food’s still good, we kept wait since you’re new. There’s coffee and tea, brandy. Or, if you’d like a beer…”
“Coffee’s fine,” I said. “By the way, I’m Jim.”
“I figured that much,” he said through a grin. “I’m Charley.”
Charley led me into the house. The living room floor was covered with newspapers, except for narrow pathways of exposed, unfinished planks that snaked about. A sharp, acrid smell rose from small brown stains coating the newspapers on the floor. The furniture was worn bald and ragged—bits of stuffing showing in spots—and a dinosaur Sylvania console tv stood against one wall. The windowshades were closed. Dim dirty chandeliers cast an orangish hue over the room. Dust covered everything.
I followed Charley along one of the paths into the dining room where he seated me at a huge table laden with pork chops, apple sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, black-eyed peas, and salad. A stout woman wearing a yellow flowered summer dress pushed through the kitchen door carrying a steaming basket of dinner rolls. Charley said, “Jim, this is my wife El.” She looked to be in her mid-sixties, short with a thick middle, bulky arms, frosty brown hair.
“Good to meet you,” I said. “Food looks great.” El looked at me with lost eyes and walked back into the kitchen.
“That’s just El,” said Charley as he handed me a mug. The coffee was very hot and felt like razors on my tongue. I was already sweat-soaked from the heat of the dying day. “Sure you don’t want a beer?” Charley asked.
“On second thought,” I said, accepting.
Charley got up and headed toward the rear of the house. El came in with plates. She dished up the food, set a full plate before me, and sat down to eat without a word. The dining room was much brighter than the living room—almost cheery—and very tidy. The windows were open and a breeze drifted in. Along the walls hung many painted portraits of famous people; Lenin, Nixon, Kissinger, Elvis, The Duke, Jimmy Stewart, and more.
“Do you paint?” I asked of the squat, aged woman.
“Charley’s,” she said, keeping her attention on her plate.
I said, “I’ve come to look at the dogs.”
El knew what I was there for, and she said so, and kept eating. “How do you like the dogs?” I asked. “I’ve never owned one.”
“Dogs is dogs,” she said. Then, “They’re Charley’s. He knows how to keep ‘em. Ask him.”
Charley returned with two bottles of Miller High Life and I asked him about the paintings. He said it was an old hobby of his, that he’d wanted to be a paid artist when he was young.
“You’ve got a talent,” I offered.
“Yeah, well, you make decisions in life, Jim. Things happen.”
We ate and I thanked El and she gathered up the dishes and took them into the kitchen silently. Charley removed a bit of chewing tobacco from a pouch and packed it under his lip. He offered me a pinch but I declined. He took me into the sitting room—his name for the living room—and instructed me to sit while we finished our beers. He managed to drink his beer right over his chaw, and occasionally he’d bend over the side of the recliner and spit a wad of tobacco juice onto the floor. That explained the newspapers. Charley caught me looking at his recent deposit and said, “Might as well be comfortable in your own home, Jim.” He pointed to the newspapers. “Better than worryin’ about the floor all the time. Just wad ‘em up and throw ‘em out when they get bad.”
Charley told me that the house was built around the turn of the century by a sometimes-crooked judge, who’d ranched and gardened as a pastime. He explained that he’d acquired the house from the judge’s kids after the old crapper had kicked off, some years ago when a decent working man, even with an artist’s heart, could afford to own his own home. He made a vague reference to “the war,” something about serving his dues and now figuring into the scheme of things as surplus retired military: “Noncommissioned nada.” I finished my beer slowly while Charley talked and spit. Finally he said, “How about we go look at those dogs, huh?” and scooped up my empty bottle. He pitched the two bottles into a barrel on the front porch and we walked out into the waning sun.
The old man pulled his hat down against the pinkening horizon, squinting at the toes of his steel-tipped boots kicking up dust. His awkward, choppy strut had a strange buoyancy as if he’d just stepped off a fast-moving elevator. I followed him toward the door of the barn. Halfway there, he stopped and turned to me and said, “Don’t mind the wife, Jim. Sometimes she seems sore when she ain’t. She’s had a hard one, that’s all.”
“Bad day?”
“Bad luck. It can be hard on a woman, I tell you what.” He nodded to me morosely. “Her first boy died when he was three years old, bit by a water moccasin, and I believe her spirit flew off right there on the spot, right along with that baby’s. Sometimes it’s hard for a woman, getting over things.” He squinted and looked off toward the mountains pensively. “There was a time when you could look at her and you’d see a light.”
He said the episode with the snake had happened in South Carolina, some forty-five years ago. I asked if it was their only child and he said no, but she never really seemed to have her heart in the raising of the others, not like the first. “She’s had other troubles too. Her daddy was killed in a bar fight when she was just thirteen, then one of her brothers was killed in the war, the other one an armed-robber.” He shook his head. “What can you say, Jim? After the boy died… nothing.”
I mentioned that he seemed okay, and he said he looked at life differently. He felt it was important to live in a place more than you die in it, and he figured that El had been dying just about most of her life. He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s just bad luck, grabs ahold of you and doesn’t let go.”
Charley pointed out across the pasture. A large cluster of orange-brown cattle hovered in a far corner of the property, around a place where the creek widened into a marshy pool. “Scottish Highlanders,” said Charley. They had long shaggy coats and reminded me of miniature buffalo. “Smaller than regular cattle. Meat’s better, more real—hearty. And no hormones. Course, we mostly just raise ‘em to look at. Sort of an oddity, you know. We’ve got forty acres out here altogether. On days like this, they like to go out there and wallow in the mud pit.”
Charley took me into the barn. It had been converted into a kennel; ten large pens made of chain-link fencing. Each pen contained an adult dog, except one empty pen and another which housed a female and a litter of puppies. Charley said the father was chained up out back of the barn. “He was getting rambunctious so we took him out of the equation.”
There were seven blue-gray pups; Weimaraners, just what I came for. Most of the dogs there were Weimaraners. There was one pair of Gordon setters.
“These here are ready to go,” said Charley motioning toward the puppies. “They got papers too. And don’t worry about bad ones. I never inbreed ‘em.” He told me about all the problems with purebred dogs, about how after centuries of inbreeding they’d become genetically worthless, doomed to skin and hip problems, hair loss, blindness, even bad temperaments. “But I make sure brothers and sisters from my litters never get involved,” he said. “Bad medicine.”
If I didn’t want one of the Weimaraners, he said he would have some Gordon setters coming up in a few months.
I said, “I’ve always wanted a Weimaraner.”
“Yeah, they’re my favorite too.”
I walked through the cage rows to the rear of the barn. Hay lay about the dirt floor and dangled over the edges of rafters, and rusted tools leaned against posts or hung from hooks like a scene out of Americana Postcardland. The back of the barn sagged as if resting its haunches, and there was a huge hole in the roof with bits of shingle drooping inward. Through the gap, the high rock face of the cliff stretched to the pale sky. “Jesus,” I said. “Looks like this place was hit by a meteor.”
Charley studied the hole soberly. He said, “Practically was.”
Before I could ask what he meant by that, a low rumble started outside. Through the wide door I could see a red Dodge Charger hauling ass up the drive, spitting dust and rocks everywhere. “Shit,” said Charley. “Here comes trouble.” The driver slammed the brakes and the car slid to a stop next to the Caddy, a khaki cloud sliding over it and dissipating against the house.
A dirt-streaked, long-haired man, wearing jeans and no shirt, hopped out of the driver’s side of the Charger holding a nearly-empty 40 ounce bottle of Lucky Lager. He was lean and tan and had a tattoo of St. Sebastian packed full of arrows across his back. A blond woman got out of the passenger side carrying a white-haired boy in overalls who looked to be about two or three years old. The woman was slender and exuded a jouncy, careless sex-appeal, wearing jeans and low-cut peasant blouse. Neither of them saw us, and they headed up to the porch and into the house. “We better go see what they want,” said Charley.
We walked into the house and the man turned to give Charley a big earnest grin. “Hey, old man,” he said. He looked about my age, late twenties/early thirties, with a scruffy face and big brown eyes. The woman put the boy down and he ran to the man’s side, who picked him up and set him in the crook of his arm. El stood at the edge of the dining room, looking the scene over.
The new guy turned, held out his free hand to me, and said, “Mom says you come out for a dog. My name’s Doug.”
I took his hand and gave it a light shake. “Mine’s Jim,” I said.
Doug’s grin broadened. “No kidding?” he said. “So’s my boy’s here.” He squished his nose against the child’s forehead. “You hear that Jim? This guy’s a Jim too. Two Jims in the house!” He faced me again and pointed to the woman. “This is my wife, Cheryl.” I shook her hand. She had soft, searching eyes and a nice body but her pallor was sallow and bags swelled beneath her eyes—lifelong smoker, maybe.
“What do you say, Jim?” Doug said, lightly slapping my shoulder. “Want a beer?”
Charley had his hat off and was running his fingers through his thick greasy white hair, looking toward the floor. “Well I just came for the dog,” I said.
“Oh come on, Jim. It’s a hot day out and you’re already here. A beer ain’t gonna hurt ya.”
“Okay,” I conceded. This kind of generosity of character wasn’t something I was used to, and I was enjoying it.
“Great. I’ll be back in a sec.” Doug put the boy down and ran out to his car.
Little Jim immediately went to the hall closet and pulled out a bunch of big yellow Tonka trucks, put them into a red wagon, and began to drag them outside. “Look mom,” said the boy. “A backhoe, and a dump truck, and a crane, and a bulldozer.” He walked out the front door, hauling the toys behind him absently.
Just as the screen door was about to slap back against the doorjamb, Doug jumped through it wearing an oversized pinkish flowered shirt and carrying a half-rack of Miller and a videocassette. He held up the tape. “Look mom,” he said. “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. It’s got Steve Martin and John Candy. You love John Candy, remember?”
“The fat one?”
“Yeah.” He turned to me. “Hey Jim, come with me. We’ll go out back and drink these.” I looked to Charley, and he just raised his eyebrows and held out his palms deferentially.
Doug led me out the back door and set the box of beer down on the steps. He cracked a couple and handed me one, then began digging around in his jeans pocket. He looked up at me with a salacious grin. “Hey Jim? D’you smoke?” he said. I guessed from his delivery he wasn’t talking about cigarettes. He abruptly shoved a tiny square bag of marijuana at me. I shook my head no, and he broke apart a bud and stuffed a chunk into a small metal pipe. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said.
“Look,” I said. “Maybe I should just get my dog and—”
Doug laughed. “Jesus Jim. Lighten up. Where’s your spirit? Besides, isn’t the Old Man still testing you out? Who says you’ll even make it out of here tonight with dog in hand?”
I sipped my beer, wondering if Doug did this with everyone or if something about me made him feel inordinately comfortable. He took a deep drag off the pipe and sat momentarily with a stupefied near-grin, then began to cough. Little Jim was audibly room-a-zooming as he played with the Tonkas in the flower garden alongside the house.
I took a couple gulps waiting for Doug to empty his pipe into his lungs. The caved-in rear of the barn was obvious from where I stood, and looked as though it might drag the whole thing down any second. “Hey,” Doug said to me, a smile wrapping up his face. “Did the Old Man tell you about his name?”
“No.” I finished my beer and Doug handed me another before I had time to set the empty bottle down.
“He didn’t tell you his last name was Reynolds? Charley Reynolds, spelled C-H-A-R-L-E-Y, named after Lonesome Charley Reynolds, famous scout during the Indian wars? Charley Reynolds, who rode with Major Reno under General George Armstrong Custer, that fateful day of The Last Stand? The old man loves to tell that crap.” Doug paused and downed his beer, saying thoughtfully, “Maybe he’s lost hold of his memory. Shit, I used to tell my history teachers about how Lonesome Charley was a distant uncle of mine. Until one of them told me he was basically a butt boy to that prissy Yellow Hair’s family. Military family you know, the Custers. They were all there at The Stand.” Doug unleashed a sudden bitterness with the last statement. “Fucking old man,” he concluded.
I was beginning to feel a slight tang crawling through my skull. “What about the hole in the roof of the barn?” I asked, randomly attempting to steer Doug away from his disgust.
He burst out laughing. “Oh, that. That one really nailed the old man, suspicious old bastard.” He told me the hole had been there since he was a kid, around eight years old. One night, just coming on one o’clock, the family was jolted awake by an explosion—the five of them: Dad, Mom, Doug, and Doug’s older brother and sister. They’d all run to the window, and, in the light of the moon there sagged the barn, smoke and dust rising in the night. What they found really freaked Charley out. “Made him start to wonder about things,” said Doug grinning, crossing his eyes and whirling his finger at his temple.
“It was just a car. Wheels in the air and smashed flat as a pancake. Hell, we were expecting a flying saucer, not a ’55 Chev—what it turned out to be. But the old man, he took it as a sign.” Apparently, there was a road above, some distance back from the cliff, and the car had missed a corner, plowed through hundreds of yards of thick brush, and sailed over the embankment. “He went on and on about how easily it could have landed on the house and killed us all,” said Doug.
Later a note had been found pointing to suicide. A fifteen-year-old kid.
“Killed some of the dogs,” Doug said. “Three I think. The old man said it was shitty luck. Part of some ongoing fucked up thing with this family he thought he’d got away from out here. He said that kid brought death back to this place and left it here for us. Like it would seep in and eat us from the inside out. Jesus.”
Doug finished his second beer and stood up and said, “I know you came for a dog Jim, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to see a man about a horse.” He walked off around the front of the barn. I cracked a third beer and began to drink. Little Jim was still playing with his trucks and I watched him for awhile. When I heard footsteps coming from the barn I looked up to see Doug walking toward me with his right hand buried in his crotch. He said, “Shit Jim, I almost forgot,” and pulled his hand out, wrapped around a small black pistol. “It’s so comfy down there I didn’t even feel it.”
I automatically backed up toward the steps, but I was a little drunk and stumbled, dropped my beer. “Grab it quick before it all gets out of the bottle,” Doug urged, moving toward me. I scooped up the bottle and set it on the steps. “Damn,” said Doug giving me a Clint Eastwood squint. “You’re drunker than me and I had a forty on the way here. You some kind of lightweight?” Then he swung his arm around and flinched as he popped off a round that splintered a fencepost near the barn about fifty feet away. The dogs inside started to bark wildly.
At the sound of the shot, Little Jim abandoned his trucks and came running over squealing with joy, “Daddy shoot. Daddy shoot.”
Doug looked down at him and said sternly, “Daddy’s drunk, Jimmy. Go find somewheres else to play.” The little boy pooched out his bottom lip. “Now!” said Doug. “I mean it.” He patted the boy on the butt and scooted him along. Little Jim walked off, mumbling disgustedly under his breath.
Doug put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a light shake. “Don’t look so worried, Jimbo,” he said. “All part of the Hooterville hooplah. Here.” He handed me the pistol. “You try. We’ll set up some cans. There’s a whole bunch back here from over the years.” Doug ran to the fence and started pulling cans out of the tall grass and placing them along the rail.
There was a whine and an excited yelp from just behind the barn. Doug jumped. “Fucking dog,” he said. “The old man doesn’t like the fathers around the pups. Always tying ’em up out here. Scared the piss out of me.”
“What is this?” I asked, holding the gun out.
“Just a .38. There’s more ammo in the beer case. Ever shoot one before?”
“No.”
“Well, keep it pointed at the ground till I get back over there.” I held the grip tightly, keeping my finger away from the trigger.
Doug got back to me and we each shot off a few rounds. At first I had some trouble because I was locking my elbow and holding my arm too stiffly out of nervousness. And because I was a little drunk and in mild shock from being confronted by a drunken stranger with a gun. Doug nailed a couple cans which went leaping off into the air like miniature back-flipping acrobats. The closest I got was about an inch to the left of a coffee can, but Doug said I was getting the hang of it.
When we finished, Doug told me that he’d just wanted to let off steam before the day slipped away completely. He said he used to roar down the highway out front going eighty, drinking and shooting out street lights on restless nights like these, but now that he was older and more responsible he got rid of his anxieties during safe hours of daylight.
We were both sweating heavily and opened another beer each. I felt the coolness popping out of my pores as fast as I put it in. Eventually Doug lifted his shirt and stuck the gun back into his jeans, wiped his cold bottle across his forehead. The sun was nearly gone over the horizon.
He wanted to know how I happened to be in this place and I explained that a friend had told me about the dogs.
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Jerry Laughler.”
“Nope, don’t remember him,” he said, as though he expected to know everyone who’d ever been to the farm.
Jerry was a bartender I’d come to know over the years. He’d heard through a friend of a friend about the “old character out in the hills” who raised Weimaraners. A kind of legend. Said he’d get me the number, which is what he did.
Doug popped his knuckles, grabbing each one separately and twisting sideways. “The old man’s had those dogs since before toilet paper and Wal-Mart,” he said. “I’m twenty-eight. My brother Randy’s almost forty, and the dogs have been around longer than him. Not the same dogs of course, but same thing anyway.” Doug pulled a smashed pack of Marlboros out of a pants pocket and offered me one. I declined and he went ahead and lit up. He said, “The old guy’s pretty weird about how he gets tangled up in things. Seems like a lot of times he doesn’t have room for much else. He’s never been too happy with us kids ’cause none of us takes life too seriously. He’s always been an old man.” He laughed smugly. “I got my wife and I got my kid and that’s something.”
It was dusk and I was drunk. There were three beers left out of the twelve. Doug tried to give me the pipe again, but I grinned no. He shrugged and reloaded it for himself. “Shit,” he said. “I got kicked out of a house once for offering to smoke out my landlord. He just wasn’t as cool as I thought.”
Doug and I stumbled in through the back door and everyone was in the dining room, at the table. El got up and took a stack of dirty dishes into the kitchen as we entered. Jimmy was eating a piece of cherry pie with ice cream—a good deal of it on his face—while Cheryl worked at some potatoes with gravy and a bowl of salad. Charley was telling her about how the wooden mailbox he’d made, shaped like a doghouse, had been terrorized by some boys up the road: used condom in it one week, dead possum the next; finally they’d planted it in the middle of his field, filled it with cow shit, and torched it. He ended the story quickly when he noticed us. “Heard the shootin’,” he said.
Doug ignored him.
“Dad wouldn’t let me shoot,” piped Little Jim with a growl.
Doug tousled the little boy’s white hair. He said, “Little Grumpy sounds ready for bed.” The boy looked up and Doug said, “You know what cranky means, kiddo. It means it’s past your bedtime.” Jimmy’s face got all pouty as he worked slowly on his pie. Doug hollered toward the kitchen door, “Hey Mom, we wanna start the movie now okay?”
Charley took a bottle of brandy and a glass from a windowed hutch. “Feel like a taste?” he asked bleakly.
“Really, no,” I said, holding up my palms.
We followed Doug along one of the pathways between newspapers into the sitting room and Charley said to me, nodding toward his son, “I hope he didn’t put you off too much. Sometimes he’s like to be quite a whirlwind.”
“I’m all right,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was already after nine-thirty. “Hey, Charley, I don’t think I’m going to stick around for the movie.”
“Sure,” Charley said. “Yeah. Just let me get a drink in me.” He dropped into his recliner, kicked his feet up.
I felt trapped, not knowing how to respond. I suppose I could’ve made some claim about prior obligations. But Charley was just probably trying to show me his best hospitality, give me a dose of his common decency despite the chaos around him. I sat down on the couch, taking count-five breaths—exhale—to keep the passing minutes from ticking my nerves.
Doug pulled the dust cover from a VCR on top of the tv cabinet. He loaded the tape and white noise exploded into the room. Charley put a chaw in his lip. He poured himself a drink. As I slumped there, preparing to sit through another couple hours of lazy-day down-home funnin’, Cheryl’s voice suddenly ripped squalling from the kitchen. “Doug! Doug!” she hollered. “Oh my god, Help! Char-ley!”
Doug turned an open-mouthed stare toward the wall and fell into a run. The old man and I were up just as quick, following on his heels, charging through the swinging kitchen door and crashing into each other like keystone cops against Cheryl, who stood arched like a cat and gaping. The kitchen was yellow and bright and immaculate, with a breakfast table and chairs at one end, and a floor so well waxed your reflection rose up to meet you. I stood aside of Charley and followed Cheryl’s gaze toward the floor by the table. The smell of bleach and lemons pervaded. Cheryl’s hands stroked absently about her neck and cheeks, clearing away spectral cobwebs; then, registering Doug’s nearness, she locked onto his arm with a gasp. There, jutting out from behind the table, was a pair of stumpy veined bare legs.
“Oh shit,” I heard Doug say.
I instinctively headed for El’s limp body. She lay almost in a sitting position against the wall, her chin forward upon her chest, eyes closed. There was a chair pulled out from the table, and her position indicated that she’d either slipped from it, or missed trying to sit down. El’s expressionless face contained a sublime peace that momentarily gave me pause, as if disturbing it amounted to something profane. I put my hand under her head and quickly slid her flat onto the floor.
I couldn’t remember exactly how or in what order things were supposed to go, so I just started in. No one else was doing anything but staring. I pinched El’s nose and held her jaw open and breathed hard into her mouth. Her eyes were closed and she felt like a lead-filled dummy under me. I paused for a few seconds, keeping her mouth open as the air wheezed out slowly, then I filled her lungs again. I did this four times.
“Can I do something?” asked Doug.
“Call 911,” I said. I looked up at the three of them standing dumb. Charley wore a vexed, angry expression. Doug walked out of the room to get the phone.
I climbed on top of El and felt around through her flowered dress for the little button at the bottom of her rib cage. When I found it, I put my hands together palms down on her chest and pumped down hard with all my weight, over and over and over, at one-second intervals. I counted to ten, then I went back to breathing into her mouth. I continued this process, not knowing if I was helping or hurting or not making a difference at all as El’s muscles and bones jolted and shuddered under my weight.
A flicker shot across El’s eyelids and I jumped. I put my ear down on her chest and heard a thrumming. When I lifted myself up, her eyes were open and looking around groggily. Cheryl was sobbing loudly behind me.
“She’s okay,” I said over my shoulder. “Are you okay?” I asked El. She stared into my eyes and nodded slowly.
El was not easy to move, limp and bulky, but I lifted her onto the chair where she leaned back in a distant haze, staring about the room at all the faces staring back.
Doug breathed heavily and groaned for a beer.
I looked to Charley who had been completely wooden staring at his fallen wife, but who snapped out of it with Doug’s words. He gave his son a blank look and rasped, “Beer’s out back.” He pulled the can of tobacco out of his pocket and stuffed in a fresh pinch.
Doug said he knew where the beers were,and started to walk off, but his bawling wife shoved him disgustedly and said she was getting the fuck out of there.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Doug. Charley watched Cheryl and sucked on his chaw of tobacco, casually spitting into a cup he must have picked up while I was working on El.
“You guys make me sick,” yelled Cheryl. She was flushed and heaving, her eyes brimming tears, shining in the harsh light. She threw a pointing finger toward El, screaming, strands of gluey residue clinging to her lips, “This is your mother, you bastard! She just had a stroke or heart attack or something. Show some concern!”
Doug said, “It was scary while it was happening, Cheryl. It was. But she’s okay now, okay? So relax. You need a beer.”
Cheryl exploded. “You don’t know if she’s okay you son of a bitch you don’t know a god-damned thing she could be permanently brain-damaged right now for all you know she needs to go to the hospital. She needs to be looked at!”
“I don’t think I’m brain-damaged,” said El meekly.
“Call 911 back and tell ‘em to cancel the ambulance,” said Charley.
Cheryl started ranting about Doug working long hours at the cheese factory and getting drunk every night with his scumbag friends and not coming home till all hours, then sleeping all day, and what kind of god-damned life is that? Her mother’d told her to leave him long ago, and she should have listened, but of course she listened to her stupid heart instead and made herself believe things would work out. He was a selfish bastard and didn’t give a shit about Jimmy or her or anybody but himself and she was leaving.
“If you don’t like it, get a job!” said Doug. “Maybe you’ll quit being such a bitch all the time.”
“I can’t! I’ve got Jimmy—I’m not leaving him at a day-care. Not with all the psychos out there.” Cheryl headed for the doorway but Doug blocked her way. Her eyes surged aflame. “You asshole,” she said with a searing hate. She turned, marched across the room, and took up a large gleaming carving knife. She said, “I’m leaving, you son of a bitch, and I’m taking Jimmy with me.”
Charley spit into his cup next to me. His eyes were blank. El was still goofy, sitting at attention like a schoolgirl.
Doug laughed. “You think that little knife is gonna hurt me?” he said. “You just try it baby.”
“You’re drunk,” said Cheryl. She walked toward him, toward the door behind him, using the knife point as an axis, but Doug reached into his pants and pulled out the .38. Cheryl faltered momentarily, then her look of surprise curled into a sneer. “Your gun doesn’t scare me, bastard,” she scorned.
“Put down that knife.” Doug said coolly. “Put it over on the counter, bitch.”
“Or what?”
“Why don’t you find out?”
Cheryl tried to maneuver past Doug through the doorway, keeping the knife point close to his belly. He grabbed her neck and she pricked him through his shirt. “Owww!” he wailed, and in one fast thrust knocked her on her ass sliding across the slick floor to the other side of the room. “You cunt!” His face was swelling to a flushed pulp, and I was sure he would kill her. He brought his hand away from his stomach and there was blood on his fingertips.
“Doug,” I said. “Please put down the gun. You’re drunk and I’m here and I don’t want to see anybody die and I don’t want to die and your little boy is upstairs.” He turned to me with a curious expression, as if watching two scenes flicker back and forth so fast he couldn’t distinguish which one was real. A vacuum of silence filled the space around us. It felt like the moment of reckoning before a major Biblical event.
“Please,” I said. “Please put the gun down. This is crazy. I don’t even know why I’m here. I just came for a dog.”
Doug held his hand out to me covered with blood. His eyes were glossy and his nostrils pumped. Cheryl was on her feet now, standing at the other end of the room with her knife at the ready.
Charley said, “Go call 911 back, boy. Cancel that ambulance.”
I wanted to tear out of there—out the side door of the kitchen, out the back door of the house—but I was afraid to leave and wind up reading about the scene the next morning in the paper; I felt somehow responsible just by being present. Doug stood quietly, with his gun and his bloody stomach. He looked at the floor and walked out of the room.
“She needs medical attention, damn you all,” said Cheryl turning the blade on Charley now.
The old man shrugged. “Well, I suppose I’ll take her in the car, then. Ambulance is a waste of everybody’s time.” Cheryl rolled her eyes and roared, stomping out of the kitchen with what I took to be amazement at the abounding stupidity.
Charley helped El out of the chair, put his arm through hers, and together they started their long, slow journey to the car. They hobbled in tandem, looking like a pair of ancient convicts ducking out of a chain gang.
Doug was just getting off the phone in the living room. The gun was no longer in his hand. He said he’d called 911 and the dispatcher said she’d cancel the ambulance. Cheryl reappeared, marching quickly through the room over the soiled newspapers, past us all as we stood momentarily dispossessed of motivation. She had Jimmy thrown over a shoulder, sleeping as if nothing strange ever happened in life. Doug asked her where she thought she was going and she said the hell away from him and his crazy family. “I’m not going to end up like this,” she said pointing to her silent mother-in-law. “Why don’t you just stay here with your nutcase dad? You two deserve each other. Drink yourselves silly.” Doug tried to block her way again, but Cheryl still had the knife handy and just missed giving him another poke as he jumped to the side.
Jimmy opened his eyes, dusted in a layer of sleep and squinting. “Mommy,” he groaned, “I’m hungry.” Cheryl told him they would be home soon and there was a banana in the car and to go back to sleep.
“What happened to Daddy?” asked Jim, seeing the bloody shirt.
“Daddy scratched himself, sweetie. He’s going to stay here and take care of it.” Jimmy flopped his head onto her shoulder and slipped away again into dreamland.
Cheryl walked out the front door, Doug following after. He was yelling about how ridiculous she was being and how she didn’t give him any reasons for anything, so what was he supposed to do?
“You’re drunk, and you won’t listen anyway,” said Cheryl as she climbed into the car. She held up the keys like a trophy. “Time to start paying attention,” she said with a murderous glare. She started the car and roared it backward.
I was on the porch spotting for Charley in case El became too much for him to handle while he prodded her forward. It was well after dark and the moon was half-full above us and the air was still warm. The automatic porch lights had come on at dusk in the front and back of the house. Doug yelled, “I’m not that drunk,” toward the taillights of the deserting automobile. Then he said under his breath, “Drunk has nothing to do with it. Just an excuse.” He pulled his shirt off and howled like a mad dog toward the dark prairies in the distance, then strutted off around the side of the house.
Charley and I each took one of El’s arms and were helping her toward the Cadillac when we heard a gunshot. We set El abruptly onto her butt and ran toward the sound. I was ahead of Charley and rounded the edge of the porch to see Doug standing at the rear of the house, in a tent of dim yellow light cast by a bulb hanging above the back door.
Charley veered off toward the barn and I heard the doors slide open. A floodlight suddenly blasted Doug and me from the roof line of the barn. “Are you okay?” I asked Doug. I was worried he’d shot himself and just hadn’t fallen down yet. Then a loud high-pitched howl erupted from the edge of the house, and I saw movement on the ground, a dark form trembling in the shadows. Doug raised his pistol and there was a loud flash and the movement stopped.
I heard footsteps, and Charley said from behind me, “Doug, you back away from there now. Hear? Get the fuck away from my dog and you unload that pistol.” Doug pulled out of his daze and looked at Charley. The old man was standing next to me with a shotgun in his hands.
Doug dropped the .38 into the dirt and backed away. Charley angled slowly over to the dead dog and bent down. “Why?” he said. “Why did you kill Stan?” He put his hand on the dog and cooed gently, “Poor Stanislov. Such a good boy. Such a good boy.” His eyes glistened.
“I hate your fucking dogs,” growled Doug. He was sitting on the back steps now, slumped over, elbows on his knees, shaking his head.
“What?”
“I hate your fucking dogs!” he hollered. “I came back here and that mutt was whining and whimpering…” He snorted, tossed his hands. “Fuck him. I just didn’t want him to be here anymore, I guess. Anywhere. That dog has been too much a part of everything already.”
Charley lifted the dog onto his lap and his face was all squeezed up, looking back and forth from the dog to his son, shaking his head. “Stan hasn’t done anything to you,” he said. “He’s never done anything to anybody.”
“What do you have, old man?” Doug said. The two stared at each other with separate ferocities. Doug answered his own question, “Nothing. Not a shit-ass kernel of nothing. You’re pathetic.”
Charley said, “Keep away from my dogs.”
Doug laughed. “Fuck your dogs,” he said. “Cry, old man. People die, the world goes on. Everywhere, the world goes on. Except for you and those god-damned dogs. And me. What would life be without the dogs? What then, huh?”
Charley stood up with the shotgun pointed at Doug and told him to get the hell up. “You come with me to take your mother to the hospital, then I’m taking you back to your place where you can rot. Then I’m gonna come home and bury Stan. Now go get in the car.” He gestured with the shotgun. Doug laughed again and walked off toward the car.
Charley said to me with tears in his eyes, “Too much death in that boy.” He reached down and patted the dead animal once more, then he leaned the shotgun against the back steps and told me to come on.
We went into the barn where a lighted bulb hung from a rafter in a large circle of yellow. The dogs were excited and nervously jumping about, except for the mother with her puppies gathered into her. Charley said the dogs smelled the death on us. He told me Stanislov was his best dog; always happy, loyal, healthy. He didn’t expect to find another one so good.
I looked over the steel grey puppies. Charley unlocked a padlock on the door of the pen and stepped inside. He stirred up the lazy mess as the mother offered a nervous wag of her tail. Charley told me to pick one.
I didn’t spend a long time deciding. I pointed to a pup who had a strong look to him; independent, energetic. “Don’t worry about the money,” said Charley. “What you did for El was payment enough.” He held the puppy up and looked into its droopy complacent eyes. “I like this little guy.” He handed it to me.
“Use good food,” he said. “Use good food and he’ll love you for it.”
We stepped through the chain-link door and Charley clicked the padlock together, then I followed him outside. My dog was whimpering, quaking softly in my arms as its head bobbed with my footsteps.
Doug had helped El into the Caddy. I could see them waiting in the darkness. Charley nodded to me and turned and strutted toward the big car, mumbling absently to himself. When he reached the driver’s side door he paused, hand on the door handle, staring down through his own encompassing fog, then climbed in.
A moment later, the Cadillac was undulating along the dark dirt tracks into the night. The puppy and I watched it leaving together.
I plopped the dog onto the passenger seat of the Dart, then pulled the wad of bills out of my pants and stuffed it under the front door of the house, keeping twenty dollars for myself as consolation for I’m not sure what.
There was a warm breeze, and I listened to its silence. The quiet felt overwhelmingly good. Distinctive. Suddenly, ten thousand crickets started fiddling. Something in the moment struck me then, got me thinking about a man I’d come to admire in my early twenties, back in my college days. R. Buckminster Fuller. Someone I’d nearly forgotten about, a lover of silence—a man, who, for example, recognized television as a font of babbling distraction and who’d ceased vocal communication altogether so he could concentrate on the composition of the physical universe. A man who walked the beach. Quiet, even amidst the natural clamor. Modern transcendentalist.
I climbed into my old car that warm silent night, blood pulsing thick in my hot ears, and looked down at the tiny grey Weimaraner staring up at me hopefully from the passenger seat, his tail tossing his rear-end side to side. “Come on Bucky,” I said. “Let’s get you to your new home.” And he licked his chops, yawned, and stretched in a nervous way that seemed to me to suggest agreement.
END