Dog Run Moon (3 page)

Sid found himself nodding in agreement with Montana Bob. It was a nearly involuntary movement and he had to force himself to stop.

“You dumb bastard. I don't even know what to do to you. But, also, I guess you done it plenty to yourself. What do you think, Charlie Chaplin?”

Sid looked up into the pale, dirt-and-tear-streaked face of the accountant. He tried to read what was there but came up blank. Charlie Chaplin knelt creakily and untied his Top-Siders. He kicked them off his feet toward Sid and then turned to climb on the ATV, his socks startlingly white from the ankle down. Silently, Montana Bob took his seat in front of Charlie Chaplin and drove away, his accountant clinging to his waist from behind, his dog padding along at the end of the chain.

It was a long time before Sid could get to his feet and walk, slowly retracing his bloody tracks. It was even longer before the pain made him slip the Top-Siders over his ruined soles, feeling when he did, at once something like balm and betrayal. With the shoes he was somehow more naked than before, and he faced the reality of shuffling back to town, no longer unfettered, just exposed. He thought then about going for it, turning east and just continuing on till he either evaporated or made it, collapsing in a heap on her porch. Begging her to wash his feet.

I
t was June 21, the longest day of the year, and the snow on Beartooth pass was still eight feet high on either side of the road. Dale drove Jeannette and her two boys up there. It was seventy degrees when they left town, at least twenty degrees cooler when they got to the top. They glissaded down the soft edges of the glacier and had a snowball fight. The sun at that altitude was close and they all got a little burned. Later that evening, back at her house, Dale grilled hamburgers, and they ate on the porch. The creek that normally trickled through her backyard was on the rise, noisy, the color of watery chocolate milk.

After dinner Jeannette rubbed aloe on the boys' red cheeks and put them, complaining, to bed. “Its not even dark yet,” he heard the oldest one say. “I can't go to sleep when it's light.”

“You've had a big day,” Jeannette said. “You just don't know you're tired yet.”

She came back out on the porch with a beer for him and a glass of wine for herself. She had the bottle of aloe too and she sat on his lap. She rubbed in the lotion, working it into the skin on his neck, his ear lobes, his cheekbones. Jeannette had small hands, strong fingers, blunt nails. Before she'd met her husband she'd been a massage therapist. She told Dale that when they got married her husband hadn't
quite
demanded that she stop working. “He was always good at that, making demands seem like something less. I was a good massage therapist. And I enjoyed it. He said it was too sensual. He didn't like me doing that with other men.”

“Too sensual?” Dale said.

“It wasn't like I was giving happy endings. I'm thinking about getting back into it. It's been ten years but I've still got my table and everything. I could use the money.”

“I volunteer to be your practice dummy. Maybe you could reconsider that happy ending policy.”

She laughed and swatted at him.

The aloe was tingling on his cheeks. Jeannette had her head back on his shoulder. He could feel her heat through the thin material of her sundress. She was a small woman. Small breasts, small waist, delicate feet, good thick heavy dark hair. She had an aversion to undergarments that he found attractive. This year she'd lost her father to cancer, turned forty-three, and watched as her husband was led away in handcuffs.

She sat on Dale's lap, wriggling a little, as if she was just trying to get comfortable. She sighed. “What a great day,” she said. “That was the best day I can remember having in quite some time. The boys had fun. They really like you. They tell me that, I'm not just assuming.”

“I always kind of wished I had younger brothers,” Dale said, realizing immediately that it was probably not the right thing. Jeannette gave a soft laugh and sipped her wine. “How old would your mother have been?” she said.

“Much older than you.”

“How much?”

“It doesn't matter. You're beautiful.”

“I guess I'm not quite a hag yet.”

Dale had recently turned twenty-five. He hadn't managed to finish college. He was almost done with his EMT certification but for the past few months he'd been living in his father's basement. He considered meeting Jeannette to be the single best stroke of luck that had ever befallen him. Before Jeannette, he'd been dating a girl for almost a year. A bank teller. She called him every day for a week before she gave up.

Occasionally, he thought about Jeannette's husband, but only occasionally. The last thing she had told Dale about him was that he was in a halfway house in Billings. The boys wanted to see him but she hadn't decided yet. She thought maybe it was too soon. For the most part she didn't talk about him, and Dale didn't ask.

They sat on the porch in the slow solstice twilight. The lilacs had opened and the air was musky with them. Dale was rubbing the back of her neck with his thumb, listening to the sound of the creek, hearing in its dull murmur something like a gathering crowd, just beginning to voice its displeasure.

Dale ran in the mornings. It was a habit he'd picked up recently, part of some more general desire to straighten himself out. He'd tried meditating. That had never really worked. Running, though, was good. He laced up his shoes in the dark of his childhood bedroom, took the stairs two at a time, and did a five-mile loop. Across the tracks that bisected town, the gravel of the railway crunching under his shoes, down the hill to the river.

His dad would have considered all of it—meditation, breathing exercises, even running—nothing but hippie bullshit. Dale would have agreed, not too long ago. But then he went on his first ride-along with the Park County EMT crew and he'd seen a girl, a few years younger than himself, bleed out on the side of the highway while her drunk boyfriend got handcuffed and pushed into the police car. The boyfriend's pickup was upside down in the barrow pit, the headlights still on, shooting off into the trees at a crazy angle. The girl was coughing, blood coming up. She'd been thrown from the truck and impaled on a jagged limb of a fallen pine tree.

He asked the other EMTs how they did it, coped with the constant trauma. Margie suggested meditating. That hadn't worked. Tim said that he ran every day, no matter what. Dale tried this, and was surprised that it seemed to settle him in some way. Everyone said you became numb to it, or if not numb then just more able to break it down into a series of responses you needed to make to perform your job. Every situation, no matter how horrific, had a starting point, a place you could insert yourself to go to work.

He had to do something. He knew that. He'd floundered for three years at the university in Missoula, changed majors four times, finally just decided to not return for what should have been his senior year.

He'd been in the bar, drinking with some friends, half-watching a football game, when an old guy a few stools down keeled over and hit the floor, his back in a reverse arc, the cords of his neck straining, lips going blue. Dale stood up, looking around. Someone had his phone out, making the call. A guy that had been sitting at a table with a woman—maybe they were on a date, they were both kind of dressed up—came hustling over. He got down next to the old man, turned him on his side. He'd taken his jacket off and rolled it up under the old man's head. He was holding his arm, saying things to him that Dale couldn't hear. Aaron Edgerly, one of Dale's friends, walked over, started saying something about jamming his wallet in the old guy's mouth so he wouldn't choke on his tongue, but the man waved him off.

“Just stand back,” he said. “If you want to do something, clear these barstools away. They're going to need to get in here with a stretcher.”

Aaron grumbled a little. But he put his wallet away, started moving stools. There was something in the man's voice, ex-military probably. He was calm when everyone else was freaked out. Eventually the ambulance showed up. The paramedics carted the old guy off and the man went back to his date and Dale had spent the whole night thinking about how it would feel to be the guy who knew what to do in a situation like that, the one who people listened to when things got heavy.

Dale signed up for the EMT course the next day. He hadn't told his dad. He wanted to wait until he had something, a certificate or diploma or whatever you got when you passed the exam.

Not long after he'd quit school and moved back home he'd overheard his dad talking to his uncle Jerry. They were sitting out on the porch listening to a baseball game on the radio. The kitchen window was open, and Dale was pouring himself a glass of milk.

“He's a good kid,” his dad was saying.

“He is,” Jerry said. “A great kid, always was.”

“He's just kind of a beta dog. You don't like to say that about your only son but it's true. He's willing to be led, is what I'm saying. I love him to death.”

“Of course you do.”

“There's alphas and betas. It's how it has to be, but you just want the most for your kid. You know?”

“He's young. I bet he gets it together.”

“I'd started my own business by the time I was his age. Bought a house.”

“Everyone's different, man. He's a good kid.”

“I know. That's what everyone says.”

Dale went back down to his room at this point.

Though Dale's first ride-along was forever burned into his memory—months later and the sight of the girl run through with a pine stob was still freshly horrible—his second was oddly pleasant, fortuitous even. It was a quiet evening in town, they'd only had a couple calls. One older guy who thought he might be having a heart attack but was just suffering from indigestion. A minor fender bender, a passenger complaining of whiplash. And then, a call from a residential neighborhood not too far from Dale's father's house, a child with a possibly broken arm. They got to the scene, and there were bikes on the sidewalk. A boy of about ten writhing on the grass, a woman kneeling next to him, trying to keep him still, smoothing his hair. Dale helped the EMT on duty check the boy over and apply a splint. He stole glances at the mother, cutoff shorts and a tank top, hands dirty like she'd been working in the garden.

In the ambulance the boy's wailing slowed, and the woman caught Dale looking at her. She smiled.

Later that week he went for a walk and passed her house. She was out in the front yard carting a wheelbarrow load of mulch to spread under the rhododendrons that lined her driveway. The boys were playing basketball, the one in the cast making awkward one-handed shots. Dale was just going to walk by, but then she saw him and waved him over.

He played a game of H-O-R-S-E with the boys and then he fell out and sat there on the lawn with her, watching them play until it started to get dark.

“Well, I've got to get these hooligans to bed,” she said, nodding to the boys. “But, if you're not in a huge hurry, you could finish spreading this mulch for me. I could probably dig up a beer for you.” She laughed as if she were mostly joking but Dale—who had very little experience with these things—could tell fairly easily that this was a woman at some sort of departure point in her life.

Dale stayed. He spread the mulch. It was pitch-dark when she had returned. He was sitting on the front step, and she sat close enough to him that their legs touched. She had beers for each of them and she told him that she was very impressed with people that devoted their lives to helping others in their most dire time of need.

“I agree,” he said. “It's not for everyone. Very rewarding, though. Or, at least I think it will be.” He was going to say something else but she had her hand on his leg now.

“You could stay,” she said. “Here, tonight, I mean, with me. If you don't have anything else to do.” She was talking fast now, like now that she'd started, her words were gaining momentum, coming downhill out of control. “I'm not going to sleep with you, I mean, I want to sleep with you but that's it. I mean, I want to do more than sleep with you but tonight I just want to sleep with you. Maybe this is weird. I don't know. Never mind.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Really? I'm forty-three years old and I'm still married, technically.”

Dale shrugged. “I just dropped out of college, and live in my dad's basement.”

Jeannette laughed like this was the funniest thing ever. “God, that sounds perfect,” she said. “If we could all be so lucky. You want to take a shower?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, again? You're pretty agreeable aren't you?”

“I guess.”

“My husband, ex-husband, whatever, once called me a bossy bitch.”

“You seem nice to me.”

She stood, reaching to pull him up too. “My shower's not real big,” she said. “But, I bet we can both still fit. It might just be a little tight.” She said this last bit right in his ear. Dale figured that sometimes when a woman wants you to sleep with her but not
sleep
with her she actually means it. This turned out to not be one of those cases.

Later, in bed, her hair still wet, she pulled his arms around her and sighed. “This is what I wanted most,” she said. “I wanted all that other stuff we just did too, but this is it. I miss this so bad sometimes.” Eventually her breathing slowed and Dale thought she was asleep but then she gave a little kick as if startled. “Shit,” she said. “You've got to leave in the morning before the boys get up. It would just confuse them.”

I'm kind of confused myself, Dale thought.

Five years ago, her husband had been in a motorcycle accident. He'd been left with horrible back pain and had developed an addiction to OxyContin. He was unable to work. He got caught with three different prescriptions from three different doctors. That had scared him straight for a while.

“I thought he was better,” Jeannette said. “It was a hard thing. I never blamed him. I still don't, really. He was trying. He still seemed out of it, though, like he was when he was on the pills, but he swore he wasn't taking them anymore and I believed him. I had gotten another job at this point. I was still working days at the nursery and then nights at the Bistro when my mom could watch the boys. Anyway, I'm not complaining, but that's why I did it. I was fed up. I was tired all the time and I just snapped.”

“What do you mean?” Jeannette had made him dinner. They were doing the dishes when she was telling him this. Standing side by side at the sink, Dale scrubbing a pan, Jeannette drying plates.

“I had him arrested,” she said. “Maybe it wasn't the right thing to do. I came back from my second job and the boys were home from their grandmother's, watching TV, and I looked all over for him and I eventually found him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. He was—it was—
heroin
.” She said the word so quietly he could barely hear it over the running water. “He played baseball in college. He was a regional sales rep for outdoor gear. I still can't really believe it. I called the cops on him. He tried to drive off and they got him before he'd made it five blocks. He did a year in Deer Lodge. He's in a halfway house in Billings now.” With this, Jeannette finished drying the last plate. She snapped him on the rear with her towel. “Enough of that sob story.”