Dog Run Moon (4 page)

That night she didn't tell him that he needed to leave, and the next morning she made him breakfast, the boys looking at him, solemn eyed, across the table.

“Our dad can throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball,” the one with the cast said. “How fast can you throw it?”

“Football was always more my sport,” Dale said.

The boy eyed him skeptically. “How tall are you?”

“Five-ten.”

“Where did you play?”

“Right here at Park High.”

“I meant after that.”

“That was it. There was no after that.”

The boy nodded as if this had confirmed some more general suspicion he'd been harboring. “My dad played in college.”

“Okay,” Jeannette said. “Boys, go brush your teeth. Dale, would you like more coffee?”

Dale had never been good at taking tests. He could know the material front to back, inside and out, but as soon as he was confronted with that sheet of empty, lettered bubbles—the knowledge that the whole enterprise was timed, the feeling of all the other test-takers silently massed around him, the smell of the freshly sharpened number-two pencils—his eyes would blur over, he'd second-guess himself, he'd sweat through his shirt. The EMT exam was a brutal gauntlet of 120 questions laced with words like: hypovolemia, necrosis, eschar, maceration, and diabetic ketoacidosis.

After running every morning, Dale sat at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice and took practice tests. He put his watch on the table so he could time himself. Sometimes his dad would interrupt him, coming in to get some water, or making toast, or firing up the lawnmower right under the window, but Dale didn't mind. He could have done his studying in his room, but he liked to do it out in the kitchen where his dad might see. So far, his dad hadn't asked him what he was up to, but Dale knew he was curious. He'd caught him drinking his morning coffee, thumbing through one of the study manuals, his eyebrows raised.

Dale was taking a practice test, in the middle of trying to decipher a particularly dense question, when Jeannette called. He let it ring. He was fairly certain that the correct answer was C. But, it was one of those questions where there could be multiple right answers, just one was
more
right than the others. He was pretty sure it was C, but it might have been A as well. These things confused him. He knew it was C. But then it might be A as well in which case it would be D because answer D was both C and A. Fuck. After a moment's silence, his phone was ringing again. He answered this time and her voice was panicky.

“The creek,” she was saying. “It's overflowing and it's going to come in the house and I don't even know if I have flood insurance and everything is going to be ruined and then mold sets in and maybe the foundation is already getting undermined and then when that happens you might as well just bulldoze the house. And—”

“Okay,” Dale said. “Hang on. Don't worry about all that. No bulldozing. I'm coming over.”

When Dale got there, Jeannette was standing on the back porch, her hands wrestling themselves. The boys were on the couch watching a movie, and she shut the door so they couldn't hear.

“I put a stick in the ground to mark where it was last night. That was completely dry yesterday. Now look. It's come up a foot.”

The creek was huge, out of its banks, sluicing through the willows. The low spot in the yard where Jeannette had her rhubarb was completely underwater. There was a small rise and then the ground sloped back to the house. From what Dale could tell, if the water was to come up another foot it would top the rise and come pouring down the back side; there'd be no way to keep it out of the house at that point.

“Shit,” Dale said. “Okay. Well.” She was looking at him. Waiting for something. Dale imagined he could see it in her face, her want of husband writ large. He didn't know what to do. “All right,” he said. “We'll figure it out.”

He went down to the creek, slogged over the saturated ground, cold water rising above his boot tops. He could feel the trembling in the soil, the bushes rollicking in the flow, their roots trying to maintain their hold. A basketball came bobbing down the flat, turgid center of the creek—obscenely orange against the gray current—it caught for a moment against a branch, and then was gone. The creek that normally meandered sleepily through the backyards on this side of town had come awake, answering the call of the main river, bringing with it for tithe anything it could catch up.

“Don't get too close,” she said, shouting so he could hear over the roar of water. “It's dangerous.”

He slogged around some more, looking at the small rise that was the last defense against the rising creek, the stick she had pounded into the ground, trying to calculate how much time they had. It didn't look good. He went back to stand next to her on the porch. He tried to put his arm around her, but she was too nervous. Pacing up and back on the porch.

“Shit, shit, shit. What else?” she said. “What in god's name can be next?”

Dale didn't know what to do. He called his dad.

Dale hadn't told his father about Jeannette. But the town was small, and it hadn't taken him long to find out. He'd been driving through the park, and spotted them sitting on a blanket, the boys playing in a sandbox, Dale's head in Jeannette's lap.

That night Dale's father had insisted on making dinner. “I'm going to grill some elk steaks,” he said. “You make a little salad or something. We haven't sat down together in a while.”

Dale was at the kitchen table reading about how to spot the signs of diabetic ketoacidosis. He looked at his father warily. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? We always run off and do our own thing. I haven't seen you in a week. You too busy to eat a steak with your old man?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Okay, then.” He went out to get the grill going, and Dale washed some lettuce. They ate on the porch, the elk meat leaking red onto their paper plates, the salad mostly untouched, as if it were existing for memorial's sake, a small gesture of remembrance for the woman who had been gone from their lives for a long time now.

His father had finished eating, his feet kicked up on the porch railing. He took a drink of his beer and belched. “I saw you got a girlfriend now, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Saw you in the park. Now, that was a domestic scene. Got yourself a little ready-made family going there.”

“It's not like that.”

“I recognize that one. That whole thing was in the paper. He used to be a T-ball coach. A drug addict T-ball coach. Hard to imagine. He was embezzling too.”

“He doesn't really factor into our equation.”

Dale's father laughed. “Oh, son. Wetting the wick is one thing. Picnics with the kiddies is a whole different story.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“Who said I'm worrying? Trying to impart some advice upon you is all. Pretty soon, you're going to have fucked the interesting out of her and then you're going to be in a world of hurt.”

“Save it.”

“I'll not. You live in my house and you'll hear me out. All I'm saying is this—women are already a little bit ahead of men, age-wise. So, you start taking up with one who's got a few years on you, and you're putting yourself at a big disadvantage. She's got a head start on you and there's no way you're going to catch up, she'll be lapping you before long and you won't even know it. There's damage there. Trust me. When a baby comes out, part of her rational mind comes out with it, caught up in that stuff they throw away.”

“Jesus, Dad.” Dale carried their plates into the kitchen and then retreated to his room. Like his father had some great wealth of knowledge from which to draw his theories about women. As far as Dale knew, there had only been his mother, and god knows that hadn't worked out too well.

Dale went around to the front of the house to make the call where the sound of the rising water wasn't so loud. When his father picked up the phone Dale could hear voices in the background, phlegmy laughter.

Once a week Dale's father and a number of his cronies met at the Albertsons for fifty-cent coffee and day-old donuts. It was an hour-long bullshit session. Topics veered, but usually returned and settled comfortably on: the current administration's latest outrage against common sense, the weather, the elk herd numbers in relation to the burgeoning wolf population, what was hatching on the river, and why it was that the trout were all smaller than they used to be.

Dale filled him in on the situation, and in a few moments he was at the house in his pickup, donut crumbs in his beard. Jeannette was in the driveway, a worried half-smile on her face. Dale's father brushed off Dale's attempt at introductions.

“Forget all that,” he said. “No time to spare here. Fairgrounds. They got the Boy Scouts down there filling sandbags. Let's go.”

At the fairgrounds, the Boy Scouts had a small mountain of sandbags. They were working in pairs, one boy fitting an empty bag over an orange traffic cone with the end cut off, the other boy shoveling sand in the funnel. Trucks were coming in and out, people tossing bags, classic rock turned up loud. It was Dale's father's type of scene. He immediately recruited a couple of loitering Boy Scouts and they hoisted the bags up to the truck bed where Dale stacked them. Dale's father was circulating, shouting good-natured insults and encouragement. He'd found a Styrofoam cup of coffee somewhere and Dale heard him talking to the Scout leader. “Nah,” he was saying, “our house is on a hill. It would have to get biblical for it to touch us. This is for Dale's little girlfriend. She's about to get washed away.”

They stacked sandbags all afternoon. Dale and his father standing up to their knees in the icy water, Jeannette right there with them, ducking down to balance bags on her shoulder, walking from truck to stack to truck, a slight woman, but surprisingly capable of bearing weight. She dropped a bag with a grunt and went back for another. Dale watched his father watching her. He was a man who valued work above all else. He'd told Dale a long time ago that he wanted the inscription on his gravestone to read:
HE GOT HIS WORK DONE.

The three of them stacked feverishly until their wall was built, a three-foot high barrier spanning the low spot in Jeannette's lawn. When Dale looked up he could see the boys inside, their faces pressed to the sliding glass doors. His dad occasionally made an exaggerated scowl at them, and they ran back into the kitchen.

It took them two loads of sandbags until they had something that seemed capable of holding back the water. The rain had slackened, and they sat on the back porch, exhausted. Jeannette had gotten them beers and they drank watching the water rush by, still rising.

Eventually Jeannette stood and gathered their empties. “I want you both to go home and get cleaned up,” she said. “And then I want you both to come right back over for dinner. I've got lasagna that I made last week and froze. I can heat it up and make a salad and some garlic bread.” Dale's father was starting to say something to protest but she held up her hand to cut him off. “I insist,” she said. “Dinner in forty-five minutes. Hit the showers. I make a damn good lasagna.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

After dinner, Dale's father thanked Jeannette, and she hugged him, kissed his cheek, his face going red. Dale walked him out to the porch.

“I guess you'll not be needing a ride home?”

Dale shook his head. “Guess not.”

“Can't say that I blame you there.”

“Yep.”

“That was good lasagna.”

“Not bad.”

“Well.” He was looking down, scratching at his beard. He cleared his throat and spit. “Good work, son.” He stomped down the steps and Dale could hear him belching as he swung into the cab of his truck.

Dale went back inside and helped Jeannette with the dishes. They went to the porch with a blanket wrapped around them, listening, trying to gauge the depth of the water in the dim broadcast of the moon, not talking much. Eventually she fell asleep with her head on his chest, her arms and legs twitching occasionally.

Dale woke, sun just peeking up over the lilac bushes in the backyard. One of the boys was crying, he could hear it coming through the upstairs window. Jeannette was still sleeping, curled, knees to chest with her back to him. He waited for a moment for her to wake up, but the boy continued to wail, and she showed no sign of movement. He nudged her and she groaned and rolled over, her face still under the blanket.

“One of the boys is up,” he said.

She said something, mostly unintelligible, that might have been, “It's your turn.”

Dale lay there listening to the boy wail for a few more moments. He slipped from under the blanket and squelched across the soggy, cold lawn in his bare feet. There was a brown scum line on the sandbags marking the high point the creek had reached. Their wall had held. The creek was still rushing but it had settled back within its banks, running straight and hard and tea colored. He walked back to the porch, and the lump under the blanket that was Jeannette had not stirred. It was silent, and then another sob from upstairs. Dale deliberated for a moment.

He went inside. They're just kids, he was thinking, why are you nervous? He opened the door to the boys' room and immediately, the crying stopped. They looked at him expectantly, red faced.

“Mom?” one of them said, trying to look around Dale to see if she was back there.

“She's still sleeping,” Dale said. “Let's let her sleep.” They were staring at him. The younger one was looking like he was going to start crying again. “Do you guys like coffee?”

Silence. The older one shook his head.

“I bet your mom doesn't let you have coffee, does she? No? Well, she's asleep so we can do whatever we want. Let's go. We're going to have to hurry before she wakes up and shuts us down.” Dale headed downstairs, not sure if they were going to follow. He was filling the carafe with water when they came into the kitchen, blinking, hair standing on end.