Dog Run Moon (8 page)

“I like beans. But, I don't eat black beans. I think they look like rabbit turds. My dad thinks that too.”

“Okay, I'll leave those out, then. Sound good?” The red on Lisa's cheeks had spread. A crimson blush was leaching down her neck all the way to the collar of her barn overalls. “All right, August, see you at dinner. Your dad's probably wondering where I got off to. We have to get these cows taken care of.”

Lisa headed into the barn, and August wandered out to the back pasture, swinging his wrench at stalks of burdock and thistle, stepping around the thick plots of fresh manure.

He climbed the low hill before the tree line on the property boundary and sat next to the pile of rocks that marked Skyler's grave. There was a slightly bent sassafras stick with the bark whittled off jutting up from the rocks. It had once been the vertical member of a cross August had fashioned from two such sticks lashed together with a piece of old shoelace. It was a gesture August had seen performed in all the old westerns he watched with his father. Any time a gunslinger went down his buddies erected a cross just like that. Over the course of the past year the sun had rotted August's old shoelace so that the horizontal crosspiece had fallen off, leaving just the vertical stick pointing up at the sky like a crooked, accusatory finger.

Skyler had been his birth dog. His father had brought the tiny six-week-old pup home when August had been out of the hospital less than a week. It was something August's father had said that his own father had done for him. He thought it good for a boy to have a dog to grow up with. And, against August's mother's objections, he put the soft, pug-faced shepherd mix in the crib with August—“to get acquainted,” he'd said. “A boy with a dog is healthier, more active, less inclined to allergy and listlessness.” And, it seemed true. August had been a particularly healthy baby, a bright, energetic boy who grew up with a tongue-lolling, shaggy, good-natured four-legged shadow.

At twelve, Skyler had been in remarkably good shape, a little stiff in the mornings, but by noon harassing the barn cats like a dog half his age. And then, one day after school, August didn't see him anywhere in the barn or yard. He went to the equipment shed and found him, stretched out on his side with a greenish-blue froth discoloring his grayed muzzle. He'd chewed through a gallon jug of antifreeze that August's father had stored under the workbench.

August and his father had carted the body up to the hill, and they took turns with the pickax and shovel. When they finished, they stood and regarded the cairn of rocks they'd stacked over the raw earth to keep the skunks out.

“I guess twelve is as good an age as any,” his father had said. At the time August thought he'd been talking about the dog. Later, he thought that maybe his father had meant that twelve was as good an age as any for a boy to lose a thing he loved for the first time.

August watched the sky in the west become washed in dusky, pink-tinged clouds. Unbidden, the turning sky made him think of Lisa, the crimson in her cheeks that spread like hot infection down her neck and shoulders and back and arms, all the way to her legs. That this was the case wasn't mere supposition. He'd seen it.

It was an early dismissal day last fall. August off the bus and out of his school clothes, eating a piece of cake from the new house. He wandered down to the barn, the air sharp with the acrid tang of the oak leaves his father had been burning in the front yard. The pile smoldered. There was no one around. Skyler slept in the shade of a stock tank. The cows were yoked up in their stanchions. The whole barn was full of the low rumble of suction, the automatic milkers chugging away.

And then, through the open doorway of the grain room, there was his father. Muck boots on, barn overalls around his legs, thrusting behind Lisa, who was bent over a hay bale, her cheek and forearms pressed down into the cut ends of the hay. Their overalls were around their legs like shed exoskeletons, like they were insects emerging, their conjoined bodies larval, soft and pale. August saw the flush of Lisa then, the creeping red that extended all the way down her back to her thick thighs to her spread calves. She had her underwear pulled down around one knee and their brilliant lacy pinkness was a glaring insult to the honest, flyspecked, gray and manure brown of the barn.

On his way out, August turned the barn radio up as loud as it would go.
Golf,
Paul Harvey was saying,
is a game, where you score a six, yell “fore,” and write down a five.

At the dinner table, Lisa and August's father each had a beer. Lisa cut a lime wedge and jammed it down the neck of her bottle and August's father said, what the hell, he might try it like that too. They smiled at each other and clinked their bottles together and drank, and August watched the lime wedges bobbing in their bottles like floats in a level held on a surface that was out of true. When they'd finished eating, August's father leaned back in his chair and belched mightily, wiping taco juice from his hands, his rough, callused fingers shredding the paper napkin.

“Best meal I've had in a while. Thanks, Lisa.”

Lisa smiled and said, “You're welcome, Darwin. I'm glad you liked it.”

“I got three cats today,” August said to break up their stupid smiling competition. “I did it with a wrench. Right in the head. They never knew what happened.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Lisa wrinkle her nose slightly.

His father finished his beer and piled his fork and knife and napkin on his plate. He was a large man, all his joints seemed too big, hard knobby wrists and knuckles, his hands darkened from the sun up until the point where his shirt cuffs lay. He was forty-five years old and still had all his hair, dark brown, just starting to gray at the temples. In the cold months, he liked to wear a bright silk cowboy scarf knotted up around his neck. He smiled at women often, and, August noticed, women often smiled back. His mother used to say that for a guy with manure on his boots he could be fairly charming.

“Come on now, Augie. I gave you a job and I appreciate you getting right down to it. But there's barn talk and there's house talk. I'm sure Lisa wouldn't mind a little house talk now. How about you clear the table and clean up the dishes. And why don't you thank Lisa for making that delicious meal? She worked all day, and then came up to do that for us.”

“Thanks,” August said and scooted his chair back loudly. He stacked the dishes into a precarious pile and carried them off to the kitchen. He ran the water until steam rose and squirted in soap until the bubbles grew in great tumorous mounds, and then he did the dishes. Clanking plate against plate, banging pots against pot, running the water unnecessarily, making as much noise as possible to cover the low murmur of Lisa and his father talking in the next room.

Through the kitchen window he could see the murky green cast of the yard light, the hulking form of the barn, and, farther out, the long, low shape of the old house, completely dark. When his father came in to get two more beers, August didn't turn around to look at him. He stood next to August at the sink and took the tops off the bottles. He nudged August with an elbow and August scrubbed at a pan, ignoring him.

“How's your mother?”

August shrugged.

“I'm not going to run her down, Augie, but she's not a woman that will ever give you her true mind. You know what I mean?”

August shrugged.

“She's been disappointed her whole life, probably came out of the womb that way. You don't disappoint her, I know that. But everything else does, me included—always have always will. She never learned to hold herself accountable, that's the way her parents allowed her to grow up. She's very smart, and she thinks she sees things I don't see but she's wrong, I'll tell you that. I see plenty. You hear me?”

August swirled a cup in the dishwater and didn't say anything. His father slapped him on the back of the head.

“I said, You hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you.” August looked straight ahead out the window.

“Okay, then.” He reached into the dishwater, came up with a handful of suds, and smeared them on August's cheek. “You're all right,” he said. “When you think it's time you let me know and we'll go find you a pup.”

In the morning, the smells of toast and coffee and bacon pulled August from his bed before the sun had even hit the east-facing window. He clumped down the stairs into the kitchen and sat at the table rubbing his eyes. Lisa stood at the stove making eggs. Her feet were bare and she had on the gray long underwear she wore under her barn overalls. They were made for men and were tight around her hips, and when she bent over to get the butter out of the refrigerator, August could see the faint lines of her panties curving across her full rear.

“Would you like coffee, August?” August nodded and she put a steaming mug in front of him.

“I figure you like it black, like your dad likes it?”

“Sure,” he said, taking a sip, trying not to grimace. “Black and strong.”

His mother mixed his coffee half and half with hot whole milk, dumping in heaping spoonfuls of sugar. She told him that's how she learned to make coffee when she lived in New Orleans, in another lifetime, before she married his father. August knew that Lisa would never go to New Orleans in a million lifetimes.

His father came from the bedroom. He had a dab of shaving foam under one earlobe. He put his hand on Lisa's waist as he got a coffee mug from the cupboard and she turned and wiped the shaving foam from his ear with her sleeve.

“How long before the eggs are done?” August asked, tapping his fingers on the tabletop.

“A few minutes. The bacon is almost ready.”

August sighed, downed his coffee, and took a piece of toast from the plate on the counter. “Well,” he said, “some of us can't sit around. I have to get to work.”

He got his wrench from the mudroom, and slid on his boots, leaving them unlaced, and walked across the lawn with his boot tongues flapping like dogs breathing in the heat. The cows were milling in the pasture, gathered up close to the gate. They rolled their dumb baleful eyes at him and lowed, their udders straining and heavy with milk.

“Shut up, you idiots,” August said. He picked up a small handful of pebbles and continued to walk, pelting any cow within reach.

The trees that lined the back pasture were big old oaks and maples and a few massive beech trees with low limbs and velvet gray bark. The ground around them was covered with the scattered spiny shells of their nuts. There was an ancient barbed-wire fence strung across the trees. It was rusted and had been mended many times, so old that it had become embedded in the trunks. August walked down the line and ran his fingers over the rough oaks and maples and the soft gray crepe of the beeches with their bark that looked like smooth hairless hide stretched over muscle. He let his fingers linger on the places where the wire cut into the trunks, and then he knelt and sighted all the way down the fence and squinted into the strengthening light and imagined he was looking at a row of gnarled old people, the soft skin of their necks—the throat cords, the veins, and esophagus—garroted by barbed wire, the twisted branches like arms raised, fingers splayed, trembling and clutching for air.

Until last year August had helped with the milking every morning before school and every evening after school, and then his mother forbade it and his father had been forced to hire Lisa full-time.

“Do you like helping your father with the milking?” his mother had asked one evening as he helped her clean up the dinner dishes. His father was on the porch listening to a baseball game, and the sound of the play-by-play came through the screen door, garbled and frantic. Someone had made a triple play. The announcer spit hoarsely, a
hard line drive, he's going, he's going, he's going.

“I don't mind it too much,” August said, wiping a plate dry. “Most of the time I like it.”

“Huh, well, that's a problem,” his mother said. She had a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth, and ash drifted into the dishwater as she spoke. “You'll be in high school soon, you know. And then there'll be girls. They're going to find you so handsome. And then there'll be college, and then there'll be any life you want after that. This is just a small piece, Augie—and if you hate it then you should know that soon you'll be making your own way.”

“But I said I don't hate it, Mom.”

“Jesus. I really hope you don't mean that. Getting up early, the shitty cows, the dullness?”

“What about it?”

“My god, Augie, look at me and tell me you don't hate it.” She turned to him and held his chin with her soapy hand, and her cigarette trembled and August tried but couldn't tell if she was serious and about to cry, or joking and about to laugh.

“I don't hate anything. It's fine. I like everything fine.”

“You're serious?”

“Yes.”

“Then I'm disappointed in you,” she said, exhaling smoke forcefully through her nose and turning back to the dishes. “But I suppose it's my fault, for letting it go on. I'm going to talk to your father. Your barn days are coming to an end. I'll finish up here. Go out and listen to the game with your dad.”

Out on the porch, his father was on the rocker, his legs stretched out long in front of him. He nodded as August sat on the step.

We're going into extra innings. Hang on as we pause for station identification—you're not going to want to miss this.
The radio crackled, and an ad for a used-car lot came on. Bats flew from the eaves, and August threw pebbles to make them dive, and then the game came back on and Cecil Fielder won it for the Tigers on a long sacrifice fly to center field. August looked at his father. He was slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together over his chest.