Dog War (14 page)

Precious went to help the mistress prepare for bed and found her sitting sourpussed at her vanity, pawing at her limp blond hair with a brush.

“What’s the use of men, Precious?” she asked bluntly.

“We need dem to have children, mum,” Precious ventured.

“That’s no good. I’ve never wanted children.”

Precious considered a secondary use for man.

“Dey are idlers, drunkards, and sinners whose souls need saving, mum. All a Christian woman need is to save one of de-brutes’ soul and heaven will be her reward.”

“Religious bunk. Men have no souls.”

The mistress prowled agitatedly around the enormous manless room, looping the perimeter of the gigantic bed where she slept alone every night, looking exasperated and vexed.

“For once in my life, I just want to meet a man who’s more of a man than I am. You know what I mean?”

“But dat applies to every old negar man off de street, mum!” Precious protested.

The mistress did not quite get “old negar man,” but the drift was plain enough to merit rebuttal.

“It does not. It applies to none of the men I have ever known,” she snapped, glaring. “Like tonight. I went out with Harold. He tries to screw me. I say ‘No,’ and you know what he did? He started to cry. Can you imagine that?”

Precious could sympathize with this outrage, which reminded her of the too-too wretch. She sneered without mercy, “I’d box his face and say, ‘Who you bawling to, wretch! Hush up and get outta me sight!’ Den de next Sunday, I’d drag him into church.”

Mistress Lucy looked startled. “Why didn’t I do that?” she exclaimed enviously, clouting herself on her forehead with an open palm at her gross omission. “I’ll call him on his car phone.”

She rushed to the telephone, dialed, and putting on a bogus smile and manner, purred, “Harold, turn around and come back at once. I want to continue our conversation … Yes, yes. I said turn back.”

Hanging up, the mistress threw on her housecoat and rushed into the living room and out the front door to ambush Harold while Precious, who had only been playing the battle-axe, followed with a gaping mouth, fretting about revocation of her green card for inciting assault. “But I also say, Mistress Lucy,” she sputtered, “dat I’d carry him to church de next Sunday!”

“
You
carry him to church,” the mistress threw scornfully over her shoulder from her shadowy ambuscade. “I’m just going to slap his face silly.”

They were interrupted by the distinctive crunching of tires in the driveway and the garish creaminess of headlights spilling over the dark landscaped grounds.

Precious slunk in the shadows of the living room, unsure of what to do next. She was weighing rushing down the hallway to Mannish’s room and pleading for the factotum’s intervention when the front door suddenly banged shut, the mistress stalked past, and Harold’s car roared away.

Poking her head timidly through the ajar bedroom door at the end of the long hallway, Precious spied the mistress standing under the pearly glow of the bathroom light. She was soaking her right hand under a rushing tap.

“That was a wonderful suggestion, Precious!” she chortled triumphantly. “Go get Riccardo for me, will you please? I want some company in my bed tonight. What a refreshing whack that was! Keep coming up with such wonderful ideas and I’ll-give you a raise.”

Grumbling under her breath about being innocent in the vicious assault on Harold, Precious went to the dog’s bedroom where she roused him snarling from his slumber atop the cotton bone sheets and coaxed him into the mistress’s bedroom. The dog immediately jumped up and snuggled beside the mistress on the bed, who engulfed him in a bosomy hug.

“You’re more man than a thousand men,” she cooed at the dog, who slushed her face repeatedly, greasing it with dog mouthwater.

Later that night Precious went under her bed to talk to Jamaican Jesus and explain that she had not meant for the mistress to attack Harold, that she had only been using a manner and tone of speaking that Jamaican wives habitually use on their own verandas to cuss and berate worthless husbands, and that she didn’t feel it was fair that she should be charged with inciting assault and possibly get an undeserved singeing of her bosom if she should die tonight. (Precious always imagined with a shudder that if ever she got a broiling on hell’s spit, which she was determined she never would, it would be atop her tender, swollen breasts that malicious demons would gleefully plop glowing rivets.) Jesus said he quite understood, for he had sat on the same verandas night after night and heard plenty plenty Jamaican old wife rant about what they intended to do to the worthless brute, once the worthless brute finally crawled out of the rum bar and staggered home, without ever giving the brute more than hot cocoa and a tongue-lashing. However, Jesus counselled against talk that advocated violence because he could see that Americans were plainly a people who took everything at face value and didn’t understand Jamaican veranda chat. Precious said, yes, she saw that herself, though she refrained from the criticism that here was evidently a serious flaw in the creation.

Nevertheless, Precious sighed, as she settled wearily under her sheets, she still didn’t understand how a woman could let a dog sleep with her and couldn’t even visualize the way the dog had licked up the mistress’s face without a spasm of disgust.

Jesus said he didn’t understand it, either. It was a mystery to him. Americans were a strange and perplexing people about their dogs. Sometimes he felt like just turning around and going back home. Precious said she felt that way every day. And she would, too, as soon as she made a little more money and didn’t have to return to wallow penniless among peak.

How much money did she have saved up now? Jesus wondered, and Precious told him that she had just exceeded $1,600, which made Jesus whistle once he did the arithmetic on conversion into Jamaican dollars at the black-market rate.

Just before dozing off, Precious muttered a sincere prayer of thanks that her Jesus was a native Jamaican who understood her ways. God only knew what she would do had he been a foreigner.

Chapter 16

Mistress Lucy awoke in her ornate bedroom and began to think fretfully about the woeful history of protoplasm. It was a subject she often thought about as she crawled through the crack between dreaming and waking, and this morning she came back to it anew as to a persistent toothache. She understood with grim certainty how she had come to live upon this earth but still found it philosophically bracing to occasionally relive the harsh facts.

In the morning of her earth nothing existed but rain, mist, and stone. Then one day a disgruntled stone took up foot and walked; soon it grew a mouth and began to eat next-door stone, which grew a voicebox and began to bellow. After eons of such rampant eating and bellowing, a stone named Mozart began composing symphonies, another named Leopold crowned himself King of Bohemia, and the incidental tomfoolery of ancestral stone had become recorded human history. To Mistress Lucy’s way of thinking, that she walked on two foot and owned a Rolls Royce was nothing but an accidental cosmic perk. Flesh was still the child of stone whether the flesh had been pulped into a dog that barked at the moon or a preacher who shrieked on a pulpit.

Mistress Lucy passionately believed that justice and love should flow between all fellow creatures; that monkey should sit at the dining room table with the family and not be left to eat alone in the dingy kitchen like a poor relation from the country; that people should not be so small-minded as to prefer speech to barking just because speech was comprehensible and barking was not, the blame being on the speciest school curriculum with its senseless craze for the human alphabet; that mistress of the house should not lord it over mongoose and worm as if home ownership entitled her to assume airs over the rest of creation; and that man should not be so vain as to think himself the only son of stone in the cosmos to whom woman might be attracted.

Given this cosmic philosophy, the mistress could not have been more utterly at odds with Precious if they had been rival capitalists playing at monopoly, for they were two women with vastly different outlooks and life ambitions. Mistress Lucy longed to consort with her fellow creatures under the common sun and save them from cruel human depredations, while Precious aspired to be the first Jamaican-born archangel and, if such lofty goal proved beyond the reach of humble colonial circumstance and island birth, to be appointed guardian angel for some drunken man whose soul she could curb of craven gluttony by whispering preachment in his ears as the brute caroused.

In spite of their differences, Mistress Lucy was soon freely confiding her man problems to Precious during intense mistress-to-maid chats. As a Jamaican Christian woman used to the management of sinners in trousers, as some sisters of her congregation had nicknamed men, Precious regarded herself as an expert in manhood and capable of grappling with almost anything that herd of hard-of-hearing beasts could provoke.

But the mistress had her own bizarre ethic about man, which proved a source of mystery and wonder to Precious, who did not understand, for example, why the mistress lost respect for Richard, a strapping investment banker, after discovering that she was the better water-skier. Nor did she approve when she overheard the mistress tell the dog that he was more of a man than Richard. Such treatment, Precious was grimly convinced, would only give the dog airs.

Argument naturally followed. One particularly bitter row began when Peter, another date, became sick in the door of an airplane and chickened out of skydiving with the mistress as he had promised. The mistress jumped by herself and heaped scorn and contempt on him afterwards, again telling the dog in front of Precious the lie that he was more man than cowardly Peter.

Precious was moved to gainsay.

“Mistress Lucy,” she said boldly, “you know what dat dog would do if you put parachute on him and push him to de open door of a plane? He would bite you.”

The mistress looked momentarily startled, then replied heatedly, “Riccardo is a brave dog! He would jump!”

Precious scoffed. “You wouldn’t even get de parachute on de dog without a biting.”

“I know Riccardo better than you! He would jump! He wouldn’t bite. Why am I taking part in this silly argument?”

Just then Mannish ghosted around the corner, observed female row in progress, and tried to slink off. The mistress, however, beckoned him over, installed him as judge for this argument, and asked his opinion: Would the dog bite if asked to skydive or would he reveal the courage and loyalty of his nature and jump?

“It depends on what the dog was before he incarnated as a dog,” Mannish adjudicated gravely. “If he was a parachutist in a former life he would recall the experience and jump. Otherwise, I am of the opinion he would offer resistance.”

“Former life!” jeered Precious. “Nothing in scripture say dat man get reborn as dog!”

The mistress agreed. “There’s no former life. There’s no future life. The dog would jump. This is my house, my dog. You are my employees. I expect philosophical unity under my own roof. The dog would jump. Right, Mannish?”

Mannish’s head bobbed up and down in a chicken-hearted nod. “If you say he would jump, I am also of the mind that he would jump.”

“Right, Precious?”

“There is earth, mum, and rules of earth which all must obey. But there is also heaven, and rules of heaven, which none must disobey. De dog would bite.”

Mistress Lucy became shrill. “To say that the dog would jump is against your religion?”

Mannish tried to defuse tension with a joke. “I believe Precious was a snapping turtle in a former life.”

“I have a good mind to dismiss you right now—contradicting me about the nature of my dog. Who do you think you are? This is
my
dog! I know what he would do! He would jump!”

“Bite, mum.”

Mistress Lucy frothed with anger over this unreasonable opposition. Finally she snarled, “This is what you get from employing Third World help,” and stomped off with Riccardo cradled in her arms.

“Precious,” Mannish whispered urgently, “what harm is there in saying that the dog would jump?”

“Because beast of the field must never be exalted over man. De dog would bite. And next time you come tell me any of you rudeness ’bout me was a snapping turtle in anodder life, you goin’ get a box, for I know who my modder was, and my-grandmodder, and my great-grandmodder, and for your information, not a one of dem was a turtle, Mister Mannish Chaudhuri!”

Then she flounced angrily out of the room.

The mistress suffered an ongoing, inordinate, excessive dotage on animals. She felt sorrow for every conceivable beast and creature on earth, some of which Precious had not even known existed. Once when Precious was putting on her only silken shawl, the mistress paused on her way out the door to explain that the silk had been spun by slave worms. Precious blinked and said she didn’t understand. The mistress explained that silkworms were enslaved in the Orient and compelled to weave fingers to the bone day and night by wicked overseers, and anyone who bought and wore silk contributed to international worm enslavement.

The mistress departed, leaving Precious standing before a mirror feeling guilty. She was about to take off the shawl and burn it when she realized that whatever happened in the Orient was between Chinyman and worm and none of a Jamaican’s business. She had an additional flicker of insight: A worm was a worm, and the whole race of them were nothing but malingerers who would benefit from the discipline of hard work. Moreover, when she came to think of it, which worm had fingers to weave to the bone day and night? She would wear her shawl and hold up her head when she did it.

And she did wear her shawl one time after that encounter, drawing from the mistress a single sour comment: “Slave fabric.”

After that, Precious locked the shawl away in her suitcase, where it stayed until she returned to Jamaica.

Wildebeest migration was the next issue the mistress, in her animal dotage, used to browbeat Precious.