Dog War (18 page)

Yet another grisly scene ensued.

The mistress was away again, this time at a day-long meeting, and Precious was slaving in the kitchen over a vegetarian stew. His amatory lapse already a week old, Mannish still slunk discreetly out of reach whenever she approached, and although Precious felt sorry for him and tried hard to think of a biblical parable to cheer him up, she finally decided that scripture should not be quoted to console fainthearted hood. Moreover, the dog was playing her watchman with unusual vigilance, and the chauffeur had only to walk into a room in which she was present to convulse the beast into a fit of snarling.

This afternoon, Precious was warbling a hymn and feeling fairly content with life as she stirred the stew and bustled about the spacious kitchen, Riccardo padding in her wake. She sat down briefly at the kitchen table and the dog was instantly at her side, peering at her with watery eyes and trying to vacuum vapors from her crotch with its nasty nose.

Mannish came into the kitchen, looking for a rag. With a-snarl, Riccardo darted over to him, closing fast at an unmistakable christening angle.

“No!” Mannish barked, scooting around the kitchen table at which Precious sat. “Precious,” he pleaded, “he wants to christen me again!”

“Leave the man pants foot alone, dog!” Precious commanded, bending over to swat halfheartedly at the animal. Riccardo dodged her swipe and drove pell-mell for the chauffeur.

Around the table whirled two blurry figures, Precious’s head serving as their makeshift maypole.

“Stop it!” she yelled, getting dizzy and nearly losing her balance and toppling off the chair.

“I have already been christened!” Mannish bawled.

With a nimble jump, he hurdled a chair, threw open the back door, and galloped into the courtyard, the dog plunging after him. Precious stumbled in pursuit, yelling for Riccardo to-stop.

In the backyard, after a breathless run, she found Mannish perched atop the low-lying branch of a tree, with Riccardo agitatedly circling its trunk, yapping shrilly.

The chauffeur went berserk. Laughing maniacally, he unzipped his fly and aimed a malicious arc of human piss at the circling dog. Precious shrieked at the unpleasant sight of a urinating hood, something she had not glimpsed since girlhood, and shielded her eyes. The dog scurried away from the drizzle with a dissenting yip.

“Stop you wee-weeing on the dog!” Precious bellowed, her eyes closed. “Who going wash him now dat you wet him up? Stop it!”

Order was restored by her bellowing. When she opened her eyes again, hood was thankfully out of sight, but Mannish still sulked on the branch.

“I’m sorry, Precious. He has driven me temporarily mad.”

“Dis is not how you behave in a mansion!” she shrieked with frustration.

Riccardo nuzzled up to her foot as if to agree, directing a scolding snarl at the treed chauffeur.

“Now I going have to bathe you wee-wee off de brute!” she groused, coaxing the dog into the house for a wash.

After she had bathed the dog, Precious returned to the backyard to find Mannish sullenly slouching behind the tree. He mumbled another round of apologies, and Precious told him she had not come to listen to his excuses for infantile behavior, but to convince him to allow the dog to christen him in peace here and now, or there was bound to be dickens to pay later when the mistress came home.

Mannish scuffed at the brick paving with an aggrieved shoe.

“You are getting too Americanized,” he remarked petulantly.

Precious heatedly denied that she was becoming Americanized. But she had studied the dog brain and knew that once he had made up his mind to christen a foot, he would christen the foot, and it was better to caulk up you eye and let the dog have free with you foot now while the mistress was away than wait until the mistress came back when he would have free with you foot anyway and you might kick him and lose you-work.

“All right!” Mannish snapped in the face of unassailable logic. “Bring on the stinking beast. Let my foot be his urinal!”

Precious nodded, went into the house to fetch him, and returned with Riccardo trotting at her side.

The dog immediately bounded over to the sitting-duck chauffeur, circled briefly to establish the range, then brusquely lifted its leg and performed the nastiness.

“Is he finished?” Mannish asked through closed eyes and clenched teeth.

“All done,” Precious sang.

The chauffeur opened his eyes, shook off his pants leg, and marched grimly toward his room above the garage.

He turned to hiss murderously, “One day, I am going to cook and eat that dog. America will not turn me into a fire hydrant without a fight.”

Chapter 20

As an old time housewife Precious grimly knew that hood was only an earthbound ornament which man shed immediately upon assuming a spiritual form after death, hood and batty being two bodily parts definitely not retained in the resurrection. That argument, of course, had had absolutely no influence on the living Theophilus, for when he would frequently come panting after her during the hotblooded days of his youth to remind him that his wayward hood would never see inside the gates of heaven only made him furious. He would snarl irritably, “Listen, woman! Don’t chat no rubbish in me ear!”

So in her own way Precious knew how to cope with a slack man. But she did not know how to cope with the attentions of Riccardo, and the only frail blessing she could see in this nasty dog wooing was that it was happening to her in a foreign land.

Indeed, if this had happened to her in Jamaica, the backyard gossiping would already be raging. A few understanding souls would absolve Precious and blame the dog, complaining that in Jamaica today a woman couldn’t even go about her business without dog hood popping up in her path while the good-fornothing government did nothing. But other tongues would maliciously lash at poor Precious’s reputation and accuse her of leading the dog on, with some backbiting sisters sarcastically asking stupefied husbands questions that man mouth would never dare answer, such as, “She say a dog try grind her-.-.-.-How come no dog ever tried to grind me? What happen? Don’t my batty fat, too?”

In the mansion tension was building, and plotting was going on, and subterfuge and ruse were being waged as Precious tried her best to dampen the ardor of the dog, to keep him at foot’s length, to discourage his amorousness. And the mistress continued to think the beastly business funny. She laughed her head off in the kitchen when the dog would occasionally lock its forelegs around Precious’s foot and squeegee its sticky hood up and down her shinbone.

Precious would shriek, “Dog grinding me foot!” and shake off the beast and dash into another room, and the mistress would howl with glee and pass some snide remark like, “Precious, Riccardo just loves you!” From behind the door Precious would shriek what went without saying in any other country but this mad America, “I am a decent woman! I am a Christian! De dog is out of order to grind me foot!” To which the mistress would cynically reply, “We all come from the same stone, Precious! Stop being so ridiculously speciest!”

None of this Precious understood. She did not understand how dog could come from stone, to say nothing of a riverbaptized sister, and if she had understood the reference, she would have hotly argued that common ancestry still gave the dog no right to grind her. She just knew that she couldn’t stay any longer in the mansion with the dog mewling lewdly beneath her tailbone.

She made up her mind to give notice and return to Jamaica. Enough was enough. She was finished, through; she was done with the out of order dog, mansion, and America.

The next evening she told Mannish she was finished. The mistress and the dog were spending the night away. Mannish had dropped them off and returned to the mansion, and now he and Precious lolled in the living room and cocked up foot as if they were the rightful owners of all the lavish surrounding wealth.

She could not go on, Precious blurted out bluntly. She had gotten to the point where she was ashamed even to go to church, where hymns choked in her gullet, where knee would not freely bend in lawful worship. Although her conscience was clear that she had done nothing to encourage the nasty animal, if she allowed matters to carry on this way people would talk.

The chauffeur looked wistful and begged her not to leave. He had been drinking wine, which made his ripened face sag-like a flaccid balloon, and he tried to make light of her trouble by remarking, “You have the same effect on me as on this dog.”

“You think dis is a joke? You think dat my foot is a dog grinding post? You think I migrate to America to become a laughing stock?”

Mannish said he thought no such thing, that he respected her and admired her sense of dignity and deportment and was begging her not to go.

“How can a woman have dignity and deportment when every time she look behind her she see a dog hood longing out for her?” Precious wanted to know, eyes blazing.

Mannish finally admitted that he did not know. He sipped the wine and thought about it, wearing the faraway and perplexed look of a child puzzling over some nursery rhyme story such as why a thiefing brute like that good-for-nothing high-school dropout Jack should be allowed to scale a beanstalk, thief a householder’s personal possessions and poultry, murder the man when he gave pursuit, and live happily ever after off his illgotten gains without getting the gallows. Then he brightened and snapped up erect in his chair.

“I have it, Precious,” he said briskly. “I have the solution. I-will purchase a bitch in heat for Riccardo. The mistress will not know, for I will keep the bitch at my cousin’s house. When Riccardo becomes amorous, we will bring her to him.”

“But isn’t dat what I heard a television preacher call ‘wanton recreational sex?’” Precious fretted.

“It is moral and purposeful sex! It will make everyone happy. It is the perfect solution!”

Precious was uncertain that that was the solution but she could think of no other objection except her nagging doubts about introducing recreational sex into the animal kingdom. She said that she wished he would do something, anything, just to give her an ease from the pushy dog. Mannish got up and came over to where she was sitting. He bent down and kissed her warmly.

“Precious,” he said huskily, nuzzling her neck, “I know that since my Babylonian days my outlook has been indecisive, but I promise you that I will do this thing for you.”

He said other things, mainly clumps of sugary endearments, and tried to perch her palm atop his stiff hood as if a woman’s hand had been specially created to perform such untoward capping. Precious, however, pulled her hand away, mumbling that in her present confused frame of mind the sight or touch of any hood would only remind her of the dog. So he kissed her and hugged her and nuzzled her and-begged her to at least administer a light brushing of his pant-front steeple for encouragement, but Precious stoutly refused.

The next morning Mannish tried to find a bitch in heat for Riccardo.

The first ASPCA office he called hotly informed him that because pound animals are fixed, they were never in heat. Moreover, the woman on the other end of the line asked just what he intended to do with a bitch in heat, implying that she suspected bestiality. Mannish stiffly retorted that the bitch was not for him, but for his bulldog. There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line before the woman informed him that the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was not a whorehouse.

Mannish hung up. “Stupid woman,” he muttered.

He dialed another pound and the conversation went much the same way and had the same outcome.

“Hello,” Mannish began brightly, “I’m calling to ask if you have female dogs suitable for adoption.”

“Certainly, sir. We have many different kinds of dogs here.”

“Would you happen to have a bitch who is in heat?”

There was a sudden pause; the telephone wire hissed.

“In heat? You want a bitch in heat? Why?”

“She is for my bulldog. He is feeling frisky.”

“Sir, our animals are not for surrogate sex.”

“I just thought that you might have one bitch in heat who has not yet been neutered.”

Another menacing pause.

“Sir, what is your accent? Are you from Vietnam?”

“Certainly not!”

“May I have your name and address please?”

Mannish hung up quickly.

He had similar rebuffs calling up want ads advertising dogs for sale. One indignant man on the other end of the line said that he was prepared to shoot any foreigner who tried to buy one of his dogs and turn her into a slut and who the hell did he think he was coming here from overseas to whore American dogs?

“Come over and be shot, Saddam Hussein,” the man nastily invited.

Mannish asked the man if he didn’t think that dogs screwed, too, and why was he making such a fuss about such a harmless request.

“Dogs screw, too? That’s how you foreign bastards think, eh? What’d you do, you bastard, beat the poor animals until they give you a filthy peep show?”

“It’s no use,” Mannish mumbled to Precious that evening. “There are no bitches in heat in America. And if there are, you cannot buy one. The only suggestion I have is that we drive around and try to locate one for dognapping on the street.”