Dogfight (7 page)

On his way to work, Reed ran into Joan Bishop. She was standing at the curb, rifling through the morning's mail, her hair tied down with a crimson scarf. The spaniel was with her and trotted a circle around the car. He idled behind her and rolled down the passenger window.

“Good morning, Joan,” he said, leaning across the seat, smiling.

She glanced at him over her shoulder and scowled. This time of year her roses were in full bloom, practically glowing on her lawn, open to the morning, each bush surrounded by a small chicken wire fence to keep the dogs away.

“Is there something wrong?” Reed said when she didn't answer.

“Don't talk to me,” she said, tucking the envelopes into her purse. She stalked away, up the gently sloping driveway toward her house, swinging her arms angrily. The dog padded along in her wake.

“Mrs. Bishop, wait,” Reed said, putting the car in park and getting out. “Why don't you like me? What have I ever done to you? Is this about Hi John and your rosebushes? Is this about the dogs?”

“I don't want to talk to you,” she said without looking back.

Reed had been disconcerted by this meeting and believed it was the reason his presentation wasn't going as well as he had hoped. He began at Shiloh with a bad imitation of A. S. Johnston saying to his officers, “Gentlemen, tonight we water our horses in the Tennessee.” It was a nice beginning, he thought, accenting both the foolish optimism of the Confederates and the poignancy of Johnston's death in the battle. He drove the man and woman who had come this morning over the field in a golf cart, trying to conjure for them images that would be moving enough to inspire donation. The abandoned campfires, left by Union troops in the face of a surprise attack, coffeepots still warm. The small watering hole where wounded of both sides crawled for a drink, reddening the muddy water with their
blood. He showed them the place where Johnston's officers cradled his head in death. The patch of ground where Beauregard's tent stood, in which he wrote to Jefferson Davis, “Grant is beaten. Will mop him up in the morning.” Monuments marked each site and Reed paused a moment after he was finished to let them read. He thought if he could just get the telling right, and he told these same sad stories all the time, then they would understand the need for preservation.

“Don't you think all this glorifies the South's participation in the war?” the man said. “We have quite a few black employees and I don't know how happy it would make them to give money to something like this. The South was, after all, fighting to perpetuate slavery.”

“What we are trying to glorify here, sir, is bravery,” Reed said, “on both sides. We want people to come out here and be reminded of how horrible the war was. But also, to recognize the character of the participants. We can learn quite a bit from the past.”

The man nodded but Reed could tell he was still unconvinced. The cart whined up a hill toward a Union graveyard, showing through a knot of trees, and the family there, taking pictures, their little boy holding a souvenir Confederate flag.

The woman said, “This isn't what I expected. I'm having a hard time seeing the big picture. I think I was expecting a football field or something.”

Reed said, “That's my point. The whole thing has been trivialized by time. We need to get people out here. To sort of run the history through their fingers, if you get my meaning.”

“I think someone is calling you,” the man said, pointing.

Reed stopped the cart and all of them turned to look. They were parked on a cobbled path that divided a manicured lawn. To their right were rows of dilapidated cannon along a split rail fence and past those, a peach orchard, where pink and white petals blanketed the grass, pulled loose by their own creamy, lustrous weight. In the other direction, they could see a figure running through the trees, spindly white oaks, waving one arm wildly and shouting Reed's
name. He must have cut over from the parking lot. They waited to let him catch up and as he got closer, Reed recognized Bill Hoffman.

“We're being charged,” the woman said.

“Shit,” Reed said.

“Excuse me?” the man said.

Bill Hoffman reached them, gasping, and stood a moment, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. He was wearing a suit and tie and his cast jutted out from beneath his sleeve. His fingers were mottled blue.

“What are you doing here, Bill?” Reed said, stepping from the cart.

“Christ,” Hoffman said. “Wait a minute. I haven't run that far since high school.”

“Bill?” Reed said.

“What?” Hoffman said. “What, goddamnit?”

He glanced up at Reed and their eyes met, just briefly, just long enough for Reed to notice that Hoffman's eyes were startlingly blue. Pool water blue. April must have told him everything. He doesn't know what else to do, Reed thought. He knew that feeling, desperate and weak and helpless with loss. They cut the look short at the exact same moment and both of them blushed, faces going hot, each of them having seen something private in the other's eyes.

“You don't have to go through with this,” Reed said.

“You slept with my wife,” Hoffman said, still breathing hard. Then to the others, pointing with his cast, “This man slept with my wife.”

They were absolutely still, frozen like awkward bronze monuments.

“Look, Bill, I'm not going to do this. I won't fight you,” Reed said.

Right then, Hoffman straightened and hit Reed in the temple with his cast. From the ground, Reed could see Hoffman, doubled over in pain, clutching his injured arm to his chest and he could see the sky behind him, pale, brushed occasionally with clouds. He had been about to say, it was an accident, we hadn't planned anything, it meant nothing, though all of those things, he knew, were just things you said at a time like that, even if they were true. He had been
about to say, I know how you feel, I'm sorry. He didn't hurt as much as he would have expected, was just sort of dreamy and light. The man was waving his arms, the woman shouting wildly for help. Reed got to his feet, shakily, not knowing what else to do, and kicked Bill Hoffman in the groin. In the process, he lost his balance and fell on top of Hoffman and they began beating each other as best they could in such close quarters, Hoffman with his cast, pulling Reed's hair with his good hand. Reed held Hoffman in tight so he couldn't use the cast effectively and butted with his head, used his knees and elbows. They fought halfheartedly, dutifully, almost sadly, doing no less damage to each other for their lack of passion, rolling down a subtle incline, picking up fallen leaves and twigs in their hair and on their clothes, until they fell apart exhausted. The two of them lay on the grass, side by side, Hoffman's arm, the one with the cast, draped across Reed's chest, rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing. Reed wanted to ask Hoffman if, now that he knew, he was still in love with his wife, but he didn't say anything. After a few minutes, Bill Hoffman pushed himself up and left without another word.

Reed drove to Maggie's house and let himself in the back door with the key she kept beneath an empty red clay flowerpot. He lay down on the couch in the living room and waited for her to come home. With his eyes closed, he took stock of his injuries. He must have somehow bitten his tongue, because it was swollen and felt heavy in his mouth, and by pressing it against the insides of his cheeks, he discovered a loose tooth. His face burned, as if someone had held him by the hair and dragged it back and forth across thick carpet. There was a throbbing, slow and even and only a little painful, in his temple. He could picture the bruise, a vivid discoloration, spreading back into his hairline, like a tattoo. Reed hadn't minded the horrified stares that strangers in other cars had given him on his way home. He believed, as surely as he had ever believed anything, that he deserved them. He thought of Joan Bishop, living alone in that house since her husband died. Of the morning she had
called him and Maggie into her yard to tell them what Hi John had done. The roses drooping heavily on their stems that day, the petals browning at the edges. They're so fragile, she had said, they can't bear even the slightest mistreatment. He had seen Joan Bishop in the rain, another time, tying trash bags over the little wire cages to keep the flowers from being drowned.

Maggie came in slowly, wary at having found her door unlocked, and dropped her keys when she saw Reed lying in the evening shadows on her couch. He smiled crookedly at her surprise, his lips cracked and tight with dried blood.

“Oh my God,” she said. “What happened to you? Were you in an accident?”

She crossed the room to him and pushed back his hair to examine his bruise. Reed moved her hands away. She was left poised, her hands inches from him, fingers curved to the shape of his head.

“Bill Hoffman and I got into a fight,” he said.

“What?” she said. “That's insane. You're grown men.”

“That doesn't make it any less the truth,” he said.

“Let me guess,” she said, holding his chin, despite his efforts to prevent her, and turning his face slowly back and forth, examining him. “Bill won. It serves you right. You look like you were thrown from a moving car.”

Maggie put two fingers inside a rip in his shirt that he hadn't noticed before and touched his chest. Her fingers were cold and she left them there until they warmed a little on his skin. She plucked a bit of leaf from his hair. He turned on a lamp beside them and they squinted at each other in the new light. She was kneeling next to the couch, rocked back on her heels. He liked the way she was looking at him. Maggie stood and kicked off her shoes and padded into the kitchen.

“If he won,” Reed said to the swinging door, “it was a Pyrrhic victory.”

He could hear the sink running, drawers opening and closing.

“Hi John gets out tomorrow,” he said. “I've been sitting here thinking we might go together to pick him up. He would like that.”

“That sounds nice,” she said over the rush of running water.

Maggie returned with two washcloths, one wrapping ice and another soaked in warm water. She made him slide over and sat on the edge of the couch next to him. She pressed the ice to his temple and lifted his hand to it, so he would hold it there. With the other cloth, she brushed his face, wiping his forehead first and working gently down along the bridge of his nose. The washcloth stung where it touched his wounds but in a strangely pleasant way, the way muscles ache after a long, satisfying exercise.

“I want you to tell me everything,” Maggie said.

He didn't say anything for a long time, just lay still and let her press the washcloth to his cheeks, run it over his lips. She was turned to him in such a way that one side of her face was lit completely by the lamplight, the other side drawn in shadow. She pushed his eyelids gently closed with her fingertips. Water streamed down his cheeks and he thought it must have looked like he was crying.

Gerald wanted a monkey and Wishbone said he could get it for him. Wishbone had a man on the inside. The three of us were burning out badly rusted floor sections of a tuna rig called
Kaga
and welding new pieces in their place, patchwork repairs, like making a quilt of metal. A lot of Japanese fisheries were having ships built in the states; labor was cheaper or something. This hold was essentially a mass grave for marine life and it stunk like the dead. The smell never comes out, Gerald told me, even if you sandblasted the paint off the walls. The door to the next room had been sealed, so there was only one way in, an eight-by-ten-foot square in the ceiling, and it was almost too hot to draw breath. They seemed connected somehow, the heat and that awful smell, two parts of the same swampy thing.

“Will it be a spider monkey?” Gerald said.

Wishbone shut down his burner and looked at Gerald.

“I don't know. My Jap gets all the good shit. It'll eat bananas,” Wishbone said. “It'll scratch its ass. Shit, Gerald.
Will it be a spider monkey?”

“Spider monkeys make the best pets,” Gerald said.

“Gerald, what the hell do you want with a monkey?” I said.

Gerald started to answer, paused in his burning, white sparks
settling around his gloved hands, but Wishbone cut him off. He said to me, “Do not speak until you are spoken to, little man.” His voice was muffled and deepened by his welding mask. “A monkey Gerald wants, a monkey Gerald gets. Now, run and fetch me some cigarettes.”

He stood and stretched his legs. Wishbone was one large black man. With his welding mask down and black leather smock and gloves and long, thick legs running down into steel-toed work boots, he looked like a badass Darth Vader.

“Wishbone, can you read?” I said.

He snapped his mask up. His face was running with sweat and his eyes were bloodshot and angry. He was high on something. This was my second summer at my uncle's shipyard, and the best I could tell, Wishbone was always high.

“Did you speak, little man? I hope not.”

I didn't say anything else, just pointed at the sign behind him—
DO NOT SMOKE
, painted in red block letters on plywood. The torches burn on a combination of pure oxygen and acetylene and sometimes tiny holes wear in the lines from use. The welding flames themselves generally burn off all the leaking oxygen and gas, but shut down the torches and give the gas a little time to collect in the air, then add a spark, and the world is made of fire. A spark is rarely enough but why test the percentages? There's a story around the yard about a guy who'd been breathing the fumes for hours with his torch unlit. When he went to fire it up, he inhaled a spark and the air in his lungs ignited. Afterward, he looked okay on the surface, nothing damaged, but his insides were charcoal, hollowed out by fire.

Wishbone glanced over his shoulder at the sign, looked back at me, shrugged. He reached under his smock and came out with a rumpled pack of Winstons. He put a bent cigarette between his lips, struck a match, and held it just away from the tip.