Last Days of the Dog-Men (11 page)

“Marcia?” Merle said, looking back at the box. “In this crate?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“Oh, we all wondered where you'd put her,” Merle said.

“Ha, ha,” Dick laughed, nodding, his eyes closed.

“I'm serious,” Sam said. “She shipped herself back here from New Orleans in this box.” He leaned down and looked into the plug hole. In the poorly lighted
room he couldn't see inside, but he could still smell her perfume, faint and trailing from the plug hole like a memory.

“Marcia,” he said. “Are you still in there?”

“Are you serious?” Merle said. She leaned down to the hole.

“Marcia?”

“Hello, Merle,” Marcia said.

Sam felt his blood race for a moment in relief.

“Ahh!” Merle cried, straightening up. She looked at Sam.

“What's she doing?”

“I guess she's not ready to come out,” Sam said. He shrugged. “We had an argument.”

“Don't mind me,” Marcia said, with the irony so familiar to Sam. “Go ahead and eat your dinner. I'll just stay in here awhile. I'm not hungry.”

“Strange,” Dick said, fluttering a hand in front of his face.

“Huh,” Merle said. “Well,” she said after a moment, “let's eat.”

Sam had baked a hen and sweet potatoes, steamed buttered carrots, baked fresh onion, and made a spinach casserole. He carried it all out on a large wicker tray and set it on top of the box. There was barely enough room for the food, so they held their plates in their laps. Dick had a small fire going in the grate, and he and Merle ate rapidly. Sam ate slowly, watching them and listening. There was no sound from the box. He felt of the wood on the fire side to make sure it wasn't getting too hot. No one said anything
throughout the meal. They avoided one another's glances.

He went out to the kitchen for another bottle of wine, and when he came back Merle was staring at the box and Dick looked vexed.

“So,” Merle said. “Is she staying in there because we're here for dinner?”

“Stay out of it,” Dick said. He stared at a blank spot on the wall.

Sam knocked lightly on the box.

“He's communicating with the woman in the box,” Merle said.

“Marcia,” Sam said softly. “You doing all right?” He leaned his head down to the box. Nothing stirred. Mingling with the paling scent of her perfume he thought he detected another odor. A cool breeze wafted in through the window, and he looked up at Dick and Merle. Merle pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders and seemed to be making her rabbit face again. Dick's fire was dying.

“What's that smell?” Merle said.

Dick sniffed and furrowed his brow.

“I've been smelling that, too.”

“What?” Sam said.

“Something rotten,” Dick said.

“It's a dog, I think,” Sam said. “It crawled up under the house and died. Sorry. I meant to get it out today, but I ran out of time.”

“A dead dog?” Merle said. “Under the house?” She looked down at the remains of their meal. Sam looked, too. The picked rib cage of the chicken, the
cold claylike sweet potato chunks, the single shiny orange carrot, the bit of spinach in the corner of the dish like something a cat coughed up.

“Gross,” Merle said.

Dick straightened up.

“You want me to get rid of that dog for you?”

“No,” Sam said. “Just sit there. I'll be back in a second.”

He got a scented candle from the kitchen. When he got back to the living room, Merle and Dick were staring at the box.

“I left Dick one time, he nearly died,” Merle said. “Laid around and wouldn't go to work or eat.”

“Oh, Sam wouldn't do that,” Marcia's voice came from the box. “Sam would just go on about his life. He would try to pretend nothing had even happened. And pretty soon that's the way it would be. His whole life would seem like a blank because he never let himself get involved in anything.”

“Maybe you're being too hard on him,” Dick said.

“How would you know?” Marcia said.

“Why didn't you just take a bus?” Merle said. She sat up and crossed her arms and legs.

Dick was looking away at the wall. Sam looked down at the pointed toe of the pump that on Merle's skinny, bouncing leg looked like the beak of a hatchling. Dick wore large scuffed wing tips and thin blue socks that gathered around his pale ankles. Sam had on the cowboy boots he'd bought himself when Marcia took off. They looked as cheap as they actually were.

Dick straightened himself up and sniffed. He cleared his throat.

“Seems like I can still smell that dog.”

“Why don't you go get rid of the dog, then,” Merle said. “A while ago you said, ‘I'll get rid of the goddamn dog.' ”

“I didn't say that.” He glared at her.

“It stinks,” Merle said. She glowered at Sam, then at Dick.

“He wouldn't let me get us a dog,” Marcia said. “He didn't even want the responsibility of owning a dog.” Sam could hear the emotion in her voice and almost welled up into tears himself in silent protest and anger.

“Here he is with this fucking dead dog under the house,” Marcia said, her voice quavering. “Oh, he can care about this stupid dead dog. It's completely safe. He has nothing but the simplest responsibility. To bury it.”

“Christ, Sam,” Merle said. “Why don't you let her out of the box? What the hell's going on here?”

“I didn't put her in the box,” Sam said, his voice rising. “She can let herself out of the goddamn box.”

“Whoa, now, bud,” Dick said, straightening up. “Settle down, now.”

Sam started to lash out at Dick and checked himself, breathing deeply and dropping back into his chair.

“I'll let her out of the box, for Christ sake,” Merle said. “Dick, go find a hammer or something.”

“I don't want to come out,” Marcia said. “Jesus.”
She was crying now. “What an idiot. I'm such an idiot.”

“I don't want to hear that!” Merle said. “Don't get into that, for Christ sake.”

“Why don't we go check on that dog?” Dick said to Sam.

“Ah, shit,” Sam said under his breath. “Look, maybe you guys should just go on home, now. I'm sorry. I'll take care of this.”

Dick looked offended. Merle stood up and brushed roughly past Sam toward the back of the house.

“What are you doing?” Sam said. He followed her back into the kitchen, where she began to rifle through the cabinet drawers.

“If you're looking for a hammer, it's in the bottom drawer on the left,” Sam said, “but I think she's locked herself in there.” Merle glared at him briefly, then went for the drawer.

“The least you could do is help us get her out,” she muttered.

“I'm telling you, Merle, just leave it alone,” Sam said. “She'll come out of the box when she's good and goddamn ready and you better just leave it the hell alone.”

Merle straightened up from the drawer and stamped her feet in a paroxysm of fury, sputtering a mangled mouthful of curses, her face screwed up and her fists flailing about the kitchen air.

“
Ahhhhh!
” she shouted. “Don't you tell me what to do!”

She reached into the drawer, pulled out the hammer,
and reeled past him on her way back to the den. Sam got his flashlight out of the open drawer and stepped outside.

The starlight fell softly on the mound of dirt beside the perfect grave he'd dug that afternoon. He stood for a moment, breathing the clear night air in the breeze from the south. Then he walked around the house and looked into the living-room window. Dick pried at the box's lid with the hammer claw while Merle stood by, her hands on her hips.

“Hurry it up, Dick,” she said.

Sam left the window and walked around back. He shone the flashlight onto the crawl-space hole, then shut it off. Crawling through the hole, he turned the light on again and swept it toward the spot beneath the den. He saw the hindquarters. The stench was bad. He crawled, circling around to the right, the light slashing back and forth in the dark on the bricks and boards and earth. He came around in front of the dog, set himself, and shined the light on her face.

Her eyes bore fiercely into the beam, black lips curled back from her teeth. Sam's heart leapt and raced in his chest.

She never moved.

“Oh,” he whispered, eyes welling, “poor thing.” He shut off the light and lay in the dark beside her. Above him, the shuffling sounds of the living were creaky and vague.

KINDRED SPIRITS

O
N THE LONG GREEN LAWN THAT LED DOWN TO THE
lake, Bailey's boy tumbled with their two chocolate Labs, Buddy and Junior. The seven of us sat on Bailey's veranda sipping bourbon and watching the boy and his dogs, watching partly because of what Bailey had just told us about the younger dog, Buddy's progeny, a fat brute and a bully. Bailey had chosen Buddy's mate carefully, but the union had produced a pure idiot. A little genetic imbalance, Bailey said, hard to avoid with these popular breeds.

Watching Junior you could see that this dog was aggressively stupid. A reckless, lumbering beast with no light in his eyes, floundering onto old Buddy's back, slamming into the boy and knocking him down. The boy is about ten or eleven and named Ulysses
though they call him Lee (sort of a joke), thin as a tenpenny nail, with spectacles like his mama. He was eating it up, rolling in the grass and laughing like a lord-god woodpecker, Junior rooting at him like a hog.

“I hate that dog,” Bailey said. “But Lee won't let me get rid of him.”

The slow motions of cumulus splayed light across the lawn and lake in soft golden spars, the effect upon me narcotic. My weight pressed into the Adirondack chair as if I were paralyzed from the chest down. Bailey planned this place to be like an old-fashioned lake house, long and low with a railed porch all around. Jack McAdams, with us this day, landscaped the slope to the water, then laid St. Augustine around the dogwoods, redbuds, and a thick American beech, its smooth trunk marked with tumorous carvings. Three sycamores and a sweet gum line the shore down toward the woods. The water's surface was only slightly disturbed, like the old glass panes Bailey bought and put in his windows.

Russell took our glasses and served us frosty mint juleps from a silver tray. Silent Russell. The color and texture of Cameroon tobacco leaf, wearing his black slacks and white serving jacket. I am curious about him to the point of self-consciousness. I try not to stare, but want to gaze upon his face through a onesided mirror. I see things in it that may or may not be there and I'm convinced of one thing, this role of the servant is merely that: Russell walks among us as the ghost of a lost civilization.

Bailey says Russell's family has been with his since the latter's post-Civil War Brazilian exile, when Bailey's great-great-grandfather fled to hack a new plantation out of the rain forest. Ten years later he returned with a new fortune and workforce, a band of wild Amazonians that jealous neighbors said he treated like kings. Only Russell's small clan lingers.

I looked at Russell and nodded to him.

“Russell,” I said.

He looked at me a long moment and nodded his old gray head.

“Yah,” he said, followed in his way with the barely audible “sah.” After he'd handed drinks out all around, he went back inside the house.

“Russell makes the best goddamn mint julep in the world,” said Bailey, his low voice grumbly in the quiet afternoon, late summer, the first thin traces of fall in the air.

I could see two other men of Russell's exact coloring working at the barbecue pit down in the grove that led to the boathouse. Russell's boys. They'd had coals under the meat all night, Bailey said, and now we could see them stripping the seared, smoked pork into galvanized tubs. Beyond them, visible as occasional blurred slashing shadows between the trunks and limbs and leaves of small-growth hardwoods, were Bailey's penned and compromised wild pigs, deballed and meat sweetening in the lakeside air. He looked to be building up a winter meatstock, product of several hunting trips to the north Florida swamps with Skeet Bagwell and Titus Smith, who were seated next to me
on Bailey's side. It seemed an unusual sport, to catch and castrate violent swine and pen them until their meat mellowed with enforced domesticity, and then to slit their throats. Russell's boys partially covered the rectangular cooking pit with sheets of roofing tin and carried the tubs of meat around back of the house to the kitchen. Along the veranda we drank our mint juleps—McAdams, Bill Burton, Hoyt Williams, Titus, Skeet, Bailey, and me—arranged in a brief curving line in Bailey's brand-new Adirondack chairs. Russell came out with more mint juleps, nodded, and slipped away.

“H
ERE
'
S TO LOVE
,” B
AILEY SAID, RAISING HIS SILVER CUP
. He smiled as if about to hurt someone. Probably himself. A malignant smile. Here we go, I said to myself, I don't want to hear it. I didn't want to hear his story any more than I wanted to take his case. He'd called the day before and invited me to the barbecue with these men, his best friends, and said he wanted me to represent him “in this business with Maryella.” Bailey, I'd said, I've never handled divorces and I don't intend to change—as criminal as some of those cases may be. I suggested he call Larry Weeks, who's done very well with big divorce cases in this town. No, Bailey said, you come on out, come on. We'll talk about it. I supposed at the time it was because we've known each other since the first grade, though in the way of those who live parallel lives without ever really touching.

So here we were. There were no women around, apparently, none of these men's wives. I began to feel a familiar pain in my heart, as if it were filling with fluid, and it seemed I had to think about breathing in order to breathe. Even what little I knew about Bailey's problem at the time forced me into places I didn't want to go. So his wife has left him for his partner, I thought—so what? What else is new in the world? We all know something of that pain, to one degree or another.