Last Days of the Dog-Men (12 page)

Ten years ago I defended a man accused of pushing his brother off a famous outcropping in the Smoky Mountains in order to get his brother's inheritance, set for some reason at a percentage much greater than his own. It was an odd case. There'd been several other people at the lookout, where in those days a single rail kept visitors from succumbing to vertigo and tumbling down the craggy face of the cliff. My client's hand had rested in the small of his brother's back as they leaned over the railing to look down when the brother—like a fledgling tumbling from the nest, one witness said— pitched over the edge and disappeared.

It was considered an accident until my client's cousin, who had never liked or trusted him, who in fact claimed he had once dangled her by her wrists from the treehouse behind their grandmother's home until she agreed to give him her share of their cache of Bazooka bubble gum, hired a private investigator who was able to plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of enough witnesses to bring the case before a grand jury in Knoxville. Incredibly, the guy was indicted for
murder one. I thought it so outrageous that when he called I immediately took over his case, even though it meant spending time traveling back and forth across the state line.

I liked the man. While he and I prepared for trial, my wife, Dorothy, and I had him out to dinner a few times and twice even took him to my family's old shanty on the Gulf Coast for the weekend. He and Dorothy hit it off well. Each was a lover of classical music (Doro had studied piano at the university until she gave up her hope of composing and switched to music history), and he was a tolerable pianist. They discussed the usual figures, Schubert and Brahms and Mozart, etc., as well as names I'd never heard of. They sat at the piano to study a particular phrase. They retired to the den to play old LPs Doro had brought to our marriage but which had gathered dust during the years I'd built my practice, never having had the energy to listen with her after dragging in at near midnight with a satchel full of work for the next morning. I often awoke at one or two in the morning, tie twisted and cinched against my throat, the dregs of a scotch and water in the glass in my lap, while the stereo needle scratched at the label of a recording long done easing strains of Sibelius from its grooves. In the bedroom I'd find Doro turned into the covers, her arms tossed over a pillow that covered her head, as was her sleeping habit, as if she were trying to smother herself.

I can look back now and see things. I pursued her when she didn't necessarily want to be pursued. The law school was just two blocks from the music school,
and I would wander down the boulevard and into the resonant halls of the studios and to the room where she practiced and composed. I would stand outside the door, looking in through the narrow window no wider than half of my face, until she looked up, would have to look up, with her dark eyes as open upon mine as an animal's in the woods when it discovers you standing still and watching it, and it is watching your eyes to see if you are something alive. I did not do this every day, but only when my blood was up too high to sit at the law library desk and, thinking of the last time we had been together, I had to see her. One day when she looked up, I knew that she had not wanted to but for some reason had been unable not to, and when she did look up she knew that was it, she was mine. It was the moment when one is captured by love in spite of one's misgivings and is lost.

But light bends to greater forces, and so does fate, in time. I should not have been so stricken when she left with my client after the trial, but of course I was. An overweight man who eats bacon, drinks heavily, smokes, and never exercises should expect a heart attack, too, and does, but is nevertheless surprised when it comes and he is certainly stricken. I'd given my all to the case, I'd fought for the man. Work had become my life, after all. I'd exposed the cousin as a bankrupt, scheming bitch, read letters between the brothers that were full of fraternal endearments, and I borrowed and brought into court an expensive, full-size oil copy of Durand's famous painting,
Kindred Spirits
, depicting the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William
Bryant standing on an outcropping in the Catskills, a spot less lofty than the scene of my client's alleged crime, but more beautiful in its romantic, cloistering light, and I asked them how a brother, in a setting such as this, and with witnesses less than ten feet away, could do something so
unnatural
as pitch his own flesh and blood to a bloody end. It was a stroke of brilliance. No one sees that painting without being moved to sentimental associations. Rosenbaum, the D.A., was furious I got away with it. My client also had a noble face: a straight nose, strong brow, high forehead, strong jaw and chin, clear brown eyes that declared a forthright nature. But in the end, after the hung jury and the judge's bitter words, my client and my wife moved to Tennessee, of all places, where he would set himself up in the insurance business. And here is my point, I suppose, or what makes the story worth telling.

When she began to call me three years later, in secret, explaining how he had become a cold and manipulative man, she told me he had admitted to her while drunk that he had indeed pushed his brother off the lookout, and he'd said that only I had any evidence of this, in a statement I'd taken wherein he slipped up and said the one thing that could have convicted him had the D.A. gotten his hands on it. I could hear the ghosted voices of other, garbled conversations drifting into our line. What one thing is that? I said. I don't know, she said. He wouldn't tell me. There was a pause on the line, and then she said, You could find it, Paul.

But I have never opened the file to search for the incriminating words. Moreover, although I have acquired an almost tape-recorder memory of the utterances of people in trouble, I have not bothered to prod that little pocket in my brain. I have detoured around it as easily as I swerve around a sawhorsed manhole in the street. I protected my client, as any good attorney would. I've moved on.

W
E WALKED DOWN INTO THE GROVE, PAST THE THIN
smoking curtain of heat at the edge of the pit, its buckled tin, and up to the heavy-gauge wire fencing that surrounded about a half acre of wooded area bordering the cove. Here there was no grass, and the moist leaves were matted on the rich, grub- and worm-turned earth. Through the rectangular grid of the fencing we saw small pockets of ground broken up as if by the steel blades of a tiller where the pigs had rooted, and slashes and gouges in tree trunks where they'd sharpened their tusks.

I looked over at Bailey swirling the crushed ice in his cup, the righteous tendons in his jaw hardening into lumpy bands of iron. He was seething with his own maudlin story. But before he could start up, we heard a rustling followed by a low grunt, and a wild hog shot out of the undergrowth and charged. We all jumped back but Bailey as the hog skidded to a stop just short of the wire, strangely dainty feet on scraggly legs absurdly spindly beneath its massive head. Its broad shoulders tapered along its mohawkish spinal
ridge to the hips of a running back and to its silly poodlish tail. The pig stood there, head lowered, small-eyed, snorting every few breaths or so, watching Bailey from beneath its thick brow. Bailey looked back at the beast, impassive, as if its appearance had eased his mind for a moment. And the boar grew even more still, staring at Bailey.

The spell was broken by the loud clanging of a bell. Russell, clanging the authentic antique triangle for our meal. The pig walked away from us then, indifferent, stiff-legged, as if mounted on little hairy stilts.

W
E MADE OUR WAY BACK TO THE PORCH
. R
USSELL AND
one of the men who'd been tending the pit came out with a broad tray of meat already sauced, and a woman (no doubt one of Russell's daughters or granddaughters) came out and set down on the table a stack of heavy plates, a pile of white bread, an iron pot full of baked beans, and we all got up to serve ourselves. When we sat back down, Bill Burton, who'd dug into his food before anybody else, made a noise like someone singing falsetto and looked up, astonished.

“By God, that's good barbecue,” he said through a mouthful of meat. Burton was a plumbing contractor who'd done the plumbing for Bailey's house. He said to Skeet Bagwell, “Say you shot this pig?”

“Well,” Skeet said, “let me tell you about that pig.” Like me, Skeet is a lawyer, but we aren't much alike. He rarely takes a criminal case, but goes for the money, and loves party politics and the country club
and hunting trips and all that basically extended fraternity business, never makes a phone call his secretary can make for him, and needless to say he loves to tell big lies. His compadre Titus built shopping malls during the 1980s and doesn't do much of anything now.

“Titus and I
captured
that pig,” Skeet said, “down in the Florida swamps. Ain't that right, Titus?”

“I wouldn't say, not exactly captured,” Titus said. “In a way, or briefly, perhaps, we captured that pig, but then we killed it. It may be a mite gamy.”

“Uhn-uh,” voices managed. “Not a bit!”

Skeet said, “You ain't had your blood stirred till you crossing a clearing in the swamp and hear a bunch of pigs rooting and grunting, you don't know where they are, and then you see their shapes, just these big, low, broad, hulking shadows, inside the bushes on the other side, and then they smell you and disappear, just disappear. It's eerie.” Skeet took a mouthful of the barbecue, sopped up some sauce with a piece of bread, and chewed. We waited on him to swallow, sitting there on the veranda. Down on the lawn the boy, (Ulysses) Lee, ran screaming from the bounding dogs.

Skeet said it was exciting to see the pigs slip out of the woods and light out across a clearing, and the dogs' absolute joy in headlong pursuit. They were hunting these pigs with the local method, he said. You didn't shoot them. You used your dogs to capture them.

“We had this dog, part Catahoula Cur—you ever heard of them?”

“State dog of Louisiana,” Hoyt said.

“Looks kind of prehistoric,” Skeet said. “They breed them over in the Catahoula Swamp in Louisiana. Well, this dog was a cross between a Catahoula Cur and a pit bull, and that's the best pig dog they is. Like a compact Doberman. They can run like a deer dog and they're tough and strong as a pit bull. And they got that streak of meanness they need, because a boar is just mean as hell.” Skeet said he'd seen an African boar fight a whole pack of lions on TV one night, did we see that? Lions tore the boar to bits, but he fought the whole time. “I mean you couldn't hardly see the boar for all the lion asses stuck up in the air over him, tails swishing, ripping him up, twenty lions or more,” Skeet said. They had pieces of him scattered around the savanna in seconds, but there was his old head, tusking blindly even as one of the lions licked at his heart. Skeet took another bite of barbecue and chewed, looking off down the grassy slope at the tussling boy and dogs.

“This dog Titus and I had, we bought him off a fellow down there said he was the best dog he'd ever seen for catching a hog, and he was right.” Titus nodded in agreement. “We got out in the swamp with him, and
bim
, he was off on a trail, and ran us all over that swamp for about an hour, and never quit until he run down that hog.

“We come up on him out in this little clearing, and he's got this big old hog by the snout, holding his head down on the ground, hog snorting and grunting and his eyes leaking bile. I mean, that dog had him. But
then we come to find out how we got this wonder dog at such a bargain.”

“I had a preacher sell me a blind dog one time,” Hoyt said. “Said how hot he was for a rabbit, and cheap. Sumbitch when I let loose the leash took off flying after a rabbit and run right into an oak tree, knocked hisself cold.”

Everybody laughed at that.

“Preacher said, ‘I never said he wasn't blind,' ” Hoyt said.

“Well, this dog wasn't blind,” Skeet said, “not
literally
, but you might could say he had a blind spot. He would run the hog down, like he's supposed to do, then take it by the snout and hold its old head down, so you can go up and hog-tie him and take him in. Way they do down there, like Bailey's doing here, they castrate them and pen them up, let the meat sweeten awhile before they kill 'em.

“But this dog, once you grabbed the hog by the hind legs and begun to tie him, thought his job was done, and he lets go.”

Skeet paused here, looking around at us. “So there was old Titus, gentlemen, playing wheelbarrow with a wild pig that's trying to twist around and rip his nuts off with one of them tusks. I mean that son of a bitch is mean, eyes all bloodshot, foaming at the mouth. That meat ain't too tough, is it?”

Everyone mumbled in the negative.

“Ain't gamy, is it?”

Naw, uhn-uh.

“So finally Titus jumped around close to a tree, lets
go of the hog and hops up into it, and I'm already behind one and peeping out, and the hog jabbed his tuskers at the tree Titus was in for a minute and then shot out through the woods again, and the dog—he'd been jumping around and barking and growling and nipping at the hog—took out after him again. So Titus climbed down and we ran after them.”

“Dog was good at
catching
the hog,” Titus said.

“That's right,” Skeet said. “Just didn't understand the seriousness of the situation, once he'd done it. Actually, the way I see it, the dog figured that once the man touched the hog, then he had taken
possession
of the hog, see, and his job—the dog's was over.

“Anyway, you can imagine, Titus wasn't going near that hog held by that dog again, so one of these fellows we're with tries it, and the same thing happens, two more times: As soon as the man
touched the hog
, the dog let go. And it was starting to get dark. But this fellow, name was Beauregard or something—”