Last Days of the Dog-Men (14 page)

Bailey swirled what was left in his mint julep cup, looking down into the dregs. He turned it up and sucked at the bits of ice and mint and the soggy sugar in the bottom. Then he sat back in his chair, poured more bourbon into the cup, and said in a voice that
was chilling to me, because I recognized the method of manipulation behind it, taking the shocked imagination and diverting it to the absurd: “So when I brought them back here, that's when Russell's boys skinned 'em up and put 'em over the coals.”

There was silence for a long moment, and then McAdams, Bill Burton, Hoyt, Titus, and Skeet broke into a kind of forced, polite laughter.

“Shit, Bailey,” McAdams said. “You just about tell it too good for me.”

“So gimme some more of that human barbecue, Russell,” Titus said.

“ ‘Long pig' is the Polynesian term, I believe,” Skeet said.

Their laughter came more easily now.

The boy, Lee, came running up to the porch steps.

“Daddy,” he said. He was crying, his voice high and quailing. Bailey turned his darkened face to the boy as if to an executioner.

“Daddy, Junior's trying to hurt old Buddy.”

We looked up. Out in the lake, Buddy swam with the ball in his mouth. Junior was trying to climb up onto Buddy's back. Both dogs looked tired, their heads barely clearing the surface. Junior mounted Buddy from behind, and as he climbed Buddy's back the older dog, his nose held straight up and the ball still in his teeth, went under.

He didn't come back up. We all of us stood up out of our chairs. Junior swam around for a minute. He swam in a circle one way, then reversed himself, and then struck out in another direction with what seemed
a renewed vigor, after something. It was the blue ball, floating away. He nabbed it off the surface and swam in. He set the ball down on the bank and shook himself, then looked up toward all of us on the veranda. He started trotting up the bank toward the boy standing stricken in the yard.

Bailey had gone into the house and come out with what looked like an old Browning shotgun. He yanked it to his shoulder, sighted, and fired it just over the boy's head at the dog. The boy ducked down flat onto the grass. The dog stopped still, in a point, looking at Bailey holding the gun. He was out of effective range.

“Bailey!” Skeet shouted. “You'll hit the boy!”

Bailey's face was purplish and puffed with rage. His eyes darted all over the lawn. He saw his boy Lee lying down in the grass with an empty, terrified look in his eyes. He lowered the barrel and drew a bead on the boy. The boy, and I tell you he looked just like his mother, was looking right into his father's eyes.He will never be just a boy again. There was a small strangled noise down in Bailey's chest, and he swung the gun up over the grove and fired it off,
boom
, the shot racing out almost visibly over the trees. The sound caromed across the outer bank and echoed back to us, diminished. Junior took off running for the road, tail between his legs. The boy lay in the grass looking up at his father. Titus stepped up and took the shotgun away, and Bailey sat down on the pinewood floor of the veranda as if exhausted.

“Well,” he said after a minute. His voice was deep and hoarse and croaky. “Well.” He shook with a gentle,
silent laughter. “I wonder what I ought to do.” He cleared his throat. “I don't know who else to ask but you boys.” He struggled up and tottered drunkenly to the barbecue table, put together a sandwich of white bread and meat, and began to devour it like a starving man. He snatched large bites and swallowed them whole, then stuck his fingers into his mouth, sucking off the grease and sauce. He gave that up and wiped his hands on his khakis, up and down, as if stropping a razor. “Russell,” he said, looking around, seeming unable to focus on him, “get another round, some of that Mexican beer, maybe. We need something light to wash down this meal.” He ran his fingers through his hair.

Old Russell glided up like a shadow then, taking plates, stacking them in one broad hand, smiling with his mouth but his eyes as empty and blank as the sky, “Heah, sah,” he said, “let me take your plate. Let me help you with that. Let one of my boys bring your car around. Mr. Paul,” he said to me, “I guess you'll be wanting to stay.”

There was little more to say, after that. We formalized the transfer of deed for the old place in Brazil, along with the title to Bailey's Winnebago, to Russell. By nightfall he and his clan had slipped away on their long journey to the old country, stocked with barbecue and beer and staples. The women left the kitchen agleam. Bailey and I sat by the fire in the den. They'd lain Reid Covert and Maryella on the hickory pyre that, reduced to pure embers, had eventually roasted our afternoon meal. There was nothing much left
there to speak of, the coals having worked them down to fine ash in the blackened earth. I could hear a piece of music, though the sound system was hidden, nowhere to be seen. It sounded like Schubert, one of those haunting sonatas that seem made for the end of the day. In his hand Bailey held a little bundle of cloth, a tiny palm-sized knapsack that Russell had given him before he left. A little piece of the liver, sah, to keep the bad souls from haunting your dreams. A little patch of this man's forehead, who steal his own best friend's wife. This light sap from her eyes, Mr. Bailey, you hardly see it, where the witch of beauty live in her, them eyes that could not lie to you. You take it, eat, and you don't be afraid. He walked silently out the front door and disappeared. Bailey placed the little knapsack on the glowing coals in the hearth, watched the piece of cloth begin to blacken and bum, and the bits of flesh curl and shrink into ash. He was calm now, his boy asleep fully clothed and exhausted up in his room.

In the last moments out on the porch, before we'd drifted inside in a dream of dusk, the afternoon had ticked down and shadows had deepened on the lake's far bank. The other men, dazed, had shuffled away. Russell's two younger sons had stood on the shore and tossed ropes with grappling hooks to retrieve old Buddy. Bailey's boy stood on the bank hugging himself against some chill, watching them swing the hooks back over their shoulders and sling them, the long ropes trailing out over the lake, where the hooks landed with a little splash of silver water. A
momentarily delayed report reached us, softly percussive, from across the water and the lawn. Bailey stood on the steps and watched them, his hands on top of his head.

“Look at that,” he whispered, the grief and regret of his life in the words. “Old Buddy.”

They brought the old dog out of the water. The boy, Lee, fell to his knees. Russell's sons stood off to one side like pallbearers. Above the trees across the lake, a sky like tom orange pulp began to fade. Light seeped away as if extracted, and grainy dusk rose up from the earth. For a long while none of us moved. I listened to the dying sounds of birds out over the water and in the trees, and the faint clattering of small sharp tusks against steel fencing out in the grove, a sound that seemed to come from my own heart.

More praise for
Last Days of the Dog-Men

“A sad, beautiful meditation on love, loss, and dogs. . . . Watson's best writing is full of an unusual sort of lugubrious humor and depth.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“A book for those of us who like our dogs doggy—that is, unsentimentalized, unanthropomorphized, decent-in-their-hearts vomit-eaters—and our people the same way. The prose is crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence.”

—Pinckney Benedict

“[T]he dogs are not pets so much as fully realized characters, the equals—sometimes the betters—of the men and women stirring up today's Deep South. Watson writes with surprising emotional force.”

—Amy Hempel,
Elle

“Stunning . . . superb. . . . Should become essential to the canon.”

—
Commercial Appeal
[Memphis, Tennessee]

“Brad Watson's prose is exciting, superb. Not a dull story here. Dogs? Well, often they're more interesting than their masters, certainly more abiding. Watson's people are the wretched dreams of honorable dogs. I read these pieces with great pleasure.”

—Barry Hannah

“[B]racing prose, heralding the arrival of a new talent on the literary scene.”

—
Tuscaloosa
[Alabama]
News

“Brad Watson is a writer still mystified by his own immense talent. How could he not be? He writes sentences you wait a lifetime for. Tells stories you've never heard.
Last Days of the Dog-Men
is the best I've read in ages. Mercy for none, but salvation for all.”

—Robert Olmstead

“Watson is a writer keenly aware of the duality of canine nature—the familiar, loving, always accepting domesticate, and the feral, wandering, howling wild animal. . . . Extraordinary.”

—
Clarion
[Mississippi]
Ledger

“
Last Days of the Dog-Men
observes without blinking the inevitable, necessary, and bewildering relationships between people and dogs, between men and women. Brad Watson writes brilliantly and knows what he is talking about.”

—Fred Chappell

“The very nature of
Last Days of the Dog-Men
—a gathering of ‘dog' tales that exploits both the loyal and the feral nature of man's best friend—reflects Brad Watson's comically dark and deceptively wry vision in a prose as accurate as it is lovely.”

—Allen Wier

“Brad Watson's stories are wholly original—humorous and heartbreaking; there is a compassion for both humans and dogs and the world as they know it that reduces the focus to life's bare minimums: food, shelter, and companionship.
Last Days of the Dog-Men
is a powerful debut by a master storyteller.”

—Jill McCorkle

“Consider me a serious fan of Watson's brilliant storytelling. He's as bull-hearted and true a writer as any of the Southern masters.”

—Bob Shacochis

“In the pages of his quietly crafted prose, Watson digs with a persistence only a canine tracing a scent can match, into piles of the familiar and intractable emotions of his characters, their relationships, and their dogs.”

—
San Francisco Review

“[W]ry commentary on the base nature of humanity.”

—
Macon
[Georgia]
Telegraph

“Stunning.”

—
Spectator
[Raleigh, N.C.]

“The insight and beauty with which [Watson] writes reveals a deep love for both dogs and people, and yet his unflinching gaze at their abiding foibles seems to have provoked in him an intense anger at their unpardonable sins.”

—
Trenton
[New Jersey]
Times

“A powerful debut collection.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Watson has uncanny insight.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“HIS PEOPLE AND DOGS—THOSE WONDERFUL DOGS!
—COME ALIVE WITH HONEST, THRUMMING ENERGY.”

—
New York Times Book Review

Also by Brad Watson

Miss Jane: A Novel
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives: Stories
The Heaven of Mercury: A Novel

BRAD WATSON
is the award-winning author of two collections of stories and two novels,
The Heaven of Mercury
, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award, and
Miss Jane
(2016). His fiction has been published in
The New Yorker
,
Granta
,
Electric Literature
, and
Idaho Review
, among other publications. He teaches at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.

I
n each of these “weird and wonderful stories” (
Boston Globe
), Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. “Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts” (
New York Newsday
), Watson's vibrant prose captures the animal crannies of the human personality—yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment.

Pinckney Benedict praises Watson's writing as “crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence,” and Fred Chappell calls his stories “strong and true to the place they come from.” This powerful debut collection marks Watson's introduction into “a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford” (
The State
, Columbia, S.C.).

Copyright © 1996 by Brad Watson

First published as a Norton paperback 2002

All rights reserved

“The Wake” was originally published in
Dog Stories
, edited by
Kevin Kaszubowski.