Mohawk (8 page)

Two doors down the block, staring at her curiously, stood a mangy-looking dog of indeterminate breed. Anne returned his gaze until the mutt became self-conscious and, panting, walked a tight circle. For some reason, staring the animal down cheered her up a little.
When Anne backed out of the driveway, the dog’s ears perked and his wet tongue lolled out of his mouth. When she disappeared around the corner, the dog loped forward toward the garbage cans.

Dallas Younger’s life was place oriented, at least as far as it was oriented at all. At certain times of the day or week, only certain places would do, and if he happened to be anyplace else he was vaguely unhappy. He had started spending his Sunday mornings in his brother’s wife’s kitchen shortly after Loraine and David were married. He and Anne had recently split up, which made his Sundays seem pretty purposeless—the only day of the week when he felt any serious dissatisfaction with his life. On the Sabbath Dallas’s two-room apartment, small and cramped and none too clean, always seemed to him small and cramped and none too clean. Only rarely did it seem that way on other days of the week, and when it did, he simply left. But on Sunday mornings Dallas’s haunts were all closed, and the men he drank and shot pool with felt obliged to stay home with their families, at least until the ballgame came on and the bars opened at noon.

Loraine’s kitchen, thick with the smell of fresh cinnamon rolls,
was
Sunday morning to Dallas Younger. Before his brother’s death, Dallas, who had a key, would be waiting in the kitchen when they returned from church. He would cheerfully accept Loraine’s chiding about being a heathen and David’s pretended anger
over his treatment of the Sunday paper, which got rearranged, its pages mixed up and folded the wrong way before David even had a chance to look at it. To make matters worse, Dallas would read aloud from the sports page. Both men were avid fans, but David always saved the sports for last, dutifully reading the other sections thoroughly before allowing himself the pure pleasure of box scores. He’d done things that way all his life. As a boy he separated Oreo cookies, first eating the dry cracker shell, saving for last the sweet white filling. No one had ever succeeded in breaking him of that habit, not even his brother, who always swiped the hoarded filling, stuffed it in his mouth and grinned, his mouth open far enough to reveal the depth of his childish depravity. Dallas, of course, had eaten his cookies in reverse order, as he had begun every endeavor with the part he enjoyed most. The landscape of his life was littered with classified sections and dry cookie shells.

But since David’s death, Dallas had not been regular in his Sunday visits. Sometimes he didn’t wake up until noon, which meant that Sunday morning had taken care of itself. Other times he didn’t go over due to the vague feeling that Loraine wouldn’t really want him there. And he hadn’t been back since the morning he’d been confused about his niece’s birthday and only now, as he pulled up in front of his brother’s house, did he remember his promise to Loraine to keep an eye out for a job. He couldn’t remember having heard of anything, though, and he was grateful for that.

Loraine answered the door in her bathrobe again, looking surprised to see him or, maybe, anyone. “What’s the story,” Dallas asked. “It’s ten o’clock. How about getting dressed?”

“Thanks for the advice. For your information, I’ve
been up all night with a sick child. Hundred and two fever.”

“How about me cheering her up?”

“Like hell. I just got her to sleep.”

“Oh,” Dallas said. He had wondered if he would end up sorry he came over, and sure enough he was. Loraine looked tired and grumpy, and there was no cinnamon-roll smell in the kitchen.

“Come on in, though. There’s coffee, and I could use a little cheering up myself.”

Dallas took his usual seat and immediately began to feel more comfortable. In the unlikely event that he ever owned a house, he would want it to be one like David and Loraine’s. It wasn’t that much of a house, really, but somehow it felt right. When coffee brewed, you could smell it everywhere in the house, and on holidays with a turkey in the oven you could feast on the aroma. Though today there were dishes stacked in the sink, several days’ worth, and it occurred to Dallas that his sister-in-law’s explanation for still being in her bathrobe might be a convenient excuse. She poured them each a cup of coffee. “The paper’s in the living room if you want it.”

“Maybe later.”

Loraine stirred some cream into her coffee. “I figured you must be mad at me for treating you so rotten.”

Dallas made a face. “You know better. I’ve been busy, is all.”

“I know how busy
you
get,” Loraine said. “That the same set of choppers you had before or different ones?”

“Don’t get smart. What’s wrong with Little One?”

“Flu, prob’ly.”

“Want me to take her to the doctor?”

“Where? It’s Sunday.”

“There’s the hospital.”

Loraine shook her head. “I’m not that scared yet. Besides, I can take care of her. What I need is someone to take care of me.”

“If it’s money.…”

She smiled. “No. What I need is a good hot beach someplace. Where I can lie in the sand and have somebody whose only job it is to bring me those tall native fruit drinks with miniature palm trees in ’em. He could also rub suntan oil on my back if he felt like it.”

Dallas was surprised by his sister-in-law’s mood and, for some reason, a little embarrassed by it.

“You don’t have to look at me like that,” Loraine said. “There was a time when the boys would have fought for the privilege of greasing me up.”

“What did I say?”

“Nothing. You’re too kind to say it.”

They drank their coffee, Dallas stirring his in order to appear occupied. Again it was clear to him that he shouldn’t have come, and he wondered if there was any way he could leave without offending. He hated not knowing what people were thinking. It happened mostly with women. When he married, he had never known what to make of Anne, whose moods were unpredictable and far too subtle for him to read accurately. He always laughed at the wrong times, thinking he was supposed to, and then got serious when she was trying to joke with him. It made him grateful that women didn’t play poker, because then he’d always be folding and raising at the wrong times, a problem he had anyway.

“Don’t you ever wish someone would take care of you?” Loraine said. “Cook you a meal? Iron you a shirt? Someone who’d always know where your teeth were?”

“Keep it up.”

She frowned. “That’s no answer.”

“No, then. I don’t want anyone to take care of me. I live the way I want.”

“That’s crazy. Nobody lives the way they want.”

“If you want to meet somebody new, get out of the house. Who’s going to come over here looking for you?”

“That’s just it. I’m not even sure I want to meet anybody. I hated dating, even as a teenager. All that being nice when you don’t feel like it. All the time wishing you were cleverer and better looking than you are. I haven’t got the stomach for it any more. I can’t even get up the nerve to look for a job.”

“I’ve talked to a couple people,” Dallas lied. “Something will turn up.” He made a mental note to really look around. He hated telling lies to people he liked, but maybe he would be able to find Loraine work. That would make up for it.

“Don’t use up any favors,” Loraine told him. “When push comes to shove, maybe I won’t have the guts.”

“What else can you do?”

“Sell the house, live off that for a while. After Dawn is grown up, I don’t care that much.”

As if on cue, the little girl cried out upstairs and Loraine started from the table.

“Want me to go up,” Dallas asked.

“Not really. All you know how to do is tickle.”

Alone, Dallas went into the living room and found the paper. He started with the sports section, which quickly absorbed his thoughts. It would’ve been nice to read out loud if there’d been somebody to read to. He would’ve liked to get his brother all red-faced just one more time. Subconsciously he lifted his bridge free
of the roof of his mouth with his tongue, then let it slip back in again. He’d been without his own front teeth since he was nineteen, when he got into a fight and refused to give in, even after taking a terrible beating. The loss of his teeth didn’t bother him much, even at the time, but his brother David had unraveled. Coming to see Dallas in the hospital, David didn’t even recognize him at first. Dallas’s face was swollen and gray and, when he grinned at his younger brother, the boy had broken down. Years later, after his marriage to Loraine, Dallas could still unhinge his brother by removing his partial and grinning at him. Once David was so angry he made Dallas promise never to do it again. “They’re gone,” Dallas had told him. “I don’t see why that should bother you if it doesn’t bother me.” But after that he rarely removed his teeth in his brother’s company.

When Loraine came back downstairs, Dallas was completely absorbed by the college football line scores, and she studied him with interest from the foot of the stairs. Her late husband had been slight of build, his dark brown hair thinning badly after his twentieth birthday. Later, after the treatments, he was completely bald. Dallas’s hair was still thick and black, and he was sturdy at just under six feet. Anyone who didn’t know him might have mistaken Dallas’s thoughtful expression as he read the paper for profound intellect, and Loraine, who knew him well, couldn’t help wondering if her brother-in-law’s lunatic behavior might not mask a better mind than people gave him credit for. Everyone said his son Randall was very smart in school, and the boy must’ve inherited it from someone. Anne, perhaps, but maybe even Dallas. When people jokingly asked Dallas how he wound up with such a smart kid,
Dallas explained by saying he’d had a smart milkman. In truth, Dallas himself was not convinced of his son’s intelligence.

He finally became aware of her. “Fever’s finally broken,” she told him. “She’d like to see you.”

He quickly rose and went to the foot of the narrow staircase. “Where’s my girl?”

From above there came a delighted peal of laughter.

Much to the delight of Mather Grouse, the autumn days stayed mild well into November. He felt like himself for the first time since early summer, and even the thought of the approaching winter and the bitter winds that would keep him housebound failed to dampen his spirits. Autumn had always been his favorite season, and in the afternoons he was able to take short walks without the cloth mask given him by Dr. Walters. The neighbors raked leaves and burned them in large drums, the sweet smell lingering in the neighborhood long after the leaves themselves had been reduced to white cinders. Mather Grouse enjoyed the scent of autumn because it reminded him of Keats’s ode, which in turn made him feel better about life than was his custom. After summer, which exhaled suntan oil on sweaty limbs, the scent of nature incinerated was reassuring.

About the only part of summer that Mather Grouse missed was his little garden in back of the house—dead now for another year, the vines of his tomato plants brown and brittle. Today he got down on one knee to feel the earth. Inside the house he heard Mrs. Grouse humming tunelessly. In the kitchen, by the sound of it. When the humming moved to a more remote corner of the house, he pulled out a loose board above the
cellar window and removed the plastic bag he’d hidden there. Inside the airtight plastic pouch were some Camels. He took one out, slipped it into his shirt pocket and quickly zipped his windbreaker to the neck before returning the bag to its hiding place. Fortunately, Mrs. Grouse was cleaning and wouldn’t interrupt her sacred duty to take a walk with him, even though she would be suspicious and irritated when he returned.

Getting away with something sent a dark sensation through him, as when he was a boy. As far back as Mather Grouse could remember, he had always known the difference between right and wrong, though his mother had always pleaded Mather’s defense with his father when the boy misbehaved, arguing that he was too young to grasp the significance of his misdeeds. But his father was a wise man who never suffered recriminations or self-doubts once he’d taken off his belt. Young Mather had always endured his punishments stoically, tracing the progress of the pain to its climax, then to its gradual decline until that time after the strapping when he could cheerfully pronounce it gone. He saw no good reason to resent punishment, at least at the time, for he knew in his heart that he was more often bad than punished, which was what kept life from seeming a shabby, piddling thing.

After his father’s early death, the result of having whistled into too many empty gin bottles and having no one to strap him for it, Mather Grouse took upon himself the task of reining in his passions. His mother was far too weak and compassionate to help her son, so he donned the hair shirt pretty frequently—whenever it seemed like a good idea. He didn’t overburden himself with commandments, but merely pledged to steer clear of women and mind his own business, which
covered just about everything that was likely to cause him serious grief. By the time he reached his middle teens, he had made of himself a sober and industrious youth, and when he left his mother’s house to take his first job, he was able to compliment himself that he had successfully held in check his innate depravity, though now and then he still enjoyed getting away with things. But at sixty-four his wife’s vigilance took up where his own left off.

This afternoon he decided to walk through Choir Park—a good deal farther than he usually ventured, for he tired easily, but today he felt strong and it had been a long time since he’d truly tested himself. He enjoyed the symmetrical paths that wound among the hedges and pines. If he tired, he could always stop at the bandshell and rest on one of the benches. There weren’t any flowers this late in the year, but with luck he’d catch the smell of burning leaves.

It was a gray afternoon, and when he arrived at the park, Mather Grouse was thankful for his windbreaker. He had the park to himself. There was no hurry, since Mrs. Grouse would be equally suspicious and irked regardless of the length of his absence. In the end he would still have to face her arched brow, the offended tilt of her slender jaw, the pursed lips, but in the meantime there was the autumn afternoon and the threat of an endless winter during which to remember it. When he arrived at the bandshell, he wasn’t breathing heavily and the smell of the leaves made him feel young and strong. He sat down on a park bench, content.