Shape of the Final Dog and Other Stories (9781101600665) (4 page)

Then I'll whip off the blanket, and the question then is gonna be, will Mot perform? Will he have the heart for it? And right then, like he was inspired by our little rehearsal, he starts gnashing his teeth, growling like a dog, wagging his big head around. And I knew we were in business. Best to save our energy for the performance. I call it a night.

Next day was lots to do. First thing was make sure Mot wasn't left to go wandering into Sister's attention, because I had no time for complications. And he couldn't be left in the yard either, because I'd caught Auto nibbling at his tar. So I had to lock him in the barn for the day while I attended to my appearance.

I went down in the basement, go through what's left of Daddy's belongings. First thing I find is a little box. I think what's going to be in there is cufflinks, but what's in it is a rattle off a rattlesnake Daddy killed. Daddy's clothes are stored in a cardboard box. Suits, shirts, and shoes. I try on a checkered coat. It's thick and got leather at the elbows, but it's the right look, and a tweed cap to go with it. There's gloves too, soft Italian ones for driving with. And a cane covered in snakeskin I'm going to use to point out the importance of what I'll be saying.

I go up to find Sister to invite her to the show, but she says she hates the carnival, even if her own brother was gonna be one of the main attractions. She makes a comment about my outfit, doesn't like that I'm wearing Daddy's clothes. I feel like saying, Hey, you wanna wear 'em? Go ahead. But there's no point in it.

O
kay, here's what happened. We get to Skyland on the early side so I can get certain details settled. For instance, I gotta arrange for the cage, so we go on over to the office first. That's when Jack tells me some crap about being over the limit on platform space. Says it's state regulation, and if an inspector comes by, that's it, they've had it.

Who says? I wanna know.

Doc, he tells me.

I say, Bullshit!

He says, Call him.

I do. Called him on Jack's bastard cell phone. When I heard it from Doc I started yelling, telling him I wanted paperwork on this, something in writing. Telling him, You don't go around dropping somebody out of his job without having a legitimate reason for it. He says that I never had the job in the first place. I remind him it was all sewed up the night before on our phone conversation, but Doc can't remember it. Drop Chicken Man, I tell him. Me and the Wild Man will take his place. But it turns out Chicken Man has a contract. I tell him I'm getting a lawyer on it, and he hangs up on me.

I can hardly believe it, but I do. That's the kind of crap that happens down here. I even bought a big chocolate cake so after our opening me, Mot, and Sister could celebrate.

When we get back home, I join Sister in helping her finish off her nightly bottle. Seeing the cake was a sad thing. Me and Sis sat there drinking the gin, not talking much, just watching Mot. Watched him stick his finger into the icing, testing the taste, then watched him eat the whole damn thing. I knew what was gonna happen, so did she, and we were right. He threw up. This time we cleaned it up together.

I was fired up on all kinds of dirty tricks I wanted to play on Jack. I didn't blame Doc so much as the LaHands. I knew they had him over a barrel. And when Sis heard enough about my ideas of getting even with those needleheads, she went off to bed. But I couldn't stop, and there's Mot sitting there, staring at me like he knew what I was thinking. I'd taken my thinking about as far as it would go by sunup. Then I knew what I had to do, and it had nothing to do with setting fire to Skyland. What I really needed to do was what I'd been dreaming about doing for a long time before all this ever happened. So I take myself a shower, wake up Mot, and drive us out to the lake to go fishing.

But an excursion that starts out simple can pull you right out of what you expect into a fate you never dreamed of.

T
he shoppers and the merchants were gone. The silence of leftover noise, of leftover smells, was strong. Everything closed. Almost dark. It was Sunday.

The horse's head above the horse-meat shop. The machine that made it cannot be imagined by the man looking at it. But nothing is a waste, he thinks, for him who will touch the bottom of no matter into what he falls, and he thought of the Arab girl. Saw himself as a restless tired bird, her as an island.

Later in his cool sheets waiting for the noise of morning, he imagines her sitting alone somewhere eating, and vaguely all the other functions of her body, running sure as the cycles of the moon, like a rock or a cat. The little hairs of her body stood out like stars in the dark of his love, and he made a note of it.

A page full. And after hesitating to throw it away, he threw it away, then bit into the skin of his wrist so hard the impression of his teeth remained for a day.

If he knew her, there would be nothing he couldn't tell her, nothing he wouldn't show. He was sure she was noble. He liked her hands. Here all alone from Algiers, he liked to think. Proud. Expecting nothing. Actually she was from Jerez de la Frontera. She was Spanish. She'd been in Paris almost a year. Worked at the confectioner's washing dishes and silverware up the narrow steps on the second floor where they had a small counter and tables.

From her window above the street she watched him standing in front of the horse butcher's, looking up at the plastic horse head. Her stomach was empty. Her fingers went to the scar on her abdomen. She rubbed her belly through the cotton shirt. Two years before she had awakened with a pain like fire and it didn't go away. At work that morning, finally she could no longer walk, and was taken in a cab to the hospital and operated on.

They found teeth in her belly. She didn't want to see them. The doctor said they were little vestigial teeth. She tried not to show her fear so he wouldn't tease her. He would have if he thought she was better-looking, and told her that it was not unheard of to find such things, probably left over from what might have been her twin. It sounded nasty, and when she went to her village the following Christmas she was afraid to tell her mother, but she did. Her mother said nothing.

There was still light in the sky, but the streetlights were on. The street completely empty. The man had gone. She didn't like to go to bed so early, but there was nothing else to do. At least this way she would sleep through her hunger, wake up and go to work where she could eat. She drank a glass of water from the bottle and lay down.

I
t rained. To get out of it he went into an English-language bookstore on the rue de Rivoli. Glancing through some Stephen King, he noticed a sign and a stairway that led to a smoke-filled tearoom with uncomfortable chairs and poor service. He took a table next to a young American girl eating bread and a salad. A redhead—not the orange flaming kind, but darker and cut short. She was tall, had a slim strong body with the hands of a boy and a redhead's firm, almost opaque skin.

Her face was sharp, sensuous, alert, easily given to irritation. Or ecstasy, he thought. A touch of consternation on the forehead. Nothing blurred; she was exact, she was radar. She was reading a French magazine, but he knew she wasn't French. It was her shoes. They were scuffed, well used. This girl was an American who had done some walking.

“You ever had a fire in your refrigerator?”

That was a good line. Stupid, but unique. She'd have a mind that might appreciate something like that. She would respond:

“You mean stove?”

“Depends on what you keep in it.”

“Like what?” she would ask.

“Artwork.”

That would be good. She might ask him if he was an artist. No, she wouldn't—she wasn't an asker. What was she? Student? No, Ph.D. maybe. Maybe just on vacation. Maybe married. Nope, no ring. Boyfriend then. So what?

He could ask her if she knew Tartini.

“Tartini who?” Or maybe she would know. No, she wouldn't know. He'd have to tell her. Italian. First half of the eighteenth century. Composer, violinist. “The Devil's Trill.” Fuck Tartini, she'd think he was a nerd.

He watched her eat. She used her teeth like she didn't want to get her lips in the way. Gave her a kind of snarling affect. This girl was against her own best gift, constitutionally. What gift?

To give, to be true, to be known. She lacked goodness. She had it, but didn't have a clue how to live with it. She confuses it with compromise. A lady, sure, but still a teenager. Her own way or no way. A sensualist, but her trust was pinched. Her hunger, her sentiments, be damned. Yet he could see that there were mountains of it. A woman with sympathies she can't express. Her sweetness rotting in the brig. She loved so strongly she couldn't live with it, is what he decided. But so what, not acting on your best qualities is like not having them. But he needed something from her. Needed her to look at him, to want to know him, to help him. He needed her goodwill.

Humor was the way: “A lot of people die on the toilet. A friend of mine's wife just did.” That he had a friend who had a wife might help. It was a lie. But it was a grabber. “Lenny Bruce too, he died on the toilet.” That was true. Then maybe in a barnyard voice he would say, “I tol' you not to go in the outhouse, Billy, Grandpa's busy. / No he ain't, Ma, he's dead!”

How would she respond to that? She's too young to remember Lenny Bruce. Maybe she read a book about him. He could tell her he knew Lenny's mother. That was true. And then she would go back to her salad. She ate fast, like she grew up with a brother who stole her food.

He pulled out his pen, started writing on his napkin.
enraged depressed touch of self-hatred boredom too. dread of her own feelings. helplessness. tenderness. masking it.
He turned the napkin over:
accentuates her insolence with makeup to ward off the weakeners. a woman of resolve . . .

He looked up. She is looking at him, she looks away.

She made him think of a cricket pitcher pacing off the distance and throwing the ball all the way to hell. She looked about twenty-five. He is fifty. He keeps writing.
suppressed unmet wants unappreciated . . .
He paused. Where was her curiosity, her creativity? Taken away, replaced by learning?

His coffee came, but no cream. There was some on her table.

“Could you pass me that cream, please?”

“It isn't cream.”

“What is it?”

“You don't get cream in Paris. It's canned milk.”

That was bullshit, but he wasn't going to argue with her. She went back to her magazine.

He stared at the wall, at the other people. He felt warm. He thinks about putting money down and getting out of there. She wasn't somebody he'd like to sit around a fire with. He glances at the cream. Then at her. She's not looking. He takes a quick sniff. Maybe it is canned milk. He reflects on the way she passed it. She did it with distance, but she feels close.

He knows she is fearless. But she will never drop the mask. Maybe in bed. If so, this, this is why she feels close. But she is terrified of being embarrassed. She will take no chances, not of the heart. She needs music, painting, poetry. The great abandon. She is faithless, but faithful. This is why he knows he could love her. She doesn't believe in a thing. Except not to submit.

He could tell her about the dog in his building who waits by the elevator for someone who is going to the right floor. It's a hit-or-miss proposition for the dog. Some tenants know what floor he lives on. But sometimes he gets left on the wrong floor. The dog can't open the door to the stairway either. His owner is senile. There are so many things he would like to tell her.

He waited for her to look so he could say something real. Or maybe it would be her who would speak. Tell him she has a weakness for men who have secret jobs. “Like spies?” No, she isn't talking about the CIA. Tells him she saw a fat guy once who worked in a bookstore, the kind of place professors and writers and fervent women went. That the fat guy looked like a dirty dumb giant, like he'd be better off on a farm, but it would turn out he was a poet. He would have sent her some of his work. How did he get your address? She wouldn't remember. So what's so secret about him? But this was not a girl you could press. He'd better say something real. What was real? The unreal. He could tell her about that.

“You ever felt like you might lose control?” That could scare her, but it would make her look up and listen. “I have fantasies about hitting strangers in the mouth. I get these feelings like one time I'm going to get one of these terrible, totally inappropriate urges that are not really urges, they're just these awful feelings that mean I wouldn't be what I am if I followed through, if I actually did it.” “Did what?” “The unthinkable, and I get a kind of sweat inside myself like dizziness and suddenly I'm terrified. Not because I'm angry or frustrated, but just because all of a sudden what if I became something I couldn't stop, something I didn't want to be, something I couldn't explain to myself?”

For the first time she would smile and say, “Like the wolfman?” And they would laugh. “No, not like the wolfman. More like the panic an epileptic might feel just before it happened.” And she would nod. She would understand and he would be in love for as long as he lived. The insecurity was so intense, but they would have understood each other. He would reach under the table and she would close her fingers around his hand. She would know he was an idealist and could not accept anything as it was, and she would hate that because he would never let her be.

Out the window he saw the rain had stopped. She was paying her bill—took care of it in perfect French. He put money on the table and followed her down, through the door and into the street.

He walked behind her and thought about her crying. But he couldn't really see it. “I cry a lot,” she would say, and he would believe it. She went into the Métro at Concorde, and as they were going down the steps, she ran ahead and he hurried to get to the bottom before she beat him.