Skinny Dipping (10 page)

Mimi piled the wool blankets into the attic bedroom’s cedar closet. She’d already brought in the last sun-dried linens of the summer and folded them into trunks. She’d emptied all the “vases”—wine bottles and peanut-butter jars—of their wood asters and coneflowers and cleaned out and unplugged the old refrigerator, sticking an open box of baking soda in the back before clamping on the lock, because you never knew how much stupidity a kid on a snowmobile was capable of but you could be sure it was a lot. Johanna and Charlie were draining all the water pipes for the winter, and Vida, Gerry, and young Frank were pulling in the dock.

They were closing the Big House for the season. Maybe forever.

Maybe next year someone else would own the key to the front door and be backing into the kitchen with a crate full of canned goods and toilet paper. Or maybe no one would enter the house at all. Maybe a big front loader would tear it down, scoop up its bones, and pile them into a Dumpster.

She could live with that. Hell, she thought, she didn’t have a choice.

She’d been right to stay away from the rest of the Olsons last night; she felt a hundred times better today. More herself. Not friendless, just happily independent; not poor, but unburdened by possessions. What was pathetic about that? Nothing. She didn’t know whether a night’s sleep, her own resilient nature, or the mood-enhancing qualities of a good old-fashioned, torrid make-out session had returned her to her former carefree self. She suspected all had played a part.

She wondered whether Joe had left yet. She wondered whether she’d ever see him again. Probably not. Her romantic relationships with men tended to be short-lived, ending pleasantly and without regret. Leave ’em wanting more. Or, in this case,
leave
wanting more. That’s the way it had always worked for her. Sure, she’d told him her phone number last night when he’d mentioned something about being in Minneapolis for a while this winter, but frankly, at the time they’d been more interested in nonverbal forms of communication.

She sat down on Ardis’s old bed, her gaze wandering about the room. No one had ever figured out why Ardis had chosen as her own the attic bedroom at the top of a flight of steep, knee-devastating stairs, with its sloped ceiling and gabled windows, hotter in the summer and colder in the winter than any of the other rooms in the house. No one except Mimi.

You only had to look through the windows nested under the eaves to understand. Out the north window, the treetops shivered at her feet, while overhead the sky emptied itself into forever. Facing east, she looked down into the grassy area at the side of the house where generations of children had tossed horseshoes, set off bottle rockets on the Fourth of July, and toasted marshmallows. From the south window, she could see most of Fowl Lake.

Mimi closed her eyes and pictured Ardis sinking to her knees in front of the window, her chin cupped in her hand like a little girl as she watched a deer picking its way across the ice on an early March morning. Through Ardis’s eyes she spied a pair of otters playing tag amongst the bulrushes. From here they—
Ardis
—had witnessed a hundred first swimming lessons and the launch of dozens of doomed rafts.

Oh, Mimi understood. She opened her eyes and looked around for some last memento of Ardis: a golf tee, a paperback novel sprouting a bookmark, a nail file. But there was nothing. The drawers in the battered dresser were empty, the hand-braided rugs rolled and stowed beneath the bed, the hangers in the closet naked. Only memories remained, and memories needed conduits to exist.

“Mimi!” Vida called from outside.

Mimi got up and went to the window. Below, at the corner of the house, Vida and the others stood between Charlie’s beloved El Camino and Gerry’s battered old Toyota Land Cruiser, its back open. Frank was throwing black plastic garbage bags in the Land Cruiser preparatory to the ritual Last Stop at the Dump on the Way Out. Life on Fowl Lake was filled with such little ceremonies.
Had
been full, Mimi corrected herself. She pushed open the window sash and leaned out. “What?”

“We’re ready to lock up,” Vida called up. “You done in there?”

No.
“Yup. Just making sure all the windows are latched.”

Mimi closed the window and descended the dark, narrow back stairs to the kitchen. She glanced at the sash locks to make sure they were secure, then, lightly brushing a talisman touch on the old Formica-clad kitchen table, went out the back door.

“’Bout time,” Charlie grumbled, stepping forward with a ring of keys and locking the back door. He straightened, looked down at the keys like he was wondering what to do with them, and tossed them to her. She fumbled them against her chest.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“You might as well keep ’em,” he said. “I’m going to spend the winter in Phoenix and Johanna’s coming, too.”

“We’re driving down,” Johanna said with a prim pressing of her lips that dared anyone to comment on their relationship going public. “And since neither of us has the best night vision anymore, we thought we’d take it slow.”

“Just how slow were you planning on going? It’s September,” Mimi said.

“Just take the damn keys, Mimi,” Charlie said.

“Why don’t you give them to Gerry?” Mimi asked. She disliked being responsible for things, particularly important things. You might lose them.

“Oh, come on, Mimi!” Vida exclaimed irritably. “We live two hundred miles farther from here than you. Just hold on to ’em so they’re convenient.”

They weren’t asking her to take care of the place, just keep the keys. She could do that. She might even drive up some weekend. Not many people had seen Chez Ducky in the winter—and with good reason, too. It was bloody cold and the house was not well insulated—but Mimi had and considered it their loss.

“Okay,” she said, pocketing the keys in her jeans.

“Need any help loading up your car?” Gerry asked.

“Like, when have I ever had enough stuff I needed help packing it?”

“People change,” Gerry said.

“Not me. Travel light, travel fast.”

“He who travels the fastest travels alone,” Gerry returned.

“Home, the weary traveler,” Vida piped in.

“I took the road less traveled,” Mimi countered.

“From whose bourn no traveler returns,” Charlie added.

“We’ll travel along, singing a song, side by side,” Johanna shot back.

They might have gone on like this indefinitely except that the small dog Mimi had noticed at least half a dozen times over the past week suddenly shot out of the nearby bushes. It hurled itself into the back of the Land Cruiser, tore into a plastic garbage bag, grabbed something loathsome, leapt back out with its spoils, and dashed away as the Olsons stared in slack-jawed fascination. It had been like watching an Elite Canine Corps operation.

“Whose mutt is that, anyway?” Charlie asked.

“I thought it was Halverd’s,” Frank said.

“I thought it was Naomi’s,” Vida said.

“I thought it was Debbie’s,” Gerry said.

Mimi clicked her tongue. “Like Debbie would own a mutt.”

“Fine,” said Gerry. “Then it doesn’t belong to anyone here?”

“I guess not.” Charlie began easing toward the El Camino, his hand under Johanna’s elbow. “Look at the time! We gotta hit the road, Joey, if we’re gonna—”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Vida said, grabbing the old man by the wrist. “You’re going to help us catch that dog. There’s not one cabin or cottage on the lake that hasn’t been shut down for the season if you don’t count Prescott, which I don’t because the guy never comes outside. The only other people around are the workmen on the opposite side of the lake. If we leave the poor creature here, he’ll starve. If we can stay when we got a nine-hour drive ahead of us, you can stay.” Her gaze shot to Mimi, who’d been doing her own retreat to where her borrowed Honda waited. “You too, Mimi.”

“Shit,” Charlie said.

“Come on, Charlie. It’ll be fun,” Johanna said, and Charlie, who was as irascible an old coot as nature allowed, pinked up and grumbled and obliged. That was what love did to you.

“Okay, damn it. What do you want me to do?”

“We’ll spread out into the woods and push him onto the beach.”

“Yeah? And what’ll we do then?” Charlie asked. “That thing’ll probably attack us. Probably rabid.”

Vida thought. They watched. “Damned if I know,” Vida finally said. “Poor little bugger. I guess maybe we will just have to leave him…”

“We could get some blankets,” Mimi suggested gruffly. She hated the idea of that little bedraggled mutt being left behind. “You know. Big blankets. We can toss them over him.”

“And if he starts into the water,” Johanna stuck in, “Mimi can wade in after him.”

“Why does Mimi have to grab the dirty mutt if it gets wet?” Mimi asked.

“Because everyone else has clean clothes on,” Johanna answered reasonably, with a telling look at Mimi’s chinos.

As Mimi had no reply to this unassailable logic, they dug the blankets from the trunks of the two vehicles and, arming themselves with them, started into the woods. Almost at once, the dog appeared on the footpath, something stringy hanging from its mouth.

“Here, puppy!” Vida called. “There’s a nice boy. Girl. Whatever. Come here, sweetie!”

The dog stayed where it was, matted tail wagging warily.

“Okay,” Vida said in a low voice, “we gotta circle it. Gerry and Mimi, go left. Frank and I’ll go right. Johanna and Charlie walk real slowly toward it. Pretend you have something for it to eat.”

Mimi and Gerry sidled nonchalantly to one side, while Vida and Frank sidled just as nonchalantly to the other and Johanna and Charlie moseyed forth, making loud nummy sounds. They spread out, forming a ten-foot perimeter around the dog. Mimi happened to be closest.

“Hey there, little guy,” Mimi said, crouching down with her hands on her knees, trying to look dog friendly. “What’s that you’ve got—
Oh, dear God, that’s disgusting
!”

At Mimi’s unintentional but perfectly understandable cry of revulsion, the dog, fearing his treasure was about to be wrested from him, bolted between Mimi and Gerry. Too late, Gerry hurled his wadded up blanket at the little bugger. Too late, Frank lunged for it, ending up face flat in the dirt. Charlie cackled with laughter, Johanna smacked him in the arm, and Vida cursed. Mimi took off in hot pursuit. If she could corner it, she could toss her blanket over it and nab it.

Ten minutes later, red faced and sucking wind, Mimi realized the error of this reasoning: it is hard to trap something in a corner when you didn’t have a corner to trap it in. Still, she trotted gamely on, the Dog in Dreads always a few yards ahead of her, looking over its shoulder and pausing occasionally to let her catch up, like this was some sort of really fun game.

Johanna and Charlie were far behind by now, but she caught glimpses of Vida and Frank pacing her. Gerry was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she should quit, too. Her side was starting to hurt and her lungs sounded like a kid’s broken squeeze box. She’d tried. Her intentions had been noble, but now she was getting a stitch in her side. That was it for her. Game over—

She stopped, realizing that the dog was leading her toward Prescott’s Erection. The place had more angles and corners than an Escher print. Perfect for her purposes.

“He’s heading toward Prescott’s!” she called to Frank and Vida. “You guys drive him down that chute between the house and the garage. I’ll go ’round the other side of the garage and when he comes out the end I’ll grab him. Give me a couple minutes.”

“Got it!” Vida called back.

Mimi took off, running as fast as the tangle of brush, her burning lungs, and, okay, yeah, her age allowed. She made it to the side of the garage and collapsed against the exterior wall, gasping for breath, just as she heard Vida and Frank clapping their hands and shouting. “It’s coming, Mimi! We’re almost there! Yee-ha! Hup! Hup!”

Mimi held the blanket out in front of her, plastering herself at the corner of the garage, holding her breath so she could hear the pitter-pat of little paws. There they were, right on cue.

“Five!” Vida hollered. “Four! Oh, shit.
Now!
”

Mimi leapt into the narrow opening a second before the dog. Caught off guard, the dog tried to pivot but it was going too fast. Its back end fishtailed, sending it piling into Mimi’s legs. Quick little bastard that it was, it somersaulted to the side and was just poised to bound away when Mimi acted. She launched herself at it, her blanket sailing before her, her body for one split second parallel to Mother Earth, before hitting the ground with a bone-jarring thud. Beneath the blanket, the dog howled.

Mimi hauled it to her like a fisherman with his net, the wriggling lump screeching in doggy protest. “Oh, fer Chrissake, cut it out,” she panted as she clamored gracelessly to her feet, triumphant. “You’re just lucky I didn’t land on you, Fido.”

Frank arrived first, skittering to a halt when he saw her. “She’s got the dog!” Frank yelled and grinned at her. “Nice tackle, Mimi. You ever consider going pro?”

“Shut up, Frank,” Mimi said, grinning back.

Vida came next, followed by Charlie and Johanna, and a few seconds later, Gerry. He was eating a candy bar, and he did
not
look winded.

“Gee. Thanks for all the help, Ger,” Mimi said. The dog continued to howl, not so much anxious as offended.

“No problemo, Mimi,” he said, stashing the wrapper in his pocket. “So, now you got the dog, what are you going to do with it?”

She regarded him blankly, still wheezing. “Huh?”

“What are you—”

“I heard you, and why do
I
have to do something with it?” She held up the bundled dog and commanded firmly, “Be quiet.” The dog quieted.

“Maybe it wants to breathe?” Johanna suggested.

“Oh.” Mimi peeled back the blanket. A malodorous, matted fur face with two black shark eyes stared up at her. It smelled like it had rolled in rotting fish. She glanced down at its crusty little head. By God, she believed it
had
rolled in rotting fish.

“Listen,” she said. “
I
caught the dog; therefore,
my
part is done. So one of you is going to have to find some place to drop it off.”