Whippoorwill (3 page)

“D
ON'T YOU LOOK
ravishing this evening?” Jebby said.

He had a Budweiser open in front of him, and he sat at the kitchen table beside my dad. Jebby did his rhino smile, smirky and dumb and grassy.

“What happened?” my dad said, looking up from a motorcycle part. He had been heating it with a little flame from a welding wand, and he held the flame away from him while he examined me.

“I tried to take Wally for a walk.”

“The dog?” my dad asked, genuinely surprised.

“Yes.”

“That dog's crazy,” my dad said. “You're lucky he didn't attack you.”

“By the look of her, maybe he did,” Jebby said. “You smell something horrible.”

“His yard is disgusting,” I said. “There's poo everywhere.”

“You okay?” my dad asked, and clicked off the burner. “Honey, what's going on here?”

I couldn't say. I felt like crying, but I didn't want to give Jebby the satisfaction. He used any sign of weakness by a girl as a tool against women all over the world. Mom had always called him a pig, but not a full-grown one.
Piglet,
she'd said. Meanwhile, my back felt as though it had a long scrape down near my belt line, and my shoulder clicked whenever I moved it. I knew I smelled bad. I wanted a shower, but I was afraid to touch anything on my way upstairs. I stood by the back door like a little kid in a snowsuit, hands out at my sides, paralyzed.

“Did the dog bite you, Clair?” Dad asked.

“No, it just got excited and wanted to play.”

“That dog has some Dane in it too. Great Dane,” Jebby said, turning his beer up to his rhino lips. “He's a horse.”

“It's a decent dog,” I said.

“Elwood Stewart is not a man to trifle with,” Jebby said, referring to Wally's owner. “I remember one time down at the Homegrown Lounge he beat up two men in a bar fight. I mean, he was some fierce . . . There was another time—”

“You need help?” my dad asked, cutting him off because Jebby liked to talk about the past more than the present, and he would go on and on and my dad knew it.

I shook my head and went upstairs. My eyes got full once I went away from Jebby. In the bathroom I slowly peeled off my clothes in the tub. When I was down to my panties and bra, I stepped back out and filled the tub with water so it would take some of the filth off the clothes. I let the water slosh around on them for a long time. The steam from the hot water felt good on my face and pretty soon the bathroom warmed up. I felt drowsy and strange, almost as if I had come back from a long hike miles and miles away from my house. I couldn't let myself think too much about Wally. He had freaked me out. He was like a statue that had come to life and suddenly turned crazy alive. I never got to handle him or to know the first thing about him because he had gone so spazzy. I didn't really want to see him again.

Finally I took my clothes out and put them in a laundry basket by the hamper, and then I wedged the whole mess angled into the sink so it wouldn't drip all over the floor. I stripped down and stepped into the shower. I felt sorry for myself. I felt annoyed that my act of kindness had gone unrewarded and even unnoticed. I knew I was being small-minded, but I couldn't help it. That dog was genuinely ridiculous.

I showered a long time. I let the water run all over me. Nothing could have felt better.

Dad was in the hallway when I came out in a towel.

“You okay?” he asked. “I told Jebby to take off.”

“You didn't have to do that. I'm okay.”

“What do you say we go out for pizza, maybe? Just you and me. A little dad and daughter date?”

“You don't have to do all that. I'm fine.”

“When's the last time we went to Ronnie's? Come on, I need to take the bike for a little spin anyway. Wake it up for the spring. It will give me an excuse.”

“Do we have to go on the bike?”

“Sure we do. You're a Harley chick, aren't you?”

“I'm not a Harley chick, Dad.”

“Come on. Humor me. I feel like I hardly see you.”

“I'm here all the time.”

He raised his eyebrows to ask again. I shrugged. I guess we agreed to go.

“Dress warm,” he said. “It's still mud season.”

“Then why don't we take the truck?” I asked as I closed the door to my room.

“Brrrruuuummmmm,” he called back, making a motorcycle sound with his lips. Then he shifted into second. “Brummmmppppp, brummmmmmmmp.”

Father Jasper says good and bad is a human construction placed on a dog's behavior. For instance, if you put a steak near the edge of a table and the dog slides it off and eats it in about three bites, that is good, or smart, behavior from the dog's point of view. It's natural behavior, actually. If we come in and say,
Bad dog, bad dog,
the words are meaningless to the dog, although he will decipher the tone of voice you use. A dog still thinks what he did was pretty smart, but he gradually learns that the alpha dog—you—doesn't permit that kind of thievery. So, if you're lucky, the dog will stop stealing meat off the table. Good and bad, though, have little to do with it. Dogs act on positive or negative reaction, that's all. Morality has nothing to do with it. There are a lot of humans like that, actually.

My dad drove easy on the way to Ronnie's. A couple times he slowed way down and looked forward, near the front wheel, and he bent and tried to figure out the meaning of a sound. It made me nervous when he leaned forward, because I had to lean with him, my butt perched on the back, my arms on my dad's shoulders. He didn't like what he was hearing, I could tell. It was a splatting sound inside the regular chunk of the Harley engine, and my dad had been fighting it for years. The sound was his White Whale, and wherever he went he asked different guys if they had a clue. He checked online, called Harley dealers all over the country, but he couldn't solve it. The sound didn't really do anything to the engine except make it a little less perfect than my dad would have liked, but it was the fleck of dust on an otherwise clear pair of sunglasses.

It was too bad he couldn't let the sound go, because the ride, I had to admit, was spectacular. We took Puddle Road, a backcountry route with fresh tar and a brilliant yellow line, and the bike held on like it was happy to be running. The stars had just started coming out and you could smell snow back up under the pines but the air tried to be warm and it stirred you up. Halfway to Ronnie's we stopped at the Pumpkin Span, a dinky bridge that went over two swampy areas, and the peepers called like mad. As soon as Dad turned off the bike, the clouds peeled back to let the moon filter down and it hit the water and you knew winter had passed again for another year and all the good, warm weather lay ahead. It was like the first day of vacation, and I crossed my arms across my chest and listened to the peepers and looked up at the half-moon.

“Some night,” my dad said.

He had bent down to look at the front wheel but then had clicked his tongue against his teeth and stood.

“I'm glad we brought the bike,” I said.

“Be cold on the way back.”

“It will be worth it.”

“Do you want a dog, Clair?” my dad asked, the confusion in his voice plain to hear.

“No, Dad, that's not it.”

“What is it then?”

“I don't like that dog being left abandoned over there day in and day out.”

“I know what you're saying. It's tricky, though, with neighbors. We have to live beside them.”

“I know.”

“Anything else we should talk about? I know I'm not always tuned in like I should be.”

“No, Dad, everything's fine.”

“You've never done anything like that before. Go over, I mean.”

I didn't answer right away. I had to think about what I wanted to say, and even after I came up with it, I wasn't sure I should say it aloud.

“He was invisible,” I said. “No one should be invisible.”

What I meant to say was I felt invisible sometimes. That was the truth, but I couldn't put it into words right at that moment.

“Maybe I could talk to Elwood,” Dad said after he weighed what I'd said.

“Don't do anything. After today, I don't even know if I want to walk him anymore. He's seriously strong and seriously nuts.”

“Okay,” he said. “You getting hungry?”

“Yes.”

“One thing, though, okay? Don't you ever tell me you're not a Harley chick. You're my Harley chick.”

He put his arm around me and squeezed. A blue heron neither one of us had seen suddenly spread its wings and flew halfway across the second pond. It settled down without a splash and began wading, watching for frogs.

“Some night,” Dad said again.

Stars. The sound of the bike and my dad leaning, leaning, the night flashing by. The taste of tomato sauce on my lips. Salt. My dad driving seriously now, cruising, taking pleasure in it. When we buzz past the Pumpkin Span, the peepers' calling explodes like a wave of sound, then falls behind us. A Doppler effect, I remember from science class. Then on a straightaway my dad reaches back and touches my knee. I bend forward and we rocket down the smooth blade of road. White birches pass like ladder rungs, and my dad does his yell, this crazy yodeling sound he does when he has the bike just right, the road just right, the everything just right. I yodel with him, and I feel self-conscious and dorky, but it's fun, too. It's going like nothing, and my dad throttles down to a normal speed in little hunks, the sound of the world returning in vibrations and tingles, and we might have been in space or under the sea for all the world coming back as it does.

B
EFORE SCHOOL
the next morning I made a point of not looking over at Wally's yard. For one thing, the gouge on my belt line killed. It was bruised and red and as thick as a candy cane. I also didn't want to risk seeing him or having him see me. It was like spotting a homeless person on the street. You see, but you don't want to see. Seeing means you have to do something, and I had enough to occupy me with five classes and a social life from hell. In my head, Wally had forfeited his connection to me by his craziness the day before.

To get to school I had to walk three blocks to Riley's convenience store, then wait under the front overhang for the bus. I hated waiting at Riley's, because half the men in town showed up there to slurp coffee and complain. I swear that's all they did. They complained about taxes and the president, and they complained about gas prices and about anything new that happened in town. They critiqued road projects, or the crew going out to cut the electric lines free after a storm, or the new cook down at Annie McGee's Breakfast Buffet. I avoided going inside, but sometimes I had to, and whenever I did, I kept my eyes down and my body small.

On the morning after wrestling with Wally, I stayed against the building and waited for the bus and tried not to say anything to anyone. But Cal Ball (everyone called him Cow Bell), who had been in my class since kindergarten, insisted on telling me about a fight he had witnessed between Marilyn Summers and Ernie Caldwell at the peewee baseball game the night before. They had started off low, like a storm at a distance, but before long she was outside his pickup with a tire iron threatening to smash his windshield. Everyone rooted them on, according to Cow Bell, and the game didn't stop, exactly, but no one paid any attention to the players, and pretty soon Mr. Bushall and Mr. Tomkins went over and tried to intervene. Then Marilyn Summers began screaming at them, and it wasn't until her son, J.P., left the game and ran over and sort of herded her back into their own pickup that she stopped screaming.

“J.P. deliberately ran into a kid from the other team and tried to fight him, like, an inning afterward,” Cow Bell said, his breath smelling of cough drops. “It runs in families, don't you know?”

I looked at Cow Bell and shook my head. He wore his blond hair pushed up from both sides of his skull so that the two waves met in the middle and formed a ridge. He reminded me of a dinosaur, or a fish of some kind, and I simply shook my head and looked down at the ground. He wore camo clothes and boots that went up to his midcalf. He'd always worn camo and he'd always worn boots that went up to his calf. He was like one of those Russian dolls in reverse, with bigger and bigger versions of the same Cow Bell climbing out in the identical outfit each school year.

“Leave me alone, Cow Bell,” I said.

“It does, you know? I read about it.”

Then the bus pulled in and it was a few minutes late and I would have bet good money that the men inside mumbled over their Styrofoam cups that the driver, Lenny Parkins, was driving hung.

It was weird, but on the way to school I became aware of all the dogs I saw along the route. Some of them waited for the bus with moms or dads and a bunch of kids, living in their own little world around the people's feet, and others I spotted in the backyards on poles and lines and enclosures. I wondered how I had never noticed dogs before, at least in this way, and I thought of Father Jasper, and what he would say about each dog's situation, whether it was good or bad, fair to the dog, working to bring out the canine's best qualities. I hate to say it, but even with a quick glance you could see most people didn't have a clue about their dog's world. To them a dog was just another thing, like a barbecue grill or a fancy porch rocker, and it didn't mean that they didn't love the dog, it just meant they didn't recognize a dog for what it was and what it needed.

I wasn't an expert by any stretch, but simply looking critically at what was going on with people and dogs opened my eyes. I started writing little notes in my head to Father Jasper about what I observed. In the final analysis, that's what he preached:
Leave your people world for a second and see what it means to be a dog.
That was empathy, and it counted for dogs as much as it counted for people.