by David Bergen
By the second month Earl’s still beating on me. He calls me down, or hits me with the broom and the gang laughs and then they all turn away. I’m bigger than him but he’s got his buddies, and so I always walk away. One afternoon, he catches me coming out of the can and he gets stupid and says, “What up you think you’re solid then come fight me.”
I laugh.
He spits and says, “Let’s go.”
I say, “I don’t care.” I throw my hat on the ground and hit him first, knowing that surprise is everything and it is. I give him a few more good shots and with each one his eyes open, like he’s waking up and he doesn’t know where he is. I leave him sitting on the ground, leaning against the garage door. His hands are flat on the ground, like he’s trying to stop himself from falling through a hole. After that day, Earl leaves me alone. I settle into work and I’m free. Nobody’s on me and I fall in love with the tang of the cars. You open the door and wham, it’s handsome, smelling like the lawyer woman who stands at attention in the sunshine, talking talking talking on her silver phone, hand swaying at her hip. Oh man. Sometimes, when it’s slow, I push my nose against the leather and breathe deep and think about Tiff and me rollin’. Still, it’s a shit job, but the money’s good, and it keeps me away from Jack in the evenings. I tell Tiff never to go over to my place on her own. Jack’s a scrub, I say.
Mr. Harrison takes the Geo class to his house one day after school. It’s a big house with a sunken living room and leather couches and we sit there and watch slides of his trip to a place called Machu Picchu. There’s a slide of Mr. Harrison standing by some ruins with his wife and daughter and they both look good. They’re smiling, the daughter is blonde and she has great legs, and Mrs. Harrison has green shorts, and Mr. Harrison is wearing binoculars and a grey hat with a wide rim and he’s pointing off at something behind the person taking the photo. Then there’s a shot of Mr. Harrison in a Speedo on a beach and we all laugh and make fun of him. Later, he brings out food, little bits of quiche, and wieners wrapped in dough, and taco chips and punch. Outside, beyond the picture window, there’s a pool. I go to the bathroom. It’s painted dark red and the towels are rusty coloured and soft and the Jacuzzi is red. On the cabinet there’s a bowl. It’s copper inside and black outside and on the bottom it says Burma. I put it in my jacket pocket and then go back to the sunken living room where Mr. Harrison is talking about deep sea fishing and taking Gravol for seasickness and sleeping through the whole expedition. He says the word expedition carefully, as if it were a word with a lot of meaning.
I get home late and walk in the door and I can hear the snap of something, very regular, a crack and then a sharp spitting sound, like a whip. Then I hear Jack laugh and a girl’s voice goes “Oh, oh, Jesus,” and I know it’s Tiff by the way the ‘us’ in Jesus goes up and up. They’re in the living room. Wanda’s there too. He’s standing against the wall, his head really black against the light paint, and his eyes are wide open. Jack is standing across the room and he’s holding a pellet gun that’s been shortened and he’s aiming at Wanda. He fires, the pellet hits the wall just above Wanda’s right shoulder, Tiff squeals and claps, and Jack, when he sees me, touches the barrel to his chest. “Fucking circus,” he says. “And I’m the ringmaster.”
I ask Wanda if he’s okay. He grins. Yeah, he’s all good.
“Just his head left,” Jack says.
I tell him to stop.
“Whoaa,” Jack says. “Whoaa.” And he raises the barrel and pulls the trigger and the pellet enters Wanda’s left eye and Wanda doesn’t shift, doesn’t say anything, just puts his hand up to touch his face, as if he were checking for something. His mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. Tiff moves around the room, arms in the air, lost in the music.
I go to Wanda and say, “Hey, you okay?”
He nods. Shrugs. His mouth moves, but still there’s no sound.
“Here.” I take his hand away from his eye. No blood. This is good. Blood means damage. His eyeball is whacked though. Out of control, like a marble in a bowl.
I hold up two fingers. “Look here,” I say.
His eye rolls left and all that remains is a white ping-pong ball. He sighs and lays his head against my shoulder.
“Fuck,” I say. I sit him on the couch and go to the kitchen for a rag and some water. When I come back Jack is going, “It’s cool. No problem, Wanda. Everything’s cool.”
There’s the tiniest trickle of blood coming out of the corner of Wanda’s eye. I dab at it. My hands are shaking.
Jack says, “He’ll be good. The bullet bounced off.”
“Uh-uh,” I say. “It’s fuckin’ in his head.”
“Don’t think so. Maybe it went through.” Jack touches the back of Wanda’s head. “Did it?”
Wanda looks up at Jack. His good eye is big, almost happy. “Hungry,” he says.
“There ya go,” Jack says. “You’re hungry. What’ll ya have. Pizza Pop? Cheerios? Ice cream?”
“Hungry,” Wanda says.
“Shut up with the fucking music, will ya?” Jack waves a hand at Tiff, who slides across the room and stands with her back against the wall, right where Wanda got hit. She smiles sleepily.
I take Wanda’s hand and pull him up. “Here.” I pull him towards the door and he follows easily. Nothing wrong with his walking.
“Where ya going?” Jack’s voice is hard.
I don’t answer, just take Wanda’s arm and lead him outside and down the stairs onto the sidewalk and we go up together to Notre Dame and stand at the bus stop in the darkness.
“I’m gonna take you to the hospital, Wanda, okay?”
He’s holding an orange towel to his hurt eye and so I can only see one side of his face and that side twists up and he grunts and he sounds like Harry when he’s sad or wants petting. So I pat Wanda’s curly head and say, “You’re good, man. All good.”
“Hungry,” he says.
“I know. I know. Me too.”
He says it again, “Hungry,” and then we’re on the bus, sitting near the back, and the word keeps jumping out of his mouth.
“Hungry.”
“Hungry.”
“Hungry.”
The people on the bus are watching. They’re disgusted by this chanting noise and so I turn away from Wanda and pretend that I am not his.
We go to Children’s, where the nurses do their serious look thing and one nurse, fat in blue pants that are too short, asks a bagful of questions while Wanda sits there dying. Then I am alone in a room. A stethoscope and a white coat on the door. There are all these beautiful clean objects on the desk. Beakers, sticks, cotton balls, a little black bed with paper laid out over it in case you’re bleeding and shit. A poster on the wall showing pink lungs and black lungs and at that point I want a cigarette.
The door opens and in comes a thin nurse. She’s holding a chart. Her arms are bare. She’s got a great ass. I can tell because her green fatigues or whatever you call them are tight and show off the hollows at her bum. She’s married, or something. A ring and she smells like bath powder and her hands are older like she’s done dishes a lot, or maybe changed diapers. I can smell her goodness and I think what it would be like to be married to her.
She sits close and says that Wanda’s hurt bad. He can’t talk, so I’ll have to talk for him.
“Hungry,” she says. “What’s that?”
A cloud opens above me. The thin nurse is with me in a large house, twenty-five rooms at least, and we are sitting by the pool drinking cognac out of sniffers. She is leaning into me and her mouth opens and she talks softly.
“Can you tell me his name?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Hungry. He keeps saying that.”
She is wearing nothing. I am wearing nothing. The pool has green lights. The cognac is making her voice slow down. “Do you know his name?”
>
“I don’t know him. He got hurt, I found him, I brought him here.”
Her eyes are the colour of the pool.
“Whose gun was it?”
“I dunno.”
“So, you found him and brought him here like the Good Samaritan.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
My wife holds up her long fingers and shows me the lines in her palms. “Where do you live?”
I give her Mr. Harrison’s address and make up a phone number. Then someone turns out the green lights, and the pool and the twenty-five rooms and the oily cognac all disappear and my wife sits up and says, “Good.” Then the fat nurse leans into the room and makes a soft noise and the thin nurse stands and leaves and I am alone. For five minutes I sit and wait and nothing happens, no one comes back, and when I step out into the hall it is silent and empty, and it’s like everyone has died, the thin nurse, Wanda, the fat nurse, the woman at the desk, and I turn and follow the green line down past the elevators, past the security guard, out the exit, and into the night.
When I get home, I enter through the back door and I can hear loud music and voices and when I come through the kitchen door I see Tiff naked and sitting on my brother’s lap and he’s naked too. They’re both facing the TV and Jack’s hands come around Tiff’s front and hold her tits. She’s singing or something and he’s singing too. They don’t see me. They’re on the couch and I can see them from behind and the side. I watch and then step back into the kitchen. The cast-iron frying pan is on the stove, the one my father uses to fry his pickerel and bacon. I pick it up. Mr. Fox, the Phys Ed teacher, taught us just last week the rich kid’s game, tennis, how you’re supposed to keep your arm straight as you swing through and hit the ball. In the kitchen I take a few practice swings with the frying pan. Then I go into the living room and aim at my brother’s head. I lock my elbow and say, “I saved your ass.” He looks up and back to find my words and he sees me. His eyes are like two yellow balls of surprise, and just as he’s about to call out, I follow through with this mad swing that Mr. Fox’d be terrifically proud of, and I catch one of those balls dead centre, and I can feel it, a perfect hit, and I know it’s a winner.
Never Too Late
The dog showed up at his ranch on a cool morning in April, two days after a spring blizzard blew in off the Rockies, leaving a foot of snow and trapping cows and calves in the gulches of the south section. When he stepped out onto the porch, the dog was waiting for him.
“Who’re you?” he asked. Sad eyes. Black. Curls like it’d just come from having a perm.
He stepped around the dog and walked out to the barn, lifted the latch, swung the door, and stepped inside. The dog slipped through the door.
The stable was in shadows. Warm. The smell of hay and horse and manure.
He saddled Blue and slipped on the bit while the dog sat and watched. He guided the horse out into the yard. Steam from his nostrils. A quick sideways movement. He swung up in the saddle and set out for the south pasture. The dog followed. Three hours and one dead calf later he stabled and curried Blue, walked outside, closed the barn door, and walked out to his pickup. He lowered the rear gate and the dog scrambled up into the bed. He shut the gate.
“Don’t talk much, do you?” he said.
He climbed into the pickup and drove to town and parked in front of Lachlan’s. The dog jumped out of the box and followed him into the clinic. He approached the front desk and said, “Hi Julie.”
Julie looked up at him with her clear blue eyes. “Hi Bev.”
“Bit of a storm we had,” he said.
“Was. My man was stranded in Calgary for two nights. Got in at five this morning. Said the ditches were full of cars emptied of all their fools.” She grinned. The deepest dimples.
“Lachlan around?”
“He’s out. Calving season, as you know.”
“I do.” Bev turned and looked down at the dog. “This here girl found me this morning and won’t let me go. Like Lepages.”
Julie rose and bent over the desk for a closer look. “That one belongs to Janice Collicutt. Curly Coated Retriever. Spayed her last year. She’s a runner. And a mute.”
“That a fact.”
“It is. Born without a voice. Except when she smells smoke. Then she howls like all get-out.”
“Well, I’m not a smoker.”
“Good thing then. You’ll want to find Janice.”
“I do.”
“She lives at Alton Manor. Janice will be happy to see her dog. She loses her at least once a week.”
“Might want to tie her up.”
“Oh, she wouldn’t do that. She’s too kind-hearted. She needs a good trainer.”
He took note of Julie’s dimples one last time and then turned to go.
“Careful on the roads,” she said.
“Sun’s out. Ice is melting.”
“Still.”
As he loaded the dog in the bed, he wondered what the mutt was called. Curly, he supposed. He drove to Alton Manor and parked in the loading zone. He put on his hazards and walked up the sidewalk to the front door. In the lobby there was an intercom and a list of names and numbers. He found Collicutt, Janice, and punched in 542. A sign on the glass door read, NO PETS ALLOWED. The ringer went off six times before a woman answered.
“Who’s that?”
“My name’s Bev. I have your dog.”
“Keller? You found her?”
“She found me.”
“Where then?”
“On my ranch. Sitting on the porch.”
“Oh my.”
“Should I come up?”
The buzzer rang to free the lock and Bev stared at it, and then pulled the handle and entered. He took the elevator to the fifth floor, patting Keller on the head. “Atta girl,” he said. “You’re going home.”
When the door opened he was surprised by a number of things. Janice Collicutt was in an electric wheelchair, and her face was too smooth and unlined and young for her to be living in an old folk’s home, and her hair was curly like her dog’s, and she had a green eye and a brown eye, and she was a looker.
Keller entered, sniffed the wheels of the chair, and lay down in the middle of the living room.
Janice spun around and turned left and disappeared. “Come in,” she called. “In here. Sit down.”
She was parked at the table, eating plain macaroni and ketchup.
He sat. Looked around. The dishes needed washing.
“I suppose you’re looking for a reward?” Janice said. “I can’t do that. Keller would break the bank. I can offer you noodles though. You hungry?”
He was. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Course you’re fine.” She motioned at the pot on the stove. “Help yourself.”
He stood and took a bowl from the cabinet and spooned himself some macaroni and sat and squeezed a little ketchup into the bowl.
As they ate, Janice told him about her life. She lived at Alton Manor because it had elevators and wheelchair accessibility and because she was surrounded by other people. They might be a lot older, but they were good company. She said that she had multiple sclerosis. Five years earlier she’d begun to drop things, knives, pencils, her wallet, and then her left leg began to drag behind her as she walked and one day, lo and behold, she couldn’t walk at all, and now here she was in a wheelchair. “My husband, Jack, walked away from me as soon as he found out about the MS. Cripples frighten him. He’s remarried. Has a baby on the way. Thing is, he still thinks he owns me. I have an inheritance, from my father, and Jack thinks he should get some. Courts think differently.” She ate some more. “What ’bout you?”
“What about me?”
“Your life. What do you do?”
“I have a ranch. Four hundred head of cattle. Horses.”
She
nodded. “Married?”
He shook his head.
“Been?”
“Once. A long time ago.”
“I thought so. You have that look.”
“What’s that?”
“The look of a bachelor. A little forlorn. Threadbare.”
“Is that right?”
“What I miss is the sex. Oh, of course, you don’t have to be married to have sex, but it’s easier. But then it turns humdrum.”
He looked down at his empty bowl.
“People think because I’m in a wheelchair, I can’t have sex. Not true.”
Bev took up his hat and placed it on his head. He rose. “Nice meeting you, Miss Collicutt. You might want to watch your dog more carefully.”
“I try. But she has to do her business and she gets loose and I can’t chase her down. She gets excited about the big world out there. How far you from town?”
“Six miles.”
“One time she ended up on a ranch fifty miles from here. They kept her for the winter. Saved me feeding her. You want her?”
“I favour cats.”
“Keller’s a pointer and a hunting dog. Needs some training though.”
“That’s probably true.” He touched his hat. “Well. Goodbye.”
“Yes. See you.”
He didn’t think so. All that talk of sex. He wondered if the sickness had addled her brain. Driving home, he kept thinking about her eyes, the brightness there in two different colours.
On Wednesday, as was the case every other week, he filled in as the auctioneer at the livestock sale in town. Gone were the heady times of day-long sales and thousands of head of cattle. What arrived these days was a worn-out dairy cow sold by a single owner, a bull with nothing in his rocket, or a small bevy of heifers bought up by a buyer from Monsanto. The auction lasted two hours. Bev caught sight of Janice sitting in her wheelchair along the walkway above the pen. He saw her at the exact moment a bony Jersey cow entered the ring. He said, “Ain’t she a sweetheart,” and he sold her for five dollars.
