Red Dog

by Jason Miller

  The rest of the place was plenty interesting, too. There was a sofa and a TV on a big painted console and a couple of posters on the walls, and there was a forest of pot plants growing everywhere there was space to put them. I tell you, it was a sight. They were on the floor and on the little divider wall between the living room and kitchenette. They were on top of the TV set and stereo and on the arms of the sofa. An ancient turntable had been switched on, and one of them was spinning in slow circles on that. The ceiling was fitted with maybe a half dozen banks of CFLs nestled inside metal hoods and suspended from silver chains. Their light and their buzzing sound filled what was left of the space to fill.

  “This is something else,” I said.

  “What is?” she said.

  “Nothing. What time’s he usually wake up?”

  “Wes? Depends.”

  “On?”

  “His aura, mostly.”

  That was sensible enough. Guy had a bad enough aura, he might not want to get out of the sheets. He might want to lie down in a culvert ditch or a lonely patch of red clover, or walk screaming into a forest. There were any number of possibilities.

  I said, “Can you wake him?”

  She nodded, but instead of waking him she flopped down on the sofa and said, “I don’t know you,” which seemed like something she should have thought of before, but I was too polite to say so. She picked up a one-hitter and tamped down the bowl with a blackened thumb and touched fire to it with a lighter on a cord around her neck. “Don’t remember your face none, neither. What’s your name?”

  “Slim.”

  “Funny name.”

  “I never stop laughing about it.”

  “I’m Star-Child,” she said. She handed me the pipe. I turned it around in my hand and gave it right back.

  She said, “It’s quality shit, ain’t it?”

  “Seriously?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. My head hurt. “That your real name? Star-Child, I mean?”

  “No. Duh. Actually it’s Tiffany. Tiffany Scruggs.”

  “Believe it or not, it’s better than Star-Child. You live here with Wes?”

  “I live here with Wes,” she said. She didn’t look excessively thrilled about it. “I’ll go get him up. Might take a minute, aura he’s having. While I’m gone, you decide how much you want. And be precise about it.”

  “I promise to be precise.”

  “I’m serious now. Wes hates any kind of dickering.”

  “I promise not to dicker.”

  She looked at me and my promises a moment longer and then nodded at the three of us and tottered out of the room, grabbing the doorframe a little as she rounded the corner. I got up from my seat and made a quick search of the space. There was some secondhand furniture and a pile of video games and some CDs of bands I’d never heard of and a guitar on a stand. I went into the kitchen and opened the utility room door and checked the pantry for dog food cans but found only canned SpaghettiOs and some sudden memories of my own wayward youth. I went to the window above the sink and parted the blinds and took a peek at the backyard. There was more dead grass and some patches of bare earth where even the dead grass didn’t want to live anymore and a crooked apple tree without any apples on it. There was an outbuilding, too, a yellow tin and fiberglass shed under not so much as a stipple of shade. In that weather, basically a sweatbox.

  “Surely not,” I said to myself.

  But also maybe so. Maybe even surely so. Nobody ever went broke overestimating the cruelty of people. Just heartbroke. I pushed open the sliding door and stepped out of the kitchen and into the heat. I crossed the lawn and unchained the shed and opened it, and there she was in a ball on the dirt floor. A red dog. And not just any red dog. A sixty-five-dollar red dog.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, you wouldn’t happen to be Shelby Ann Cleaves, would you?”

  She was too weak to use her voice maybe. She lifted her bony head to look at me through clouded eyes, and the knob of her docked tail twitched. I don’t guess she’d have lasted much longer. It was as hot as a coal stove in there, and there wasn’t any food that I could see. Her water dish was as dry as the inside of a mummy, and she’d done her business all over the floor. The smell of it made my eyes water. I don’t imagine Shelby Ann was any too happy about it, either. I squatted down and scratched the red fur behind her ears, she licked my hand, and we became friends. I had half a water bottle in my truck, so I went back and got that now and brought it to the shed to fill up her bowl. She lapped it down immediately and looked up at me with sad eyes for more, hopeful but not expectant.

  I said, “Wait here just one more minute, darlin’. I’m gonna go shove my foot up someone’s ass.”

  I stormed out of the shed. I left the door open and walked quickly across the yard and into the house again. There was a boy in the kitchen now, a skinny thing in tighty-whities and nothing else with a pistol in his hand. He pointed it at my head.

  I didn’t let him pull the trigger. I grabbed his arm and twisted until the gun dropped from his hand. I kneed him in the gut, causing him to bend over, and I hammered the back of his head so that his face bounced off the kitchen counter and he fell to the floor. He tried to rear up and turn again toward me but I pulled out the tranquilizer needles and stuck them in his ass. Both of them. He moaned and struggled around a little for a moment and then fell still. I took the stickpins out of his butt and just then Star-Child came into the room with the corner of her T-shirt in her mouth.

  I said, “Just FYI, your boyfriend’s a dick.”

  “Is he dead? Is that poison?”

  “No. Just some sleep stuff. He’s like to be out for a while.”

  “Oh.”

  “Try not to sound so disappointed,” I said, and she looked at me and then quickly at her feet and blushed. I softened my voice. “You don’t have to stay here, you know? And not just here-here. Here in this kind of life, I mean. There’s all kinds of things you can do instead.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Law school?”

  “Drugs are more honest.”

  I said, “Okay. That’s a point for you. How about business classes, then? Or computers? Or anything other than this mess.”

  “It ain’t that easy for everybody.”

  She was right about that, anyway. I thought about my sixty-five-dollar fee and rang up the hospital bills I’d narrowly avoided so far. Sixty-five dollars wouldn’t even cover the hospital parking. I looked at the boy snoozing on the floor and worried about a sore back.

  I said, “Help me with him, will you?”

  She agreed to help. Probably she was feeling guilt over plotting to murder me. She took Wesley’s bare feet and together we carried him through the house and into a room down the hall where we dumped him unceremoniously on the bed. After that I collected the firearms and bullets, Wesley’s piece and a shotgun I found in the bathroom near the fixture.

  “Why on earth would he keep a thing like that in there?” I asked her.

  “Some people can’t ever relax.”

  She said there weren’t any more firearms in the house, and I believed her. I took it all to the shed and deposited it in a handy wheelbarrow. Then I unclasped Shelby Ann’s collar and leash and carried her to the truck. She probably could have walked, but I elected not to risk it. Locking her in the dog box didn’t seem right, not after what’d been done to her, so I buckled her up in the front seat next to me.

  “For safety,” I told her, and climbed behind the wheel.

  I pulled out of the drive and turned south and then east past the tinderbox that the preserve was turning itself into. Along the way, I stopped at a convenience store and bought a can of dog chow, some more bottled water, and some disposable bowls. I turned the radio on low and the AC up as high as it’d go. An old Don Williams number came on—“If Hollywood Don’t Need You,” a favorite—and I ended up singing along with it a little while Shelby Ann downed her meal and three dishes of the w
ater. She was filthy and undernourished, but near as I could tell she didn’t actually appear to be physically injured. Beneath her leather collar was a shaved rectangle with a tiny row of XXXs stitched into her skin, but the incision had healed some time ago and the stitches were clean. After a while, I started the truck and we moved on.

  It was a little before nine when we returned to the Classic Country Showroom, and the dark was finally coming on for real.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said to Shelby Ann. You talked to enough crazy people in your life, talking to a dog didn’t seem like much to throw on the pile. “I only ask that you not judge me by the company I bring.”

  I left her in the cab with the engine running and the air conditioner on and walked up to Reach’s house and went inside. I called out, but he didn’t answer. The light was on in the kitchen, which I didn’t remember from before, it still being daylight and all when I’d left. That gave me pause. Pause and anxiety. For a moment, I worried Reach had somehow slipped his cuff and set up a machete ambush, but the machete was back with the fireplace tools where I’d returned it following our scrape.

  “Reach?” I said. Nothing. I made for the kitchen. I was starting to worry.

  I shouldn’t have worried. He was still on the floor in his robe and still cuffed to the pipe under the sink. But that was all he was, all he’d ever be. Someone had shot him in the face at close range, blown his head all over the walls and kitchen cabinets. Blood filled the little holes in the mesh of the window screens, the keyhole in the handcuffs. The ones I’d slapped on him. I couldn’t even look at the chasm in his face, that grotesque second mouth, or in the one in the back of his head, much larger.

  So I stood not looking at them for a moment, hoping I’d be able to control the shaking in my hands long enough to call the cops. Somehow, I managed it, but as soon as they arrived in a squealing herd of prowlers, I sort of wished I hadn’t. Maybe they’d been without a murder for too long. Or maybe they were just inexperienced in such things. Probably that last thing. You imagine there wasn’t much in the way of murders out there. The cops were so excited by it all, they walked all over the forensics and arrested the first thing in sight, as though on impulse.

  “Christ Almighty,” one of them said, a kid in a thin mustache. “This guy’s insides are out. And I bet you’ve got a perfectly reasonable explanation, right?”

  He dangled his cuffs in front of me like a silver noose.

  “Damn it all,” I said. “I was going to take him to the hospital.”

  “Well, you can take him, but I don’t know it will do any good.”

  The other deputies tittered their appreciation. Mustache ate it up.

  “Nice guys finish last, son,” he said, though he was almost young enough to be mine.

  “At least they finish.”

  The deputy agreed. But he slapped the cuffs on me anyway.

  4.

  I’VE BEEN IN WORSE JAILS, AND IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE OFF season, because my lone cellmate was a former ventilation boss who’d gone after his unfaithful wife with a Weedwhacker. He must have been pushing eighty, and he moved with the painful resolve of someone who’d worked underground too long. His breaths were the rasping snorts of camel snores—or what I imagined camel snores to be—but somehow he’d chased the old woman out of their ancestral home and down a half mile of deer path and into a dry streambed, where the whacker finally and mercifully sputtered itself empty of fuel. I told him to think about forgiving his wife and getting himself a good lawyer. He asked me if I knew one, and I just laughed and laughed until he flipped over on his bunk to face the wall.

  After another little forever, a deputy with a face like mashed turnips brought me a telephone on a wooden stool. I asked him to dial it for me, told him my dialing finger had been hurt by the mean cop with the mustache. He chuckled about that some then showed me his own finger—not his dialing finger—before going back to watching the tube or strangling his chicken or whatever deputies did when the boss wasn’t around and the professional criminals were taking a personal day.

  I put in a call to my own lawyer, but the worthless shit wasn’t in, so I left a message and then phoned Anci, first sucking a few deep breaths to brace for what I knew was coming.

  “You’re kidding?” she said, when I’d given her the rundown.

  “I wish,” I said. “But this time even the extenuating circumstances have extenuating circumstances.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what you said last time. Remember the thing with the chickens?”

  “I thought we agreed not to talk about the thing with the chickens.”

  “You agreed. I don’t remember agreeing.”

  “I remember it different maybe.”

  “You get hit in the head a lot. Forget things. What happened to the dog?”

  “Technically, she’s evidence in a homicide, but the county doesn’t have a shelter, so they called the Cleaves. I understand they’ve already been by to pick her up.”

  “At least someone’s happy, then,” she said.

  “I’m guessing that someone ain’t you.”

  “No. No it is not. This a hold-and-release kind of deal?”

  “I sure hope so.”

  Anci said, “See you in seventy-two, then,” and hung up on me.

  The warm support of children is one of the great comforts in a parent’s life. Seriously, you can ask them.

  After a few hours, I was cuffed again and led into interrogation. It was a small room, smaller than my cell even, and they’d crammed in too big a table and too many chairs. There were cops in there, too. Uniform officers, I mean. Their presence didn’t have any purpose that I could detect. They weren’t sweating me or taking notes about the case or bouncing me around for fun. They were just bored and waiting for the show to begin.

  After a while, one of them looked at me with gathered eyebrows and said, “You really kill that guy? Reach?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t fathom why you’d do something like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just mean.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I used to go out there sometimes,” he continued. “Classic Country. Pretty nice place.”

  “I guess.”

  “Seriously, it was. Food was pretty good, too. He did that catfish sandwich I liked. One with that sauce. What do you call it?”

  “Tartar?”

  “That’s the stuff. Tartar. I like it. And there were things to play, too. Games. Darts in the back room. That kind of thing.”

  “He got one of them mechanical bulls,” I said, and the cop nodded.

  “Got it and liked to show it off on account of he could afford such a gadget, but it was unplugged. Too many insurance claims. You put a bull and a bunch of drunks in the same room like that, you’re always going to get insurance claims. It’s one of them inevitables. I guess old Reach finally come to his senses about it.” He paused a moment, reflective, and then said, “It was a good place for dancing, though. That’s for sure.”

  Well, that perked up some ears. The other cops laughed and joked at him a little for liking to boogie, big old tough county lawman like that, and he got sore about it. He turned away from me and his remembrance of lights fantastic to share words with his brother officers. He explained that his wife liked to dance and that as her life partner he had a responsibility to make her happy by doing some of the things she enjoyed. Those other cops, he bet their wives liked to cut a rug sometimes, too, even if they never said so out loud, but they never got dancing. They were neglected. Someday maybe a real dancin’ man would come along, and then their wives might go dancing with him instead, and the error of their ways would be laid bare but too late. He got pretty hot about it, but it was a nice enough speech, and in the end the other cops were shamed and fell silent. I hadn’t laughed at him, but I felt ashamed, too. I thought I might take Peggy dancing more often, she got back from her sister’s. I didn’t want no dancin’ man to come along, and I said so, and the d
eputy looked at me and nodded, and I nodded at him, grateful for his wisdom, and then the door opened and the sheriff came in.

  He said, “You ain’t called a lawyer?”

  “Tried to, but he wasn’t around,” I said. “He’s one of these characters always takes off on you.”

  “You’ll pardon me saying so, that don’t sound like much of a lawyer.”

  “He’s inside the budget, though,” I said.

  The sheriff was satisfied. He didn’t want me having a lawyer, anyway—good, bad, or indifferent. He waved a hand, and the other cops filed out of the room. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite. He put a recorder on the table between us and switched it on and said the date and time and his name and mine. My real name. He added that I was commonly called Slim around those parts, result of some time spent in the coal mines. I told the recorder that this was so. The sheriff told me to shut up.

  He was on the young side for his office—early fifties, I guess—with a handsome black face and the beginnings of silver at his temples. His name tag said R.L. Lindley, but I didn’t need to read any name tag. Everybody in those parts had heard of R.L. Lindley, him being Little Egypt’s only black county sheriff and all, but we’d never been formally introduced.

  He said, “I hope you don’t mind we skip the usual back-and-forth, son. Keep this direct.”

  “I guess I don’t mind.”

  “Fine. Now, why don’t you start by telling me—directlike, mind you—why I shouldn’t drop your troublemaking ass down the deepest, darkest hole I can find.”

  “The more I think about it, though, too much directness can be dull.”

  “That your answer?”

  “Be patient,” I said. “That’s only one of my answers. Got plenty of others. You might even eventually like one.”

  “No offense, but I kinda doubt that,” he said. “You know what? I’m in a generous mood tonight, some reason. I’m going to do something I ain’t never do. Give you a second chance here. Let you start fresh. How about that?”