Precious murmured, “These are the living things which ye may eat among all the beasts that are on the earth. Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that may ye eat. Nevertheless, these shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that part the hoof: The camel, because he cheweth the cud but parteth not the hoof, he is unclean unto you.”
Leviticus or not, Precious still didn’t like the idea of having to bathe a dog hood. Every dog she’d ever known had always bathed his own hood with his nasty tongue, and she didn’t see why this dog had to be any different. But the mistress was emphatic that the bathing of the dog must include a good scrubbing and rinsing of its hood, and Precious carried out lawful command. But she was never so out of order as to recite scripture while bathing such a worldly part.
Anyone standing outside the door of the bathroom would have heard muttering of scripture followed by an interval of grim silence punctuated only by the sound of sullen scrubbing, a loud wheeze of relief, and then rinsing. And occasionally the eavesdropper might even hear a fervent “Thank God!” breathed behind the closed door, signifying that the bathing of dog hood was once again accomplished.
So the bathing was going well and had even taken on an encouraging Sunday piety. But one day during his bath the dog rolled moonstruck eye at Precious and proceeded to unreel several inches of raw hood meat as if he expected a Jamaican Christian to rinse that, too. Precious scowled. “Draw in you hood, dog!” she commanded in her best headmistress tone. The dog growled a defiant “nay”; hood oozed out of its sling, bucked, and began bobbing head gravely like a chanting bishop.
Precious immediately ceased all washing and scripture reciting and sat down on the bathroom floor. Averting her eyes, she began to hum a hymn, intending to crush nasty dog hood with a psalm.
The first verse of “Rock of Ages” caused hood to tremble and shrink, Precious noted smugly, since lewdness must ever withdraw before the hymns of heaven. She had observed the same effect on rural libertines who would sometimes parade into church hoping to corrupt a sister, only to suffer smiting by the Holy Ghost. She remembered one wooer who had strutted in boastily and who ended up fluttering between the pews, babbling in tongues, and eventually becoming an elder. It was the same with earthly dog—the beast was discovering that hood did not hold sway over grace. Soon she would have him barking in tongues. She took in a deep breath, ready to bellow out “Nearer My God to Thee,” when she observed that not even a wink of hood meat showed.
Precious clambered up from the floor and resumed the rinsing with a grim satisfaction. She could have gloated, and had the dog been a man, she certainly would have closed out the incident with a moral. However, she would not waste Truth on a dog, so she merely muttered the countrywoman’s triumphant “Ahoa!” and got on with the bath.
But the victory was short-lived, and the bathing became more and more of a struggle. The dog persisted in exposing himself to her, though she repeatedly made clear her preference for a hood-free tub. Singing it down had become impossible. After that first time, not even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir hymning at point-blank range in the dog’s ear could have shrunk his hood. Precious steeled herself to endure the provocation.
One day as Precious was drying him off, the dog exploded in a lecherous growl, seized her right leg with its front paws, and began to violently chisel her shinbone with its pointed hood. Precious shrieked bloody murder and tried to scramble down the corridor, but the lustful dog hung onto her leg and savagely pumped.
“Dog grinding me foot!” Precious bellowed loud enough to bring down the gates of heaven.
Mannish burst out of his room and bounded along the hall toward them. Mistress Lucy peered down the hallway at the commotion.
With a violent kick, Precious flung the animal off her leg and scrabbled atop the dining room table.
Mistress Lucy rushed into the room. “What did you do to Riccardo?” she snapped, eyes blazing as-she knelt beside the dog, groggy from being hurled against the wall.
“De dog try to grind me foot!” Precious babbled, nearly hysterical with disgust.
“What’s wrong with that? The greatest love a male can give a female is to fertilize her!”
“Breed me with puppy,” blubbered Precious, shuddering at the appalling prospect.
“Impossible!” the mistress raged, as she cuddled Riccardo protectively. “Screwing another species is the best birth control in the world! Riccardo loves you, Precious! Can’t you get that through your stupid head? You could have hurt Riccardo!”
“Riccardo could have grind me!”
Mistress Lucy gently picked up her dog, slathered a row of wet kisses up and down the lining of his dripping jaw, and started down the corridor with the animal slung over her shoulder. Riccardo peered longingly at Precious from his shoulder perch and whimpered.
“Tomorrow, I am gone from dis nasty place!” Precious screeched. “Away from dat nasty beast dat have de nerve to try and grind a Christian woman!”
“Go tonight,” the mistress spat, disappearing down the corridor. “Don’t wait until tomorrow.”
“Can I help you off the table, Precious?” Mannish asked, extending his hand.
“No!” Precious snapped. “You would sit by and let a dog grind me and do nothing! You’re a worthless man!”
She had a good mind to kick him, but, controlling herself, she allowed him to help her down.
So Precious should have departed that next morning, and she would have, too, except that Mannish undertook shuttle diplomacy. He shuttled into the mistress’s room and worked his guileful tact, and then he shuttled into Precious’s room, sat on the edge of her bed, and begged her to stay. He promised that he would do anything she wanted, anything. He sweetmouthed her while she lay obdurately on her bed and stared stonily at the ceiling. He reached over and stroked her hair, and then, after pouring honey down her ears for at least a half an hour, he kissed her softly on the lips. She replied with a properly discouraging Christian elbow, but he persisted and was soon kissing neck and caressing bosom and gnawing on her earlobe, suffering full and unmistakable rebuff only when he tried to wriggle tongue down her ear.
“No tongue in earhole, please,” she said gruffly enough for him to grasp that he had strayed out of bounds.
After much wooing and cajoling and cuddling with her deep into the night, Mannish perched on a narrow strip on the edge of the bed from which he proceeded to conduct a thoroughly satisfying feel-up of all relevant body parts.
“I am a Christian woman,” Precious muttered as a reminder as much to herself as to him, shivering with delight as one particular probe deliciously struck water.
“I know that, Precious,” his whisper respectfully assured her. “That is why I intend to use a brand-new condom.”
She said, “Oh,” the best she could manage on the spur of the moment.
As he mounted her she begged pardon and briefly took time out to turn Theophilus’s portrait facedown on the table next to her bed to spare her late husband the distress of witnessing her backsliding carnality when he no doubt already had enough on his mind with learning and rehearsing the angelic hymnal.
“Are you ready, Precious?” Mannish asked huskily, puffing cottonballs softly in the creases of her neck.
Thank you, yes, she was quite ready. Theophilus had been cold now for nearly a year. Burning atop her bosom was a hot-blooded young man, mounted where only emptiness and homesickness had lately ridden.
Her heart was a child with a skip rope.
When Precious awoke the next morning, she drew sweet breath, walked with a sprightly step into the massive doublejointed kitchen. As she warbled through the kitchen preparing breakfast for man and dog, she found herself pausing to stretch and crack her joints of lingering bubbles of sleep, savoring to the full the satisfaction of having reduced a grown man to insensibility against her bosom last night, teaching once again the usual grim lesson about the transitoriness of lust. When she was d
one with Mannish last night, she was proud to say, not even mythic Beulah herself could have roused a strand of his pubic hair.
She hummed a hymn and mixed a batch of thick waffle batter. Mistress Lucy strolled into the kitchen, accepted a cup of coffee from Precious, and read the newspapers in the strained morning silence that always follows nighttime domestic uproar. Precious thought to mention the row of the night before but decided against it, so other than the obvious burbling about “Morning,” neither of them said a word.
Dressed in his uniform, Mannish joined them a half an hour later, his cheeks glowing under a fresh coat of varnish, a schoolboy’s glint in his eyes. He sipped a cup of coffee near Precious, who hummed triumphantly under her breath.
Riccardo trotted into the kitchen, heading straight for Precious, when he suddenly stopped, peered suspiciously up at Mannish, and growled.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” Mistress Lucy crooned.
The dog flicked his glance at her, telegraphed a greeting with a perfunctory wag of his tail, and returned his attention to Mannish with a deeper, angrier growl. Startled, Precious stared down guiltily at him for she knew instinctively what the growl meant. It was a dog reproach for, “Why you give dat Coolie my pum-pum?” asked in such an ill-mannered tone that she felt the rash impulse to bend down and box his face.
“What on earth is wrong with you, Riccardo?” the mistress wondered, reaching down to scoop up her pet. But even settled in her lap, the dog still glared and snarled at Mannish, who feigned indifference.
“Maybe he want a cheese omelet this morning,” Precious suggested hopefully.
“Mannish, are you sure you bought unfertilized eggs?” Mistress Lucy worried, massaging Riccardo behind the ears.
“Oh, yes, Miss Johnston,” Mannish said suavely. “The hens haven’t seen a cock since birth!”
Precious clucked sympathetically and headed for the refrigerator.
Covetous dog eyes tracked her progress.
Chapter 19
“Mummy, how you get yourself in these predicaments, eh?” Shirley asked with that scolding look of perplexity a middleaged mother dreads to see in a grown daughter. Precious heaved a sigh and twiddled her thumbs with mortification.
It was Sunday, her day off, and Precious was visiting Shirley. The two grandchildren, having just returned from Sunday school, had cavorted off into the nearby woods, seeking respite from biblical morbidness. Henry was pottering in the kitchen, baking a cake, leaving Precious and Shirley briefly alone in the living room, where Precious had just told of her scrapes with the dog.
“I did nothing to encourage dis animal!” Precious declared indignantly.
Shirley got up and paced with official police briskness, dodging between sofa and chair and ending up staring out the window with her back to her mother. She posed briefly there before snapping her fingers with sudden decisiveness.
“I’ll run over him for you with my patrol car. I was in hot pursuit. A dog darted into the street, and I ran over him. The suspect escaped. Your troubles are over.”
“Murder?” Precious gasped. “You want to murder de dog?”
“Now you talking like an American! You don’t murder a dog. You run over a dog. Can you let him out tomorrow evening around 8:00? I’ll run over him for you then.”
Precious gestured irritably. “You take dis for a joke,” she grumbled.
“If I miss him with the car, I’ll just lean out the window and plug him. You can say that the dog was a victim of drive-by shooting.”
Precious shook her head. She would not be a party to murder. If the dog happened to be out in the street for a stroll and Shirley just chanced to come by and felt like running him over on her own accord, that was different.
“You stay there going on fenky-fenky,” Shirley declared scornfully, “until the dog hold you down and rape you.”
“A dog can’t rape a woman, Shirley! Use your brain!”
“A Jamaican dog, maybe. But an American dog damn well-can.”
“Listen, don’t bother with de everlasting American patriotism dis morning! I have enough trouble already.”
There was a pause in the conversation while respective digestion of opinion, word, and topic silently took place.
Precious stirred, sighed, and grumbled. “To tell you the truth, I-want to go home. It’s getting so me nerves can’t stand dis place again. I have a headache ever since I come to dis country. Murder, stabbing, shooting morning, noon, and night. Man going berserk in schoolyard and supermarket. Gunman barricading inside house. Woman murdering her husband over a talking parrot. Alien breeding Arizona housewife of two-headed baby. Bigfoot begging bus fare off hikers in Oregon. I can’t stand it anymore! I not even eating right. You don’t see how I lose weight? Ten pounds, straight off me batty, you father’s favorite part. Thank God he’s not alive today, he’d go look a young fat gal. Why can’t I just dead now and be happy, eh? Instead, Theophilus Higginson, the most miserable man on two foot, get to dead and be safe and happy, while I have to stay here on earth, alive and miserable!”
“Mummy! Leave the fool-fool job. Come back and live with us! You don’t need to work.”
Shirley’s earnest plea was still ringing in the air when Henry sauntered in on the conversation.
“Precious,” he asked eagerly, “are you coming back to live with us?”
“Not quite yet,” she said dryly.
“Mummy, mind the dog don’t hold you down, you know!”
Henry’s head swivelled excitably from mother to daughter.
“Dog? What dog? What’re you talking about?”
“You wait till I reunite with your father in Paradise, you’ll see the good kick I going give him for leaving me in dis predicament.”
“Are you guys talking Jamaican dialect?”
“Speaking of Daddy, you never did tell me who Brutus is.”
“Mercy!”
“I’m not understanding one word of this conversation, people!”
Days of tension and disagreeable scene followed. The dog began to park himself outside Precious’s door every night, whimpering to be let in until Mistress Lucy herself had to come and cart him off to her own boudoir. One morning the mistress opined to Mannish that the dog was such a victim of an insidious idée fixe that she wondered whether Precious had put Jamaican voodoo on the poor animal.
“What is the meaning of this idée fixe?” Mannish asked with polite bewilderment.
“It means an obsession. Riccardo is obviously obsessed with the Jamaican bitch.” She added gloomily, “I blame myself.”
“You should not blame yourself, Miss Johnston. The dog is only obeying his karma.”
“He got this sick obsessiveness from me. I am the same way. When a man wants me, I kick him. But when a man doesn’t want me, I screw him until he does. Then I kick him.”
Mannish sniffed with circumspection. “It is a most peculiar contrariness,” he said adroitly.
“That’s why I’m doomed to one night stands. Once a man finds out that I’m rich, he always begins snivelling. If I could only meet a fabulously rich man who hated me! I’d kiss his ass, give him healthy children, and be happy. If he worked at hating me, the relationship would last forever. Of course, once he had a lapse and started to love me, I’d kick him, and it’d be over.”
Mannish scratched his chin and tried to look philosophical.
“So here I am, in my own kitchen,” Mistress Lucy added with a shudder of self-abasement, “confiding all this to my Indian chauffeur. No wonder poor Riccardo is so neurotic.”
One morning shortly after this heart-to-heart talk between mistress and chauffeur, an ugly scene occurred. Precious was cooking in the kitchen, moaning inwardly about the hardship of boiling soup without a beefy bone. The mistress was at the kitchen table, poring over financial records. Mannish was waxing the Rolls Royce in the courtyard. Riccardo was curled up near Precious’s feet, darting lewd glances at her potbellied figure and every now and again wheezing with a l
ovelorn groan.
“Precious,” the mistress said impatiently, “for God’s sake, will you please pat Riccardo? Don’t you hear him moaning?”
With a forbearing sigh, Precious bent over and briefly dusted the crown of the dog’s head, flattening a sprig of fur that sprouted between his sharpened ears. Just then Mannish entered the kitchen. Riccardo growled and jumped up to hover protectively beside Precious.
“It is very hot outside,” Mannish declared to the kitchen at large, pouring himself a glass of water.
As if to reply, Riccardo trotted briskly over to the chauffeur and signed his right leg with a flamboyant twirl of piss. Mannish froze. “Riccardo has christened me,” he hissed between clenched teeth.
The mistress glanced up with a bemused shaking of her head. “He feels loving today. Must be the heat.”
“If I live for ten millennia,” Mannish grimaced, “I will know never to steal another man’s camels. I have learned my lesson for eternity.”
Stalking out of the kitchen, he limped toward his room above the garage.
Mistress Lucy glanced up distractedly. “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know, mum.” Precious dropped the kitchen towel on the floor, bent over to pick it up, and whispered vehemently at the dog, “Piss ’pon my foot today and is the last foot you piss ’pon on dis earth.”
With a nimble thrust of its head, the dog dug deep into her right earhole with its tongue. Precious shrieked and bolted upright as if sprung violently out of a box.
Mistress Lucy looked up peevishly.
“Now what?”
“You cannot butcher and eat the dog, and dat’s final. Now stop talking about it.”
Precious was in no mood for mincing words. Mannish was brooding in her room, slumped in a chair beside her bed. On a side table lay the butcher knife she had just forcefully extracted from his hand. The mistress had gone to a formal dinner with her date, and three distant hallways away Riccardo was scratching at the door of his bedroom in which Precious had contrived to entrap him. When she had answered the soft knock on her door and found Mannish standing there, Precious naturally assumed that the chauffeur had come to beg her another piece, which she was quite agreeable to giving, provided he was prepared to suffer brief Christian resistance. But instead, she found that he’d come to enlist her help in a harebrained scheme to butcher and cook the dog tonight while the mistress was away.
Dog War Page 13
