Year of the Dog

by Shelby Hearon

  When we passed the pharmacy, still open and doing business, I couldn’t help it, I had to go in. And if Beulah had been allowed to pee on some car tire in the parking lot and scarf down a people-treat such as a chocolate-chip cookie, I would have stayed till they closed the doors, seeing who came in at this hour with that wrinkled scrap of paper in some doctor’s handwriting, who came in just to read the labels on the herbals, needing something for their vague unease. Instead, promising my good dog, whose big paws were slowing and whose middle was sagging, that we’d just do a walk-in, I led her through the automatic doors, knowing she would be welcome in her puppy-in-training vest.

  How quickly even the smell, that faint drugstore mix of cosmetics, cleaning supplies, sick people, and drugs, made me stop dead still and have to close my eyes with homesickness. After all, it hadn’t been my job I’d run away from; it hadn’t been the people who needed me every week of their lives to stay of sound mind and ambulatory. Who else could they get down there who’d know what I knew about everybody? No one at all.

  Back out on the sidewalk, I stood stock still a minute calming down. That asshole Curtis, of all the wrong-hearted and wooden-headed things he’d done to me, including knocking up his old high school squeeze, this had to be the worst. Making me leave my work had to be the worst.

  8

  BEULAH AND I trudged up our steep hill, the faint sound of horns and strings following us, the lake reflecting stars behind us, and our driveway safe at hand. All at once, I stopped still as a fox. Pulling the leash up short, I put my hand silently on the puppy’s head, sending her an urgent signal to stay. What would a blind person do? What would her dog know to do?

  Two guys sat on our porch steps, legs spread apart, blocking our way, half a dozen beer bottles tossed in the yard. To go in the front way, I’d have to say, “Excuse me.” I’d have to lead Beulah past them. They looked like serial killers, that is they looked like the two hoods upstairs who rented the top floor of our house. They didn’t look like big-city criminals; rather they looked like the kind of punk in college who had half a dozen grievances on his mind. Irritate him, press him, ask him to get out of the way, and you got nothing or you got a threat, or, worse, he made a move. The kind who would open their fly if they thought it would freak you out or shove your arm till you spilled your coffee, dump open your backpack, flip through a textbook then drop it face down in the spilled coffee, laugh, make a few comments on your anatomy, and then, just as panic began to set in, take off.

  If I’d been by myself, I’d have turned around and headed back downtown to the safety of the pharmacy. But I had my dog. I needed to use my head. This had to become routine, an alternative set of moves for when our way became blocked, so Beulah would get the idea. It made my chest hurt just imagining the scene of a blind lady, starting up her own steps and getting an arm laid on her, a fat belly shoved up against her, a mean voice in her ear: “You going someplace? Nice dog you got there. You gonna let me have a look at your place? You reaching for the key?” I felt a rush of anger like a windstorm.

  Knotting my free hand into a fist against my chest as a shield, I led us down the driveway in the dark. Would my blind woman with her diabetic shoes and heart beating steady on its beta-blocker be allowed to carry a snubnose in her bag? Likely not. And no way would a mannerly companion dog know to go for the throat. I figured as long as we weren’t in their line of sight, as long as we circled around the side and didn’t happen to notice they were doubtless smoking dope, chances were they wouldn’t bother to move their behinds off the steps. Or so I hoped.

  In the dark back yard, my ears straining for the sound of footsteps, I held my breath and loosened the leash enough for Beulah to get busy in the perfumed air that let her know she was home. But she hesitated, rubbing against my leg, as if to say that she didn’t need to go, if I wanted her to stick by me—though by the length of time she took, I guessed she’d been about to pop. When she returned to the steps, I whispered her name, and we slipped up the back stairs into the house. Inside, I threw the bolts, back and front, and leaving all the lights out, gave her a little kibble and then spread a pallet for myself by her bedtime blanket. Figuring that if she wasn’t allowed up on my bed, I could at least snuggle down on the floor by hers. At first she seemed uncertain at this change in our routine, and kept looking to me to see what she should do: person on the floor! But when I patted her usual place, and said her name again, she gave a big sigh and plopped down beside me in relief.

  “Good brave girl,” I told her, talking maybe to both of us, and then, still in my clothes, fell asleep. Holding her front paws in mine.

  9

  BY THE END of the month, I’d got so lonesome I was going out of my mind. Sitting in my kitchen staring out at the flowering locust, I almost wished I was back at the PACIFIC VIEW motel, at least there I’d had interaction with the lady at the desk and the waiters at the fast-food places across the road. At home in Peachland, I’d had a sort of routine, seeing people all day at the pharmacy, asking about their folks or their kids or whoever they were or had been married to, did they trade in the car, how was the new roof going, was their mother-in-law still visiting. And then bringing home to Curtis a couple of stories that didn’t violate anybody’s drug-use privacy for him to savor along with the fried chicken or barbequed pork I’d readied for dinner. Then Mom would call, passing on the latest from her best friend Madge at the bank, with whom, when they weren’t meeting for lunch, she talked to on the phone about five times a day. Then Daddy might get on the line, to reminisce about when the hardware had been the very heart of commerce in Peachland and in every southern city to the best of his knowledge and surmise.

  I called Mr. Sturgis at the pharmacy almost every day. Asking about Mr. Grady’s health or how Mr. Haynes and Blind Dog were doing, or what had happened with the Baptist preacher’s mother lately, what was he giving our best doctor, Bayless, for his lungs which were tearing apart? But he gave me short answers, implying that if I was all so interested in my customers how come I’d left and gone halfway to the North Pole?

  Finally, desperate for company, I phoned up my mom’s Aunt May, thinking that she couldn’t have asked me over even if she’d wanted to (though I didn’t think she did), since I hadn’t had the nerve to give her my cell number. My plan was to call on her if she sounded even the least agreeable, and, this time, to bring a nice gift, maybe a box of Champlain Chocolates, or even some fresh flowers from the stall downtown, though that would require her to hunt out a vase. Something like the deep red peonies blooming in the yard next door, which I could smell in the early morning when Beulah and I sat a while on the steps, and which you couldn’t grow in South Carolina. And this time, I wouldn’t bring my puppy along.

  “Aunt May?” I could feel my voice crack a bit and my face flush, since I figured she wasn’t over-eager to hear from me again.

  “Do give me another chance, Janey,” she apologized, after I’d asked if I could maybe drop by a minute this morning, and how was she getting along. “I’ve had something of a shock. Perhaps you saw in the paper? Where the police it seems, not here at any rate, but in a large city, have had titanium teeth installed in their German shepherd attack dogs. Bert has been most upset—it’s quite got me out of my usual routine. Some other day, then?”

  “Sure,” I said, “gosh, that’s awful.” And it made me wonder if Mr. Greenwood did really live with her or if they were just close and he came over when he got upset about something that might end up in one of his stories.

  So when, a couple of days later, the phone rang and it was James from the Dog Park I was really glad to hear from him. “Uh,” he said, so I knew right away it was him, “you want to come over and see my place, maybe? We could go eat or something? I mean sometime? This afternoon? You could bring your dog. If you want to.”

  And that made me feel grateful toward him, his knowing that my good puppy needed to have outings and see people, the same as I did. So I said, “Sure,” and got out my ma
p.

  Burlington was shaped like a boomerang, opening out onto Lake Champlain, the north end of town curving around Appletree Bay, the south end around Burlington Bay, with five green and public parks scattered along the irregular length of the waterfront. The streets, as I knew from finding Aunt May’s house, were heavy on the names of trees—Linden, Oak, Cherry, Walnut, Aspen, Hawthorn, Maple, Tamarack, Chestnut, Butternut, Willow, Birch, Poplar, Elm, Hickory—most of which I still couldn’t identify.

  It felt good to be driving again, since I didn’t do that much up here, unless we were going to the park to play with other dogs, or I was going to the market I’d found that had free-range fresh chickens and Carolina peaches. I went South on Pine, and, after a ways, turned west on Butternut, which took me into a small industrial area that led to a neighborhood cut off from the rest of town by railroad tracks and by fields on either side. Going up a rise, I blinked to see the road appear to run right into the lake, with nothing, not even a fence, between me and the blue Adirondack across the water. And when I stopped the car to stare, no one honked at me, since there was not another car in sight.

  Turning onto Hackberry, I crawled along checking the house numbers on old two-story and one-story shingled homes, rundown, with patched roofs, small yards, porches blooming with planters and window boxes, all facing an empty grassy public playground with a slide and tire swing and a lot of space to play ball. It looked for all the world like a company town, like this was where factory workers had once lived a century ago, when this was a lumber port. I was thinking that I must be turned around, that maybe I headed the wrong way off Pine, when I saw James in the yard of a freshly-painted, robin’s-egg blue cottage.

  “Hi,” I said, a little nervous, getting Beulah out on her loose leash and waiting with her at the curb. I’d brushed my hair straight, and worn my new red hoodie with a white tee and cropped white pants, and tried to fix up a bit. But I hadn’t been on a date, if that’s what this was, in what seemed like forever, and never on one with somebody I hadn’t known since grade school.

  “Hey,” James said, giving Beulah a greeting and outstretched palm. “You found it.”

  “I didn’t know this area was here—.” Past his house, I could see a narrow yard, sloping to the lake, grown up in wild grass.

  “Pete and I found it, or I did. On my bike. I’d started riding at the Dog Park and I followed the bike path to see where it went, over that wooden bridge, you know, past those condos and docks? Then I ended up here. Pete wanted the place in back, it used to be a garage. We fixed it up, did I say that? It took a lot of work.”

  He wiped his forehead, then smiled, as if he just remembered you were supposed to do that. “We’d been looking for something. We didn’t want to be roommates, at twenty-seven.”

  “You’re a kid,” I said, surprised that he was older than I was. He didn’t have that lived-in look that came, I guess, with marriage.

  “I guess everybody’s a kid till they have kids.” He shifted his shoulders and experimented with a grin.

  I liked that idea. Picturing Curtis Prentice, former stud, becoming a daddy. Dropping by the pharmacy with combedover hair, his mind on the risks of adjustable rate mortgages and the fact that his wife Millie was putting on weight. Turning into his own daddy.

  “You wanna see where Pete lives, in the back?” He led us down a narrow gravel driveway and pointed to a former one-car garage, also painted bright blue, with a window set into the front and also the back, so you could look right through to the water. Then we walked back to the cottage, where, taking an audible breath and fiddling a minute with his watch strap, he led us up the steps and through his front door.

  Those guys in school who sat in front of me, the ones like James with layers of old t-shirts and Klondike shoes, who aced their tests and went off, or so we heard, to serious schools and later fame—they had no other existence for me but the classroom. Since I had never gone out with one, they seemed to me to exist like the chalkboards at school, coming to life when the janitors turned on the lights. Now, inside the home of one, what had I expected? A heap of flannel shirts (this being Vermont) on top of a cot, a couple of calculators, fourteen pairs of shoes and wads of dirty socks and a bathroom you didn’t dare enter.

  Instead, the place was beautiful; I felt Beulah should wipe her paws. Gleaming wood floorboards sanded smooth as velvet, the old nails hammered flat and shiny. In the room we entered, James had a polished wooden desk and facing it an elderly rust-colored settee and a black-painted straight chair which matched one at his desk. On the wall, he’d mounted a pen and ink drawing labeled OX HOIST, quite technical and baffling to me, with arrows indicating elm drums, ash wheels, chestnut poles, walnut tubes, elder rollers. And, below that, a smaller ink drawing on heavy paper of a CRANE, with instructions for eight pine beams, two elm trunks, and one large walnut tree for screws. Also on that wall: a closed door. To his bedroom?

  I had entered a different country. But then I’d never gone into a man’s house before, not one he had done himself, not a place he’d made for himself to inhabit. Curtis and I had gone from our folks’ houses to student rentals and then, back in Peachland, to a two-bedroom of our own. A small house we’d tried to fix up more or less in the style we were used to. In that way, I guess we’d been still kids, no longer living at home, but not grownups who knew what they wanted.

  While I stood taking in this glimpse of him, James put down a towel and a bowl of water in the kitchen for Beulah, turned on a tape of a deep raspy voice singing “I’m Your Man,” telling me we were listening to Leonard Cohen, then changed his mind and turned it off again.

  “You want some orange juice?” he asked. “Or a beer or something?”

  “Are these for your students?” I asked, gesturing to the elaborate drawings, thinking maybe these were details from famous structures abroad, having to do with cathedrals or mills or some other ancient building they’d be studying. Getting comfortable on the settee and tucking my feet up, I was wondering if maybe all teachers had stuff like this. He didn’t seem like any teacher I’d ever had, though maybe I’d have benefited from one like him. Could I imagine Janey Daniels, playing basketball but wishing she was a track star, going into a class taught by a Mr. James Maarten? It would have gone over my head. Though maybe later, in the university, when I’d got serious about learning the specifics of pharmaceuticals easing the discomforts of the body, I might have been curious, attracted, by a course that offered such attention to detail, might even have raised my hand to ask Mr. Maarten, “Why ash for wheels? Why elm for drums?”

  “Sort of, I guess, in a way.” He gave us each a glass of orange juice, frosty cold. A ceiling fan blew a little air; still, it was warm. “I read about this building in Italy, a long time ago, built like that—.” He leaned back in his desk chair and pointed at the drawings. “A walnut tree cut up for wood screws. That first time I read it, I lay flat on my back and kept reading it aloud because I couldn’t believe it. Work like that. I’d just be reading it in my head all the time. You ever do that? The rollers for the hoist were greased with tallow; the ropes were soaked in vinegar. Well, I thought—I take these kids overseas? It’s part of the Experiment in International Living, I did it myself after high school—anyway, I thought this impossible building, this dome, was going up, the craftsman was designing it in his head, in 1428. So I wanted my kids to know about that, and think about what was happening in The Netherlands at the same time, that’s where we go. And compare that with here—he’s figuring out chestnut poles for the hoist, and over here in this country at that time, there’s nothing like that.” He looked at me, and then had to study his knees, his face flushed with having talked so much.

  I tried to imagine reading a book aloud to myself to understand it better. Thinking about him, somebody who’d do that, I decided I hadn’t known anybody like this before. I had a hundred questions.

  “If you take students in the summer,” I asked, “how come you’re here? I mean, I saw you a
t the Dog Park the first day of June.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We did winter term this year.”

  “But when you went, back in high school, it was summer?”

  He wiggled a finger in an ear. “Mostly we do summer. It depends on where the kids are going when they graduate. It’s different, different years.” He let his eyes roam the room.

  How did he get this way, so brainy, so nerdy? “Where was home?” I asked, trying to imagine him growing up.

  He gestured around the room. “This is it.”

  “I mean—.” Didn’t he get it? “Where did you grow up? Did you go off to school, before you went on the study-abroad program?”

  He looked at me, scowling. “You didn’t start with all that at the park. I liked it that you were doing this stuff with the puppy, knowing you had to give her away. Not a lot of people would do that. You didn’t do a third degree.”

  “I was just trying to—get to know you.”

  “Well, here I am. This is me.”

  “I mean where you came from, you know, your family, the town . . .” How could he not understand that? “I mean, it’s what you do in the south, you ask all about a person’s family and where they grew up and what they did when they were kids. It’s being friendly.”

  He waved a hand in the air, dismissing my words. “That’s how you learn class cues. Isn’t that what you want? You want to know if I had a rich dad? Do I come from old money, the foreign service, starving artists, film people? That’s what you’re asking.”

  “Jeez, James, you must’ve been through this before. I mean I’m not the first girl you ever had over.” Though at that moment I wasn’t so sure about that. “Everybody asks questions, don’t they? You must’ve come up with something to tell other people.”

  “Yeah,” he answered, sitting back down, examining a split thumbnail. “I’ve been through it. Every single female is an interrogation machine.”