Year of the Dog

by Shelby Hearon

  “You’re a good artist.”

  “Another place on Church Street is interested in carrying them.” That seemed to please her.

  “Doesn’t that count?” I asked. “With him?”

  “Nothing you do outside the house counts compared to what you do inside the house. Weren’t you married?”

  “I guess what I did outside the house actually made things worse,” I admitted. It made me sad, things going wrong for her here at home. And sad for Edgar, too, who’d barreled back into the room with Beulah behind him, a faded green tennis ball in his mouth.

  “Don’t you have somebody you’re seeing?”

  I nodded, reaching out to pat the two good dogs, and throw the ball.

  “Just don’t get married again. You give them that, they own the store.”

  I gathered up my things. “Thanks for letting me bring her,” I said. “I hate having to leave her at home all by herself—.”

  “You’re cute with that dog,” she said. “You can tell you don’t have kids.”

  We walked together out to the driveway as a sudden wind whipped across the lake, turning the sky a deep flat gray. Surely not snow? While we were still on Daylight Saving?

  “Thanks for the shampoo,” she said again. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  18

  WHEN WE GOT home, figuring Beulah would want to head out to her shady privy under the black locust, I let her down the back stairs. Just as we got into the yard, with her loose on the leash, we nearly ran into one of the scary guys from upstairs in the act of pissing on a small lilac bush in Beulah’s corner of the yard. She started to come back to me, startled, and then headed right in his direction, needing, I guess, to get to her spot.

  The scroungy tenant, the burly one who looked like a serious drinker, with stringy hair and dark bags under his eyes, turned around and shook his dick off, air-drying it before tucking it in. “Didn’t expect company,” he said, not seeming to be bothered.

  “My dog pees in that corner.” I felt territorial.

  He turned around to look. “Sorry, I didn’t see the sign.” He bent down and addressed Beulah, “Don’t mind me, it’s just family.”

  I shook her leash a little to let her know it was OK, though how she could have gone right over there and done her business with this menacing guy standing there, I had no idea. I couldn’t have blown my nose with him around. I could feel the back of my neck prickle. “Doesn’t your place come with a bathroom?” I felt like scolding him, for embarrassing me, mostly.

  “Hell, Roland’s in the can. I tell him he’s impacted and oughta see a doctor.”

  “You just have one bathroom upstairs?”

  “Yeah, you could say. They divided the room, toilet over here, shower over there, like it’s two rooms. They rented it up there calling it two apartments, but what can you find this close? The answer’s zip.” He adjusted his belt. “He know you got a dog?”

  “Who? The guy that rented it to me?”

  “Lavoie.”

  “I guess if he wants to know, he can.”

  “He don’t know.”

  “He could know.” Did this jerk mean to report on Beulah and take my apartment?

  He peered at me. “You’re not blind; Roland says he bet you could tell when we’re around by the smell, he said he thought you couldn’t see. I said, By your smell maybe, not mine.”

  I laughed. “When she’s grown, she’ll go to a blind person.”

  “I told him you weren’t.”

  Beulah had come back but I kept the leash loose so she could check out the scary guy and see that we didn’t have to run away. Not yet. “What do you guys do?”

  “You mean besides nothing much? We’re back in school, the both of us. Roland took a little sabbatical from his studies to fuck himself up real bad, and I got my hide fried getting a nasty divorce as a change from a nasty marriage. You don’t look like you know much about that, but I got myself together with a get-down ugly bitch. Once I’ve got my piece of paper, I can go back to having my own place. My dad was a roofer. It fit him just right. He liked the hard work, and he liked doing it on his own time. He stayed fit; he didn’t look a day older when he died. He gave me good advice. When I got into this mess with who’s now the former wife, he said, You’re thinking with your dick. I said, You got something better to think with? I’d been working for the gas company. I liked driving a truck and being out of the office. I thought about UPS but that looked like too much work. Dad said, Go back to school. Today’s world, you got to get a degree. He was right; you want to get off hourly, you got to get the piece of paper.”

  “I know about that,” I told him. “In high school, I worked at the pharmacy back home doing the same thing I do now mostly, but now they’ve got a name for what I do, and they’re holding my place till I get back.”

  “That’s a field for women these days, I see that.” He took another look at me, hefted his pants. “How about the dude comes around here? He oughta get you a better place. He can afford it.”

  “He’s a high school teacher.”

  “Yeah, right. Rich kids can do that, they can grow these little beard jobs and dress like street people. Roland and me see them coming up here all the time from Connecticut, looking like vagrants, except they’ve got these clean fingernails and custom haircuts. You look, you’ll see what I mean. Passing joints in their Doc Martens and showing off ten years of orthodontics.”

  I shook my head. That wasn’t James; he didn’t know James. I said, “I guess in the South, it’s the other way around—runaways dress up to look like Country Club even if they’re stealing to eat.”

  “We figured you was from down there. Roland said Alabama, he knew a girl came from Alabama.”

  “South Carolina.”

  “I grew up in New Hampshire. I’m not proud of that, but I did. My dad moved here and he had the right idea. Roland, he says he’s from New York. But I tell him that’s New York, Ontario, maybe.”

  “We better go,” I said, gently giving good dog’s leash a tug. I’d been standing talking longer than I should have.

  “Tell your pup I used the Boys’ Room and not to worry.” He held out his hand, big as a slab of ham, rough as sandpaper. “Larry.”

  “Janey.”

  “Janey. I got that. Remember, you get into trouble, you pound on your ceiling with a broom handle and we’ll be right down. Though I doubt you’ll be getting anything you can’t manage, from the teacher.”

  After he went up the outside stairs, and Beulah and I went in, I sat a while at the kitchen table, hugging my shoulders, Good Dog by my chair. My folks had left a message on my cell, but I needed to think about the backyard encounter. What I couldn’t get out of my head was that here I’d talked to this scruffy guy, someone tacky enough to piss right out there in the yard in broad daylight—and I’d learned more about him and his life in ten minutes than I had about James in nearly four months.

  19

  MOM SAID WHEN they called back, “You think your daddy and I are down here listening to Ricky Skaggs and watching football while you’re up there not answering our calls, no way to find you, should there be an emergency. At our age.”

  “Mom.” I turned off Reba McEntire singing “Right or Wrong,” and tucked my feet under me on the sofa. “You’re fifty years old. You’re the age of movie stars.”

  “You’re soft-soaping me.”

  Daddy got into the conversation. “You having brought it to our attention that you are seeing this young man we don’t have proper information on, calls for us to have a look for ourselves. I’m no prude, your mother can tell you that, I am not, but this is not yesterday, this is today, and a girl has to think about is she rushing into something.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Talbot,” Mom interceded. “We have spent the last six months devoutly praying that our daughter puts past events behind her, most especially the recent past, that being exactly what she is doing.”

  Not able to grasp what they
were trying to tell me, I digressed into the breathtaking spectacle of the fall leaves in Vermont. “You can’t believe the colors. Or the thousands of busloads of tourists from all over the country who come.”

  “Did your mother mention we are getting up before breakfast to catch a plane to see you and what your winter looks like? We used to, when I was courting your mother, drive over to the Blue Ridge Mountains to see snow. My understanding is, we won’t have far to drive to see it when we land in Vermont. You’ll find us a place to stay, now, where we don’t have to worry about your unsavory types and vagrants.”

  “You’re coming—here? When are you talking about? Mom?”

  “You are forgetting your manners, Miss,” Mom reprimanded me. “The response a daughter should make is being full of joy at the idea of her parents buying plane tickets two months in advance in order to cover half the length of the United States of America.”

  I stretched out on the sofa and put a pillow on my chest. Lay me out cold. “December?”

  “In time to do our Christmas shopping.”

  A Mounting Problem

  20

  JAMES AND I had worked it out so that I could have a run along the bike path at the Dog Park while he walked his bike and Beulah, and then he could ride ahead and wait for us at the wooden bridge that led into his neighborhood while I walked her, taking her off the path at the water’s edge, letting her watch the ducks, standing still if they swam close to shore.

  Today, he thought we should introduce her to a romp in the leaves, and suggested he park his bike and we’d hike back into the thick stand of hardwoods between the path and the rocky lakeshore. I had her on a long leash, and let her wade through the piles of orange and rust and yellow which came almost to her tummy, though now she’d blossomed into a coltish dog, no longer really a puppy. I had on a heavy sweater and jeans, and so did James, essential under the cornflower-blue October sky. We sort of leaned our shoulders together, watching her. She loved the crunch of the leaves and the surprise of wading through something which rustled and rose around her. Once she snapped at a bright red maple leaf; once she rooted her face down in a leaf-drift till only her shoulders showed. I took half a roll of film. I’d tried to resist the camera—not wanting to get too sentimental about her. But I had a couple of photos of her as a brand new puppy, markers of our first week, and now these would be ones I could stick in letters to my folks and Mr. Sturgis.

  Or sit and look at in my old age.

  “Did you used to do this when you were a kid, bury yourself in leaves?” I asked James, thinking how grand it must be to grow up watching the hardwoods transform themselves from season to season. In films you saw parents burning pyramids of leaves in backyards filled with children.

  “Don’t start that stuff,” he said, locking his hands behind his head and lowering his chin to his chest.

  What stuff? Couldn’t I even ask anything as ordinary and sociable as that? Even people on the Witness Protection Program must have worked out answers to did they play in fall leaves. Even the guys upstairs would have come up with something that had to do with their young delinquent days. “Jeez,” I said, not wanting to get into a fight on this particular perfect afternoon. “I just had nostalgia for growing up here, which I didn’t do, is all. Can’t you ever just give me some kid story? You had braces or you fell out of a tree or you got a ten-speed or your feet grew two sizes in one year?” These arguments were the nearest I came to missing the males back home, any ordinary one of which could’ve come up with ten thousand memories of his boyhood in a flat minute.

  “I told you about the study-abroad program.” He located a frown.

  “You did,” I agreed. Slipping Beulah’s leash around his wrist, I threw myself again and again into the mound of leaves under the hardwoods above the lake at the Dog Park.

  When the shadows made it too cold, we walked her and the bike back along the path to James’s place, where I’d left my car in front of his house, which I could still do, though in another month or so there’d be only off-street parking so the snowplow could come through.

  “Do you want to drive with me to drop her off?” I asked him. Trying to make it sound casual, that I had arranged to leave my companion for a sleepover with Sylvia and spend the night at his place, in his bedroom which I’d never seen.

  “Uh, sure, I’ll ride upfront with her.” He looked nervous, as if he’d agreed to something that scared him to death and it was too late to back out.

  “James,” I reminded him, “we decided to do this.”

  “Right,” he said. Stopping on the sidewalk dead still, he pulled his knit cap down over his eyes, till it covered his nose. Then he took off the cap and put it on his fist, making a puppet face, having it ask, “Can I handle this?”

  I laughed, but felt terrified enough myself without his help. Having sex with somebody new, for the first time, single? Mind numbing. All I knew I’d learned from or with Curtis. And I didn’t want to think about that, about what he had liked, my ex, what turned him on, what he liked me to do and say. The point being I didn’t want him there, Curtis Prentice, in this nice man’s bed. I just wanted me there.

  But I’d decided that we had to take a stab at the sex stuff or else, if we waited too long, we’d turn into buddies. James’s pals: Pete and Janey. And I wanted us to do better than that. I wanted him to take off his clothes and to open his bedroom door to me. He didn’t need to give me his whole life story, but if he couldn’t expose his actual self to my gaze and my touch, then I’d better find that out before I got too tied up with him.

  So in the late afternoon’s slanted New England light, we drove Beulah south of town to her doggy overnight, going slowly along the two-lane state road that led us high above the lake so that we could see the changing colors of the distant mountains, and, close at hand, the blazing red and yellow maples and scarlet oaks. Maybe October was the most beautiful month of the year everywhere, I thought. We didn’t have leaves turning like this in Peachland, too great a distance from the Blue Ridge, but, even so, back home in Carolina at this time the sun always seemed the color of butterscotch and you could smell bonfires and think about pullover sweaters and football and getting outside for a walk.

  “I could fix us something to eat,” James said in the car, after we’d left Beulah playing with Edgar, and I’d given Sylvia a special thank-you squeeze, hoping another dog wouldn’t make too much trouble for her at home. “Stew? I can do stew. We could eat out back in the yard and watch the sun go down.” He was looking out the window where he could already see the flame-red globe sinking from sight. He was casting about. I could see him wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans.

  “Let’s eat at Irv’s,” I said. “My treat.” Feeling as nervous as he looked.

  “Waffles and sausage?”

  “James. Does it matter?”

  “I’m sort of having a panic attack, about tonight?” His voice rose.

  “I noticed.” I reached my hand over and found his knee, keeping my other hand on the wheel. “I don’t care what we eat for supper, do you?”

  “I might not can—you know, at my place.”

  “Hey,” I said, “I could have asked you over to wrestle my sofa into a bed. Then we could have thrown our backs out and made a lot of noise and had a fight.”

  “Yeah, but you made fried, chicken and cornbread at your place. I thought I ought to come up with something.” He turned in my direction, but I had to give my attention to wheeling into Irv’s diner without being rear-ended by the car behind us.

  But I guess he was right about fortifying ourselves, because after a good plate of country food, we calmed down and held hands driving under the over pass, up the road that wanted to plunge into the lake, until I pulled to a stop in front of his house. I gave him a kiss, turned off the engine, and we went inside.

  To, naturally, find Pete waiting for us in the living room.

  Holding three longneck beer bottles in one hand, waving the other, his face beaming, he ca
lled out, “Hey, hey, people.” And gave us the good news: the International Living Center had got an anonymous donation for nearly two million, to help high school students spend their summers in a total living experience abroad. Then they had to talk about that, the teachers—James taking off his cap, Pete running a pudgy hand through his buzz-cut hair, as if the better to air their brains. After they’d considered all the options involved in guessing how much of the funds their school might hope for, Pete showed us a new flyer he’d made up, listing which languages the Vermont Foreign Language Bank had translators for:

  Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin Chinese, Danish, Dutch,

  Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujurati, Hebrew,

  Hindi, Hungarian, Llongo, Indonesian, Italian,

  Japanese, Konkani . . .

  Then when they’d finished their celebrating and their beers, Pete took a look in my direction, wiggled his hand in a wave, and started edging out the back door, suddenly remembering he had some stuff that needed doing.

  “Uh,” James said when we were alone, as if he’d lost his train of thought.

  I stood face to face with him. “You know I have never even seen your bedroom.”

  “Well, hey, the only reason I saw yours is you don’t have one.”

  “Thanks.”

  He decided we needed glasses of water. Draining his, he wrapped an arm around his head, investigated an itch in his ear, took off his glasses to check for smears. “I’m slightly a wreck,” he said.

  “I noticed.”

  “We could go to your place?”

  “We’re here.” I’d put on brand new red panties. I’d worn my only good bra. I’d washed and creamed myself like I was doing a nudie movie. The longer we stood around like this, the worse it was going to get. Did he fret about having or not having a rubber? Should I remind him I was a pharmacist and not to worry? “Are we going in there?”

  He stood still for maybe ten beats, and then, suddenly grinning and striding across the polished floorboards, he flung open the closed door. “Take a tour. Be amazed. Be disappointed.”