Year of the Dog

by Shelby Hearon

  It didn’t look the way I’d imagined, that was true. On the floor he had a thin mattress with gray sheets and a white down comforter. On the white wall facing us he had a careful scale-drawing labeled DOME, and one small framed photo of a woman. No stacks of shoes, no old baseballs, basketballs or footballs. No girlie or band posters. No CDs or tapes or old vinyls in sight. A shelf along the front wall on the street side held a humongous computer complex which would have made Michael Dell proud. That was his private room.

  I put my arms around his chest, feeling his heart scudding rapidly behind the ribcage. He held me like that a minute, and then went over and closed the door, and, suddenly happy, looking as if some switch in his head had said, It’s okay, he began to pull the sweater over my shoulders, at the same time gnawing around on my neck.

  Relaxing some, letting out a whole lot of air from more or less holding my breath, I bit his lip, found his tongue, and then cooperated in getting us out of our clothes. The room had some faint light from the street, and, somehow, we got the right things in the right places and remembered how it all went, two people doing that fine familiar thing together. And if we didn’t move the Green Mountains on their bedrock, at least we made the moon rise over PACIFIC VIEW.

  Pleased with ourselves, we lay on our backs, nuzzling feet and touching shoulders. Relieved, not wanting to move, I turned to him and smiled, tracing my finger along his lips.

  Taking my hand, he gestured to the photograph on the wall. “That’s the woman who raised me,” he said. “She died and took my history with her.”

  21

  I COULDN’T GET enough of the snow. I’d been waking early, sitting up in bed, with it now daylight at six-thirty, though that meant it had started to grow dark by four-thirty, sunsets streaking what seemed a mid-afternoon sky, every day losing a minute or two more of daylight as we rushed toward December’s winter solstice. Not sure how I felt about the fact that by the time the days grew as long as the nights were now, I’d be back home in Carolina.

  This morning, I took a cup of coffee and sat on the outside steps in the first slanted morning light, wrapped in a robe over my sweater, with Beulah beside me, big dog who liked to sit outdoors with her person. The locust leaves had fallen, scattered, been covered in white, and the dark branches now held a pair of crows from the maple next door. (A bad fortnight for them; the paper mentioned it was crow season for hunters. To some people everything was game.) The bare limbs of the lilac swarmed with sparrows all moving at once until it seemed alive, a bird-bush. And since I’d put out a pie tin filled with wild bird food—nourriture pour oiseaux sauvages it said on the Blue Seal feed sack—the songbirds had also come.

  Above us, on the second floor, the hoody tenants, Larry and the other one, Roland, were sleeping off the night before, or so I imagined them, flat on their backs, mouths wide open, huge snorting noises, foul-smelling breath coming out in jerky gusts. When they came clambering down, all they’d see back here would be the snow and our vehicles, off the street, all in a row in the wide rental drive. The birds, the dog and I would have moved on as the sun rose in the sky.

  The thing was, I had to talk to Aunt May about the matter of my folks coming to town. I’d put it off for weeks, the same way I’d kept not dealing with the fact myself that they were really going to be here. I didn’t have the nerve to call her ahead, terrified that she’d say this didn’t happen to be a good day, perhaps we could make it later, perhaps after the holidays. On the other hand, to show up at her door the way I’d done that first time when I hadn’t minded my manners, and throw myself on her begging for help, didn’t seem like a great idea either.

  So it turned out to be nearly eleven by the time the snow crunched under my hiking boots in Aunt May’s yard, a sack with two warm big biscuits in my hand. I left Beulah curled up on a blanket on the floor of the car, a big dog who knew to wait and not get up on the seat or bark out the window, or get scared when left alone. I’d already taken her for a walk downtown, to show her how to deal with ice-slick sidewalks. But then that wasn’t really progress, because it was still me taking her on the walk, still me letting her know when her feet slipped a bit and she regained her balance, that she was a “good girl,” that she was doing fine. Instead, I knew that I should be teaching her to worry about my feet—that is, her blind person’s feet—and to be the one to navigate the treacherous sidewalks and noisy traffic on her own.

  “Good morning, Janey, this is unexpected,” Aunt May said from the front steps, the door open behind her. “Look there,” she said, in a friendly tone, “you’ve made the first tracks on the snow.” She considered, frowning. “The boy who brings us the paper must have come hours ago then, before the last flurry. Certainly he must.” She looked past me at my trail from the car.

  I handed her the still warm buttermilk biscuits from Plum’s. “I didn’t make these,” I admitted, “but they taste like home to me.”

  “Come in. I’ll fix us tea. I should have built a fire on a day like this. I bring the logs in and then—but who builds a fire in the morning now that our homes have central heat. Here, now, shouldn’t you take off your shoes? And let me hang up your wrap.”

  “I meant to call first,” I confessed, wanting her to know I knew better than to show up at the door, interrupting her morning. “But I got cold feet.”

  She looked down at my heavy socks and smiled. “About what, Janey?”

  “I need some help.”

  “Let’s put these on a plate,” she offered, taking my biscuits and heading for the kitchen, with me trailing behind.

  From upstairs, I heard a door close and the light sound of feet retreating across a room. I flushed, realizing that I had barged in without giving Kitty a moment’s thought. Then I saw, on the dining table, a newspaper article from the New York Times spread out, and copies of articles from the web, all reporting on a woman who had been chewed to death on the stairway of her apartment building by a pair of dogs.

  “How horrible,” I said to Aunt May, following her into the kitchen. I could not bear to imagine bad dogs in a world which contained Beulah. How could I ever protect her? How would she be able to protect her blind person?

  “Yes, it is devastating.”

  “Will this—do you think?—go into one of the mysteries?” And instantly felt ashamed, to be asking such a thing.

  She considered for a moment. “I have no doubt it will alter the story in some way. Exactly how—.” She set out two cups on a tray, and I saw, relieved, that it would be just us.

  I read an item from the local paper, pinned to the corkboard, quoting an expert on wife-abuse:

  Hairstylists are on the front lines, they’re the ones who see the bruises in the course of their daily work and they’re the ones who can point people in the proper direction to get help.

  “Here, now,” Aunt May said. “Let’s take our hot biscuits and jam into the front room.” She looked toward the bay window. “Did you leave your dog in the car, Janey?”

  “I did. But she’s fine. She has a blanket.”

  “You can keep an eye on her from here.”

  “Thanks,” I said, surprised at her interest.

  We ate the crumbling buttered biscuits and sipped too-strong tea, while Aunt May stared out the window at the snowy yard where even my boot prints no longer showed. I hadn’t really looked at her before, as someone apart from being Mom’s aunt, but now I saw the lines around her eyes behind her glasses, the gray bangs grown a bit too long, the face of someone with a lot of stuff going on inside. Would I look like that someday? Tall, composed, and a little bit off somewhere else? She wore a heavy cotton gray dress and sweater, and gray socks with what she called sneakers.

  “What’s on your mind, that brought you out this morning?”

  I didn’t know how to ask her, or even how to tell her. So I blurted out the whole of it. “Mom and Daddy are coming to Burlington before Christmas, to see how I’m doing up here.” I let out my breath. Did she understand what I was real
ly saying?

  “I see,” she said. Looking off, she sipped her tea and then seemed to study the rug at her feet. “You mother will wish to be invited here.”

  “She will,” I said. “She asks all the time if I’ve, when I’ve seen you, and if I’ve met—him.” I couldn’t look at her.

  “And if we disappoint her, she’ll have a duck.” She gave a sigh.

  I laughed, since that was exactly Mom’s term for getting in an uproar. “That’s it.”

  “When do they plan to come?”

  “Ten days before Christmas. They didn’t want to miss the actual holidays at home. The church does a lot.”

  She nodded. “It will be dark then shortly after four. Let me think. We need someone to dilute family here. Have you perhaps a friend?”

  “James. I’m seeing a teacher named James.”

  “Just the thing. An ally for Talbot among all the females. That will make six of us. That’s civilized. One is obligated to make general conversation with six. We’ll do something in front of the fire. I never have a tree; haven’t for years. But holly and wreaths, something festive.” She shook her head. “Family.”

  “At least, you know, we have one,” I said. “James didn’t ever know his.”

  “And is he the worse for it?” She shrugged.

  “Sure he is. He’s had to make himself up, in a way. And I don’t know anything about him, not really, because he doesn’t know a lot to tell.” I took a breath. “I’m scared about him meeting my folks, to tell the truth. They’ll ask him all these nosy questions, the way they do.”

  Aunt May studied me a minute. “A word of advice, Janey. Don’t pry into your young man’s past. Let him be. When you’re young, you believe you need to know everything about those you care for, but this is error. Did it help Kitty to know that when my father found me in bed with a friend who was visiting from Vassar, two women without their clothes, he threatened me with my life? Swearing that if he ever found me doing that again he wouldn’t be responsible for himself? Did Kitty need to know that?” She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Did I need to know that her husband sicced his German shepherd on her when she tried to run away and didn’t call him off until she gave in, scars on her legs still? Did I need to lie awake nights imagining that?” She pressed her palms to her knees. “A Rottweiler has moved into the neighborhood. They don’t keep him penned. That is the reason I waited on the porch for you when I saw your car.”

  “But you wanted to, didn’t you, tell each other those things?” My face felt hot to be talking about such personal matters with her.

  Aunt May cleaned her glasses and put them back on. “At the time, certainly. Now, I don’t know that it was wise. After all these years, I don’t know.” She met my eyes.

  My tongue felt tied, both by the dreadfulness of the bad events she had shared, and by their echo of events in the mysteries. It seemed almost as if I were reading a new story: a hairdresser noticing bruises on a woman’s neck, the judge seeing only one set of tracks in the snow. A woman mauled on her stairs by a dog. Perhaps Aunt May did live with the writer after all, a writer with long skirts and curly gray hair. And I ran the names over in my mind, the same name in two languages: Greenwood, Boisvert.

  Aunt May stood and collected our plates and cups, as if finished with our conversation.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for saying Mom and Daddy can come over.”

  She stood at the window, looking toward the street and the car. “I’ll get your wrap. It’s turning colder. Put on your boots and go tend to your puppy.”

  22

  IT APPEARED IN my mailbox, what I’d been dreading, and could not believe my mom had passed on to me: the birth announcement. Curtis Danforth Prentice, Jr., born November 14. Danny they’d call him. Danny Prentice who already would be locating the ability to make a smile to turn girls’ heads, the business hanging there between his fat little thighs already prickling with the possibility of the future to come. Looking like his dad. His granddad. Another heartbreaker at 8 pounds 2 ounces. (How could any baby that big have been delivered by Millie Dawson who didn’t look like she could carry a sparrow full term? Where had she kept him all those months?)

  Mom had tucked the announcement in a lined envelope, accompanied by a real handwritten letter from her, a first.

  * * *

  Dear Janey,

  I’m enclosing what you most likely have no desire at all to see, but you might as well know the news, since everybody else does. Plus I have to thank you for this very pretty stationery with the watercolor of a sailboat on it, which you said was done by one of your friends. Your daddy and I are glad to hear you are making friends up there.

  We ran into your old boyfriend Ralph Smalley that you used to go with, at the Southern Fried Café last night. You know he is working at his daddy’s dealership in Greenville. He came over and gave a great big greeting to your daddy and I, and let it be known that his own divorce, in case we might not have heard, was in the works.

  Just yesterday I ran into Millie Dawson’s mom on the street and had to look at a stack of photos as thick as a deck of cards about Curtis Danforth Prentice, Jr., and I’m standing there with one picture of my daughter’s DOG in my purse.

  Luv u,

  Mom

  * * *

  I couldn’t stop looking at the stamp-sized photo stuck on the blue-ribboned card. I couldn’t get my mind off the knowledge that hit my chest like a sledge hammer that every baby came with one of these: crisp white birth notice with its blue bow, yellow Pooh bear, tiny snapshot. Or some version, some word sent out about an arrival. Or if not a public announcement, that every baby came with a history like this one: the Prentice boy, the Dawson girl, that poor Daniels girl who had to leave town. That every baby had parents. At least at the start.

  By late afternoon, though, walking down the slightly icy front stairs, bundled up in my parka and boots, heading for downtown, I had to get my mind on more immediate matters. Beulah, at eight months, had begun to show signs of going into heat! Pregnancy for female puppies-in-training being the worst possible scenario. Just as male dogs were not neutered before their selection in case they were chosen as breeders, so female puppies were not spayed until after they had completed their course. Once a gangly adolescent had to turn her attention from her person to the task of birthing, nursing and tending a litter, she had forfeited her chance to be a Companion Dog.

  Today, as had been true for the last two weeks, our stroll along Church Street had become a recurrent obstacle course with all male dogs. One in particular this evening, a monster Chow-Chow whose black-tongued mouth opened at the first good sniff of her, started crowding her against the bread kiosk, and instead of tucking her between my knees—after all, you read about the male getting stuck in the female and you can’t pull them apart and then the damage is done—I actually hefted her up off the ground in my arms. The Chow-Chow’s person, a woman in ski pants (and ear muffs that looked as if they’d been fashioned from Chow-Chow fur) dragged him away, aggrieved. “He’s fixed, already.”

  Naturally, the students with James and Pete had seen the encounter, and had to make something out of it. They reported on a study some Indian doctor, female, had done at The University of Texas involving college students and their t-shirts. It seemed that males could tell when a female ovulated by her smell. And the kids, Cubby, Wolf and Lobo as they were still calling themselves, had already been talking up this idea in their dude voices, making sniffing noises whenever some girl went by, giving thumbs up or down, making growling noises, pawing the sidewalk in their hiking boots. Smart punks. Saying to James, the teacher, “Whaddya say, is that right? You tried it out?” Now, when I’d got myself and my still-virginal girl together and joined them, one of them pointed down the street. “Hey, maybe that stud dog was just checking out Beulah’s t-shirt.” Lots of gross-out laughter.

  After a beer and a stroll around, we all headed back to James’s place: James, Pete, the boys and I. He and Pete ha
d been collecting gear for taking them up into the Green Mountains over Thanksgiving break to teach them real-life first aid tricks. The International Living program liked their students to be emergency-savvy, on the theory that they would not have their parents’ insurance cards, family doctor, or even college infirmary to count on. Camping out with new friends in unfamiliar terrain, getting mugged on their rented bikes on the cobblestones, hiking from village to village, they needed to master a crash course in self-sufficiency.

  James had got a doctor, he explained to the boys sitting on the floor, shoes off, who specialized in expedition medicine to give him some pointers. In the mode of wilderness leader, he described the makeshift solutions while Pete, his big front teeth chewing earnestly on his lower lip while he held up different items, did the actual demonstrations: how to wash out wounds with sandwich bags (filled with water or snowmelt), how you could sew up wounds with dental floss, how to make a pair of emergency glasses from duct tape (poke dozens of tiny holes with a pin in the tape), how to stop a wound from bleeding with a teabag (it was the tannic acid), how to use a latex glove to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a stranger, and other stuff that apparently people died from—when mountain climbing, wilderness hiking, or traveling over-seas—because they didn’t know.

  Fascinating stuff for a pharmacist!

  After we finished another beer and everyone devoured the roast pork sandwiches I’d brought, Pete piled Cubby, Wolf and Lobo in his car and took them home.

  When we got Beulah settled on her towel on the kitchen floor, I told James, “I had a little news from home.”

  “How about we walk on the bike path to the Dog Park?” he suggested, starting in with the job of putting his outdoor gear back on.

  I nodded, pulling on my own sweater, parka, boots, and cap, not having any idea if that curving path out of his neighborhood was safe this late, but not worrying too much about us, mostly glad to leave Beulah locked safely inside where no Chow-Chow could leap from the bushes in the dark and try to mount her.