Stepdog

by Nicole Galland

  “In honor of southern history,” I said, when we paused for another slosh of moonshine, “how about I play you Thomas Jefferson’s favorite tune.”

  He gave me a suspicious look. “What the hell would you know about that?” he asked. “You going to tell me it’s ‘Irish Spring’ or something?” Then he bellowed with laughter.

  “I met the celestial Sara Renault when she hired me as a guest lecturer to play at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. I’d go around with the tours and play music that was specific to each era that was represented. Phrygian scales for the Egyptian art, Fauré for this one particular John Singer Sargent. They’ve got a big Colonial collection, so I played all the tunes popular back then, especially what Jefferson liked because he was a fiddler himself, and as a southerner, clearly had the best taste.”

  He grinned. “Don’t you suck up to me, brother, I’m actually from Chicago.”

  Without retorting, I began to play the Adagio of Corelli’s Sonata no. 1 in D Major. Alex, poised for another foot-stomper, looked briefly taken aback, then tipped his head thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, almost grudgingly. “That’s beautiful.”

  “Sit back and enjoy it,” I crooned. Really I was a crap violinist, so I was hardly doing it justice, but compared to what we’d been getting up to, it was as if a ballerina was dancing the encore for a hip-hop concert. Alex set down his banjo, sat back, closed his eyes, and, sure enough, was snoring before I’d finished the Adagio. The dachshunds waddled out of their bed to stare at him, then me, dumbfounded.

  He snorted himself awake a moment later, shook his head, and looked around bleary-eyed. “All right. I believe it’s time for bed,” he declared. “I got the guest room made up for you all.”

  You all?

  Seeing the look on my face, he gave me a sly, sleepy grin. “You haven’t forgotten that you’re here to show me you’re a dog lover, right? Well, nobody knows a dog lover better than a dog. My two buddies are going to hang with you overnight. They’ll give me a full report in the morning.”

  AND SO IT came to pass that about six hours later, I awoke with a hangover worse than I’d had the day of the green-card interview, if that was possible, and one small dog spooning up against my back . . . and the other lying across the length of my pillow, pressing his back into the top of my skull. So that when I finally managed to drag my scratchy-dry eyes open, I was looking directly at his skinny tail. When I moved slightly, the tail wagged, smacking the pillow in front of my nose.

  “Good morning, tail,” I muttered, sounding and feeling very crusty. My tongue was twice its normal size and dry as asbestos.

  The door opened. I felt both dachshunds raise their heads and glance over. There was Alex, in the same clothes he’d worn last night, grinning as if he’d never slept, or would ever need to. “Morning, everyone!” he declared. Both dachshunds tensed, preparing to leap toward him on his order.

  “I like the look of that,” he said. “They approve of you. That’s a thumbs-up. C’mon, puppies! Who wants breakfast?”

  When they were gone, I pulled myself out of bed and groggily looked around. Sunlight was slanting viciously through some venetian blinds beside the bed, illuminating a nondescript guest room. My memory of getting in here last night (or rather, earlier this morning) was sketchy at best. I was still wearing my clothes from the day before, and moonshine must have spilled somewhere, because something stank of rotten apples.

  My bag sat on the carpet across from the bed. I couldn’t actually remember bringing it in here. Dying for a glass of water, head throbbing, I clumsily changed into fresh jeans and shirt, and wondered about a shower. Ran the back of my hand across my face—God, I needed a shave. Or to grow a real beard already.

  Blearily, I followed the seductive smell of bacon wafting down the hall, and found Alex in a chef’s apron, a blond Emeril Lagasse, frying up not only bacon, but eggs and potatoes as well. It all looked, and smelled, heavenly. Possibly even better than that first breakfast at Sara’s place last August—because here, the bacon had promise, looked almost like rashers, big and thick. I was going to comment on it, but I was afraid Alex would tell me he’d butchered the hog himself, and that would make it too personal for me to eat it. So I kept my mouth shut except to say, in a froggy tone, “Good morning.” If my salivary glands were working, I’d’ve been drooling.

  “Morning to you!” he said cheerfully.

  “Water?” I said.

  “Ha! You look like you’d do better with some more moonshine. Works for me.” He jutted his chin toward something on the counter. “You got a couple of messages.”

  I poured myself a glass of water, drank it all down, poured a second, and sipped at it. Who would be calling me at seven in the morning, especially since I’d told Alto I was on the case? I picked up the phone and looked at the voice-mail log. Sara’s number. Five calls. All last night, when we’d been drinking and playing tunes. “Oh, fuck me,” I said aloud. I had gotten sucked into the Alex Craggs vortex and hadn’t even remembered to tell her I’d arrived.

  “I got three myself,” hummed Alex with perfect understanding. “Do yourself a favor and don’t listen to them, she really works herself into a lather. Especially at about four A.M.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the glass door that led to the backyard. It was wonderfully cool. “Of course I have to listen to them,” I said. “I have to call her back.” I seemed to recall something about time zones, but I couldn’t do the math. “Later. When we’re both awake.”

  “She’ll be awake as soon as you call her,” Alex joked. When I didn’t laugh along with him, he shrugged agreeably and said, “Suit yourself. Meanwhile, you got a dog to win back.”

  That brought some alertness. I could feel my pulse quicken, pressing against my dehydrated temples. “You going to help me?”

  “I’m going to be impartial,” he said. “But as an independent consultant, I might be in a position to advise you a bit. On the side. Have some breakfast first.”

  “Let me just listen to these messages,” I said. Alex rolled his eyes. As he set an impressive table, I tapped in my password and sat, steeling myself for the onslaught.

  First: “Hi, it’s me, it’s about seven your time. You should be there by now, maybe your phone died? I’m going to call Alex and see if you’ve arrived.”

  Second: “Rory, it’s about eight your time. Alex isn’t answering. Are you all right? Are you there? Is Cody there? What’s going on? Call me please.”

  Third: “Rory, it’s me, it’s eleven o’clock, I can’t believe you haven’t called me. Are you dead? Is Cody with you? What’s going on? Call me!”

  Fourth: “IT’S ONE IN THE MORNING, ARE YOU ASSHOLES DRUNK? HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE CALLED ME? I’M WORRIED SICK AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON! WOULD YOU PLEASE CALL ME WHEN YOU GET THIS?”

  I had never heard Sara speak in all-caps before. I felt horrible. And now it was four A.M. where she was, so I couldn’t call her. My fuckup-ability seemed to be increasing daily.

  And . . . there was one more message.

  In this final one, her voice was cracking but her tone was horribly calm. “Rory,” she began. “I just called Jonathan, because he was the only one who would answer his phone. His theory is that you are probably drunk out of your mind right now, which further confirms for him what an unfit dog owner you would make. He tells me you two are duking it out for Cody in a few hours. Whatever that means. Please call. Immediately.”

  The shrieking had been easier to take.

  “Well now,” said Alex heartily. “Let’s eat.”

  I put the phone on the table and bent my head over it. Fingertips pressed into eyeballs, I said, “This may be the worst I’ve felt since puberty.”

  “We’ll call her back and tell her everything’s going to be fine,” said Alex jovially.

  I slid one hand away from my face and stared up at him bleakly. “Is it?”

  “Hell, yeah!” said Alex. He put down the plate of bacon and picked up
my phone. “She’s on speed dial, right?”

  “It’s four in the morning there,” I said, reaching up to take the phone. He casually turned back toward the kitchen counter, moving it out of reach. He examined it a moment, figured it out, and called Sara. “Alex, mate,” I protested, “she’s—”

  The other end picked up and there was instant frenzy and upset on the other end. Alex let it continue for about ten seconds before interrupting with, “Sara, ma’am, it’s Alex here, not Rory, Rory is far too considerate to call you at four A.M., but I figured you’re still on East Coast time and you seemed to want to hear from one of us. How’s L.A.?”

  More upset on the other end.

  “Now calm down, Sara, he’s fine, the dog is fine, everything’s going to be fine.”

  She obviously didn’t believe him, but in fairness, if our roles were reversed, I’d probably believe him even less.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, glancing briefly at me and giving me a thumbs-up sign, “I don’t think your talking to Rory is the best idea right now, because if you go on like this, you’re going to make his balls shrivel right up inside his body and that won’t be good for anyone. I just wanted to check in with you because you clearly wanted that, but now you should just go back to sleep and one of us will call you with news as soon as this is sorted out. I absolutely promise you, it’s going to be fine.”

  Pause. Her voice again. I couldn’t tell if she believed him now or not. I laid my fevered forehead on the table.

  “I’m letting Cody decide,” he said into the phone. “I got it all figured out. Hey, why didn’t you tell me this guy plays the fiddle? He’s not half bad. Go back to sleep.” He hung up.

  “I need a shower,” I said into the table.

  “No, you don’t,” said Alex. “That’s the last thing you need. Don’t you know anything about dogs? She’s going to go with whoever’s smellier.”

  I sat up again. “Then I should slather myself in bacon grease,” I said.

  He gestured to the plate. “Why do you think I made so much?”

  I blinked. “Seriously? That’s how I win? With bacon grease?”

  Alex laughed. “You don’t win that way. Jonathan’s going to think of doing the same thing. You cancel each other out with the bacon grease. Which means it comes down to something else.”

  I could not think what. I could not have named the primary colors the way I was feeling.

  “There’s two things that rule a dog’s life,” Alex said. I really wanted to hear what he had to say but I couldn’t sit through an Alex monologue just now. He sat across from me and pushed a plate of scrambled eggs and potatoes my way. “Eat,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”

  “Two things,” I echoed him. I reached for my fork. “Tell me, please.”

  “Smell, as we’ve established. Bacon grease aside, your smell means more to Cody than his smell does, and brother”—he laughed—“you’ve got a lot of smell this morning.” Serious again. “The second thing is the pack. She will go with the leader of the pack.”

  “Jay’s got that one tied up, he has that calm alpha-male energy. And I don’t. I have will-o’-the-wisp energy. And I can’t change that. So I’m fucked.”

  “I wasn’t talking alpha male,” said Alex. “These potatoes came out great. No, my friend, when I say pack, I mean pack. Who is Cody’s pack? You and Sara.”

  “That might work if Sara were here,” I said. “On my own, I hardly rate as Cody’s pack.”

  “Sara is the leader of Cody’s pack.”

  “Sara’s not here,” I repeated, frustrated.

  “Cody doesn’t know that,” Alex said, and winked at me.

  Chapter 22

  We’d be meeting Jay and Cody at the motorcycle clubhouse at noon, and “settling things.” According to Alex, this decision (declared by Alex and imposed upon Jay by Alex and his “brothers”) had been a rude surprise for Jay: when Alex first confronted him the day before, Jay had assumed Alex would “see things his way.”

  “What is his way?” I asked as I put the breakfast plates into his dishwasher.

  “Oh, the usual,” said Alex, which made me wonder what kind of friends he hung out with. “Faithless woman ruined my life, she should at least let me keep my dog.”

  “But he spent about a year not even trying to get the dog back, why did it suddenly become so important to him?”

  Alex grinned. “It was always important to him, but he finally acted because you showed up, brother.”

  What an eejit I was, I should have realized: “It’s not the dog he wants back. It’s Sara.”

  Alex shook his head. “Nah. Or if he does, it’s just to punish her for dumping him. He genuinely wants the dog back.” He nudged me out of the way, to rearrange some things in the dishwasher. Accountants are fussy that way. “See, he’s got this vision of the life he feels he was entitled to. Sara ruined the vision by walking out on him, but the one part he feels he can resuscitate is the part where his faithful dog is curled up at his feet every night. He’ll never get any of the rest of it back, but he can still have that.” Satisfied, he smacked the dishwasher door closed.

  “Why doesn’t he just get another dog?”

  “If Cody had died, or run off, he’d do that,” Alex said. “But Cody was stolen.” He clapped his hand on the counter; the dachshunds jumped. “In his eyes, I mean. And when something vital is stolen, what does a man do?” Now he clapped me on the shoulder. “He gets it back. You’re just the poor chump who showed up and gave him a way to do it. In a weird way he’s sort of grateful to you.”

  I groaned. Alex laughed.

  “We have a couple hours. Go back to bed and take a nap.”

  That was the best suggestion anyone had ever made to me in the history of suggestions (not including Sara’s suggestion we get married, but then again that wasn’t a suggestion, it was an instruction).

  I left a message for Dougie telling him I hadn’t fallen into the East River after leaving him, and promising to be in touch for real as soon as possible. I called Sara, apologized, and briefly updated her. Then I slept a deep and blissfully dreamless sleep—without any dogs—and awoke a couple of hours later alone in the guest room. I took a moment to collect myself, then stripped the bed because I try to be a considerate guest even when my host has practically poisoned me with alcohol. I came back out into the living room.

  Where I met Alex Craggs, Badass Biker Dude.

  From the waist down not much had changed, although I didn’t remember the heavy biker boots from last night. His collared shirt had been ditched for a red T-shirt, a black leather vest, wraparound shades, and a red bandanna tied over his close-cropped hair. The vest had a circular patch on the front; he was turning away from me as I emerged, so I got the full rotational view. The back had the same patch, much larger, and emblazoned around it, the words SOUTHERN RIDERS MC. The patch seemed to show two flags crossed into an X, but don’t quote me—I was too distracted by LANCER (as he was named on his vest) standing in Alex’s living room.

  Here’s an important detail: it was not at all ridiculous. Despite his beaming grin, he was, frankly, a little scary. And he seemed fine with that. His sound track was not Neil Diamond. It was Johnny Rebel.

  “Wow,” I said, respectfully.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We went outside and he took his bike out of the garage—it was a great and glorious thing, and if I knew a damn thing about such machines, I could rattle off all kinds of impressive stats, but the information Alex gave me went in one ear, through my still-hungover brain, and out the other ear. As vehicles go, it looked like a large robotic insect that could probably set half the neighborhood on fire.

  With him in the vanguard and me following in the puny MINI, we headed off about three miles down the road, to the motorcycle club’s clubhouse. Alex’s home away from home. (Sound track: Lynyrd Skynyrd.) A neat, white cinder-block building baking in the sun, set back from the road next to a grass-and-dirt parking l
ot. It was almost perfectly nondescript except for two things.

  First: the pair of large flags hanging limp in the hot still air on either side of the door. One was the traditional American flag. The other was the flag of the Confederacy. It still reminded me of a Union Jack, and so despite Alex’s suggestions the night before equating the southern and Irish struggles for freedom from oppression, my reaction to the flag was kneejerk rejection. Roddy Doyle was right. We were the blacks of Europe, not the rednecks.

  The second feature of the place that kept it from being nondescript were the forty-odd parked motorcycles surrounding it, and forty-odd bikers milling around them. Many of the bikes were marked with the decal of the club, all gleaming bright in the sun and reviving my hangover headache. Most of the bikers—unlike Alex—looked the traditional role of Biker Guy, with ponytails and at least a little facial hair (meaning about as much as me, that morning). They all wore varieties of his regalia: the vest, at least, and usually the red T below it. Jeans, boots, sometimes bandannas. While generally strapping blokes, they were all sizes and shapes, but pretty much only one color and definitely only one gender (and surely only one acknowledged sexual orientation). The place was whiter than a Dublin pub in the 1970s.

  Alex rode his bike into the lot and parked it with the rest of the metallic herd. I parked across the country lane from the clubhouse . . . right behind the white Lexus SUV with Massachusetts plates. I punched the passenger seat a couple of times to let off some steam, but that made my head hurt, so I stopped. Took a deep breath. I promised myself not to jump the prick.

  Alex summoned me across the road. I got out of the MINI, sweating bullets. I was half the weight of the average biker, driving a car that had less power than most of their bikes. I left the window down in case the testosterone levels catapulted me back across the road and I needed to dive for shelter. Crossed the lane . . . and there, between a row of bikes and the entrance to the clubhouse, was Cody.