Hide

by Matthew Griffin

  I stomp the big gray button beside one of the wheels. Headlights pop up and flash on from the front of it, and Daisy jumps up, startled, knocks her head on the underside of the table and nearly overturns the whole thing, glasses and remote control and all. She stares at the vacuum, wild-eyed, tilting her head to one side, then the other, as if she’s just on the verge of sudden and complete understanding.

  The vacuum shudders as it hums higher and higher, to such a high pitch that the hum breaks open into a roaring, insistent emptiness, and a ball of dust six inches away gives up its grip on the baseboard, slides across the floor, and disappears into the hose. The room smells of hot dust and vinyl.

  “It actually works,” I yell.

  Daisy creeps along the wall, holding herself low to the ground, staring at the vacuum. She has to pass us to get down the hall to safety, oily hackles raised, and she pants the closer she gets, her huge tongue hung out one side of her mouth and lapped with lines of saliva like the edges of foam successive waves, each one weaker than the last, leave on sand. It looks like she’s smiling. That’s the problem with dogs: they look like they’ve never been happier, when really all they’re trying to do is cool themselves down enough to keep from dying in the heat.

  She scrabbles so hard and fast to get past us, her nails slip on the hardwood, and she falls down before clawing her way back to her feet and launching herself down the hall. I screw the round dust brush onto the end of the hose and ruffle it through the raccoon’s fur. All the animals gather dust, but he’s the worst. That thick, mangy undercoat really hangs on to it good. I make my way around the living room and down the hall, running the brush over the birds, their wings bending stiffly, and the deer reaching out of the wall overhead until the blood runs out of my fingers and they start to tingle. I’m digging it into a buck’s ear—a lot of dust builds up cupped inside them—when all of a sudden the vacuum makes a choking sound and a high-pitched, fluttering gasp. I stomp the button to turn it off. The room feels like a brittle veneer without the noise, sucked hollow and dry. I pull down the brush, and there, caught in the end of the tube, is a balled-up fruitcake wrapper.

  He carries fruitcake with him all the time now, shoved into his bulging pockets or clutched in his greasy fingers, nibbles it all day like it’s the rations of war and he never knows when he’ll get another bite. I went to every grocery store in town after Christmas and bought up all they had on closeout clearance sale. Took me five entire hours over two days, had to go in and talk to the managers and have the bag boys load whole unsold boxes of them into my trunk, but I wasn’t about to pass up those prices. Plus I liked watching the bag boys work, how the veins swelled on one’s forearms as he heaved the boxes to his chest, how the hem of another’s shirt rose when he bent over to set them in the trunk, bared the soft blond hair at the base of his spine and the shadow of a hollow that funneled down and disappeared under his low-slung belt. Luckily the good-looking ones were all back from vacation. Made the whole ordeal much more pleasant.

  I came home with five hundred logs of it, and it didn’t cost me but two-hundred and fifty dollars. That kind of stockpile ought to last us at least half the year, and the way they keep shoving the holidays on us faster and faster, the new ones’ll be on the shelves by the time these run out. I bring them in an armful at a time and leave the rest stacked up in the trunk. There’s not enough room for them in the pantry. I’m just glad it’s got all those preservatives in it. I don’t know what we’d do otherwise.

  “Frank,” I yell. “Why is there a fruitcake wrapper in this deer’s ear?”

  Daisy glances at me from the bathroom, where she’s got both paws on the toilet rim. She sniffs the water and ponders whether it’s worth the drinking, the short whiskers on the end of her muzzle barely brushing its surface. Her breath wrinkles it.

  “Get out of there,” I say.

  She gives me a look of grave disapproval and lands heavily on all fours. In a big wicker basket beside the commode, we’ve got rolls of toilet paper stacked in a pyramid, and there, inside the cardboard tube of a roll halfway down, is another wrapper. She sniffs my hand as I pull it free, her nose so cold and damp it’s a kind of relief. I scratch the spot behind her shoulder that makes her hind leg thump the floor and the corner of her mouth pull back. She leans against my shin, so heavy she about bowls me over. Her breath smells like cigar smoke.

  “Come on,” I say, and she leads me through the hall, into the living room. Frank’s at the front door, furiously jostling it, trying to yank it open. He stops for a moment to regroup, plants both feet on the floor, spread as wide apart as he can get them, grabs the doorknob in both hands, and prepares to heave back with all his might and weight, almost positively ensuring he will fall and crack his bones across the dusty floor.

  “What are you doing?” I say.

  For a moment he stands absolutely still, as if I’ve caught him at something illicit. Slowly he lets go of the doorknob and drops his hands to his side.

  “We’re late,” he says. “I knew just as soon as you started you were going to make us late.”

  “Late for what?”

  “For supper,” he says, as if this fact couldn’t be more obvious. “We’re supposed to be there at eight.”

  “It’s just after six.”

  “I knew you’d make us late. I said so.”

  “You did no such thing. And I already had supper.”

  “Why’d you do that? You know how Mama gets when you don’t eat enough.”

  “Mama?”

  He takes a long, scrutinizing, and apparently unsatisfying gander at me. “You could look a little more presentable. Put you on some decent clothes at least. She already thinks you’re a heathen.”

  “Your Mama’s been dead fiftysome years,” I say.

  He gapes in scandalized outrage. “What a awful thing to say. My mother adores you.” He pounds on the door, as if there’s somebody on the other side waiting to unlock it. “Help me get this thing open,” he says. “It’s become stuck.” He pretends to study the gap between the door and its frame, runs his shaking fingers along it as if he’s not quite sure, can’t quite see, how one fits into the other. “Might need to sand it down a little. You painted the paint on too thick.”

  He starts pressing on the door at various points to test its resolve. “Now help me get out, will you? She’s waiting.” He pounds the door as hard as he can, so hard the paint crackles under his fist. “She’s waiting,” he says. “She’s waiting on us.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I say, pulling his elbow. “Why don’t you just sit down, and I’ll see if I can get the door fixed. How about that?”

  “I’ll call her.” He starts for the hallway. “I’ll call her and tell her we’re running late. So she’s not worried.” He stops short, staring in alarm at the vacuum, at the swirl of dust and hair in its clear plastic lung. Daisy waits nearby, willing him in vain but with unflappable focus toward the kitchen, toward the treat cabinet.

  “What?” I say.

  “I just got this thing working,” he grumbles, outraged, and stomps over to the vacuum. He pops the dust chamber free. “I just got this thing cleaned out, and you’ve gone and clogged it up again.”

  He reaches inside, pulls out a handful of dust and dirt, and hurls it to the floor. It bursts outward across the boards, into dark, feathery streaks. Daisy watches, nervous, and paws his shin. I hurry toward him. He gathers up and hurls down to earth another dark cloud, breaking it open across the wide wood plane, then another, then another. I grab his hand before he can reach in for the next, but the cylinder’s nearly empty. He jams it back onto the vacuum but can’t get it lined up quite right to snap in place, leaves it hanging half on for just a second before it crashes to the floor. Daisy pounces on it, wraps her stubby legs around it as best she can, and starts chewing its plastic edge in her back teeth, the good tearing ones.

  “I just got that thing clean,” he grumbles, shaking his head. His fingers are coated in a fine lay
er of pale gray silt. “Just now got it clean.”

  “Sit down. You shouldn’t be wandering around like this.”

  He starts to cross the room to his chair, then thinks better of it and shuffles his agonizingly long way around its perimeter, slippers whispering across the floor and one hand stretched out to the wall in unbroken contact, his fingertips smudging streaks of dirt and dust across it that fade the further he goes, all the way to the television, where he rests slumped for a few breaths before launching himself into the slow, headlong plunge across the last six feet of empty space to his chair. He leans forward a little more with each step, and it’s only by luck that he makes it there before the speed and angle of his stoop topple him over, and when he does make it there he has to clutch the backrest, hug it with both arms as if he’s out on the high ledge of some building and it’s his last desperate purchase against vertigo and the wind, while it rocks groaning under his impact.

  He lowers himself onto his knees in the seat, then turns, digging one shoulder into the backrest for support, throws his arms wide to grab the arms of the chair, and slides down onto his behind. He leans all the way back, footrest up, to make it appear he’s just been resting all day long, just watching a little Sunday football like any regular fellow. The treads of his slippers are worn smooth.

  I don’t know how he can even see the television from that angle. It’s got to hurt his neck.

  The six o’clock news is on. I stomp in front of it and drop the wrappers in his lap. Daisy stares up at them in wild-eyed surprise, mesmerized by the way they slowly unfold, crackling like his knees when he stood up too fast. One of her jowls catches under her bottom teeth so it looks like she’s snarling.

  “Now,” I say. “Why are you hiding fruitcake wrappers?”

  “Hiding?” He makes the indignant face guilty people make to express just how sincerely they can’t believe you’d ever suspect them of committing such a heinous crime. “I ain’t hiding them.”

  “Then what are you doing? Saving them up in case their market value skyrockets?”

  “I ain’t saving them,” he says.

  “Then who is?”

  He’s trying hard not to smile, but I can see it there, incipient on his lips. I don’t even want to know. He pulls Daisy’s free jowl, thick and soft, upward so it matches the other one, then higher, over her gums. The bright pink muscle of her tongue rests between her teeth, stringy blood vessels running along its side. He pokes the edge of it, where it spills over the jagged mountain of her molar, and she sits there and lets him, staring at the wrappers the whole time.

  “Don’t try to blame the dog,” I say. “I’m not that stupid.”

  “They’ve got to go somewhere,” he says.

  “They’ve got to go in the trash can.”

  “Nope. Now, you see, a trash can—”

  “I know what a trash can is. What I want to know is why those things aren’t in it.”

  He sits back, raising one finger, to deliver a lecture on the proper place of the fruitcake wrapper in the home of modern man. One of them rustles in his lap, and Daisy snaps her head back in alarm, like it nipped her. She thinks everything’s alive, scrambles cowering away with her tail between her legs any time, wagging, it thumps against the leg of the table and rattles the glasses on the table’s top. Her jowl comes unpinned.

  He leans forward and kisses her muzzle, the soft, iridescent fur right under her nose where her lips meet. She snuffles, shakes her head, and sneezes.

  “Oh my goodness,” he says, and does it again. She suffers this with a look of weary forbearance. He loves it when she sneezes.

  “She was about to eat one in the bathroom,” I say. “She could get a clog of plastic in her intestines. A blockage. They’d have to cut her open to pull it out. You know how much that costs?”

  “She licks their insides clean, but she don’t try to eat them. Just enough to get the taste. She can’t get enough fruitcake.”

  “You’ve been feeding the dog fruitcake?”

  “You think I could eat three of them all by myself?” he says. “In one day?”

  “You can’t feed dogs fruitcake. She’s probably going to get pancreatitis.”

  “A log or two, now that’s one thing. But three?”

  “Now I’m going to have to follow her around in the cold to check her stool every time she goes out. Just how I want to spend my days.”

  “Ain’t given her any problems, far as I can see.”

  “Rivers of blood,” I say. “I bet it’s just rivers of blood.”

  “Yes, sir. She’s just fine.”

  “She’s fat. Look at her. I bet she’s gained ten pounds in the last month.”

  “She comes over and nudges my arm if I forget to give it to her. Knows when it’s time and everything.”

  “And when is that?”

  “Any time you ain’t looking.” He grins. His incisor’s a crumbling crag beside an empty, blasted pit in his gum. “She’s a smart girl,” he says, and scratches her under the chin. “Who’s my smart girl?”

  “You need to wear your partial.”

  “I’m pretty partial to you,” he says.

  “I used to be partial to you. Back when you were—”

  Something’s burning. Daisy smells it first, starts waving her snout all around in the air, desperate to fit it into the scent’s invisible groove, and I catch it right after that, the sharp tang and clouded smolder, like the time I set a piece of tupperware on a hot burner, melted it into a puddle.

  “You smell that?” I say, stalking around the room. “What is that?” I bend over to sniff the lukewarm air blowing into my face from the vent, stale and odorless. Daisy stays where she is, head tilted back. A thin, high-pitched keen wheezes in her throat.

  Something crackles by Frank’s chair. He sees me turn toward the noise, and glee brightens his face, sends his mouth gaping wide in dumb anticipation.

  “What?” I say.

  There’s another crackle, and a sound like a thick bubble popping. It’s coming from the lamp beside him. I hurry over to it. Frank turns his face upward, waiting for some response. I look inside the lampshade from above for the half a second before the bulb’s brightness burns a black hole into the very spot it burned brightest, the way the biggest, most luminous stars collapse into themselves and pull in everything around them, even the light itself, and there, wrapped around the lit bulb, slipped over it in a sheath, is a fruitcake wrapper, melting in the incandescent heat. Its wrinkles flatten, its flat expanses bubble, and then it, too, is pulled into darkness. I squeeze my eyes shut, reach under the shade, and turn the light off.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I say.

  When I look straight at him, the black hole takes up half his face. It fades to green as its burnt edges constrict, drawing it shut. Slowly his chin and his eyebrows emerge from it, raised in something like expectation. I lift the lampshade off and throw it on the couch. The wrapper’s already cooling, hardening into a new, streamlined shape that mimics the bulb’s curve, all its wrinkles smoothed away or else forced upward into little bubbles that burst and vanish, the words of its ingredient list, all those unpronounceable chemicals smeared into one uniform pink blur.

  I unscrew the warm bulb, so tight in its socket I nearly shatter the thing, I have to grip it so hard to make it turn. The edge of the wrapper’s gathered into a frilled collar at the bottom of the bulb. I work my fingernails under it, try to peel it from the glass, but it’s melted on there near inseparable, and all they manage to do is tear off the brittle edge and scrape faint lines through the rest of the plastic.

  “You could have killed us,” I say. “You know that? We’re lucky you didn’t catch the house on fire. Burn the whole thing down and the two of us in it.”

  He looks surprised, and somewhat disappointed, as if it had never occurred to him that wrapping a thin piece of plastic around a burning bulb might be a fire hazard.

  “I guess it serves me right,” I say, “for letting y
ou out of my sight.”

  “There you go.” He nods real encouraging, the way you would to a sensitive and untalented child. “You’re starting to get the hang of it.”

  I claw plastic from the glass in measly, crinkled shreds. And as I’m doing this, as I am standing right over him, he palms one of the wrappers from his lap and slides it into the crease between the arm and the cushion of his chair.

  “I can see you,” I say. “I’m right here.”

  Slowly, real slowly, believing apparently that my vision registers only the quickest, most jolting of movements, he returns his hand to his thigh.

  “Get up,” I say. “Put your teeth in. You ought to at least look like yourself.”

  “I’m busy,” he says, huddling down in his chair. I throw the bulb on the couch, grab him around the arm with both hands, his armpit closing hot and damp on my fingers, and try to haul him up, but he crosses his arms and sinks further into the recliner, as if he’s growing heavier by the moment, the upholstery closing round to clasp him tight.

  “Fine.” I march to the bathroom, bring him back the glass with his teeth in it and a new light bulb from the hutch in the hallway. “You’ve made me walk back and forth through this house so many times today, I’m probably going to get shin splints.” I screw the bulb in its socket and switch the lamp back on, and he turns his face away from the light as if it hurts him, like some creature of the underground or night. I hold the glass right in front of his face. The solution the dentist gave him is clear and so thick the plastic jaws hang suspended in it.

  “Put them in,” I say. “Now. I’m not going to stand around here all day and watch you looking like some toothless idiot.”

  He leans to one side, trying to catch a glimpse of the TV, but I block him, and then he leans back to the other side, and I have to block that one too before he finally huffs and shoves his big fingers into the tiny glass so hard the solution spills out on his lap. He recoils and glares at me, as if this is somehow all my fault.

  “You’re just lucky I held on to the glass,” I say.