Brute Strength

by Susan Conant

  ‘I’m more interested in finding that dark van than I am in buying a chicken pot pie,’ I said. ‘It’s one thing to get anonymous calls and letters – not that I like them – but I really hate the sense that a threatening person is lurking around. Or following me. And there’s something . . . oh, this is ridiculous! But that kind of panel van? It’s stupid. It’s a cliché. I’ve seen too many movies. But that kind of dark van—’

  ‘You expect the doors to fly open and thugs to pop out,’ Gabrielle said. ‘But they’re all over the place, aren’t they?’

  ‘Thugs?’

  ‘Dark vans.’ She glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘Well, I don’t see it now, but there was one in back of us. It’s gone now. The point is that it’s like pregnant women or Cadillac trucks or—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All you have to do is notice one of them, and then you start noticing all of them, and it feels as if they’re all over the place when, really, they’ve been there all along.’

  ‘Are there Cadillac trucks? They exist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you say so. But there’s nothing sinister about them, is there? Well, or about vans, either. I get the point. But the one in the parking lot at the match? As soon as I started walking toward that van, it suddenly took off, and, yes, post hoc, ergo propter hoc, as Leah would say – it didn’t necessarily leave because of me. Even so.’ I took a look at the Google map we’d printed out. ‘We should be almost there. Yes, there it is – on the right.’

  ‘On this busy road! All I can say is that it’s a good thing that you people don’t just give rescue dogs to anyone who asks. Now, remember! Not a word about malamutes. We’re out for a drive in the country on this beautiful spring afternoon, and we’ve never heard of Lucinda and Eldon Flood before.’

  Gabrielle’s exclamations to the contrary, we were not exactly in the country, but we were on a busy route, almost a small highway. The big wooden Flood Farm sign announced that the enterprise was open year round. In case the words didn’t register on passers-by, the sign depicted corn stalks, tomatoes, pumpkins, Christmas trees, wreaths, and double-crust pies with what at first glance appeared to be a three-dimensional rendition of flaky pastry but turned out on close inspection to be peeling paint. The farm stand itself was a low, wide, rickety-looking building with glass-paned doors across the front and a faded awning above them. To the left of the structure was a small beige ranch house; to the right were greenhouses covered in clear plastic; and on both sides and in the back were fields. Three vehicles were parked in a dirt and gravel parking area in front of the stand. Two belonged to the farm: a red pickup truck and a white minivan had tiny versions of the roadside sign painted on their doors. The third vehicle, an environmentalist’s nightmare, was a gigantic black luxury SUV. Its apparent owner, a deeply tanned blonde woman in tennis whites, was examining the flats of annuals and the pots of perennials arranged in front of the glass doors to the building. She then opened one of the doors and entered.

  ‘So,’ said Gabrielle, ‘we aren’t the only customers.’

  Leaving the dogs in the car with the rear windows open, we strolled to the display of plants, not one of which would’ve lasted more than two minutes in my yard before being stomped on or dug up by malamutes.

  ‘There are some unusual varieties here,’ said Gabrielle. ‘I do like verbascum. You know, you could grow that in front of your house. It would be safe from the dogs there.’

  ‘Shall we go in?’ I asked. Hint, hint.

  The interior, although somewhat dark, had a rustic appeal. The promised jams and jellies were neatly arrayed on shelves that also contained tins and bottles of maple syrup, boxes of candy, and jars of herbs and spices. The Native American crafts promised on the website turned out to be authentic and local: the baskets, made of ash and sweet grass, were typical of those produced by Maine tribes. Across the back of the shop were refrigerator and freezer units with glass doors, and the walls displayed herbal wreaths and bunches of dried flowers. To the right was a long counter with loaves of bread in plastic bags and a dozen or so pies at one end, and, at the other, a computer and an old-fashioned cash register. Behind the cash register was a thin, tired-looking woman of forty, I guessed. Her face was lined, and her short brown hair had been chemically fried by a bad perm. She wore a pink tracksuit at least two sizes too big for her.

  The tennis player was talking to her. ‘Apple, I think. And one blueberry.’

  ‘Blueberry pie!’ Gabrielle exclaimed. ‘Do you have blueberry? My husband just loves it, and I make rotten crust.’ Both statements were true.

  ‘Lucinda’s pies are the best,’ the customer said.

  ‘The berries are frozen,’ Lucinda said apologetically. ‘But we did grow them here.’

  ‘Well, of course they’re frozen,’ said Gabrielle. ‘At this time of year? We’ll take a blueberry pie and . . . something for dinner. We’ll take a look in the freezer, shall we?’

  ‘Do you happen to have any anemones?’ the tennis woman asked. ‘The biggish ones? I didn’t see any out front.’

  Just then, a tall, thin, blue-eyed man with a long braid entered through a rear door, a big flat of snapdragons in his arms. He wore earth-stained blue work pants and a plaid flannel shirt.

  ‘Eldon will know,’ Lucinda said. ‘Do we have any anemones out back?’

  Gabrielle and I were examining the chicken pot pies in the freezer. She didn’t quite dig an elbow into my ribs, but I saw her arm twitch. As if I needed a reminder to listen carefully!

  ‘You want the ones they call Japanese?’ Eldon asked.

  ‘Yes. Pink. I have a gap in the border, and I want a fall bloomer. And not mums!’

  ‘I’ve got Queen Charlotte, but they’re small.’

  ‘Oh, I just love Queen Charlotte!’ Gabrielle explained. ‘They do have a tendency to take over, but they’re lovely. They do beautifully in partial shade.’

  ‘How small?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Small,’ Eldon said. ‘They take a while to get established.’

  ‘Let me mull it over,’ the woman said. ‘So, just the apple and the blueberry for today.’

  As the customer was paying, Gabrielle carried two large chicken pot pies to the counter, set them down, and said to Eldon, ‘And I’ll have that flat of snapdragons, too, please.’

  I hoped that Gabrielle was footing the bill.

  ‘They’re dwarf.’ He set the flat on the counter.

  By then, I was certain. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what we were hoping for. Exactly.’

  Gabrielle nodded. ‘And I have a little question about something out front.’ She marched off with Eldon following her. I trailed after the two of them. Gabrielle paused and pretended to examine some potted delphiniums. As she was about to say something, the blonde woman emerged with two boxes of pies in her arms. Leaving the door to the interior ajar, she got into her SUV and started the engine.

  With speed and directness that surprised me, Gabrielle said, ‘My question, Mr Flood, is not about plants. It’s about phone calls. And an anonymous letter.’

  In the bright outdoor light, it was easy to see the blood drain from Eldon Flood’s face. I thought that he was about to faint. He must have thought so, too. Reaching down, he rested a hand on a big pot of white geraniums and slowly bent from the waist as if he were going to touch his toes.

  Before Gabrielle or I had the chance to respond, Lucinda suddenly appeared. Seeing her outdoors, I realized that she was far younger than I’d assumed, probably no older than twenty-five. With a jolt, I realized that both she and her husband were younger than I was.

  ‘Eldon, not again!’ she pleaded.

  Without asking whether Eldon was given to irritating fits of hysterical syncope, I cleared some flower pots off a wooden crate and said, ‘Maybe it would help him to sit down.’ Then I addressed Eldon himself. ‘Here. Put your head below your knees.’

  Ignoring both Eldon and my effort to minister to him, his wife turned
to Gabrielle. ‘What’s he done this time?’

  With an expression of infinite understanding on her face, Gabrielle said gently, ‘Phone calls. A letter.’ A stranger who knew nothing about the situation would’ve assumed from Gabrielle’s manner and especially from her confiding tone that she was sharing a secret with a close and valued friend.

  Lucinda responded by pouring out her troubles, albeit somewhat incoherently. ‘He was supposed to be cured! After the last time, he was in court-ordered therapy, and they kept saying that he did it because he didn’t know how to confront people directly, but now that he knew how, he’d quit!’

  ‘But he didn’t quit,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Did you, Mr Flood?’

  Eldon, who had made a subtle shift from lowering his head below his knees to hanging his head in shame, mumbled something inaudible.

  His wife was incensed. ‘You see, Eldon! That’s what they told you not to do! You’re supposed to express your frustrations and anger and all that shit loud and clear the second you feel pissed off instead of bottling it all up and moaning and stewing about it and sneaking around making dirty phone calls and the rest of that same old crap, and what are you doing now but bottling it all up and acting like you’re going to faint and—’

  Leaping to his feet, Eldon knocked over the wooden box he’d been sitting on and accidentally bumped into me. ‘Lucinda, shut up!’ he roared. ‘And you, too, lady!’ he hollered at Gabrielle.

  He took a step toward her, but I blocked his path. ‘You are way out of line,’ I told him.

  ‘You stay out of this,’ he growled.

  ‘No, I will not stay out of it. I did nothing to deserve that nasty phone call you made to me, and no one deserved the other nasty calls you made. You applied to adopt a malamute, and I did my best to turn you down politely, and what was your response? Your response was to harass and offend and frighten people whose only crime is trying to help homeless dogs! And you did it in a sneaky—’

  ‘Holly,’ Gabrielle said softly. ‘Holly, this—’

  Lucinda cut her off. ‘So that’s who you are! Eldon told me all about you, and I don’t see that you’re in any position to call us sneaky. There we were offering a wonderful home to a dog, and not only did you insult us, but now here you are showing up under false pretenses and—’

  ‘I did not insult your husband. All I did was turn down an application, and what your husband did in response was—’

  ‘You thwarted him,’ Lucinda said. ‘That’s what triggered his relapse. It’s all your fault. Eldon doesn’t do these things unless he’s thwarted. That’s what the doctors say.’

  Although I was ripping mad, I tried to stay cool. ‘So, he’s entitled to get all his own way because that’s what prevents him from making obscene phone calls and sending anonymous letters? You may buy that argument, but I don’t.’

  Gabrielle, the eternal diplomat, said brightly, ‘Well, we’ve all had the chance to voice our frustrations and clear the air, and we’ve reached a sort of agreement.’

  We’d voiced a lot more than mere frustrations, and far from clearing the air, we’d polluted it, or so I thought. And what was this agreement we were supposed to have reached? I gritted my teeth. ‘Positive reframing,’ as Rita calls this kind of Pollyannaish ploy, always irritates me. According to Rita, psychotherapists do it to introduce helpful new perspectives on seemingly bleak or horrendous situations: problems aren’t problems; they’re challenges. If your life has crashed down around you, you’re having a potentially beneficial learning experience. Your beloved dog has just died, and you’re supposed to reinterpret your agony as a significant part of your life experience. Lies, lies, lies! But if positive reframing, aka lies, would give us an easy exit, great!

  As if sensing my thoughts, Gabrielle rested a hand on my arm. ‘All of us have expressed our feelings clearly and directly, and that’s the most we can expect to accomplish. When you think about it, that’s quite a lot, isn’t it? So, we’ll pay for our pies and our snapdragons and—’

  I’ll never know exactly what part of Gabrielle’s little speech sparked Eldon’s outburst. Maybe it drove him wild to imagine us eating his wife’s pies or planting his dwarf snapdragons. Maybe Gabrielle’s positive reframing awakened bitter memories of his court-ordered therapy. For whatever reason, he suddenly started shouting at me about wanting Thunder, the dog he’d seen on our Malamute Rescue website, and he began jabbing his finger at Gabrielle and calling her a nosy loudmouth bitch. Now, besides being angry, I was alarmed, even frightened. Why hadn’t I realized that what lay beneath Eldon Flood’s cowardly phone calls and anonymous letter was the potential for raw violence? Why had we left the big dogs at home? Since I myself had ended up mentioning Malamute Rescue, we might as well have had the malamutes with us, and not in the car either, but at our sides. In most circumstances, the malamute attitude is: We’re equal partners, OK? I watch out for myself, and I expect you to do the same. If, however, these dogs decide that we thickheaded, weak-bodied bipeds are imperiling ourselves by engaging in stupid, ineffective dithering, they sometimes take action. Rowdy would’ve calmly blocked Eldon’s access to us by transforming himself into a canine barricade, and Sammy might’ve done the same. As for Kimi, I had no desire to imagine what she’d have done if Eldon had actually attacked. The only sure bet was that she’d have given no warning.

  In taking my eyes off Eldon and Lucinda to glance around, I obviously did not expect to see my dogs. My action was pure reflex: when scared, seek malamutes. If I was looking for anything, it was for the malamute strength and courage that might infuse me in the absence of the dogs themselves. What actually caught my eye was neither a bold, bounding, double-coated savior nor was it a mystical, strength-infusing vision thereof; rather, it was a midnight-blue panel van parked just off the pavement, perhaps fifty feet from us. Damn it all! On the ride to Flood Farm, I’d been hoping to discover that not only had Eldon Flood made the nasty phone calls and sent me that horrid message but that he had also been the person tailing me in what Steve had identified as a Dodge Ram panel van. Arriving at the farm stand and seeing the two Flood Farm vehicles in the parking area, I’d given no further thought to the van, as if the presence of the red pickup and the white minivan made it impossible for the Floods to own a third vehicle, for example, a big panel van sometimes used by Eldon and sometimes – now, for instance – driven by an employee.

  In the few seconds that it had taken me to glance quickly around and spot the van, Eldon had launched into the obscenity that I’d heard on the phone. As I moved my gaze away from the van and back to him, maybe the slight motion caught his eye, or maybe it was just my turn to become his target. Shouting filth, he lurched toward me. I took a quick step backward, and he again went after Gabrielle, first with words, then with gestures. Now, instead of jabbing a finger at her, he pounded his fist into his own palm and then into the air in front of her. I cursed myself for having let Gabrielle drive. If I’d had my car and my keys, we’d already be zooming off.

  Gabrielle, however, was still trying to talk her way out. ‘Mr Flood, let’s all calm—’

  I put my hand on her purse and shouted to make myself heard. ‘Gabrielle, your keys! We—’

  The roar of an engine interrupted me. The blue panel van, the Dodge Ram, thundered toward us and abruptly halted. By the time the passenger door flew open, I’d seen the driver and thus expected the bellow that followed.

  ‘You son of a bitch!’ my father thundered. ‘No one treats my wife like that!’

  Eldon Flood was tall, but Buck had a good four inches on him and must have outweighed Flood by forty pounds of angry, protective muscle, the force of which shot down my father’s right arm, through his massive fist, and into Eldon Flood’s jaw. As Flood toppled backward into the display of potted perennials, Buck lowered his voice and growled, ‘Stand up, you yellow-bellied piece of shit!’

  ‘Buck, stop it right now!’ Gabrielle screamed. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Yes, stop it!’ I echoed.
<
br />   Instead of joining in, Lucinda took the practical step of bending over her husband, who was clutching his face while floundering among the injured delphiniums. Incredibly, she asked, ‘Eldon, are you all right?’

  ‘Ice,’ my father recommended.

  I wanted to strangle him.

  Addressing Lucinda, he said in tones of sweet reason, ‘Hey, I can’t stand by and watch someone threaten my wife, who happens to be –’ he paused dramatically – ‘a brave woman battling –’ his voice dropped to a hoarse whisper – ‘cancer.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Buck, you are an idiot!’ Gabrielle told him. ‘You are a blithering idiot!’

  ‘Cancer is nothing to be ashamed of,’ my father told her. ‘It’s a disease that strikes—’

  ‘I do not have cancer. All I have is vanity. Vanity! Not that it’s any of your business. Now, go home! I am staying with Steve and Holly until I cool down, and until I do, I do not want to see you. Go home! Get in that van you’ve been using to stalk us and frighten us, and go home!’

  My father looked astonished. ‘I never meant—’

  ‘Buck,’ I said, ‘at the moment, no one particularly cares what you meant. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m a dog trainer. I care more about behavior than I do about intentions, and no one is happy about your behavior right now. I think that you should do what Gabrielle is telling you. Return that van to wherever you got it from, and go home.’

  With an appropriately hangdog air, my father nodded to everyone, got back into the Dodge Ram, and drove off. By then, Eldon was sitting on the wooden box he’d used earlier. His head hung down, and he was clutching his jaw.

  ‘Do you need an ambulance?’ I asked.

  ‘He hates doctors,’ Lucinda said. ‘And we don’t want a fuss.’

  I suddenly understood. ‘Is he on parole?’ I asked.